Showing posts with label Rothko. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rothko. Show all posts
Monday, June 07, 2010
.
the silence within. the silence without.
'Feeling himself unable to go forward, he must destroy the accumulations in which he has recognized himself and come to put his trust in the possibilities of the unknown'.
what is 'recognizing' (oneself or another) then? is it not a kind of affinity for silence, a search for a truer, more essential character?
the white space has its own density, its own sense of light, time. is neither full or empty, beginning or end. distinctions! the white, like the black, that passes beyond the thing. how to stand outside of oneself (ex-stasis) whilst within? to be and not be (which is neither thought, nor action)
'light from without would slowly reveal the light within...the white as a denser substance-some ghostly reminder of another place in which Rothko once said he could breathe and stretch his arms'.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Mourning Light
There will never be that stillness
Within the pulse of flesh,
in the dust of being, where we trudge,
turning our hungry gaze this way and that,
the wings of the morning
brush through our blood
as cloud-shadows brush the land.
What we desire travels with us
We must breathe time as fishes breathe water
God's flight circles us.
---Denise Levertov.
Released through bars of sorrow
as if not a gate had opened but I
grown intangible had passed through shadows,
from dark of yearning into
a soft day, western March.
Nothing can capture that dark light. Stunned and bedazzled by the black sun. I never knew that Rothko's paintings were so beautiful.
Your Misfortune (None of My Own) - Thomas Newman
Friday, April 25, 2008
Hermit
....The aniconic spirit is restless in its search for the immediate, the primitive and direct experience of reality..the anarchic. It desires, above all else, to be free of nostalgia, memory, legend, myth, and history: to escape itself, to break free from time...Is such an unmediated experience even possible , or is it merely a dream for those who live in these particular times? Is the pursuit of Utopia bound to lead to a catastrophic disaster, to despair and fanaticism?
Schama: the frayed seams that connect and separate two spaces (dihliz)...not boundaries but a visible glimpse of some glowing seal of light over which everything else is unstably superimposed. His 'black on grey', for example, was still soaked with light and yet still somehow tethered to the known world.
Human beings are halfway between nothing and infinity: therein lies his majesty, therein his tragedy. Is it the human being that is this wild horizon, this barzakh, this thin glimmering band of light that separates the black from the white? But why talk only of separation? Are we not bound and free , is there not continuity and discontinuity? Where does night begin and day end?
Rosenberg: In sum, what the new American artists sought was ...the formal sign language of the inner kingdom-equivalents in paint of a flash, no matter how transitory, or what had been known throughout the centuries as spiritual enlightenment.
Perhaps we should, then, think of the intervening light in a different way: as the light within the light, the 'divine darkness'? What is it that Rothko is looking for? The silence of the deserts, the glaciers? But, then, what of his commitment to the human angle? To look to the skies, to leave the cave, must we neglect what lies behind our backs, under our noses?
Gregory of Nazianus: The world is held together by the power and reason of God; one soul, united...["and the creation of the universe is as a single soul"]..creation is a system and compound of earth and sky and all that is in them...more worthy of admiration when we consider the harmony and unison of the whole, tending to the perfect completion of the whole. Outward beauty, as with the moon, is a ladder...'Beauty is the splendour of the True' .
Rothko: The urgency fro transcendent experience was understood , and given official status. The importance of channels, tradition, bridges, ladders. Can we, those without an inheritance, live up to that task?
Heller: The portrait of this situation is Van Gogh.the sunflower, the chair and the boots that are the chance receptacle of all that homeless energy of the spirit which once had its lawful house with Giotto's angels-once a king of kingdoms, now a squatter in boots. Look at this bough of almond blossom, look at this chair-indeed, they get much more than their due of the spirit, almost bursting with its superfluity. It is a mere moment of explosion that separates Van Gogh's objects from the distorted fragments of surrealism.
It is sometimes possible to think of Rothko's paintings as the moment just after the first creation but just as easy to think of them as the afterglow of the final explosion....the absence from our lives of commonly accepted symbols to represent and house our deepest feelings. And so these invade empty shells of fragmentary memories, ..hermit-crabs in a sea of uncertain meaning. We may yet reach the moon..
---Heller
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision.
