Eirik Johnson: Ghostland

Et in Arcadia Ego¹

Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock.²   —Simon Schama

Eirik Johnson from his Borderlands series

Much has been discussed since Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring came out in the autumn of 1962, about what it environmentalism means. Humanity’s hubris and engineering skill have led us to build projects that cannot be unbuilt, like Hoover Dam. We are capable of reversing millions of years of natural accretion in the short span of 40 years as we have with the Mississippi river delta wetlands outside of New Orleans. Our desire for ever more efficient systems and greater consumption and growth has caused us to change the ecosystem of the entire globe. As a child I marveled at NASA’s missions to the moon without the slightest understanding of the energy expelled by a Saturn V rocket (enough to electrify New York City for approximately 75 minutes). I couldn’t comprehend the hydrocarbons our gas-guzzling Vista Cruiser station wagon was contributing to the atmosphere. I watched the ads with the Indian crying on TV and witnessed first hand the smog of LA but few people understood our persistent desire for a ‘better way of life’ would be responsible for altering the climate of the planet.

I first met Eirik Johnson when he came to Stowe, Vermont in 2009 to participate in an exhibition I created called The Relentless Eye. Eirik had kindly submitted to whittling down over 1500 photographic submissions from hundreds of photographers to a mere 130 for an exhibition on cellphone photography. He carries a classic photographer’s dedication to both the frame and the equipment. He admitted that despite his love of the immediacy of his phone’s camera, the majority of his work is shot using traditional 4 x 5 cameras and film. You might imagine this would stimulate a leaning toward a nostalgia, a desire for a more idyllic past that was in turn reflected in his photography. When I first encountered Eirik’s work I was pleased to discover an aesthetic quite far from any sense of nostalgia.

Johnson’s work primarily focuses on the hidden where arcadia butts firmly against the urban or suburban. The photographs are about residue, not effect. His focus is not so much on the horrors of human impact as the questions the aftermath of such an impact leaves for us. Wherever Homo sapien has roamed, destruction or at the very least, unalterable change has occurred. Only beavers produce as direct an engineered affect on their landscape as we do. Johnson himself says these “transgressive spaces bridge the gap between the understood and the uncanny.” The uncanny in Johnson’s work is the irreconcilable relationship we as humans have with our landscape.

Nicolas Poussin, Et in Arcadia Ego. 1637–1638

In Nicolas Poussin’s painting Et in Arcadia ego, a small group of shepherds are reading an inscription by the same name on a tomb. The art historian Erwin Panofsky deciphers Poussin’s intent thusly;

The correct translation of the phrase in its orthodox form is, therefore, not “I, too, was born, or lived, in Arcady, but: “Even in Arcady there am I,” from which we must conclude that the speaker is not a deceased Arcadian shepherd or shepherdess but Death in person.³

Poussin’s painting is a precise analogy to Johnson’s photographs in the way it confronts our concept of the pastoral, the idyllic landscape of our memories. The tomb of Death itself sits as a stark monument to the realization that the damage has already been done and herding sheep is not an equivalent to the wild. This warning is something in modern times we have ignored: In Johnson’s photographs a copse grows in sediment washed into a drainage tunnel; plastic chairs and tarps are strewn amongst an otherwise secluded and idyllic under-canopy of trees. It would be easy to dismiss his work at first glance as a commentary on our apocalyptic tendencies but there is a depth to the work that prevents this. Instead, more often than not, Johnson’s ambiguous compositions present the landscape as a monochrome backdrop for the color infusion of human intervention. This even more present in Johnson’s elegiac series. Sawdust Mountain, a photographic essay that looks at the landscape of the Pacific Northwest.

