[/caption]In an article in a wonderful museum on-line magazine Tate etc., entitled Landscapes of the Mind, Brice Marden talks about both the physicality and the spirituality of experiencing the works of Mark Rothko in person.
To quote Marden: "That you're in a space--an indefinable space, but it is having an effect on you physically. You feel engulfed, totally surrounded by it. Last year I read that Rothko once said that the ideal distance from which to view his paintings is eighteen inches. So I do as he suggested whenever I am in front of one. And it makes a huge difference. You become much more conscious of every nuance, which probably at some other time I had thought were just little accidents in his printing process. I realized how carefully they were painted."
I can say that I had the same experience when finally getting close to the Rothkos at the Tate a couple of years ago. At that point they had nine of the famous Seagram murals. Standing in front of them made me feel surrounded, like Marden, and transported as well to a spiritual place. It was almost the sensation of an embrace. Now, of course, the big Rothko show at the Tate Modern is winding down by February 1st.
Which brings me to my point, which is that art needs to be experienced in the real, in real space and in real time. It is not enough to do as we all do out of academic necessity to look at them in textbooks, as huge projections in art-history lectures or on-line in our computers.
Paintings, as well as other works of art, are physical, they have size, substance, touch and presence. They demand to be seen for real, in the real, and we as artists have frequently ignored this at our peril.
Generations of art students have looked at the works of Piet Mondrian through prostheses and then went off to make paintings that they thought emulated this master. However, when in the real you see the Mondrian paintings, all kinds of things show up, they are small, almost intimate, in scale, they have thicknesses of paint and the lines are not quite straight, in a word, the works are organic.
What else needs to be emphasized is that we need to not only look at the art in person, in the real, we need to look at them in time, both in frequency and in duration. We do not spend enough time looking, we glance and walk on. Partly this is an architectural problem, museums don't have enough benches or chairs in the galleries. Why not take the leisure to sit and look? We need to slow down and look and contemplate, not just glance and run. We need to look at a painting or other work of art more than once.
1 comment:
This is a very interesting tidbit about Rothko. I got visit the Rothko Chapel in Houston a few year ago. I find his work immensely powerful. Looking forward to seeing your work in person in February.
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