___________
The hermit’s hut is a theme which needs no variations, for at the simplest mention of it, “phenomenological reverberation” obliterates all mediocre resonances. The hermit’s hut is an engraving that would suffer from any exaggeration of picturesqueness. Its truth must derive from the intensity of its essence, which is the essence of the verb “to inhabit.” The hut immediately becomes centralized solitude, for in the land of legend, there exists no adjoining hut. And although geographers may bring back photographs of hut villages from their travels in distant lands, our legendary past transcends everything that has been seen, even everything that we have experienced personally. The image leads us on towards extreme solitude. The hermit is alone before God. His hut, therefore, is just the opposite of the monastery. And there radiates about this centralized solitude a universe of meditation and prayer, a universe outside the universe. The hut can receive none of the riches “of this world.” It possesses the felicity of intense poverty; indeed, it is one of the glories of poverty; as destitution increases it gives us access to absolute refuge.
---From anton, via Bachelard
Thursday, February 22, 2007
The Sound of Silence
Jonah acutely remarks that I'm running out of things to say and increasingly turning to images and music for my/the blogs (or whatever they're called). But I've always been running out of being. Given the amount of yakking going on I constantly ask myself: why add to the noise! I feel like Rothko..the need to walk through the portals of a silent black square once, and for all.
Couldn't but help think that in this late age we're all scavengers of sorts: some use google and wikipedia, others rely on literary quotes, trying desperately to cut and paste the scraps of a story together.
'And men loved darkness rather than the light’
---John, III:19
Content with deserts:here on the arid slope of Vesuvius,
that formidable mountain, the destroyer,
that no tree or flower adorns.
I’ve seen before
how you beautify empty places,
and it seems that with your grave,
silent, aspect you bear witness,
reminding the passer-by
of that lost empire.
Now I see you again on this land,
a lover of sad places abandoned by the world.
(Leopardi and C, forgive me!)
At Postman's Park
The small square of green, surrounded by infinite grey, hemmed in by monumental stone. A desert oasis, a gem amidst tightly packed crystals, a point in the heart of the (k)capital. Only an interior realm can speak of death and dissolution and the untellable. All around the clinking of gold, the world of high finance drowning out this other place. It is as if a place of remembrance always runs the risk of being forgotten, overlooked, is always on the verge of fading from the picture, disappearing, vanishing like the words my mother once taught me...
This unremarkable place is all that is left of England now. A witness to the lives of unknown people and their heroic acts. A reminder of the lives that never had a future, only a past; lives that nevertheless live on, like a slow-burning blue flame, or faces that we can't get out of our head and that stare at us as if from the depths of a green sea. And yet, and yet, there is something theatrical, absurd even, in these sentimental retellings. To render death familiar, bring it 'home,' to name and date it when all that can be done is testify to the rupture of consciousness that is the death of other people, that is death itself. There is something child-like, innocent, in the simple plaques that commemorate these deaths.
The words and thoughts of other people's lives are written on my soul. The substitution of a life for a life, a death for a death. A manic collector of fragments, of lives we have not lived and never could have. Even my smile isn't mine. My fingers smudge the blank page with a foreign ink. We speak. We repeat words uninspired, not knowing why. As if all we could do was to caress meaning from a dumb monument, or interpret a dream: analyse, decipher, remember. Until we open our hands and gaze intensely out at outstretched palms, noting the marks of time. In our heart of heart's the truth doesn't blink. We had but a fool's wisdom.
Couldn't but help think that in this late age we're all scavengers of sorts: some use google and wikipedia, others rely on literary quotes, trying desperately to cut and paste the scraps of a story together.
'And men loved darkness rather than the light’
---John, III:19
Content with deserts:here on the arid slope of Vesuvius,
that formidable mountain, the destroyer,
that no tree or flower adorns.
I’ve seen before
how you beautify empty places,
and it seems that with your grave,
silent, aspect you bear witness,
reminding the passer-by
of that lost empire.
Now I see you again on this land,
a lover of sad places abandoned by the world.
(Leopardi and C, forgive me!)
At Postman's Park
The small square of green, surrounded by infinite grey, hemmed in by monumental stone. A desert oasis, a gem amidst tightly packed crystals, a point in the heart of the (k)capital. Only an interior realm can speak of death and dissolution and the untellable. All around the clinking of gold, the world of high finance drowning out this other place. It is as if a place of remembrance always runs the risk of being forgotten, overlooked, is always on the verge of fading from the picture, disappearing, vanishing like the words my mother once taught me...
