Feeling Things

Mark Rothko, Orange and Tan. 1954

At the risk of being thought a soulless monster, I have a confession to make. I have never stood before a Mark Rothko painting and cried. I remember as an undergraduate I felt a little angst about this fact. At the time, I was told by more than a few people that this is how they respond to his work. So many claimed to be utterly moved by Rothko’s paintings’ cathartic power, yet I was always left unaffected by these big fuzzy squares. Was there something wrong with me? Have I no heart? Am I not sensitive enough? 

“The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.”

- Rothko

It is a popular refrain that looking at a Rothko is a religious experience, but I have never really got it, or felt it.  I know the same people who earnestly speak of their profound awe gazing at canvas and paint would express absolute dismissive skepticism of a church or people speaking in tongues. Could these “religious experiences” have a similar aspect? It is my suspicion that there is more cross over between the two groups than either would admit. Both would claim their form of religious ecstasy is authentic and the other is a counterfeit. I, however, am not touched by either the squares nor the Holy Spirit. I don’t think either group is faking it: presumably both are touched in a profound way. Perhaps somewhere inside themselves they feel they are supposed to emote. Whatever the case, I can’t share this with them.

Maybe I am soulless.

Despite being dubbed an Abstract Expressionist, Rothko was more interested in inspiring (that is, affecting his viewers), than expressing anything. Unlike some of the surrealists and other Abstract Expressionists, he wasn’t trying to suss out his own depths. It was the depths of the universe he hoped to convey. And despite the term “religious experiences” the paintings had nothing to do with conventional religion. His aim was the sublime. The sublime is something beyond intellect and civilization, and for Rothko, illusionistic painting couldn't touch it. It is this conception of the sublime, as described by authors like Burke, Kant and Nietzsche, that Rothko was attempting to harness. If Rothko was effective in his goal, these sublime pictures could very well drive people to tears, but more likely it would inspire screams. As Burke would put it:  “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” This seems to be a tall order for Rothko. The word sublime is so commonly attached to his paintings (by viewers, and critics alike) that it makes me wonder if those who do use the word know its definition? Is it possible that they are watering down the word? 

… or perhaps I have no soul.

About twenty years ago, I went to a retrospective of the drawings of Arshile Gorky. The Armenian-American artist marks a transitional space art historically. Commonly he is called a bridge from Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism. As I reached the end of the show (which was arranged chronologically), I was struck by the change in the pictures’ composition. Gorky’s early drawings were quite colorful. But the later ones were sparsely colored.

In a piece he wrote for the New York Times, Dick Cavett recounts describing depression to Larry King: “if there were a curative magic wand on the table eight feet away, it would be too much trouble to go over and pick it up.” I find this to be a spot-on observation. The depressive might be buried in the depths of despair, yet at the same time, the will to change one’s condition is buried even deeper. It was in Gorky’s final drawings that I saw a graphic description of depression as apt as Cavett’s verbal one.

Gorky’s sparing color usage spoke to me as representational of a lack of joy; a lack of energy; the lack of will. This isn’t to say that the drawings are indolent or sparse. The black and grey markings carrying the drawing. They are  doing all the necessary work of a drawing. Which makes the color application seem all the more listless. The color in the drawings seems to have given up. Just as in life, a depressed person might have obligations to keep things running, it is the joy, or the color, that is gone. The dates of the drawings in the exhibition end in 1947 or 48, at which time Gorky was 44.  The exhibition and his life was cut short by Gorky’s suicide.

I remember the sadness I felt leaving the exhibition. I didn't feel this way because I was told I had to, or I was expected to be. I wasn’t saddened by the informative placards on the wall that might have related the narrative of Gorky’s life (I normally ignore these postings anyway); I was saddened by the actual artworks.

 Arshile Gorky, Summation.1947

I suppose that many would scoff at my claimed feeling of depression as being anything comparable to the real thing. Without bringing my own emotional/psychological history to bear by means of an appeal to “my truth” (gag!), I don't think it is necessary to have experienced actual, clinical depression to understand the pain of others. The fact is, that people can empathize with those suffering experiences that are peculiar to a sufferer. As anyone who has seen any work of art will know, so much of the emotional potency of art is reliant on the force of empathy. Art’s capacity to inspire empathy is quite an amazing thing; it is not bound by time, language nor circumstance. 

I actually quite like Rothko’s paintings. I appreciate them in a way that, I’m sure, Rothko himself would disapprove of. That is I like the pictorial qualities of his work; namely, his color usage and compositional construction.  And, I admire Rothko’s quest to inspire grand, cosmic reactions in his viewers; delving deep into our collective, atavistic souls. Gorky also spoke with the same mid-century grandiosity, and neither of the artists’ aims should be ignored. Yet setting all of the big talk aside, speaking as an honest viewer, I find that Gorky’s actual corpus draws on something that is much more interesting. It is something that possesses an affecting power much more profound than an ersatz approximation of the principle of the sublime. The power of which I speak is our shared humanity. It is this touching empathy that Gorky’s drawings possess, and that has always meant more to me than some Brobdingnagian aims. I don’t think I have the capacity to weep for the sublime, whatever that is. I am, however, able to weep…or laugh…or feel with, and for you my fellow mortal. What do you know…Maybe I do have a soul after all.