Was he [Rothko] then a religious man? When he first got the commission for the chapel, he told them he was not. “My relation with God was not very good,” he told her, “and it has gotten worse day by day. I started out thinking the paintings should have a religious subject matter, but they became dark, on their own”.
Page 4
Rothko is also the only major twentieth-century painter who accepted the possibility that people might cry in front of his paintings. “The people who weep before my pictures”, he said in an interview in 1957, “are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them”. He did not say whether he cried over his own paintings, though I would like to imagine he sometimes did. His idea of “religious experience” was very melodramatic – just the kind of over-the-top motion that could lead to tears. “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions,” he said in the same interview, “tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on – and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions”.
Page 13
….It was April 1969….”I just sat there in fear”, she told me. “I was literally shaking”. For her, the painting just “said death”. She told an assistant, “Someone needs to get to him”. He went on ten months before he committed suicide.
Jane Dillenberger on how she predicted Rothko’s suicide by what his new paintings “said” to her.
Page 15
As Wittgenstein said, philosophy less a cure than an illness in its own right.
Page 17
In an interview in May 1951, Rothko said he painted large canvases they put viewers inside the work: “you are in it”, he said, “it isn’t something you command.” His large pictures sweep forward, curling around you, filling the very air you breathe with colour. It’s as if the world has been melted into washes of thickened light. The delicate edges of Rothko’s colour fields are just visible in peripheral vision, reaching out like smoky fingers. The effect can be exhilarating – it may be part of what Rothko meant by “ecstasy” – and disquieting. Viewers can feel “hemmed in”, as Breslin puts it, “threatened by fusion, by an absorptive, smothering unity.”
Sounds like coming under a trance by looking at the painting
Page 18
As an experiment, I walked up to one of Rothko’s canvases in the chapel and stood eighteen inches from it, pressing my shins against the low metal guard rails. That is closer then I like to stand when I am talking to someone, and the result was an uncomfortable feeling of intimacy….the hopelessness of it really came home, and I felt what I took to be Rothko’s impending sense of despair. I began to get a little dizzy. I felt like stumbling backward, and after a few minutes I did.
Page 19
The funny thing is about Magherini saying that Franz’s reaction has “more to do with the history and personal experience of the patient than with the object” is that it strips the artwork of its power just when its power is strongest.
Here, Elkins is talking about “Stendal Syndrome”, a syndrome where people are (dubiously) affected so much by an artwork while on holiday that they go into fits, hysterics, swoons, etc. In this account, a German man called Franz had to check himself into a hospital after obsessing over, and suffering hallucinations from Young Bacchus by Caravaggio while on a trip to the Ufizzi in Florence.
 |
| Young Bacchus by Caravaggio, 1596 |
Page 51
The Stendhal syndrome and the Mark Twain Malaise are two sides of a single coin. For each tourist who is looking for a revelation, there is another who is hardened against anything disorienting. The one is soft; the other jaded. The one wants to feel everything; the other insists on feeling nothing. Stendhal’s tourists throw their arms wide and are overcome. Twain’s put on dark glasses and sneer. Yet they both look, and they both react to the works, and not just their own frayed emotions.
Page 53
The moral I take from the histories of the syndrome and the malaise is that even outlandish experience in front of paintings need to be taken seriously, because they are part of the spectrum of human response. I wouldn’t feel comfortable if I were on a trip with Franz, Brigitte, or Kamil, but I don’t see any reason why people should be in full control of themselves when they look at artworks.
There is no reason looking should be easy, because pictures are not just decoration. They are peculiar objects that pull at us, tugging us a little out of the world. A picture will leave me unmoved if I don’t take time with it, but if I stop, and let myself get a little lost, there’s no telling what might happen. Caravaggio put Franz into a sexual frenzy.
Who among us (besides Mark Twain) is so stable that we can say no painting could move us? And who among us is so superficial that we don’t want art to affect us? What exactly would paintings be, if they didn’t have the power to hit us where we live? The experience of looking can be, should be, hard to manage.