This unremarkable place is all that is left of England now. A witness to the lives of unknown people and their heroic acts. A reminder of the lives that never had a future, only a past; lives that nevertheless live on, like a slow-burning blue flame, or faces that we can't get out of our head and that stare at us as if from the depths of a green sea. And yet, and yet, there is something theatrical, absurd even, in these sentimental retellings. To render death familiar, bring it 'home,' to name and date it when all that can be done is testify to the rupture of consciousness that is the death of other people, that is death itself. There is something child-like, innocent, in the simple plaques that commemorate these deaths.
The words and thoughts of other people's lives are written on my soul. The substitution of a life for a life, a death for a death. A manic collector of fragments, of lives we have not lived and never could have. Even my smile isn't mine. My fingers smudge the blank page with a foreign ink. We speak. We repeat words uninspired, not knowing why. As if all we could do was to caress meaning from a dumb monument, or interpret a dream: analyse, decipher, remember. Until we open our hands and gaze intensely out at outstretched palms, noting the marks of time. In our heart of heart's the truth doesn't blink. We had but a fool's wisdom.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Saturday, December 16, 2006
Rothko's Sound Thought
We see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face...
That we are not very securely at home
in the interpreted world.
---Rilke.
God is not God. God is not God. God is not God. He is. He is before the sign that signals him. Before designation. He is the void before the void, thought before thought; thus also the unthought before the unthought-as if there were a nothing before the nothing.
He is the cry before the cry, the trembling before the trembling. He is the night without night , the day without day. The look before the look, the listening before the listening. He is the air before breathing..Not yet wind, but light air, indifferent in its primitive infinity.
------Jabes, in Desert, Ethos, Abandonement.
Natur hat weder Kern
Noch Schale
Alles ist sie mit einem Male.
Half our story is a search for a wider world, untrodden paths to the open..but half is to find our place in it, for the cosmos and order and wholeness. It sometimes seems that all we have are other people's thoughts, the fragments of others' words..idols of the mind. But we look for those gateways, those portals that will take us away from the world or the inner world of ideas and second-hand emotions, learned responses, the soul's cliches. A passageway that is also a labyrinth where we are lost and found. A transitional place, neither outside or inside, that leads outwards but that is also connected to the familiar world of memory and human warmth: 'home'..the dihliz...
But if access to that transcendence has been blocked then we withdraw into ourselves, seeking out hidden paths, an 'Orphic descent' into our deepest past: a sub-way. But there is an air of desperation and anxiety in such a move. The air is still, heavy with resignation, and space itself is cramped and we willingly accept our slipping away out of sight...By doing so we may avoid the nausea of every-day reality, its horror and absurdity, its shallowness and theatricality. To bear witness to our suffering in an age of crass materialism and easily-worn emotions, an age in which reason sleeps and brings forth nightmares, primordial monsters from the depths...To escape the predicament of theoretical man-'Am I in pain?' is answered by 'What is pain?'.
The artists, whenever the truth is uncovered, will always cling with rapt gaze to what still means covering even after such uncovering. The philosopher wants to dispel all wonder , or hold it like an idol. He is oblivious of the mystery that inheres in every breath of life, every brain cell.
There is a sorcery in art, a magnetic pull to the unknown; by focusing on the particular totality is avoided. This human being-not the human being-is the gateway to infinity.We must learn to stop at appearance and its folded, concentrated reality. The moderns are obsessed with uncovering, revealing and purifying. The Secret is his greatest enemy.
Rothko's art is an attack on the sedative, commercial world , the world of entertainment and forgetfulness, of synthetic brightness and superficial cheerfulness . (Schama). Modern man's idol is a false infinity.
There is, perhaps, a Jewish sensibility to his work..and the interior glimmer all make looking at them an inexhaustible process. Feeling himself unable to go forward , he must destroy the accumulations in which he has recognized himself and come to put his trust in the possibilities of the unknown. What else is this but an aniconism that preserves the secret of God's creation from the Medusa-like gaze of the world? Art, like love and thought, can never exist solely in the realm of necessity. They are bound and free. But his is a hard-won freedom and only the adventurer, the sea-gypsy embarks on the journey for the unknown space, the terra incognita, that 'second space' that lies behind space.
