Nothingness Made Visible: The Case of Rothko`s Paintings

Mark Rothko. Untitled, 1952. Oil on canvas.
95% x 81 %in. (243.2 x 208 cm). Private
collection.© 2005 Kate Rothko Prizel
and Christopher RothkolArtists Rights
Society (ARS) NewYork. Photograph:
Bob Kolbrener.
The word "nothingness" frequently appears in writings about twentieth-century
art.Yet how can we perceive nothingness or know what it is? Everywhere we
look we can see, feel, or think something. If we shut our eyes and ears, we can
always sense our heartbeat; no matter how much we try not to think about anything at all, we will still be aware of our own existence. It appears to us that
there is no such "thing" as nothingness; hence, to associate an artwork, which
is always something, with nothingness seems absurd. In the
Natalie Kosoi
following, I will show that such a relation is possible and
not absurd. By considering two philosophers who pondered
the notion of nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin
Heidegger, I will first address the problem of how we can
understand nothingness and then show how the works of
Mark Rothko represent it.
Respectively, Sartre's and Heidegger's concepts of nothingness exemplify two major and conflicting approaches.
For Sartre, nothingness is a nonbeing, a negation of all the entities in the world,
which comes into "existence" through human consciousness. Heidegger, however, assumes the existence of nothingness from the outset, arguing that although
we cannot grasp or know nothingness, we nonetheless, when anxious, have an
experience of it. He argues that because any being is finite, nothingness forms
beings and as such is a prerequisite of everything that is.
Many commentators on Rothko invoke the word "nothing" in describing
his paintings. James E.B. Breslin, in his biography of Rothko, writes, "Rothko's
artistic enterprise was, after all, a something that was dangerously close to
nothing."' Barbara Novak and Brian O'Doherty, in their essay "Rothko's Dark
Paintings: Tragedy and Void," also assert that Rothko's work is "very close to
nothing" and that nothing is indeed its very content." Robert Rosenblum
3
described Rothko's paintings as "images of something near to nothingness."
These are only a few examples among many.
The common characteristic of these writings, although not always explicitly
stated, is that Rothko's paintings-because of his reduction of painterly means
(figure, line, space, and eventually even color), which resulted in almost monochrome paintings-are on the verge of "nothing." As such, they reflect the way in
which we are accustomed to think about nothingness, as the negation and absence
of entities, and thus correspond much more closely to Sartre's notion of nothingness than to Heidegger's. In the following, examining the works of the 195ps,
I will argue that Rothko's paintings are not only on the verge of being nothing but
that they also represent nothingness, which corresponds to Heidegger's concept.
Jeffery Weiss, in his essay "Rothko's Unknown Space," particularly associates
Rothko's paintings with Sartre's thinking, using the story of Pierre from Being and
4
Nothingness to interpret Rothko's paintings. In this story Sartre arrives at a caf6 to
meet Pierre, but the latter is not there. The caf6 with all its people and activity is
"fullness of being," but while Sartre is looking for Pierre it becomes the "ground."
Each figure or thing in it gains a moment of Sartre's attention (is this Pierre?),
isolated and standing out against the background, and shortly after sinks again
into the background (it is not Pierre). Sartre calls the successive disappearance
of these objects into the background "original nihilation." On the surface of
this original nihilation another nihilation occurs. Since Pierre is nowhere to be
Nothingness Made Visible:
The Case of Rothko's
Paintings
I. James E.B. Breslin, Mark Rothko: ABiography
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 7.
2. Barbara Novak and Brian O'Doherty,
"Rothko's Dark Paintings: Tragedy and Void,"
in Mark Rothko, ed. Jeffery Weiss, exh. cat.
(Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 281.
3. Robert Rosenblum, Modem Paintingand the
Northern Romantic Tradition:Ffiedrich to Rothko
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 10.
4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans.
H. E. Barnes (New York. Washington Square
Press, 1992), 42.