Page 54
It happened in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He [Rob Klinkenberg] was walking by a side room when he felt as if something had pushed him. He says it was like the feeling of sleeping on a train, when “you suddenly have to open your eyes because you feel as if someone is staring at you”. He looked into the recess, and saw a painting of Rothko’s. “Its presence was so unmistakable,” he writes, that “I nearly wanted to step forward and warm my hands on it. That was when I lifted my hands in an involuntary gesture, because I wanted to applaud”.
….that feeling of sleeping, and knowing your being stared at, that feeling of being tapped on the shoulder, being pushed from behind – those are sure signs that something unusual is happening.
Page 55
Is it true, when all is said and done, that if you cry in front of a painting it is your fault? To my mind, stories like the ones I have been recounting are enough to show that many emotional encounters with paintings are prompted by the pictures themselves and not the viewers overactive tear ducts.
Page 65
Imagine you’re walking through a large art museum. You stop at a painting of Flemish peasants sitting at a bar and smoking. You notice that one of them is about to fall off his stool, and you laugh. Surely that’s because the painting itself contains a joke….
In each case, it is the picture that causes those reactions, and I do not fault people for getting a bit sick, or (in the case of the Dutch tavern scenes) laughing out loud.
Page 66
Sexuality, horror, and humor are in the images. But if they are, then why is crying in the eye of the beholder? Why is it the image that tickles my ribs, or my fancy, but its my own fault if I cry? If you’re walking through a museum, and you have the good luck to be captured by a picture, and if you find yourself crying, then I think it would be a pity to assume it was just fatigue or wayward thoughts from your own past. There is a good chance the painting itself was responsible.
If you think of it, the paintings in our museums are full of pictures that are sad or strange or powerful enough to make us cry. [or laugh].
Page 67
A powerful picture raises tempestuous thoughts and unpredictable moods, like the variable winds of a thunderstorm. Looking at a strong picture, you can feel buffeted, as the picture pushes your thoughts one way and another.
Page 68
….every well imagined painting has its currents, its tensions, its uneasy truces of opposing forces.
Page 69
Bertrand [Rougé] thinks of the artwork as a bridge that makes it possible to be transported to another side of experience, away from real life. There is truth in this idea….people can find themselves staring at a painting and not know how long they have been there. Pictures have always been like that for me. They put me in a little trance, and make me forget where I am…In Bertrand’s way of thinking, people who cry in front of paintings are actually taken away: their motionless bodies remain in front of the paintings, but their thoughts are temporarily lost, even to themselves. They are “gone”, somewhere inside the world of the artwork. Crying, or shock, [or laughing?] is what keeps them there, and when the tears dry up and they come back, shaky and unsteady, as if the trip back from the painting led across a narrow bridge suspended high over a gorge.
I’ll call this theory the trance theory…
This is something I would like to build on, along with parts of what Gell (Technology of Enchantment), and Lewis-Williams (the Trance Vortex, and shifting consciousness) has written on the subject. Also, what artists such as Guston (also mentions trance) and Bacon (chance) have said.
Page 72
People who have cried at paintings are not like Shamans, because they keep their eyes fixed on something everyone can see.
They have a foot in our world, and the other in the illogical, irrational domain of the artwork.
Page 73
Why? Is it because images really can be too powerful to be out on display in front of us all of the time. Imagine Frances Bacon’s Triptych, May - June, 1973 splashed about on billboards and TV adverts all the time – the result, for me anyway, would be really depressing. For some images’, especially in the case of powerful ones like this, there is a time and a place.