The Pacific Northwest is a landscape imbued with exotic beachfront and trees that predate the construction of Hadrian’s Wall. Huge rivers penetrate volcanic mountain ranges, ancient rainforest and rolling hills that produce some of the finest Pinot Noir in the world. It is also a place of contrasts where the 19^th century economy of logging rubs up against 21^stcentury ecology. A two hour drive between Portland and the Oregon coast reveals the potent and melancholy reality of hundreds of acres of old growth forest reduced to stumps and scrub. Somehow, Johnson’s photographs — a stack of felled timbers or the lone hawk poised in a tree overlooking its clearcut landscape — manage to convey not just the sorrow of loss but the intricacy of our universal complicity without falling into didactic perdition. Johnson’s gift is to avoid that  the idyllic sentimentality that Samuel Beckett extolled, “In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness.” Johnson intuitively, it seems avoids all reference to precision on either side of the debate, whether it nature or man. To expose a precision suggests engineering and that would push the images into metaphysics, diminishing their strength. As Schama says, “landscapes are culture before they are nature” because they are named, witnessed and transformed by us. The comedian Lewis Black has a joke about golfers, that sums this up nicely, and I’m paraphrasing here; “A golfer can be the biggest environmentalist on the planet until he hits his ball behind a tree, then the first thing he thinks about is a chainsaw.” Our view of landscape is forever entangled with our cultural viewpoint, sometimes only in a single moment in time. As environmentalists we can herald Julia Butterflies’ tree-saving exploits while we voraciously consume a plethora of products ensconced in materials that require trees. One could look at Johnson’s photographs and begin to ask is it better to create monoculture tree farms or farm old growth forest? Is there another material that could replace trees? Would that simply deplete a different natural resource? Is it ok to find an image of destruction beautiful?

Eirik Johnson, from the Sawdust Mountain series

In this age of hyper change, we grapple with debates about climate change and overpopulation. Like teenagers forced to tell the truth, we now coyly admit responsibility, but assuming stewardship is another matter. We are a species, although unique, born of the same basic molecular material as bears and bees. As with the idea of invasive species and viruses, humans are natural despite our own descriptions of ourselves to the contrary. Poussin’s and Johnson’s reminder to us is that we are not the creators we think we are, nor necessarily the destroyers. Nature has a way of leveling the playing field, as death’s tomb reveals.

In my mind, Johnson’s most potent work is the photo series Animal Holes. Here we have all the great dramas of antiquity and modernity meeting face to face in the simple awareness of holes in the ground. Johnson’s photographs of animal holes provide a matter of fact presentation of something normally overlooked in everyday life. These holes, of course, are all around us, from our own backyards to the park down the block to the deepest wilderness. They become both hidden places of secret nature as well as conceptual points akin to the Beatles asking “how many holes does it take to fill Albert Hall?” In many cases, the surprise of the photographs is how closely they appear to be Andy Goldsworthy sculptures. The fact that Johnson sees animal holes as an aesthetic idea outside of any loaded environmental or conceptual conceit is revelatory and liberating. Animal Holes become a visual haiku.

Which brings me back to the strength of Johnson’s ouevre. The best artists embrace ambiguity while holding a deeper more abiding truth. As artists we all know that any kind of ultimate truth is elusive. Our desire to unravel the world is really more a desire to know ourselves and in so doing, know humanity and connect with it. What makes the eerie photographs of Eirik Johnson so compelling is not in their subject matter per se, but in how he manages to place that subject matter on a razor’s edge between contentiousness and freedom. His photographs suggest there are no easy answers or rectifying promises anymore than the tomb in Poussin’s painting provides solace to the shepherds. We are on this earth and we must make the best of what we inherently have in our genes. The dynamics of human evolution and cultural change up till now has been centered on one word: progress. Do we see the floating logs in the Columbia river or the concrete waste on the Pacific coast in Johnson’s photographs as progress? Is it possible to look at the intersection of humankind and our surroundings objectively given we’re the ones doing the looking? The environmental writer Derrick Jensen puts this another way which exposes the ambiguity, perhaps unintentionally;

In a lot of cases, progress is good for some and bad for others. For the perpetrators of the Nazi Holocaust, the technological progress that made possible more efficient ways to kill large numbers of human beings was “good,” or “useful,” or “helpful.” From the perspective of the victims, not so good. For the perpetrators of the United States Holocaust, the development of railroads to move men and machines was “good” and “useful” and “helpful.” From the perspective of the Dakota, Navajo, Hopi, Modoc, Squamish, and others, not so good. From the perspective of bison, prairie dogs, timber wolves, redwoods, Douglas firs, and others, not so good.⁴

Asking the perpetrators of an act to view their actions after the fact with objectivity and contemplation borders on absurdity. As Jared Diamond has so eloquently portrayed in his novels Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, “History as well as life itself is complicated — neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.” The photographs of Eirik Johnson persistently remind us of this fact couched in the beauty of a singular experience and discovery.