The picture 'expands and quickens' in the eye. It remains unfinished, a symbol of perpetual becoming.Is Rothko really attempting to make a painting or is he trying to compose music...a sound thought? A Russian Jew: two pre-occupations: to communicate, the ethical commandment to take on responsibility, to have comapssion for other human beings ("the highest form of understanding"); but also to shatter images, to trace that invisible axis, and listen to that silence behind the music...
That we are not very securely at home
in the interpreted world.
---Rilke.
God is not God. God is not God. God is not God. He is. He is before the sign that signals him. Before designation. He is the void before the void, thought before thought; thus also the unthought before the unthought-as if there were a nothing before the nothing.
He is the cry before the cry, the trembling before the trembling. He is the night without night , the day without day. The look before the look, the listening before the listening. He is the air before breathing..Not yet wind, but light air, indifferent in its primitive infinity.
------Jabes, in Desert, Ethos, Abandonement.
Natur hat weder Kern
Noch Schale
Alles ist sie mit einem Male.
Half our story is a search for a wider world, untrodden paths to the open..but half is to find our place in it, for the cosmos and order and wholeness. It sometimes seems that all we have are other people's thoughts, the fragments of others' words..idols of the mind. But we look for those gateways, those portals that will take us away from the world or the inner world of ideas and second-hand emotions, learned responses, the soul's cliches. A passageway that is also a labyrinth where we are lost and found. A transitional place, neither outside or inside, that leads outwards but that is also connected to the familiar world of memory and human warmth: 'home'..the dihliz...
But if access to that transcendence has been blocked then we withdraw into ourselves, seeking out hidden paths, an 'Orphic descent' into our deepest past: a sub-way. But there is an air of desperation and anxiety in such a move. The air is still, heavy with resignation, and space itself is cramped and we willingly accept our slipping away out of sight...By doing so we may avoid the nausea of every-day reality, its horror and absurdity, its shallowness and theatricality. To bear witness to our suffering in an age of crass materialism and easily-worn emotions, an age in which reason sleeps and brings forth nightmares, primordial monsters from the depths...To escape the predicament of theoretical man-'Am I in pain?' is answered by 'What is pain?'.
The artists, whenever the truth is uncovered, will always cling with rapt gaze to what still means covering even after such uncovering. The philosopher wants to dispel all wonder , or hold it like an idol. He is oblivious of the mystery that inheres in every breath of life, every brain cell.
There is a sorcery in art, a magnetic pull to the unknown; by focusing on the particular totality is avoided. This human being-not the human being-is the gateway to infinity.We must learn to stop at appearance and its folded, concentrated reality. The moderns are obsessed with uncovering, revealing and purifying. The Secret is his greatest enemy.
Rothko's art is an attack on the sedative, commercial world , the world of entertainment and forgetfulness, of synthetic brightness and superficial cheerfulness . (Schama). Modern man's idol is a false infinity.
There is, perhaps, a Jewish sensibility to his work..and the interior glimmer all make looking at them an inexhaustible process. Feeling himself unable to go forward , he must destroy the accumulations in which he has recognized himself and come to put his trust in the possibilities of the unknown. What else is this but an aniconism that preserves the secret of God's creation from the Medusa-like gaze of the world? Art, like love and thought, can never exist solely in the realm of necessity. They are bound and free. But his is a hard-won freedom and only the adventurer, the sea-gypsy embarks on the journey for the unknown space, the terra incognita, that 'second space' that lies behind space.
The picture 'expands and quickens' in the eye. It remains unfinished, a symbol of perpetual becoming.Is Rothko really attempting to make a painting or is he trying to compose music...a sound thought? A Russian Jew: two pre-occupations: to communicate, the ethical commandment to take on responsibility, to have comapssion for other human beings ("the highest form of understanding"); but also to shatter images, to trace that invisible axis, and listen to that silence behind the music...
...Eliade once wrote of man's ontological thirst -his quest for being. This now seems, to me, to be only half the story. For what he wants most is to step beyond the frontier, to un-do himself, unfasten his createdness, to catch a glimpse of what is beyond-being. Such a person does not search for 'existence' but has a 'fanatic thirst for essence'...to break not the sound barrier, but that of light...
