Closeness and curation: at a Mark Rothko exhibition
A few days ago I went to see the Mark Rothko exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. I was on my own, so I could go through as slowly as I wanted. I tried an exercise that I’d heard an art professor had given her new students: with a handful of artworks, I set a timer for myself and looked at the works for the whole time without letting myself get distracted. It’s easy enough to be distracted from one artwork by another, and in this regard there are really far too many pieces of art in most exhibitions: how am I supposed to pay enough attention to, say, fifty or sixty paintings in just an hour or so? And if I’m not supposed to, which ones am I supposed to choose? (Earlier this year, in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, I went to see Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, because of the beautiful John Ashbery poem it had inspired. Nobody was looking at it when I entered the room, but once I had stood by it for a few minutes some other tourists came and stood by it too, giving me the thought that an audience is what draws an audience.)
Anyway, after each period of time I spent looking at a painting, I sat nearby and wrote down my thoughts on my phone, and those thoughts are what make up the most of this post. It’s open to question how much they are actually about Rothko’s paintings; I guess a question on my mind is what it would mean for a thought to be about an artwork in the first place.
1. I can’t seem to stop being confused by art. All that changes is that my confusion changes shape. (Is art criticism meant to remedy this confusion? If art criticism can help someone to have a fuller experience of art, is there a criticism of life that can help a person to have a fuller experience of life—a fuller life? Would that be ethics? What is ‘fullness’?) Looking at these paintings of Rothko’s can feel as if I am waiting to see what happens. With some of the pictures I find that, as much as I resist it, I keep seeing them as figurative; my eyes, or I guess my mind, will find something—usually just a colour, or the specific place of a colour—that it can make sense of by imagining it as a depiction of something real. So the green in No. 15 (1957) becomes a lawn or a park at night beneath a dark sky. I suppose that so many landscapes, especially the ones we first learn to draw as children, have the same structure as so many of Rothko’s paintings: two rectangles, one on top of the other.
2. But now in these later paintings, from the mid sixties, the colours are so dark that it takes a while for my eyes to adjust (if they do at all) in order to perceive anything distinct. Now I get the sense of these pictures as lacking a foreground; they are nothing but background. Take away an orchestra performing in a concert hall and there will still be the low, perhaps nearly imperceptible, ambient hum of the room. If you amplified that sound it might sound like a rumbling or a roaring, or the sound of something ominously approaching: and maybe these pictures capture something like a visual equivalent of that sound. — Or maybe it’s the fan in the museum that I’m hearing.
And if my eyes have to adjust to see them correctly … and if I have to avoid the assumptions and figurations that my mind naturally assumes … are these paintings demanding, or expecting, something of me on the level of a body, an organism? Is it that I’m not animal enough to get it? (We think of humans as more abstract than other animals, but here’s a case of the opposite being true. My mind is too literal for something so abstract as these paintings—and that reminds me of the apes seeing the equally dark, equally rectangular monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. What could I make of Rothko if I were an ape?) Is the light maybe too bright in this museum for these paintings? I wonder what it would be like to be in an almost completely dark room and, as your eyes acclimatise to the darkness, to notice one of these paintings in the opposite corner to you. When I imagine this, I can imagine what it would be like for a colour or a shape to scare me.
3. These are paintings that I cannot get close enough to. For a start, they’re in a museum, so I’m only allowed to get so close. But there’s also that feeling that I described getting from them: the sense of something dark and roaring which is approaching. The paintings are hung low enough to the ground that they are like doorways into another room—or, since most of them have frames of colour painted onto them, like windows leading out of the room. But I can’t walk through a painting: a picture might draw us in, but it won’t let us in. And the boundaries between Rothko’s colours, they are not sharp lines: in fact, they are hardly lines at all. They have the shapelessness of fire in motion (and now I hear that roaring sound again); they remind me of the seemingly infinite resolution of eyesight, such that no matter how close I get, I cannot get down to a minimal level—as if the painting were made of pixels—at which I could finally witness one colour stop and another begin. I can’t look closely enough.
In some of these reflections—in my attention to, or distraction by, the sound in the museum; in my wish for the lights to be dimmed; in my more general frustration at what is really the very idea of a museum: of its separating me from the artworks by ropes or wires, and of my experience of the paintings as taking place always within a small crowd—I notice how inseparable our attention to artworks is from the fact that they are curated. When part of our general idea of artworks is that they belong to museums, the difference between art and the curation of art is difficult to determine. Part of what can be confusing about art, I sense, is that we encounter it in these places where we do nothing but encountering it. I can imagine that people put artworks in churches to signify the idea of God’s presence there; but what else is present in a museum other than its artworks?
I really like this piece. ‘We’ are also in museums, as well as the artworks. I wonder if that might mean that we and the artworks are also an artwork? (Doffs hat to Bertrand Russell).
Visiting the Mark Rothko exhibition is now on my bucket list. Whatever art museum I can see before that, I will try your little exercise to make the most of it :)