Page 210
 |
| Giovanni Bellini, St Francis in Ecstasy, 1480-85 |
Of any picture, this is the one that brings me closest to tears [Giovanni Bellini’s Ecstasy of St. Frances]. I may never have actually wept in front of it – it’s been a long time, almost thirty years – but I remember standing there, choked up, with a rush of half-formed thoughts swimming in my head. When I was thirteen or fourteen, the Ecstasy of St. Frances was almost too much to look at: I recall thinking I could only take in a few details on each visit. It wasn’t a painting, really: it was a dream of what a painting might be. By comparison other pictures were clumsy illustrations where things were, as Beckett put it, ill seen and ill said. Somehow, the Ecstasy of St. Frances resembled the way I thought. It had the right texture, it pooled in the right places. When I looked, it was as if words had been swept out of my head and replaced by brushstrokes and colors. The word “magical” doesn’t do justice to what I felt: I was attached to the painting in a strange fashion that I have nearly lost the ability to recall.
Links to Alfred Gell’s ‘Enchantment’, and also to trance states that could be induced by paintings.
Page 75
Envoi: How to look and possibly even be moved
Painters have set out to shock and dismay, to confuse and delight, work magic, inspire prayers and pilgrimages, arouse violent and irrational urges. Most of that has gone, drained away into the history books.
Freedberg’s book The Power of Images is a wonderful compendium of the strong reactions people used to feel, and an indictment of the passionless present. I’ve often had it open as I wrote this book, comparing his accounts of images that inspired religious devotion, passion, and psychotic violence to my own stories about crying. Reading his book opened my eyes to the many things images can do, but it left me wondering what pictures can still do, here and now. Are we confined, like historians, to reading other people’s responses?
Twentieth-century painting is said to be difficult: it demands analysis rather than raw reactions.
Page 206
Modernism, whether it begins with Kant or with Cézanne, is like a new continent that has raised up, dry and mountainous, out of the ocean of earlier painting.
Art museums….teach people how to look without feeling too much. Contemporary museums shuttle their visitors from label to label, and tell them very little that can promote genuine encounters with objects.
Page 207
If they are given the chance, pictures can ruin our stable sense of ourselves, cutting under the complacent surface of what we know and starting to chafe against what we feel.
Page 208
Studying history is like smoking: they’re both habits that give us pleasure, but they are very bad for us. One kills the body, the other the imagination.
…..its comforting to think that paintings require only domesticated, predictable emotions. Everyone knows more intimate encounters might be possible. That’s why some painting are masterpieces. But we also like them safely locked away in museums.
 |
| Francis Bacon, Triptych May-June, 1973 Oil on Canvas |
Page 210
It can take weeks, even years before they [paintings] decide to speak.
You have to concentrate on understanding what you see. That takes sustained and focused energy. There’s a strange state of mind involved, in which you forget yourself just enough to lose track of the boundary between the pictures world and your own world. Michael Fried, the art historian who wrote on “presentness” and “grace”, calls the state “absorption”. Bertrand Rougé thinks of it as crossing over a bridge into the paintings world. However it is named, it means you have to pay strict attention to the picture at the expense of everything else.
Page 211
For my colleagues in academia, I’ll draw a different moral: let’s just say that we see. If a picture seems to mean something personal, emotional, or otherwise unacademic, let’s say so. Why continue talking in such straightjackets?
If a painting attracts you, then by all means let yourself be taken in: allow yourself any thoughts, no matter how bizarre. Let the painting do its work. Fantasize about the picture, if you want. Project your thoughts onto the painting. Let the painting hypnotize you. That is the only way to really experience a picture, and it should never be dampened by thinking of what’s proper or true.
Page 212
We think while we cry, and we feel while we think: it’s really that simple, and people who believe otherwise may be trying to defend themselves against some dangerous influx of passion. It’s said that only sober thoughts are reliable. But if sobriety can bridge centuries, why not passion?
Page 213
…I have worked to keep the architecture of this book as open-ended as I can, so that each reader can find a different path through it.
Throw yourself into looking, and be ready to accept whatever you see: it can seem that is the only key you need.
Page 214
No comments:
Post a Comment