And since man is made in the image of God, a God who in virtue of his indeterminacy of unlimited actuality , is supremely undetermined (Duns Scotus) would it not be fair to say that his search is, ultimately, an irreducible desire for freedom? Does not thought transcend matter all the time? In love, do we not leap out of our own narrow horizons? The mystery of life is in life itself. Is it only the mind that gives the impression of 'outer' and 'inner'?
Natur hat weder Kern...
Man only becomes aware of himself when he perceives all others, and then as a condition of his existence.
The Descrtesian cogito is shattered into tiny grey pieces by :
We are, therefore I can think.
(Wisdom is grey but religion and life are full of colour).
Two things: something is given and it is given to us.
Is Rothko after a silence that refuses to become a name..an absence, the spark before the world, the speech before the word, the light before the light, the space before the space (Jabes?)? A space that is neither the beginning nor the end; neither outside or inside..a space that is a point..death is the point of all points.
Rothko on large pictures: precisely because I want to be very intimate and human [insaan: ins: intimacy] To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a steroptic view or with a reducing glass. However you paint a large picture , you are in it. A lived experience, a sound thought: we need to think the stars and feel them...
But again, we must ask ourselves if such a thing is possible in these times, in an age devoid of religion and metaphysical understanding.How is this autonomous individual related to Nature and to the universal, to the cosmos, except in terms of radical discontinuity (Descartes , again. Also, "reducing glasses"..see Rorty). Man, who is closed in on himself, sees only himself or the reflections of his own mind in everything. He who sees Ratio sees only himself...
Robert Hughes poses this question in another way: Do the paintings carry the weight of meaning that he intends, is there a final epiphany ..the sceptic answers : No! [having seen them again in the Tate yesterday, I tend to agree with him].
But Rothko's is at least a high order of doubt. Can we ever possess and experience..should we? What can be revealed to us in these days but the absence of God? We, who search for ever new destinations, might we not be draw to what is actually always the same?
But the desire for that open space is in the blood, the pressing need to elicit meanings unmediated by discursive language , to find, be lost in, a space divested of rigid boundaries [Does his work not make them fluid?] What use words here, what thought? A knowledge of human feelings is to understand, not to 'know' ; still less is it a knowledge of how that knowledge was acquired. Knowledge through suffering...
Men, with their minds, produced a vision of the world,a concept. Perhaps there is too much thinking,a hypertrophy of the mind. When what we desire is a light from outside to reveal the light within. [Fides et Ratio: faith illuminates the paths of reason]
Was Rothko searching for a black square, a Ka'ba? A sign that would be and not be (Zeus wants to and does not want to be named)...a housing of the spirit, an enclosing of the presence moving through it. Movement in stillness. Does something end with the inexplicable or only begin...a sacred enclosure.
Blanchot: Light illuminates, that is to say that light hides itself, that is its sly characteristic. Light illuminates; that which is illuminated presents itself in an immediate presence which reveals itself without revealing that which manifests it. Light effaces its traces; invisible it renders visible.
Art, then, that is like a house that has breathing spaces (Terminus) , a broken circle that is both presence and absence.
Rothko is influenced by Fra Angelico and the search for that purest essence...no space of perspectival perceptions ..the single features are consumed by the cool flowing light...conjures up a space that knows no limits and yet flows tangibly before our eyes. Insight over sight, or maybe both. Or is he influenced by Monet: to be immersed in a vision, an 'oceanic feeling'; to dissolve oneself and feel oneself slipping away to unknown lands. And who can then say where one ends and one begins, whether I am one or two?
But for the moderns is this anything but a show-a spectacular show, no doubt- in the theatre of the mind? Is the world of things and humans left behind, made more opaque by the glowing radiance of the interior realm? Or is beauty a ladder where one cannot look back or down? Rothko admires the impenetrable, blank walls of Byzantine chapels: outwardly sober, inwardly drunk. They are the keepers of the treasures. To re-create 'the place' : ho topos. A place where necessity and chaos flees. Everything here is about the right proportions-but that of music, not architecture. People praying are distracted by images.
All is rhythm: the entire destiny of man is a single celestial rhythm, just as the work of art is a unique rhythm.