21 art journal
found, his absence haunts the caf. Thus, Pierre presents himself as "nothingness
on the ground of the nihilation of the caf6 ... the nothingness which slips as a
nothing to the surface of the ground."s Sartre calls Pierre's perpetual absence
from the caf6 "double nihilation." Weiss writes:
Certainly Rothko's almost ineffably subtle manipulations of figure and
ground (or the center and the edge) can be characterized in Sartrean terms
as a "double nihilation" whereby the absent figure is experienced as presence, or the apprehension of nothingness, and plenitude is experienced
6
as ground.
5. Jeffery Weiss, "Rothko's Unknown Space," in
Mark Rothko (National Gallery of Art), 323, refers
to Sartre's Being and Nothingness, 42.
6. Weiss, 323.
Although Sartre argues that nothingness is the origin of negation and not
the result of it, it is nonetheless a nonbeing, a negation of being, and depends
on being, an entity, in order to negate it. This is precisely what the story of Pierre
illustrates: that a negative judgment, "X is not," stems from nothingness as a
nonbeing, and not vice versa, and that nonbeing (that of Pierre) depends on
(Pierre's) being.That is, a nonbeing cannot "exist" apart from being, as it
depends on our expectation of finding something or someone in particular
(Pierre) that is not there, and thus on our consciousness of the existence of a
thing or a person.
Certainly, if nothingness is represented in Rothko's painting, the comparison
to Sartre's story is not without foundation, for nothingness is also absence and
nonbeing. However, Sartre thinks of nothingness as a nonbeing that comes to
"be" through human consciousness and our expectations of finding something
particular. The application of Sartre's theory of nothingness to Rothko's paintings
therefore seems to me problematic, as it poses the question: what inparticular do
we expect to find in Rothko's paintings, or any other painting? This question
remains unanswered in Weiss's text. I believe that a perception of nothingness
as that which constitutes beings, one closer to Heidegger's than Sartre's, corresponds to nothingness as represented in Rothko's paintings and might indeed
relate to how he himself thought of it.
Sartre and Heidegger both agree that nothingness is the origin of negation,
but they disagree as to its nature: for Sartre it is merely a nonbeing, which stems
from human consciousness, while for Heidegger, nothingness is also an affirmation of beings as it is the limit imposed on all beings. Heidegger maintains that
everything in this world, including ourselves, is finite, and hence nothingness
constitutes the being of all that exists, and as such forms everything in the way
that it is.Without it, entities could not be.Yet it is even more acute in the case of
human beings, since humans die, while according to Heidegger other beings,
such as animals, plants, and objects, simply dissipate into nothingness and perish. He maintains that death, our own impending nothingness, is not simply
something that happens at the end of life. Our awareness that we might die at
any moment pervades and shapes our life. Thus, because death-the possible
impossibility of being-is what constitutes our being in this world and also
what negates it, our being in its essence is anxious being.We repress our fundamental anxiety by engaging ourselves in the world and its affairs. In rare moments
during our existence, however, anxiety floats to the surface and reveals to us
what we in our everyday life are trying to repress, namely, that it is nothingness
that constitutes our being.
22
SUMMER 2005
The difference between anxiety and fear is that we fear a particular and
determinable being, whereas anxiety lacks a determinable object. If a person is
asked what he or she is anxious about, the answer, according to Heidegger, will
be: nothing. Nothingness is revealed through anxiety neither as a being nor as
an object, nor as a negation of beings. Rather, in anxiety nothingness is known
7
"with beings and in beings expressly as a slipping away of the whole." By "the
whole" Heidegger means all entities, whose meaning for us and our relation to
which compose our world. Because we are anxious about our being, which is
a being-toward-death, we flee from ourselves and from facing this fact, toward
these entities that supply our world with meaning and thus enable us to forget
that our being is being-toward-death. In anxiety, when all beings slip away from
our grasp, we face our own mortality, since the world and its entities can no
longer impart any meaning to our existence. He writes that "the 'nothing' with
which anxiety brings us face to face, unveils the nullity by which Dasein, in its
8
very basis, is defined; and this basis itself is as thrownness into death."
