Rothko and resonance

ABSTRACT

I take Mark Rothko at his word when he claims that an encounter with his paintings involves ‘companionship’ and argue that this insight reflects the artist’s recognition that an observer and his work are in a relationship in which, as the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa puts it, ‘both sides speak with their own voice’. To understand what this might mean, I first discuss Rosa’s theory of ‘resonance’ and its importance for the study of art. Then, I explore ‘resonance’ in relation to Rothko, relating it to how he manipulated the language of painting to de-centre the normative visual perception of the observer, but also how he potentially opens this observer up to radically non-normative psychological and somatic experiences. The de-centring involves making space for an active relationship with Rothko’s paintings which shifts the observer from the focused, outer-directed and controlling attention that usually dominates visual perception towards a more inwardly directed but more porous mode enacted under conditions of essential uncontrollability.

KEYWORDS:

• Mark Rothko
• Abstract Expressionism
• Hartmut Rosa
• phenomenology of art
• sociology of art

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the anonymous reviewers for constructive and encouraging remarks on an earlier draft, and for thereby spurring me on to develop my argument more fully.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The canonical formalist reading of Rothko is by Clement Greenberg (1961), while an ‘existentialism’-tinged approach can be found in the writings of Harold Rosenberg (1972). Robert Rosenblum’s 1961 essay ‘The Abstract Sublime’ ([1960] 1999) and book-length study (1975) constitute a broadening of the critical contextualization of Rothko and other Abstract Expressionists beyond the constraining contexts of formalism and existentialism, drawing attention to affinities with the ‘Northern Romantic tradition’. More recently, an iconological analysis of Rothko’s work is presented by Anna Chave (2001), and a psychoanalytic one by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit (1993). James Elkins reading of encounters with paintings in Pictures and Tears (2004) is significant in the present context as it addresses the fact that they ‘can move us – strongly, unexpectedly, even to tears’ (2004, vi), and in the first chapter he discusses Rothko’s work (in particular, the Houston Chapel). ‘There is no survey to prove it, but it is likely that the majority of people who have wept over twentieth-century paintings have done so in front of Rothko’s paintings’ (2004, 3). Elkins’ discussion of Rothko parallels the approach that will be developed here, in which I draw on the theory of Hartmut Rosa. However, Elkins’ account risks succumbing to what Bruno Latour (2007, 237) describes as a ‘zero-sum game’ in which it is necessary to choose between the ‘social’ interpretation of a work of art or recognition of its ineffable ‘inner qualities,’ rather than recognizing, as I hope to do here, the possibility of a ‘win-win situation’, one in which both approaches converge.

2 While he was a student at Yale, Rothko founded and edited a student journal during 1923 entitled The Saturday Evening Pest, and anonymously wrote in Nietzschean mode therein: ‘False gods! Idols of clay! There is only one way to smash them, and that is a revolution in mi nd and spirit in the student body of Yale University. Let us doubt. Let us think … . Someday, we shall see what is as plain as daylight – that blind conformity to the custom of the majority, to the average, brings mediocrity, and crushes genius’ (Quoted in Bresslin 1993, 52). In a book on art written in 1940–1941 and unpublished during his lifetime, Rothko continued to echo his hero Nietzsche when he opined: ‘It is really one of the most serious faults which can be found with the whole conception of democracy, that its cultural function must move on the basis of the common denominator. Such a point of view indeed would make a mess of all of the values which we have developed for examining works of art. It would address one end of education in that it would consider that culture which was available to everyone, but in that achievement it would eliminate culture itself. This is surely the death of all thought’ (Mark Rothko 2004, 126–127). Even later in life, having achieved remarkable critical and material success, Rothko still sought to preserve his sense of being part of an embattled and uncompromising outsider-elite, reminiscing: ‘When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing. No galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet, it was a golden age, for we all had nothing to lose and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity, consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large I shall not venture to discuss. But I do know, that many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow. We must all hope we find them’ (Rothko speaking in 1969. Quoted in Lopez-Remiro 2005, 157).

3 In this, Rothko was far from alone, of course. His aversion to the vulgar inclusivity of democratic society also echoes the belief amongst the radical Left and the radical Right that modernity was pervasively alienating and dominated by a dull and mediocre ‘bourgeois consciousness’ which could enjoy only ersatz forms of ‘resonance’, and in which a commercialized mass culture designed to pacify the masses was disseminated. For example, Rothko’s contemporary, the critic Clement Greenberg, in a now celebrated essay published in 1939, ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’, described the avant-garde as pitted in battle against kitsch. Greenberg later developed his reductively formalist concept of ‘Modernism’ in which the only possibility open to the progressive arts was to identify their medium’s autonomous, non-transferrable properties, and thereby to act as a bulwark against the encroachments of an inherently inauthentic mass culture. In the case of the medium of painting, Greenberg deemed that this property was ‘flatness’. Greenberg considered Rothko’s paintings exemplified this reductiveness. He egregiously misinterpreted the purpose of Rothko’s paintings for the artist himself, as well as their potential – and manifest – impact on an audience.

4 For Rosa’s analysis of modernity as ‘acceleration’ see Rosa (2013).

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Simon Morley

Simon Morley is a British artist and the author of Writing on the Wall. Word and Image in Modern Art (2001), Seven Keys to Modern Art (2019), The Simple Truth. The Monochrome in Modern Art (2020), By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose (2021), and the editor of The Sublime. Documents of Contemporary Art (2010). He has contributed essays to several journals, including Third Text and World Art. He lives in South Korea and is currently Assistant Professor of Fine Art at Dankook University. His Modern Painting. A Concise History will be published in 2023 by Thames & Hudson.