BLACK

As a painter I can attest to the fact it is exceedingly difficult to portray the act of painting in film or on stage. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which involves a lot of doing absolutely nothing but thinking. If you paint non-representationally, the act of painting looks random and silly. Hence the phrase, “my kid could do that.” There is something unique about art making that makes it less accessible. What painters do is very private involving years of processing a complex matrix of knowledge and experience and pushing it firmly up against the moment.

Red Trailer from Portland Center Stage on Vimeo.

In John Logan’s play, Red, now playing (through the 18^th of March) at Portland Center Stage, the act of art making is beautifully rendered. Logan does this in probably the only rational way he can, by never showing the actual act of painting. The only “painting” that takes place in the play is a two-minute segment where Rothko (Daniel Benzali) and his assistant Ken (Patrick Alparone) theatrically ground a large canvas in a solid red field of paint. The play is in the tradition of working plays, meaning there are no stage hands or faux constructs. The actors mix paint, build canvases and build stretchers. It creates an immersive environment where you believe you are secret witness to the machinations of a great artists’ studio. The stage crafting is very accurate in its portrayal of Rothko’s actual 53^rdstreet studio, the one he created the Seagram Building murals in.

Rothko in his 53rd Street Studio in the 1950's, photograph by Henry Elkan, c. 1953

I have seen snippets of the Alfred Molina/Eddie Redmayne production that originated in London and then Broadway, and I have to say I am glad I saw the Portland production. All fairness to Molina’s Rothko and Redmayne’s Ken, their presentation appears less gruff. Perhaps it is in my notion of what a life long chain smoking, heavy drinker would sound like. Benzali not only looks more like the actual Rothko, I think he embodies his anger a bit more convincingly and of course his gravely voice fits my perceptions mentioned above. Perhaps it is more that Benzali and Alparone are Americans. We don’t have the benefit of audio or video of Rothko as we do with other painters of the New York School painters, but there are written transcripts of interviews and his own writings. This combined with the thoroughly researched, if not dryly written biography Rothko written by James E. B. Breslin provides a fairly clear picture of Mark Rothko’s tenor. As a man he was deeply cynical and felt persistently sidelined by the places he occupied. Russian born, and Jewish during a time of Cossack rampages, he left Russia at 10. Making his way to his merchant relations here in Portland, he was raised in the Jewish ghetto, now SW but never felt at home either in this city or amongst his peers. Excelling at school but living in a fiercely anti-communist, patriotic and gentile city, he was an outcast. It was clear early on that Rothko had the heart of a poet, not a pharmacist like his older brother Moise. His fierce intellect would have kept him from suffering fools lightly and his sponsorship by the wealthy Weinstein family, left him feeling a peasant in the land of opportunity. In 1921 he traveled to New Haven to attend Yale on scholarship but that ended up being disastrous as well. Surrounded by New England WASPs he was chided and would never be accepted as part of the Ivy League clan. He left Yale into his second year to “bum around New York.” These early experiences formed both a hardened shell of resentment and a never ending feeling of insecurity in Rothko.

The play captures this insecurity wonderfully through diatribes that wonder through Nietsche to angry rants on everything from the color red to Rauschenberg as well as withdrawn moments of depression. Although the play is called Red, the center of focus for the Rothko character is in fact black. At one point in the play he says his greatest fear is black, the absence of light, the absolute end to existence.

The Red Studio, Henri Matisse. Issy-les-Moulineaux, fall 1911. Oil on canvas, 71 1/4" x 7' 2 1/4" (181 x 219.1 cm). Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund. © 2012

Despite his assistants protests to the contrary that black is just another color, a device for painters, Rothko is unpersuaded. He expounds on Matisse’s profound use of a tiny gash of black in his famous painting The Red Studio, in the mantle piece above the dresser. In a room completely consumed by red, Logan’s Rothko proclaims the black is necessary. It is terror and tragedy waiting to spread and no matter how much fullness of joy the red represents, the black, the tragedy must always be present. It is necessary, essential. Eventually, the black will consume the red and death comes.

