Rothko's Asceticism
Endless buzz of cicadas. The sun rising high over the canopy of intertwining branches and leaves. And the air rising up from the ground to meet it, softly smoldering in the summer heat. The smell of wet clay beneath it all; how green the grass grew in its promise; how the birds exclaimed their existence and the worms surrendered theirs. Field of pleasure, of endless time, it was here that I first glimpsed the light that was shining from “my place in the sun” — falling faintly from the edge of my vision onto the contours of the waiting world. And behind this small pasture, hidden from sight by tall hedges of wildly growing bamboo, like a void in the garden, was Rothko’s windowless chapel, with its high walls set against the world in every direction, turning instead to its interior, as if guided by an inverted tropism, towards the silence of a space so consecrated, of the building of itself as such….
What was I looking for here? The heat had had an enervating effect on my mind — a cloud of shifting lights, of impressions muddled by the simple sense of pleasant things all bathed in gold, occluded all my further thinking, made every act appear superfluous, and finally seemed to cause me to abandon all struggle, to cease all effort, and to abandon all needless exertion. It was this temptation — to forget, to annihilate myself — that overcame me from within this boundless warmth. Sunk into the world, I could thus no longer separate myself by the distance formed in reflection but would be submerged within the substance of the naive world, diminished to a point in totality, a meaningless part in the eternal whole. To choose another fate, then, and to escape this siren song, I entered the Rothko chapel.
Renzo Piano, Menil Park, 1986. Menil Collection
Here, the air was much cooler, breathing from the walls and the floors and the long shadows folded into alcoves in four corners of the octagonal room. The paintings were large and hung on every side, to the left and right in groups of five, with three panels hung together on the large central wall and the others, larger, on adjoining walls on either side. At the far end was a final trinity, commanding the space like an altar. Slowly, I came back to myself and looked more closely at the work I had entered: it was a perfect image of the world I had left, but inverted and estranged.
The same sun shone through the skylight above, but as its light passed along the ceiling and down the white walls, it seemed to be stripped of its warmth and reduced to a cold abstraction. The paintings themselves contracted in this unnatural glow. They were composed of intensely rich fields of purple, with dark, almost black rectangles nearly filling the triptychs to the left and right. And yet the light that fell here did not penetrate the pictures but reflected from their surface, catching the slight folds of the stretching canvas and the opaque density of the paint itself instead of the color, which receded further and further from view. I wanted to approach the paintings and be absorbed in their depth, but they refused me, turning away from my senses. This was a new force, an ascetic ideal that fixed my place in an obdurate world. As I sat down to consider my options, I felt its presence swirling around me, a darkness blinding in harsh light. At last, I could take no more and quickly made for the exit. Outside, I was confronted by Newman’s Broken Obelisk; I felt the pain of being squeezed by its touching extremes. The cicadas continued to sound…. //
Interior side view, Rothko Chapel, Houston.