Encountering Rothko
One day last year, a friend and I were exploring the Modern and Contemporary exhibition at the Yale Art Gallery, drifting from artwork to artwork with only mild interest. Neither of us knew much about art, much less what makes one abstract expressionist painting better than another. We were merely getting our fix of "culture."
Turning a corner, I caught sight of a pair of similar-looking paintings on a far wall. Both abstracts, they depict a number of colored blocks and bars stacked on top of each other. I recognized them as the work of Mark Rothko, famous for these "multiforms," though I never really understood what made them stand out. To me, they weren't much different from the other abstract pieces I'd seen in the gallery that day, which all sort of blurred together with none really standing out.
Only when I stood close in front of them did I begin to understand what I was looking at. The many gradations of color give the work a scintillating effect, as though it were alive. The shapes have a mythic quality, like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, seeming to emerge as though from a primeval mist. These observations, however, were made after the fact. What predominated at that moment was a strange sense of epiphany: I totally “get” it.
You see, unlike the other paintings which seemed to depict random collections of objects and symbols begging to be pondered and interpreted, there was nothing to unpack here. Whatever Rothko was conveying with this work—and I still couldn’t tell you exactly what that is—seemed to bypass my critical faculties entirely and embed itself in my mind directly, like a stroke of insight. That visceral power, a quality shared by my favorite works of literature and poetry, promises me this: the birth of something unprecedented, wholly new.
Something wholly new came to me, something I never expected. I never expected to have any strong feelings towards any of those paintings. As I said, I knew nothing about painting, and I still don't. My experience from college had been that in order to fully understand something like poetry, you need to learn the history of the form, what makes a poem great, interpret the symbols and imagery. However, this always felt like a staid, intellectual exercise that had little to do with the artwork itself. I never felt anything about what I was interpreting.
In this encounter with Rothko, feeling and understanding came together without the mediation of thought.
As Martin Buber has said¹, the true creative work is an action of the whole being, and in the presence of such a work, “the receptive beholder may be bodily confronted now and again.” The result of this creative process is an object, dragged across vast seas of subjectivity, that can sneak beneath our veils to bring us into true relation. The moment of creation and the moment of encounter converge into a single, timeless moment, as thought and feeling melt together amidst the imprecise contours of the encounter—the unknown, yet understood, convergence into the immeasurable present.
In such moments of pure relation, the entire space around us is colored by it. We enter a space where the entire universe, at that moment, resides only in I and You. When you spend time with a close friend—speaking to each other directly, open to one another, letting nothing come between you—you enter this space, where the world is your conversation. That why this connection to Rothko's work felt so familiar and so human despite the creator not being physically present. I saw, I felt, and I knew.
Moments always come to an end, and the meaningful, life-affirming ones are no different. In fact, we should want them to end so that we may find them again. To build a mystique around these encounters cheapens them, and even makes them less likely to occur again. Hoarding experiences is no different than hoarding money or possessions. Relation occurs in the moment, and if you try to hold onto it any longer, it ceases to be a relation, to be alive, to be human. You only need to keep yourself open to the deepening of experience so that you may enter new spaces of encounter.
“The man to whom freedom is guaranteed does not feel oppressed by causality. He knows that his mortal life is by its very nature an oscillation between You and It, and he senses the meaning of this. It suffices him that again and again he may set foot on the sanctuary in which he could never tarry. Indeed, having to leave it again and again is for him an intimate part of the meaning and destiny of his life. There, on the threshold, the response, the spirit is kindled in him again and again; here, in the unholy and indigent land the spark has to prove itself.”
Some time after this, in appreciation of this moment with Rothko, I bought a poster reproduction of one of his paintings to hang in my apartment. Would having this in my room, where I can look at it every day, rekindle that relation?
So far, it hasn’t. How could it? Besides the reproduction being necessarily inferior to the actual painting, the poster is merely an object that never succeeds in overcoming its pure objecthood. The oversized poster, the sleek aluminum frame I put it in, it’s prominent position in the living space of my apartment: these attributes keep the object separate from the creative work they’re trying to represent.
It serves its purpose for me as a physical emblem of that experience and a neat piece of decor in my minimally-decorated (and that’s being generous) apartment. People like it and it makes me seem “cultured” without having to open my mouth. These are functions of the It-world, as Buber calls it, and by necessity we have to return to that world again and again. But the poster contains a promise, known only to me: the promise of serendipitous encounter.
“In all the seriousness of truth, listen: without It a human being cannot live. But whoever lives only with that is not human.”
All images from the Yale Art Gallery borrowed from weaver in the woods.
Footnotes:
2. Ibid. pg. 101-2