It is well known, and often repeated, that Rothko thought that art should
9
deal with the human drama or tragedy and should intimate mortality. Such
intentions correspond to the role that Heidegger-who thought of poetry as
the highest form of art-assigns to poets. In "What Are Poets For?" Heidegger
maintains that the role of the poet is to present the whole sphere of being,
including death, the side of being that, like the dark side of the moon, is hidden
from us, invisible to us in our everyday life. Heidegger explains, "This affirmation, however, does not mean to turn the No into aYes; it means to acknowledge
the positive as what is already before us and present." What is present to us is
what we are certain of, and "what is more certain than death?" 10
We might ask: Is it plausible to argue that art can present something we
have only a vague experience of and know nothing about? And if art is indeed
able to present our mortality to us, then how can we recognize it? Maurice
Blanchot, in The Space of Literature, like Heidegger maintains that writing has a fundamental relation to death and nothingness, since it draws from it as from its
origin. But, contrary to Heidegger, he believes that art attempts not to present
death but rather to negate it. He argues that it is a generally accepted idea that
art stems from the desire not to die; as an example he quotes Andr6 Gide, who
wrote in his journals (July 27, 1922) that his reason for writing is "to shelter
something from death."" However, we cannot hold death at a distance, if death
7. Martin Heidegger, "What Is Metaphysics?" in
Bask Writings, ed. D. Farrel Krell (London:
Routledge, 1996), 102.
8. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans.
J. Macquarrie and E.Robinson (London: Blackwell,
1996), 356.
9. Mark Rothko, "Pratt Lecture" quoted in Irving
Sandier. "Mark Rothko (In Memory of Robert
Goldwater)," in Mark Rothko, Paintings 19481969, exh. cat. (New York. Pace Gallery, April
1983), II.
10. Martin Heidegger, "What Are Poets For?" in
Poetrey Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter
(New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 125.
II. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature,
trans. A. Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1955), 94.
12. Ibid., 95.
is not possible, and Blanchot, contrary to Heidegger, maintains that death is
impossible. Obviously, we all know that we will die.Yet we cannot know it
for certain:
What makes me disappear from the world cannot find its guarantee there;
and thus, in a way, having no guarantee, it is not certain. This explains why
no one is linked to death by real certitude. No one is sure of dying. No one
doubts death, but no one can think of certain death except doubtfully. For
to think death is to introduce into thought the supremely doubtful, the
brittleness of the unsure. It is as if in order to think authentically upon
the certainty of death, we had to let thought sink into doubt and inauthenticity, or yet again as if we strive to think on death, more than our brain12
the very substance and truth of thought itself-were bound to crumble.
23 art journal
In other words, we cannot think or understand death. Nonetheless, writing,
at least writing that is worth reading, according to Blanchot, must endeavor to
make death possible. By this he means that writing must attempt to grasp death
in its incomprehensibility and, therefore, "it hovers between death as the possibility of understanding and death as the horror of impossibility."'3 The writer, he
argues, is like Orpheus descending into death to bring his Eurydice into the light
of day. And like Orpheus the writer necessarily fails in his or her task as he or she
succeeds in capturing not the certainty of
death but the "eternal torments of Dying."4
Visual Representation of
Nothingness
Caravaggio. Death of the Virgin, 1605-06. Oil
on canvas. 145SY
x 96%4
in. (369 x 245 cm).
Mus6e du Louvre, Paris. Photograph: Erich
Lessing/Art Resource, NY.
Although both Heidegger and Blanchot
find a fundamental relation between death
and writing, they disagree as to its ability to
render death and nothingness. Both discuss
mainly literature and poetry, but the question of whether art can present mortality to
us can also be extended to the visual arts.
Indeed, references to death can be found
in abundance in the tradition of Western
painting. Does it succeed in presenting "the
other side" or does it merely render the
"eternal torments of Dying"? In the following examination of two possible ways of
representing death visually, I bear in mind
that there is a fundamental difference
between visual and conceptual experience:
we can know what we see but not necessarily understand it, while conceptual experience must first be understood in order to
be known.