(Holderin)
The problem for the artist, then, is how to give shape to the absent, how to speak about silence. Is it only in silence that one surpasses oneself? Perhaps we should be cautious of thinking of Rothko's art as a stark alternative between a return to an interior space and a journey to outer space. But for someone who was so aware of his mortality is it so surprising that he should be fascinated by wells and caves, the subterranean, portals and gateways. Death is a kind of birth....
The indeterminate bars of colour, the flow of the river, the eternal flux that lies at the heart of all that appears so solid. It is a certain light : the absolute, but also a particular light. Are his pictures about the attempt to get a feeling (not an idea) of what is boundless, unlimited and the paradox that we are but creatures who are subject to birth and death: finite beings with immortal longings...is he saying that we, we who move from womb to tomb, move from one unknown to the other?
Main concerns are the mysteries of the emanation of the divine powers of the hidden God. On the one hand God is so remote from human understanding that nothing can be said about Him. On the other hand, the whole raison d'etre of any mysticism is the need to grasp, by thought and imagination, , the living dynamic presence of God in the world. [Black Sun?]
---M.Megged, The Darkened Light.
Rothko's experiences were shaped from the land of opposites: Russia. Or was it a Zorastrain sense of light and darkness and their moral relation to good and evil?
*Most of the words and ideas in the last three blogs are from Ashton's 'About Rothko', Schama's 'Power of Art' , and Robert Hughes' 'Shock of the New'. *
Jonah's response to Rothko is, intriguingly:
Between the idea and the reality
Between the motion and the act
Falls the Shadow
Between the conception and the creation
Between the emotion and the response
Falls the Shadow
Between the desire and the spasm
Between the potency and the existence
Between the essence and the descent
Falls the Shadow
---T.S.Eliot
And since man is made in the image of God, a God who in virtue of his indeterminacy of unlimited actuality , is supremely undetermined (Duns Scotus) would it not be fair to say that his search is, ultimately, an irreducible desire for freedom? Does not thought transcend matter all the time? In love, do we not leap out of our own narrow horizons? The mystery of life is in life itself. Is it only the mind that gives the impression of 'outer' and 'inner'?
Natur hat weder Kern...
Man only becomes aware of himself when he perceives all others, and then as a condition of his existence.
The Descrtesian cogito is shattered into tiny grey pieces by :
We are, therefore I can think.
(Wisdom is grey but religion and life are full of colour).
Two things: something is given and it is given to us.
Is Rothko after a silence that refuses to become a name..an absence, the spark before the world, the speech before the word, the light before the light, the space before the space (Jabes?)? A space that is neither the beginning nor the end; neither outside or inside..a space that is a point..death is the point of all points.
Rothko on large pictures: precisely because I want to be very intimate and human [insaan: ins: intimacy] To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a steroptic view or with a reducing glass. However you paint a large picture , you are in it. A lived experience, a sound thought: we need to think the stars and feel them...
But again, we must ask ourselves if such a thing is possible in these times, in an age devoid of religion and metaphysical understanding.How is this autonomous individual related to Nature and to the universal, to the cosmos, except in terms of radical discontinuity (Descartes , again. Also, "reducing glasses"..see Rorty). Man, who is closed in on himself, sees only himself or the reflections of his own mind in everything. He who sees Ratio sees only himself...
Robert Hughes poses this question in another way: Do the paintings carry the weight of meaning that he intends, is there a final epiphany ..the sceptic answers : No! [having seen them again in the Tate yesterday, I tend to agree with him].
But Rothko's is at least a high order of doubt. Can we ever possess and experience..should we? What can be revealed to us in these days but the absence of God? We, who search for ever new destinations, might we not be draw to what is actually always the same?
But the desire for that open space is in the blood, the pressing need to elicit meanings unmediated by discursive language , to find, be lost in, a space divested of rigid boundaries [Does his work not make them fluid?] What use words here, what thought? A knowledge of human feelings is to understand, not to 'know' ; still less is it a knowledge of how that knowledge was acquired. Knowledge through suffering...
