Each act of writing was a challenge to the canon; it was potentially an act of erring and of swerving away from the authority of tradition. And each act of reading could also empower the reader rather than simply setting them on a course of obedience. Indeed, in the modern world books can often be seen as posing such a threat to the ruling order that not only will they be severely censored, but the books themselves will actually be destroyed.
In order to more fully understand the significance of this change in symbolism, it is important to understand that the idea of the book — and its authority — is derived from deep within the structures of western thinking. It is a tradition that cannot allow the possibility that such opposites might be equivalent. They do not co-exist peacefully, and one term is always privileged over the other. This, in turn, becomes the basis for an asymmetrical hierarchy that has determined the theological, logical, axiological and political domains throughout the course of western history.
The western idea of the subject is thus founded on an ability to lay claim to a sense of sovereignty or authority through a process of expulsion of the negative and opposing aspect of the dyad. Reading Rothko The evolution of the arts in the modern period was a many-sided rebellion against the hierarchy of values inscribed within this western dualism.
Rothko sought the essence of painting by stripping away all that hides what it alone is, and thereby secures objective grounds for its aesthetic and cultural value. It also reflects his belief in the superior reality of an invisible and transcendent absolute.
A strictly formalist interpretation would not interest itself in any ostensibly symbolic dimension. What he was doing, perhaps, was burying a highly complex history just under the surface. This line of enquiry might also be expanded from within the theo-aesthetic paradigm.
For here what we see is to be construed as an act of iconoclasm of a far-reaching kind, one that aims at the obliteration of all sacrilegious idols — including written words. Rothko, then, belongs within a long western tradition that has always taken the war against idolatry far into the domain of the written word.
Within these traditions, verbal, visual or aural signs — all the normal carriers of information - are employed in ways that seek to make them allude to what is beyond presence. The asolute can only be referred to by what it is not. In a strictly Judaic context, we might say that Rothko presents us not so much with a book page as with something far more fundamental: a defaced or erased stone tablet — the Mosaic Tables of the Law.
What this interpretation implies is that Rothko is protecting us from some kind of dangerous encounter, perhaps from the seductive power of all visual signs. But he first sets out to invoke the conditions for the appearance or presence of these signs and then, by his act of concealment or erasure, he declares that it can never be the basis for the establishment of any legitimate power over the real.
I refer to those works by Ruscha in which he presents us with dark coloured rectangles of different lengths laid out on blank backgrounds, which, on a first encounter, might be taken for some kind of Malevich-like Suprematism, but soon, with the aid of the information provided by the titles, turn out to be censored fragments of demotic American speech of the kind encountered in film noir, or Raymond Chandler novels For example, Little Snitches Like You End Up In Dumpsters All Across Town Within Daoism the virtues of water are often extolled.
Water does not seek to attack impregnable objects, but instead peacefully finds its way around them. Rivers do not fail to reach the sea, though they seek the lowest level and the simplest course. The reason for this emphasis is that, rather than focusing on the eternal, unchanging or the immutable as the highest aim and ideal, as do western philosophical and theological traditions, Daoism gives a central place to the liquidity of change — to the role of time in forming our experience of reality.
Within this perspective the existence of a thing or a person is as much determined by what they are not, as by what they are. Everything is an open to the invisible breath or flow of life. Everything is radically impermanent. The name that can be named Is not the eternal name. In order to clarify this, I want to explore the East Asian concept of void or blankness.
Not surprisingly, the concept of void has considerable importance within the language of East Asian art. As the Korean curator Lee Joon writes: East Asian painting traditionally placed more emphasis on the inherent spirit in objects than on representing them….. From the perspective of Western art, which explicates everything based on forms, the void of Asian painting may appear, to certain extents, to suggest a lack of forms or a space of incompletion.
As a matter of fact, it is difficult to find a term corresponding to the concept in the Western artistic lexicon. In that sense, void does not mean the renunciation of the use of space but rather the encouragement of space and is absence-cum-presence. Lee unpaginated All this implies a kind of sign-system that fundamentally challenges the implicit bias of western dualistic thinking. He describes void as participating in both the noumenal the metaphysical dimension that refers to essence and origin and the phenomenal worlds.
Like the valley it is hollow, but nourishes everything, and like water it is inconsistent and penetrates and animates everything. The void thus roots a life in time and space and links it to the origins in the eternal Cheng Thus Cheng describes void as a central aspect of an expanded sign-system in which it is considered to be a privileged sign. All signs aim to freeze or arrest time.
So in order to evoke radical impermanence and void, East Asian artists employed devices that aim to challenge this false impression. They customarily employed the iconography of clouds, smoke, water and mountains, for example — all of which denoted impermanence within nature. Furthermore, they used techniques that were explicitly designed to relinquish conscious control of the process of making and to blur the boundaries between sign and non-sign.
They sought an explosion of viewpoints. Rothko's art is captivating and I wanted to get more insight into the way he thought. This book should do that, but I found it very dense.
It's a challenging book, I didn't like reading it and I didn't feel I got a lot out of it for the effort. Sometimes those are the books you have to turn around in your mind a bit, go back, reread, and eventually synthesize. I hope that happens with that book. I wouldn't recommend it to someone trying to understand Rothko yet, but perhaps in a few months.
Feb 03, Kathleen Quaintance rated it did not like it. Dec 30, Loki rated it liked it. Some insightful and interesting writing about art in this book -- however, it is interspersed with correspondences that would have been better put in a different book.. Jan 13, Misty rated it really liked it. Dec 06, Antonio rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorites.
Jan 15, Catherine Corman rated it it was amazing. Nor could the solitude be overcome. It could gather on beaches and streets and in parks only through coincidence -Rothko. Sarah rated it it was amazing Feb 06, Kaitlin rated it really liked it Dec 30, Whtvrs rated it it was ok Apr 20, Robert Walrod rated it really liked it Nov 17, Bill Van Dusen rated it it was ok Nov 14, Federico Toscano rated it liked it Oct 13, Carl rated it really liked it Jan 18, Paulos Kalebrikos rated it really liked it Apr 15, Julian Sirre rated it really liked it Aug 15, Sebastiano rated it liked it Aug 28, Alejandro rated it it was amazing Apr 23, Charles rated it it was amazing Jul 25, Aaron Reyes rated it liked it Jan 24, Jacque rated it really liked it Jun 07, Ervinos rated it liked it Nov 01, Francesca rated it really liked it Oct 18, Rebecca rated it it was ok Oct 20, Rothko also wrote a number of essays and critical reviews during his lifetime, adding his thoughtful, intelligent, and opinionated voice to the debates of the contemporary art world.
Although the artist never published a book of his varied and complex views, his heirs indicate that he occasionally spoke of the existence of such a manuscript to friends and colleagues. Mark Rothko was born in Russia and came to the United States with his family in Christopher Rothko is a writer and psychologist and is actively involved in managing the Rothko legacy. He lives in New York City. Writings on Art is the latest evidence of his revealingly eloquent ways with words.
Addressing art in terms of tradition, myth, history, philosophy, form, politics, biology, and emotion, Rothko asserts the individuality and necessity of the artist, as he also reaffirms that the Abstract Expressionists were continuing an ancient tradition.
This is one of the most important documents written by an Abstract Expressionist—or by an American painter. In addition to affording invaluable insight into the mind of its author, this volume is the most considerable single verbal text, in length and sustained argument, to have emerged from what we now call the New York School. This is a fully worked-out theory of art, written by an essential American painter at the very dawn of his artistic maturity.
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