The most obvious way to render death
in a painting, and the one that has been
most commonly employed, is by the representation of a corpse. In The Death of theVirgin,
for example, Caravaggio based his representation of the body of Mary on an actual
corpse-that of a woman drowned in the
Tiber. Jean-Luc Nancy in his book The Muses
observes that this painting situates us on the threshold before death. He finds
three such thresholds. We, the dying creatures, are the first one. The second is
represented by the virgin's corpse-dead, but still existing as a thing-and the
last by the group of people depicted as disappearing into the darkness of the
background. Discussing the representation of the Virgin in this painting, Nancy,
recalling Blanchot's argument about the impossibility of death, asks, "And what
24
SUMME?fR200S
if that were the subject of this painting: there is never death 'itself" but only a
threshold before death.'I
It might be argued that this painting in fact represents death only as it was
perceived by a religious society, that is, as a threshold between worldly and otherworldly life. Because a corpse is always something, no matter how realistically
it is represented in a painting, it does not present death as absolute nothingness
in the way that it is commonly perceived today. Indeed, Heidegger argues, when
someone dies we experience loss, but loss is a feeling on the part of those who
remain. Nevertheless, even in this painting the anxiety that there might be nothing beyond resonates. The group of the disciples situated behind the Virgin's bed
seems to be disappearing into the darkness of the background. This disappearing,
the "slipping away" of the figures from the grasp of our perception, as I will
show, will become the subject matter of Rothko's paintings.
A similar yet subtly different attempt to represent death may be found
in Gerard Titus-Carmel's work The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin, which is discussed in
Jacques Derrida's book The Truth in Painting. The most salient feature of this miniature coffin is the mirror placed at its bottom, so when one looks inside the box
one sees one's own reflection in it and thus sees oneself lying in the coffim.The
way this work renders death resembles the traditional way of representing itthat is, it shows us someone in a coffin who may be interpreted as a corpse.
The difference lies in the fact that in this case we see ourselves in the coffin and
not someone else. Seeing ourselves lying in a coffin, though, is still far from
experiencing our own death as nothingness, because, as was mentioned earlier, a
corpse is something and not nothing. In addition, as Derrida observes, the sight
is intended to induce a feeling of "calming one's own terror, of dealing with
alterity, of thus wearing down alterity," a feeling that is enhanced by the small
size of the coffin.' 6 Hence, instead of making us face our mortality, it negates it.
Rothko's Representation of Nothingness
13. Ibid., 244.
14. Ibid., 119.
I5.Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses, trans. P. Kamuf
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 59.
16. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans.
Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987), 19 1.
The apprehension of death and nothingness must be distinguished from the sublime, as Rothko's paintings, in particular, were often associated with the tradition
of the sublime painting. Both nothingness and the sublime relate to finitude and
both evoke a similar feeling. Nothingness evokes anxiety and the sublime horror
mixed with pleasure. However, there is a fundamental difference between the
two. The sublime, whether it is a quality of an object (in Edmund Burke's sense
of the word) or a feeling (in Immanuel Kant's sense), is contingent on nothingness, as it is the apprehension of our finitude and fragility, of the fact that there
are forces in nature that can destroy us. At the same time, the sublime is also a
withdrawal from such a realization, because we know that there is no real or
immediate threat to our existence, according to Burke, or because we discover
our superiority over our finite nature, according to Kant. The encounter with
nothingness offers us no such redemption. On the contrary, it points to the
impossibility of any salvation, as our impending nothingness is also what constitutes us.
In their book Arts of Impoverishment, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit argue that
Rothko began to subvert the readability of forms depicted in his painting already
in the i95os, and this tendency reached its peak in the fourteen Rothko Chapel
25 art iournal
paintings at St. Thomas University, Houston, in which the differences between
forms, background, and even the paintings themselves are almost completely
obliterated. They argue that the sameness of the paintings in the Rothko Chapel
has a twofold effect. First, it renders visibility unnecessary, as there is nothing
to see, and therefore it induces a kind of blindness. Second, by obliterating the
forms in the chapel paintings, Rothko creates an example of what Friedrich
Nietzsche called Dionysian art, in which one's individuality is lost as the borders
that constitute the individual by differentiating it from its environment collapse.