All photographs by Eirik Johnson   You can purchase his books Borderlands here and Sawdust Mountain here

1 Erwin Panofsky, “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition,” in idem., Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York, 1955), 295-320

2 Simon Schama, “Landscape and Memory”, Fontana Press, Harper Collins, (London, 1996), p. 61

3 Erwin Panofsky, “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition,” in idem., Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York, 1955), p. 307

4 Derrick Jensen, “High on Progress”, http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/5505/

Windows & Whiskey

“For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche

“Bring forth what is true; Write it so it’s clear. Defend it to your last breath.”
—Ludwig Boltzmann, quoting Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust

Red on Maroon, 1959 (The Rothko Room - The Tate Modern)

The bridge from the old ways of gods and monsters to the new of the mind is not without its fatalities. For those who are the first to cross it, there is often a heavy price to pay. This was particularly true as the early 20^th century welcomed the dawn of modernism. Humankind was venturing beyond God and plowing the depths of the mind as never before. The mathematician Georg Cantor, and physicist Ludwig Boltzmann were the first to unravel classical ideas of science that had stood in place since Newton’s Principia. Cantor grappled with the very limits of math, attempting to describe infinity and Boltzmann began describing our modern ideas of probability theory. These were fracturing, revolutionary ideas that titled against the windmills of entrenched thought. Isaac Newton’s Principia, which defined classical science and mathematics until the mid-nineteenth century saw no contradiction between God and pure science. He once said “Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done.” The underlying structure of the universe was ultimately defined and created by God — he was the unifying force underneath all. But what happens when you discover that underneath the mechanics of the universe is chance and unbounded infinite sets. How could God be irrational? If teleological God was dead then what philosophical binding now held the world together?

In the early 20^th century unravelling classicism disintegrated in the conflagration that was the first World War. When the dust settled and the Treaty of Versailles was signed, the outcome writ large. God died in the poison gas clouds and trench warfare that killed nine million human beings and eradicated an entire generation of Europeans. If there was any doubt about finding a loophole in the cosmic mysteries that would reinstate the rational, the logical, it was obliterated in the devastation of the first world war. World War I had shown Cantor and Boltzmann to be right — any future attempt by mankind to define the universe with certainty was gone. If there was a God, it was us, and we were a merciless, vengeful, monster.

As the sentiment for war was fomenting in Europe, a ten year old Russian Jew named Marcus Rothkovich journeyed half way around the world to relocate in 1913 to the city of Portland Oregon. He was boy who was caught between two worlds — the world of Dvinsk, Russia and America. The world of Judaic traditions and the WASP controlled world of the U.S. A world of socialist isolation and burgeoning capitalism. Mark Rothko, as he would later be called, was a boy grasping for knowledge and certainty in a world turned upside down. After the death of his father, Jacob in 1914 at the start of Europe’s first Great War, Rothko was adrift in a conservative, provincial city in the pacific northwest where he was considered an outcast not even able to speak the language and isolated from the mainstream culture, living in the Jewish ghetto of southeast Portland. At about this time, Rothko abandoned his strict Jewish schooling, the cheder in favor of the local public school. He like his mathematics predecessors, Cantor and Boltzmann stepped away from tradition and classical pursuit and headed in the direction of the unknown, toward a pure truth. This remained his defiant stance throughout his life. The man who walked out on a Yale education because of its socio-political class pretenses. The artist who liberated himself from the traditional forms of the figure and ground.