Early in the play Rothko comments on the grandiosity of his paintings and the seriousness which must be brought to bear when experiencing them. He carefully directs his young apprentice to stand closer to the painting, but not too close! The audience found this amusing and on face value of course it seems absurd to demand such exactness in locating one’s work. But the play’s brilliance comes in bringing the audience into sympathy for Rothko, despite his rants, and megalomaniacal effusions. Despite Rothko’s anger and disputation with American culture, he is supremely American himself. He is profoundly precise and fully, almost ridiculously emotional. Therefore we can empathize with the character. Those are purely American traits that have both served our rise to supremacy and been our undoing as we have grown into empire. It is in capturing this tidbit of irony about Rothko where the play succeeds the most. Granting his and our shared need to live the American dream while also realizing its conceit and emptiness.

The play leaves you feeling a strong reverence for Rothko. You admire his poetic leanings, his robust thirst for knowledge and of course his deeply held emotion. The play makes it obvious why Rothko hated being called an Abstract Expressionist (which he was not) because he saw his task one of dispelling all personal expression in service to creating the dynamics for a fully immersive emotional experience on the part of the viewer. The content of a Rothko is our own. This is why reactions to his work are bipolar. The paintings can be dismissed as colorful, moody splashes of color or deep, penetrating zones of contemplation.

More than a biopic on Rothko himself, Red is centered on the conflicts that Modernism brought about and on our current relationship to art. The play begins with Rothko working on his commission to paint works for the newly built Seagram Building on Park Avenue in Manhattan. Situated inside the Seagram Building is a Philip Johnson designed Four Seasons restaurant and Rothko’s murals were to live there. They of course never did. Two years after he started them, Rothko ate dinner at the restaurant and promptly realized he was making a terrible mistake and pulled the commission. He returned the full $35,000, the largest commission ever paid to an artist at the time. This is the ripe center of the play. How have we reconciled, if we have at all, the majesty and utopian dreams brought forth by Modernism with our American desire for capital? Is the Seagram Building a monument to Modernism achievement, a temple of simplicity and elegance or a great black tombstone that says, “Here lies culture”? Certainly, Rothko came to believe it was the latter. However, many would argue that Rothko’s work itself is representative of death and an end. In fact the play dabbles with the use of red as a metaphor for blood, hinting at Rothko’s eventual suicide as well as the violence associated with the color itself. In the end of course, Pop Art won the day, and as Rothko rants in the play, “fine” wins. There are those that believe that Rothko’s realization of this Pop Art emergence in combination with his aneurism and subsequent impotence led to his demise, his suicide.

As a painter I celebrate any work of fiction that prompts an audience of 600 to applaud two people painting a blank canvas in solid red. That’s the art geek in me. Ultimately, Red leaves you contemplating those things at the core of being human, life, death and what’s it all about. It does this by drawing you into one of the most contentious, troubled and emotionally consumed figures of 20^th century art — Mark Rothko. Rothko is the metaphor for our modern tensions. Reconciling our inner selves with the outer demands placed upon us.

Review: Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

We eat light, drink it in through our skins. With a little more exposure to light, you feel part of things physically. I like feeling the power of light and space physically because then you can order it materially. Seeing is a very sensuous act–there’s a sweet deliciousness to feeling yourself see something.
—James Turrell

The Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego is currently showing Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface at their two locations. The show is an overview of the mainly California, Light and Space movement. They range from the little known Douglas Wheeler or De Wain Valentine to the art world giants Robert Irwin and James Turrell. The Light and Space movement is often mistaken for Minimalism and indeed on the surface, that appears to be true. However, where Minimalist artists—Donald Judd, Robert Ryman and Ad Reinhardt to name a few, sought to objectify experience through reduction against the subjective psychology of abstract expressionism before it, the Light and Space artists were focused almost exclusively on phenomenology and the nature of perception. The overlap between the two art movements appears in the geometry, reductive presentation and material of Light and Space artists’ work.