They maintain that the chapel encourages the viewers to remember and repeat
the experience of primary narcissism, which they define as "the experience of a
pleasurable shattered consciousness having become aware of itself as the object
of its desire."' 7 We can experience again such a shattering of the self's coherence
only in death and, to a lesser degree, in sex.
Yet all of this can be said about almost any monochrome painting.Yves
Klein's blue monochromes and Ad Reinhardt's black paintings offer just two
examples. Furthermore, the moment of blindness is much more prominent in
Robert Ryman's white paintings. In these, the brushstrokes create forms, but
their white color makes it difficult to discern the paintings from the wall. Their
uncertain visibility induces a blindness that shatters the self much more powerfully than any other monochrome painting.
About Rothko's paintings of the 195os, Bersani and Dutoit write:
Rothko's work is retrogressive: it returns us to the moment of looking we
have always skipped, to an effort to establish boundaries that a certain economy in human evolution may have succeeded in sparing us. What we have
been spared, however, is the very work of being, the renewed possibility
8
that presence might not take place.'
17. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of
Impoverishment Beckett, Rothko, Resnais
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1993). 142.
18. Ibid., 121.
19. Jean-Franqois Lyotard, "The Sublime and the
Avant-Garde," in The Inhuman: Reflection on Time,
trans. Geoff Bennington and R. Bowlby (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1991).
20. Rosenblum, Modem Painting, 199; Weiss,
"Rothko's Unknown Space," 305; Robert
Goldwater, "Reflections on the Rothko
Exhibition," and Peter Selz, "Mark Rothko," in
Mark Rothko, exh. cat. (Basel: Kunsthalle Basel,
1982), n.p.
21. Mark Rothko, quoted inJohn Fischer. "Mark
Rothko: Portrait of the Artist as an Angry Man,"
Harper's Magazine,July 1970, 16, quoted in
Weiss, "Rothko's Unknown Space," 32 1.
Thinking of Rothko's paintings in this way associates them with the notion
of the sublime rather than with nothingness. In his essay "The Sublime and the
Avant-Garde," Jean-Franýois Lyotard relates the sublime to the horror that nothing will happen and the relief that it is happening.' 9 If this interpretation is correct, viewing Rothko's paintings should produce a feeling of delight, since this
is a feeling related to the sublime. However, I believe that any observer cannot
fail to notice that these paintings induce anxiety rather than delight. Indeed,
many critics have mentioned, although not always expressly using the word,
that Rothko's paintings have this effect. Robert Rosenblum, for example,
describes Rothko's paintings as "awe-inspiring"; Jeffery Weiss describes them
as "objects of emotional or spiritual awe"; while Robert Goldwater writes, "It
is significant that at the entrance to this room one pauses, hesitating to enter. Its
space seems both occupied and empty"; and Peter Selz writes, "The spectator
contemplates an atmosphere of alarm .. ."2There is evidence to suggest that
Rothko himself wanted his paintings to evoke anxiety. Rothko said to a reporter
that in the Houston chapel he wanted to achieve the same atmosphere that
Michelangelo generated in his Laurentian Library in S.Lorenzo, Florence, which,
according to Rothko, "makes the viewer feel that they are trapped in a room
where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is to
butt their heads forever against the wall." 2
In what follows I will demonstrate how Rothko's way of intimating mortality
26
SUMMER 2ooS
in his works-namely, by undermining our ability to read the colors of the
forms depicted in his paintings as well as the space in which they are situatedis reminiscent of Heidegger's description of the encounter with nothingness:
the "slipping away of the whole." When things "slip away" from us, they do not
disappear and, contrary to what Bersani and Dutoit argue, the difference between
us and the world is not obliterated and we do not become one with it. Instead,
the world and its entities, to which we escape in order to avoid facing up to our
being, remain, while our connection to them is severed, leaving us with only
ourselves and our being, which is being-toward-death. It is not a state in which
we are absorbed in the world, nor is it one of either self-forgetfulness or a shuttered consciousness, as suggested by Bersani and Dutoit. It is rather a state in
which we touch the deepest core of ourselves, the finitude that constitutes us.