Surviving the Great Depression working both for the WPA easel painter project and teaching at two separate schools, he understood sacrifice. Rothko at first made associations with the Surrealists and later the New York School. He was drawn to questions more than answers but he still sought acceptance in a world that he largely felt rejected by. His mathematics was one of emotion and its transference in paint on canvas. His key focus in painting became romanticism, tragedy and death the ultimate trio of human nature. In his book The Artist’s Reality writings he said;

The artist’s hand must reduce all of these experiences for man as well. His objective is different, however, for he must reduce all of the subjective and objective with the end of informing human sensuality. He tries to give human beings direct contact with eternal verities through reduction of those verities to the realm of sensuality, which is the basic language for the human experience of all things.1

Eternal verities? Irrefutable truths on canvas? Did Rothko actually believe that one could achieve a certain truth through the manipulation of pigments and their reactions to light? He did, and unfortunately as with Cantor and Boltzmann, and Rothko’s contemporary, Jackson Pollock, that lead him to an untimely and violent end. This idea of truth in painting was shared by many of the New York School artists from de Kooning to Barnett Newman. Robert Motherwell, one of the original abstract expressionists and a younger contemporary of Rothko’s once said, “I’ve made pictures that are failures, but I think I’ve made very few that are lies.”2

Much like the pursuit of pure mathematics and pure physics, abstract expressionism is taken as an esoteric and very little understood practice. Manipulating paint to conjure pure emotional responses that might nurture the emergence of absolute truths is no different than the research going on today at CERN in particle physics. In fact, the Higgs Boson that the LHC was built to find at a cost of $9 billion dollars is ironically referred to as the “god” particle. Georg Cantor thought he was doing God’s work when he uncovered his theorem on transfinite numbers and Pollock dabbled in the ancient mysticism of southwest Indian sand painting, which is closely related to Tibetan buddhist sand paintings — meditations on the nature of time and impermanence.

Rothko saw an underlying mathematics in painting, clearly and logically based on the physics of light. In fact, he saw himself in exactly the frame in which I’m casting him, a man pursuing truth through the language of art, as opposed to mathematics or science. He said, “Yet the function of the artist or mathematician or the scientist is not to produce the wherewithal for gadgeteering or, for that matter, even more important functional developments.” Here Rothko was driving at a defense of pure knowledge. He goes on,

The sciences all work within their specific scopes: mathematics deals with generalization of quantity, geometry with generalization of positional shapes, physics the mechanical properties of matter, chemistry with the composition and the interaction of substances, psychology with the mechanics of the sensual apparatus, etc. And we must remember that ancient philosophy included all these sciences.

Now, we have stated that the function of the artist is similar to that of the philosopher, and that the kind of generalization each makes is alike because of its comprehensiveness or synthetic quality — in contrast to the specialized generalization of the scientist.3

We are unlikely to find a clearer definition of the artist and their role in society than Rothko makes here. Artists are akin to philosophers yet their tools are visual as opposed to verbal (admittedly, sometimes both, but I’m not going to split hairs here). Great artists are in pursuit of “eternal verities” because they are contending with both the “objective and subjective” simultaneously. The occult and mysticism are equally as relevant as ecology and chemistry in the eyes of the artist because they all contend with the fundamental nature of what it is to be human.

Rothko wrestled with the infinite in a different way than Boltzmann and Cantor, he took on the properties of light. He saw as Turner, Rembrandt and Caravaggio did, light being the core to painting’s potential to connect directly with our primary sense — seeing. The eyes are indeed windows to the soul, the subconscious, the billions of synaptic connections that make up our minds. A painting can place a viewer in direct confrontation with the properties of light because it is removed from the plethora of visual information otherwise encountered outside of the white cube. How often have you taken the time to observe a small collection of leaves in the sunlight or the painted surface of a building as the sun tracks across the sky? Rothko’s paintings honed in on these isolated singular moments in light-time and enlarged their presence to a scale where one could have an intimate relationship with color.

