Painting the page

Abstract

As a way of creating a heuristic opening onto my practice I will make a rather naïve observation about the paintings of Mark Rothko. I want to suggest that because of the proportions of some of his canvases, the fuzzy rectangles of colour evoke erasures, censorings, concealments or veilings of paragraphs of writing. Running with this fantasy for a while, I go on to ask what kind of ‘writing’ this might be, and what it can tell us about the relative value of words and images in our culture. I throw the door wide open, giving a brief summary of the cultural symbolism of the book in the West. After that, I look at three paradigmatic critical readings of Rothko's paintings, asking what they might make of the presence of a phantom text, and how this can be related to the symbolism of the book. Finally, I suggest a supplementary reading of Rothko that draws on the East Asian concept of void, and ask what this can tell us about Rothko and how it complicates the earlier analyses of the relationship between the visual and the verbal. The concept of void has also come to increasingly inform my own practice as an artist, and so too has the notion of veiling or censoring signs. In other word, in the end, this long detour will be a way of talking about my own work without actually mentioning it.

Keywords:

• Symbolism of the Book
• iconoclasm
• Rothko
• the theo-aesthetic
• censoring and veiling
• Taoism and Buddhism
• radical impermanence
• void