Space
From about 195o Rothko concentrated on producing rectangular forms floating
on a surface. The floating sensation was created as Rothko eliminated from his
paintings depth and space in the conventional sense, features regarded as necessary for rendering things as existing.
There are several conventional ways to devise an illusory three-dimensional
space. One is by means of a perspectival representation where figures become
gradually smaller according to their distance from the observer. A second, an
aerial perspective, involves a blurring of the forms as they recede into the background, thus causing them to appear further away from the observer. Another
way is partial concealment: when one form partially conceals another, it is perceived as nearer to the observer than the concealed one. A fourth method is the
gradual modification of light and shadow, which reproduces the look of a threedimensional form. Another is a juxtaposition of colors: some colors have the
quality of appearing to approach the -viewer (such as red) or to recede (blue).
Thus, if a blue form is depicted next to a red one, the red is perceived as nearer
to the observer than the blue.
Rothko used none of these methods in his paintings-or, more precisely,
by manipulating some of them he subverted our reading of space. Untitled from
19S2, for example, is made up of a large, red, rectangular form on top, separated
by a dark green, almost black stripe from a somewhat smaller, green, rectangular
form below it, all painted on a background whose color changes from orangebrown on top to light green in the middle and grayish-green at the bottom. The
red rectangle is prominent and its edges are clearly distinguished from the background. The emphasis on the edges produces a sensation of a floating form over
the background, which is also emphasized by the dark green stripe underneath
it, which could be perceived as a shadow cast by the red form. This floating
sensation is amplified by the gradation of the background color, which changes
from orange-brown at the top to light green in the middle, giving the impression that the upper part of the red form is closer to the background than its
lower part. But a daub of dark green color on top of the lower edge of the red
form makes it look as if the dark green stripe is in front of the red. As the green
form's edges are blurred and dissolve into the background, the form withdraws
from the viewer. However, a narrow stripe of green covering a small area of the
27 art journal
dark green stripe above the green form makes it look as if the green form is
nearer to the viewer than the dark green. The red form looks as if it advances
toward the viewer and the green as if it withdraws. Simultaneously, since the
green is also in front of the dark green stripe and the red behind it, it cannot be
decided what is in front and what is behind. The moment one thinks oneself
oriented in the pictorial space, one perceives at the same time the contradictions
in what is near and what is far. This renders the pictorial space ambiguous,
unperceivable, fluctuating, neither deep nor flat.
The conventional reading of pictorial space is deliberately confused in this
and many others of Rothko's paintings. The ability to measure distances between
forms in the pictorial space, to distinguish between what is distant and what is
near, between depth and flatness, all these are rendered dubious. Rothko, then,
was not interested in representing spatial illusion in his paintings. On the contrary, it is evident in many of his paintings that he strove to undermine any
attempt at a conventional reading of space and to eliminate any coherent spatial
sensation from his paintings.
Color
As he subverted our reading of space Rothko also undermined our ability to
read colors. His paintings blur the differences between the colors and their
boundaries, a difference that disappears almost completely in his dark and almost
monochrome paintings. In No. 27 (Light Band) from 1954, Rothko depicts three
main rectangular forms over a mainly blue background. Each of these forms
contains more rectangles, as if echoing the main form, which are distinguished
from it by gray, sometimes almost black, contours. As the color of the contour
is not uniformly applied, being sometimes thicker or thinner, sometimes wider
or narrower, even disappearing, the edges of these forms are blurred, making it
impossible to be sure how many rectangular forms each of the main forms contains. In addition to the blurred boundaries of the contained forms, the edges of
the main forms are blurred as well, making them seem as if they are dissolving
into the background. This sensation is enhanced by the similarity of the form's
color to that of the background, dark blue at the top, turning lighter and gradually becoming darker, somewhat purple, toward the bottom. The rectangular form
nearest to the top is mainly blue daubed with gray. It turns darker at the edges,
nmaking it almost blend into the background (in particular on the right side). The
same is true of the central and lower rectangles. The color of the middle form is
mainly white with daubs of yellow. It is lighter in the center, turning blue and
darker toward the edges, and the one at the bottom is gray-lighter in the center
and darker, almost black, mixed with the purple color of the background edge.