We have a common phrase in our modern vernacular that we substitute for what defies our common, immediate knowledge. We call moments ‘a religious experience’ not because what we witness is define in the true spiritual sense of the world or that we believe that the divine hand of God has reached down and reminded us of our minuscule existence, but rather because we witness something sublime. We know in our daily lives filled with advanced technology principles of science that there is an underlying mathematics, a set of rules if you were, to our usual interaction with the world. For all its attention, the stuff of quantum mechanics simply doesn’t play into the overwhelming majority of people’s everyday lives, but classical physics, the physics of the large does. Even if you comprehend that your smart phone contains billions of tiny circuits, many of them approaching a scale very close to a few atoms across, you can feel the brick of the phone in your hand and relate the vibrations of the miniature microphone to the simulation of the person’s voice on the other end. However, when we encounter an experience outside of the rational constraints we have neatly packaged the modern world into, we first look to a rational explanation. In the absence of one, we assimilate the experience by drawing metaphor to what people like Georg Cantor actually assigned to the voice of God and we call sublime  religious experience. We don’t have the vocabulary to adequately define or describe such experiences and short of fracturing our minds with a temporary psychosis we draw an analogy to the closest thing we can — a supreme being. These are fleeting moments, often experienced when witnessing acts by sufficiently advanced athletes or observing heroics. They are not the stuff of our day to day lives. For artists like Rothko, confronting this idea of the sublime and its underpinnings was his everyday life.

What is more readily digestible to us is that which is easily hidden. What does it mean when we speak of the singularity in black holes, disclose the dynamics of of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem or argue the effects of recombinant DNA? These concepts are as abstract to the vast majority of people as the surface of Rothko’s Light Red Over Black (1957). The difference lies in our observation. Deep concepts of modern science and mathematics remain largely abstractions in our minds or simplified computer generated illustrations we watch on the Discovery channel. To observe a Rothko in a museum is to confront the visual abyss directly. Rothko wanted the viewer to see beyond metaphor and irony, and stare directly into the core of what it means to be human. The idea that photons could interact with pigment on canvas was enough to unsettle us because pure color abstraction forces us to see that which is normally hidden — that the universe is ungrounded, built on layers of infinite sets that can only be reduced to probabilities. Rothko was in essence, interested in the underlying mathematics of painting. Vibrating beneath the color forms of Rothko’s Tate/Seagram paintings, the window shapes open up space so vast that it shatters our reasonable conceptions of reality. This is not something you can do quickly. You cannot understand a Rothko by walking up to it and ‘reading’ it as you would other paintings. Being with a Rothko painting is like lying on your back and staring up at the sky and watching the clouds float past, just as you did when you were a child. “The real sky is (knowing) that samsara and nirvana are merely an illusory display”4 to use the words of the Buddhist Mipham Rinpoche. 

In 1964 Mark Rothko was commissioned by the art patron Menils to create paintings for a meditative space situated outside of Houston, Texas. The commission gave Rothko full artistic license and took him three years to complete. The chapel opened posthumously, filled with enormous canvases nearly monochrome in nature. The triptychs and single canvases act more as a meditation on death than living. The ultraviolet near black canvases push the viewer into a deep void precisely emulating Rothko’s favorite philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, who said, “If you look long enough into the void the void begins to look back through you.” This is what it truly means to contemplate the infinite, the abstract, the profound. We are systematic, tool-making animals. We design systems to describe and define our environment and in turn shape it to our needs and wants. But what happens when our systems break down? Language is a system for communicating our experiences and knowledge but it is one we bend often to conform to all sorts of irrational compulsions, (a list much to long to grapple with in this essay, requiring a litany of references to the history of semiotics and linguistics) like slang and metaphors and yet we harden our existence in its rules. Within the language of mathematics lies the rules for defining the concepts that describe our universe, but like conventional language it is ill suited when it comes to describing fundamental underlying concepts, like infinity. As the mind struggles to understand how it might be possible to describe ‘sets’ of infinity that are interrelated the only rational strategy becomes one of abstraction in order to avoid this deeply troubling schizoid. In children this dilemma takes on a very simple form, pure emotional response. Children cry, scream, laugh etcetera in order to contend with notions that are outside of their intellectual capacity at that time. For adults, it’s not so easy because we have layered on top of are so-called rationality the laws of social convention which prevent us from expressing ourselves in such emotional outbursts. However, we have found other ways of coping. The most reliable of these is art. At the heart of a Rothko lies the desire to allow one to address the infinite without losing one’s mind because his best work is so purely emotional. The fuzziness of pure color and form is awash with our full compliment of emotional range, fully present and open to what we bring to it. A Rothko painting provides us with an opportunity to live with uncertainty in a world of overwhelming complexity. His brilliance was in the affirmation of life, even when confronting the epitome abstraction, death.