Men, with their minds, produced a vision of the world,a concept. Perhaps there is too much thinking,a hypertrophy of the mind. When what we desire is a light from outside to reveal the light within. [Fides et Ratio: faith illuminates the paths of reason]
Was Rothko searching for a black square, a Ka'ba? A sign that would be and not be (Zeus wants to and does not want to be named)...a housing of the spirit, an enclosing of the presence moving through it. Movement in stillness. Does something end with the inexplicable or only begin...a sacred enclosure.
Blanchot: Light illuminates, that is to say that light hides itself, that is its sly characteristic. Light illuminates; that which is illuminated presents itself in an immediate presence which reveals itself without revealing that which manifests it. Light effaces its traces; invisible it renders visible.
Art, then, that is like a house that has breathing spaces (Terminus) , a broken circle that is both presence and absence.
Rothko is influenced by Fra Angelico and the search for that purest essence...no space of perspectival perceptions ..the single features are consumed by the cool flowing light...conjures up a space that knows no limits and yet flows tangibly before our eyes. Insight over sight, or maybe both. Or is he influenced by Monet: to be immersed in a vision, an 'oceanic feeling'; to dissolve oneself and feel oneself slipping away to unknown lands. And who can then say where one ends and one begins, whether I am one or two?
But for the moderns is this anything but a show-a spectacular show, no doubt- in the theatre of the mind? Is the world of things and humans left behind, made more opaque by the glowing radiance of the interior realm? Or is beauty a ladder where one cannot look back or down? Rothko admires the impenetrable, blank walls of Byzantine chapels: outwardly sober, inwardly drunk. They are the keepers of the treasures. To re-create 'the place' : ho topos. A place where necessity and chaos flees. Everything here is about the right proportions-but that of music, not architecture. People praying are distracted by images.
All is rhythm: the entire destiny of man is a single celestial rhythm, just as the work of art is a unique rhythm.
(Holderin)
The problem for the artist, then, is how to give shape to the absent, how to speak about silence. Is it only in silence that one surpasses oneself? Perhaps we should be cautious of thinking of Rothko's art as a stark alternative between a return to an interior space and a journey to outer space. But for someone who was so aware of his mortality is it so surprising that he should be fascinated by wells and caves, the subterranean, portals and gateways. Death is a kind of birth....
The indeterminate bars of colour, the flow of the river, the eternal flux that lies at the heart of all that appears so solid. It is a certain light : the absolute, but also a particular light. Are his pictures about the attempt to get a feeling (not an idea) of what is boundless, unlimited and the paradox that we are but creatures who are subject to birth and death: finite beings with immortal longings...is he saying that we, we who move from womb to tomb, move from one unknown to the other?
Main concerns are the mysteries of the emanation of the divine powers of the hidden God. On the one hand God is so remote from human understanding that nothing can be said about Him. On the other hand, the whole raison d'etre of any mysticism is the need to grasp, by thought and imagination, , the living dynamic presence of God in the world. [Black Sun?]
---M.Megged, The Darkened Light.
Rothko's experiences were shaped from the land of opposites: Russia. Or was it a Zorastrain sense of light and darkness and their moral relation to good and evil?
*Most of the words and ideas in the last three blogs are from Ashton's 'About Rothko', Schama's 'Power of Art' , and Robert Hughes' 'Shock of the New'. *
Jonah's response to Rothko is, intriguingly:
Between the idea and the reality
Between the motion and the act
Falls the Shadow
Between the conception and the creation
Between the emotion and the response
Falls the Shadow
Between the desire and the spasm
Between the potency and the existence
Between the essence and the descent
Falls the Shadow
---T.S.Eliot
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Russian Jew
I don't usually mention politics but the ridiculous 'conference' on the Holocaust in Iran by that monkey makes me wonder just how thick a human being can be (in thickness I include a lack of ethical values). Looking forward to Jimmy Carter's book on Palestine...
For Jonah and C: Robert Hughes on Rothko:
Patience, patience
Patience in the blue!
Each atom of silence
Is the chance of a ripe fruit.
"... This obsession with the qualities of light, issuing from motionless emblems which are themselves fixed in a completely frontal pictorial structure, exactly repeats procedures of American Luminism and its 'small, still voices' of inner contemplation..the idea of a deity that was a 'great, luminous, oblong blur'. "
"He was a Russian Jew, obsessed with the moral possibility that his art could go beyond pleasure and carry the full burden of religious meanings-the patriarchal weight , in fact, of the Old Testament."