In this case, as in many other Rothko paintings, the readability of the colors
is deliberately confused.The first problem the observer encounters when standing before Rothko's paintings is the impossibility of locating the precise contours
of the form, making it difficult, if not impossible, to discern where precisely it
begins and the background ends. This problem entails another: the number of
forms actually depicted in the paintings is uncertain. Thus, the forms depicted on
the canvas evade the grasp of our perception and create the impression that they
are slipping away from us.
28 SUMMER 2009
Mark Rothko. No. 27 (Light Band), 1954. Oil
on canvas. 81 x 86% in. (205.7 x 220 cm).
Private collection.©2005 Kate Rothko
Prizel and Christopher Rothko/Artists
Right Society (ARS) NewYork.
Photograph: Michael Bodycomb.
29 art journal
There is no evidence to suggest that Rothko had read Heidegger. Nevertheless, Heidegger's account of the encounter with nothingness and in particular his
notion of the "slipping away of the whole" perfectly describes Rothko's paintings. As already noted, for Heidegger, anxiety reveals nothingness, which is expe22
rienced "with beings and in beings expressly as a slipping away of the whole,"
meaning that in anxiety the entities in the world recede from us and we cannot
get hold of them, leaving us with only our own being, which is being-towarddeath. Rothko's way of representing the human drama, which for him was constituted by the fact that we are born to die, resembles Heidegger's thinking of
nothingness. He intimated mortality by rendering the things represented on
his canvas as escaping the grasp of our gaze. The forms are there, but we cannot
really perceive or be certain that we accurately perceive what exactly is there. In
other words, by blurring the readability of space and colors, Rothko reenacted
and represented in his paintings what according to Heidegger we experience
when we encounter nothingness.
Some reservations must be added regarding the "existence" of nothingness:
since it is not a thing among things, so that we can say that it is this or that, its
existence cannot be scientifically proved but only assumed. If we, however,
assume that there "is" something that we call nothingness, and that we encounter
it when anxious, we can also assume that nothingness is what Rothko's paintings
show us. Although it might be that it is not experienced by all, such an experience nonetheless is shared by many. In any case, the fact that Rothko wanted to
intimate mortality and the way he chose to do it-by depicting forms on a background that do not entirely submit to our grasp-as well as his paintings' invocation of anxiety point to a congruence in Rothko's and Heidegger's thinking, at
least insofar as it concerns nothingness.
Covering Nothingness
Rothko not only wanted his paintings to intimate mortality, our impending
nothingness, but, as he told Werner Haftmann, he also wished his paintings to
"cover up something similar to this 'nothingness."' 23 Indeed, Rothko covered his
22. Heidegger, "What Is Metaphysics?" 102.
23. Werner Haftmann, quoted in Anna C. Chave,
Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1989), 193.
24. Many critics, as well as Rothko himself, noted
the paintings gave the sensation of being and
presence. In his Pratt lecture, when describing the
difference between himself and Ad Reinhardt,
Rothko said, "The difference between me and
Reinhardt is that he's a mystic. By that I mean
that his paintings are immaterial. Mine are here.
Materially. The surfaces, the work of the brush
and so on. His are untouchable"; quoted in Dore
Ashton, About Rothko (New York. Oxford
University Press, 1983), 179.
25. Heidegger, "What Is Metaphysics?" 103.
canvases with colors. He put layers of color one on top of another, concealing
and revealing the colors underneath, making the process of covering transparent.
With no other content represented in his paintings, the covering becomes the
sole content of his art.
Rothko's paintings cover nothingness in another sense as well, one that
is close to Heidegger's notion of nothingness. By eliminating most of the components that used to constitute painting, except the framed surface and color,
Rothko, as many other abstract artists, and as many critics have commented,
pointed to nothingness as a negation and absence. This negation, though,
emphasizes the presence of the paintings,2 4 as it draws our attention to the fact
that they simply are, that they are something rather than nothing, and in this
sense they conceal nothingness. Paradoxically, this concealing is also a revealing,
first, because for Heidegger, nothingness is what makes it possible for us to be
aware that something is in the first place, and second, because it draws our attention to the fact that there could be nothingness instead.