On the whole, however, modern art is not a denial but an affirmation. Like most of our scientists, the process of disintegration or analysis is not a wanton act of destruction but part of a process for the evolving of more comprehensive synthesis. And therefore modern artists have not left us merely with the members of the body of art strewn about, but they have reassembled them and revivified that body with their own breath of life. In short, they have attempted to regain a synthesis as complete as that of the primitive, based, of course, upon contemporary considerations and point of view.5

In the end it doesn’t always play out the way we would like. The intangibles of abstract thinking inevitably give way to the practical, in this case of our own physicality. In 1968, after years of heavy drinking and almost certainly a severe case of bipolar disorder, Rothko suffered an aneurysm while walking home from dinner. After two weeks in hospital he returned home, considerably weaker and warned off alcohol and cigarettes, both of which Rothko was addicted to. At the time little was understood of antidepressants.Only his studio assistant and a few close friends really knew the extent that alcohol addiction had taken control of Rothko’s life. His concession to quit drinking and smoking did not hold, and Rothko’s condition worsened. His friend, the poet Stanley Kunitz, relays “He wasn’t working very well that summer. He was in very bad shape. He was drinking a great deal. He was terribly sloppy personally in his habits, and got fat and confused. And then he had these terrible quarrels with Mell that were ugly in every way. I just had the feeling that he was going completely to seed.”6

The constraints of the physical body had given way and no amount of mental acuteness or abstract thinking could alleviate the reality of his condition. For Rothko the conditions of his exploration of the void were inextricably linked to his own physically virility, both literally and figuratively. Left impotent by the aneursym and self-medicating with potent doses of Sinequan, Vallium, whiskey and nicotine, he could no longer hold the schism at bay. In February of 1970, on the very same day his masterful set of Seagram’s paintings arrived for their installation in a site-specific room at the Tate in London, Rothko slashed his forearms and bled to death. After a life long pursuit of imagination, Rothko fell prey to the most human of conditions — a need for logic. He could not find a comfort in the uncertainty of his own physical reduction and therefore saw no other recourse than the one chosen by some of the great minds before him, he took his own life.

The Rothko Chapel outside of Houston, TX.

G. K. Chesterton once said; “Poets do not go mad; but chess players do. mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in  logic, not in imagination.”7

The inability of Cantor and Boltzmann to rectify logically within the constraints of their known world what they had uncovered caused them both tremendous suffering. Cantor died in an asylum, broke and alone while Boltzmann hung himself. Rothko had lived his life acting as a bridge between the classical and the modern. When his health turned south and Pop art emerged as the dominant form of the later 20^th century, Rothko took refuge in death. His imaginings of the blocked windows of Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library, which he imagined in his Seagram paintings, became a barrier rather than infinite regress. In Rothko’s own words; “And men are therefore gathered together in a common action no through some human interaction but rather in the abstract symbolization of the heroic quality of man’s response to insecurity and the impending specter of death. It is to this threat, in proportion to risk, that we experience genuine excitement.”8

In the end, Rothko gave way to his insecurities in a most un-heroic manner and stifled forever the career of one of the most brilliant painters ever to have lived.

1 Rothko, Mark, and Christopher Rothko. The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. p. 25

² Motherwell & the New York School: Storming the Citadel. Dir. Catherine Tatge. Perf. Robert Motherwell. Kultur, 2009. DVD.

³ Rothko, Mark, and Christopher Rothko. The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. p. 24

⁴ In: Chögyal Namkhai Norbu Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light. Edited and introduced by Michael Katz, Snow Lion Publications, Ithaca, NY, ISBN 1−55939−007−7, pp. 117.

⁵ Rothko, Mark, and Christopher Rothko. The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. p. 61

⁶ “Mark Rothko | Robert Motherwell | Barnett Newman | Dada, Surrealism Heritage.” Andy Warhol. Web. 07 Aug. 2011. <http://www.warholstars.org/abstractexpressionism/timeline/abstractexpressionism68.html>.

⁷ Wallace, David Foster. Everything and More: a Compact History of Infinity. New York: Atlas Book, 2003. Print. p. 6

⁸ Rothko, Mark, and Christopher Rothko. The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. p. 36