On the Rothko chapel:
"all the world has drained out of them, leaving only a void. Whether it is 'the Void' glimpsed by mystics , or simply an impressively theatrical emptiness, is not easily determined. ..In effect it is the last silence of Romanticism..art, in a convulsion of pessimistic inwardness, is meant to replace the world."
All the artists… agreed to hate the image. The art of the new man must suppress all representation of man. Malevich, an eloquent if erratic propagandist, thundered against the Venus de Milo ('not a woman but a parody') and against the 'rubbish filled pool of Academic art' with its female hams, depraved cupids and congealed legacy from Greece. His tone is that of Isaiah on the subject of idols and I think the comparison apt. For beneath the Russians' obvious devotion to human images lurks an impulse to smash them to bits. The ugly riches of late Tsardom, it is true, were an open invitation to the wreckers, but iconoclasm in Russia has a longer history.
As 'Third Rome' and guardian of an orthodoxy denied by the renegade West, Russia inherited from Byzantium her peculiar attitude towards the image. The statue of an emperor or icon of a saint proved the legitimacy of a political or religious idea. The saying 'He who delights in the Emperor's statue delights in the Emperor' applies as well to Justinian as to Tsar Nicholas II Authoritarian societies love images because they reinforce the chain of command at all levels of the hierarchy. But an abstract art of pure form and colour, if it is serious and not merely decorative, mocks the pretensions of secular power because it transcends the limits of this world and attempts to penetrate a hidden world of universal law.
Anarchic peoples, like desert nomads, hate and destroy images, and a similar image-breaking streak runs through Russian history…
Malevich was touched by mystical yearnings. In his hands the non-objective canvas became an icon of anarchy and inner freedom: this is what made it dangerous to Marxist materialism. Of his painting Black Square he said he had felt 'black nights within' and a timidity bordering on fear', but as he decided to break with reality and abandon the image: 'a blissful sensation of being drawn into a "desert" where nothing is real but feeling, and feeling became the substance of my life.' Now this is not the language of a good Marxist, but of Meister Eckhart – or, for that matter, of Mohammed. Malevich's Black Square, his 'absolute symbol of modernity', is the equivalent in painting of the black-draped Ka'aba at Mecca, the shrine in the valley of sterile soil where all men are equal before God. And if this seems far-fetched, I quote the judgement of Andrei Burov, an architect who left the Constructivist Movement: 'There was a strong Muslim influence and orthodox Mohammedanism at that; by way of decoration only clocks and letters were allowed.'
excerpt from "George Costakis: The Story of an Art Collector in the Soviet Union," in What Am I Doing Here? by Bruce Chatwin
Celeste says,
Rothko himself said, in conversation with Selden Rodman: 'I'm NOT an abstractionist.'Selden: 'You're an abstractionist to me.. You're a master of color harmonies and relationships on a monumenal scale. Do you deny that?'Rothko: 'I do..... I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions -trajedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on - and the fact that lots of peple break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate these basic emotions. .. People who weep in front of my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, {meaning Selden}, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.
'The above is taken from Seldon's Conversations With Artists.(First published in 1957.)
Seldon also spoke with Rothko's great friend, the Japanes artist Kenzo Okada, who said, among other things: 'Like Cezanne, like Matisse, [Mark's] pictures [are] always changing, meaning different things to different people. This is not true of Rouault or Picasso.'Looking at Rothkos's paintings, arouses those same 'mystical yearnings'that one experiences when contemplating the geometrical art of Islam, which have no iconographic meaning but makes its appeal direct to the spirit (or whatelse?). In his Introduction to Keith Critchlow's Islamic Pattern, Seyyed Hossein Nasr says:'The doctrine of unity which is cental to the Islamic revelation combined with the nomadic spirituality which Islam made its own brought into being an aniconic art wherein the spiritual world was reflected in the sensible world not through various iconic forms but through geometry and rhythm, through arabesques and calligraphy which reflect directly the worlds above and ultimately the suprenal sun of Divine Unity.'
I won't pretend to understand the full implication of Nasr's words, but want simply to convey the idea that work like Rothko's evokes a passionate response which is beyond words and which taps into the sort of deep levels of awareness which I sense in Islamic geometrical art.
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