Nothingness, Heidegger argues, "discloses these beings in their full but
30 SUNIMER 2O00
heretofore concealed strangeness as what is radically other-with respect to
the nothing." That is, nothingness reveals beings because "they are beings and
not nothing,"2 5 and the more we are aware of the presence of a thing, the more
we are made aware of its radical other: nothingness. Among all the things in the
world it is the presence of an artwork that we are most aware of. Because a work
of art, no matter what kind, is,simply by reason of its presence and continuing
endurance, even when we no longer are, it stands against nothingness as its radical other. And this, for Heidegger, is the difference between artworks and other
human products, which disappear in use, sinking into the nothingness from
which they came, while the work of art is preserved. The less that is depicted
in a work of art, the less our attention is distracted from its bare presence, the
stronger our realization that this work is, and the greater our realization that
there could be nothing instead. Heidegger writes:
The more solitary the work, fixed in the figure, stands on its own and the
more cleanly it seems to cut all ties to human beings, the more simply does
the thrust come into the open that such a work is.... the more simply does
it transport us into this openness and thus at the same time transport us out
of the realm of the ordinary.To submit to this displacement means to transform our accustomed ties to world and earth and henceforth to restrain all
usual doing and prizing, knowing and looking, in order to stay within the
6
truth that is happening in the work.1
26. Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art,"
in Basic Writings, 19 1.
27. Derrida, in the last part of The Truth in Painting
(378), similarly argues that for Heidegger to say
about something that it is, we first must have the
experience of nothingness: "That which is,as the
being of the existent, is not (the existent). A certain thinking, a certain experience of nothingness
(of the nonexistent) is required for access to this
question of the being of the existent, likewise to
the difference between being and the existent."
Therefore, it could be said that any painting,
because it is, by its very existence points to nothingness. However, this does not indicate how
nothingness can be (re)presented in a painting.
28. Novak and O'Doherty, "Rothko's Dark
Paintings," 274.
29. For one of the possible effects that facing our
mortality and accepting it might have on us, see
William Haver's most enlightening essay "Really
Bad Infinities: Queer's Honour and the
Pornographic life," Parallax5, no. 4 (1999).
The word "nothingness" is not mentioned here, but the citation nonetheless
manifests the relation of the artwork to nothingness. Because for Heidegger it is
the encounter with nothingness in anxiety that severs our ties to all beings and
our world, it is also nothingness that gives us access to beings and makes us
aware of their presence, that each thing is,27 and again, it is the encounter with
nothingness that transports us out of our ordinary everyday life and makes us
reevaluate our situation in the world, facing the fact that we are going to die and
that we might die at any moment. This nothingness, which the existence of the
work points to, is not an absence but something perceived as the origin of everything, but whose "existence" cannot be logically proven. In his essay "What Is
Metaphysics?" Heidegger points out that we can only surmise that there "is"
such nothingness.
Novak and O'Doherty write, "Rothko's method in these works could also be
seen as masking and unmasking... .What is behind the mask? Another mask, a
fallible human presence-or nothing?""2 Rothko's paintings are masks indeed,
but masks that show what they hide: that it is nothingness that lies behind them.
This nothingness, which Rothko's paintings conjure up, is not only a negation
and an absence but also what designates the limit of human existence, and as
such, it is also what defines and constitutes it. In other words, Rothko's paintings
simulate what we experience when encountering nothingness and thus make us
face what we normally try to repress: that it is the certainty of death that makes
us the way we are. 29
Natalie Kosoi teaches aesthetics at the Shenkar School of Design and Art History in the Open University
in Israel. Her PhD dissertation is tided 'Nothingness in Art Mark Rothko, Robert Ryman, Anish Kapoor,
and Eva Hesse."
31 artjournal
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TITLE: Nothingness Made Visible: The Case of Rothko’s
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SOURCE: Art J 64 no2 Summ 2005
WN: 0519704400002
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