Recently, I went to see a Rothko exhibit with my friend Adam. We were in Paris, and the city was gray and cold. On my way to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, I walked through a wooded area. I looked up, and there were pine trees. For a few moments, I couldn’t walk because I was so flattened by the sight of these enormous trees. They were bare of needles. The scaly bark was an ashen purple. The branches were dark as they spread out over the milky veil of the sky. I used to run through pine forests with my cousins. The pine tree is an indelible image of my childhood. But something about seeing them there, when I least expected it, thousands of a miles away from the pine trees of my youth, the trees which had been cut down to pay for booze and which would never be replaced, all this time and distance away from those lost trees, to have encountered them in Paris, my life so radically transformed, startled me. We went to the Rothko show. I was still thinking about those trees. When we arrived at a series of late gray-and-black paintings, I felt that Rothko had captured something true in my experience of the world. Amid the swirling gray field in the lower half of one of the paintings, I saw the shifting faces of those in the beyond— indistinct, but present. I do not mean that there were figurative aspects to the painting or even that the painting gestured toward the figurative at all. I also do not mean to say that there was anything in the painting that suggested I should have found some personal resonance in it. Yet, in that negative space, the painting felt extremely personal to me. Perhaps what I am trying to describe is not looking as such. But that in my looking at the subtly shifting bands of light and shadow in the abstract gray field of the Rothko paintings, I remembered very strongly how I felt when I watched my father’s cigarette smoke turn and billow or how I watched fire and smoke stream out of the burning barrels we used to dispose of trash or the shapes the wind made as it kicked up dust from the fields in late summer. What I felt then was perhaps a recognition for a prior state of looking, which belonged to a part of my life that has nothing to do with the way I live now or the person I am. The Rothko with its many shifting shades brought it all back, tumbling over me. In a moment like that, the strange and sudden overlaying of the past and the present brought on by just one painting, you can’t help but to think, Yeah, art can be an ethic. Art can be a moral universe.
Posted 19 hours ago.