It is certainly no accident, that California artists in opposition to their east coast counterparts, developed an acute receptivity to light and material. The prevailing light of California’s climate, whether it the glaze of dream-like sunshine in the south or the foggy, ethereality of the light in the Bay area to the north, light in California is very different from the light of the northeast. The weather is itself reductive and outdoor spaces tend to be more important than indoor spaces. The material sensitivities of Light and Space came from a combination of Hollywood backstage craft and car culture. Robert Irwin has talked about his many hot rods. The American Graffiti (A film by another Californian – George Lucas) obsession with cars led to a hyper-sensitivity to surface, sometimes painting more than 17 coats of paint and lacquer. That same obsession with surface carried over to art with slick spheres of resin or highly polished, chemically treated glass. The California Light and Space artists found materials purely a medium for delivering altered states of perception, not objects unto themselves.

There were two striking components of the show in San Diego. The first was the odd juxtaposition of a show which focused on the phenomenology of light and space in a place where that was ever present. In other words, the exhibition conveyed indoors what was usually experienced outdoors. Secondly, I found the show largely melancholy, which was surprising given the context of the work.

I have seen several of James Turrell’s Skyspaces, or openings that he has carefully shaped in the ceilings of various locations which allow the viewer to confront the photons penetrating our atmosphere throughout the day as a tangible experience. We don’t often think of light (photons) having physicality until we witness a cutting laser, but photons indeed carry mass. This mass in reaction to the physical components of our atmosphere creates a living entity that becomes an object unto itself, as a sculpture or a car would be. Without the grounding of other objects it is difficult to lend scale and in turn, mass to the sky.

"Afrum" by James Turrell at the MCASD

The subtle layers of color variation created by photons hitting various particles in our atmosphere ends up becoming simply blue, or grey. It is the unwitnessed umbrella to our everyday existence, taken for granted and rarely experienced as an entity unto itself. Turrell of course, wants us to return to a more ancient perception of our atmosphere, the sky with mass. Unfortunately, there was no sky space at MCASD, but only Turrell’s artificial light spaces. Experiencing Afrum (White) or Stuck Red and Stuck Blue, reduced his work to a parlor trick. These obvious riff’s on colorfield painting, although beautiful, held much less potency than his Sky Spaces command. Walking into an empty gallery space or a darkened theater-like room to view one of these works somehow nullified the phenomenon. We are so accustomed to artificial light being projected at us now, the pieces ended up looking nostalgic, empty diorama’s of light from some museum of dead physics.

Robert Irwin’s large coated glass piece and cast acrylic column, carried a similar fait accompli to Turrell’s work. Combined with pieces by John McCracken, Helen Pashgian, Craig Kauffman, and De Wain Valentine, who primarily work(ed) in acrylic and resins, felt dated, and quaint. The experience was akin to re-watching Logan’s Run, the 1976 science fiction movie starring Michael York and Jenny Agutter, and realizing the memories of a 13 year old boy cannot sustain the much older, adult man. The sophistication of computer graphics (CGI) today has ruined most films prior to 1990 relying on special effects (the notable exceptions being Blade Runner, Star Wars and of course 2001: A Space Odyssey). The reason for this is Arthur C. Clarke’s third law of prediction, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I went to MCASD with recollections of magic and left seeing dated technology and dated art. The exhibition’s focus is on phenomenon, but one generation’s phenomenology is another’s banality.

The exhibition was not entirely without merit. Irwin’s cut out windows at the La Jolla branch demonstrated a simple yet brilliant shift in our perception of glass that seemed timeless. Arguably, in this age of architecture overrun by glass facades and boxes, e.g., Apple stores, Irwin’s work seemed highly relevant. By removing roughly one square foot of glass from the center and the corner of a gallery space window that overlooked the ocean, perception immediately clouded the idea of surface and space. This object (windows) that we take for granted is actually a physical reality altering our environment. Were you indoors or out? Were you looking through an opening or entering into a different dimension of time/space? My friend Carol who joined me at the La Jolla branch where the cut outs are, immediately questioned whether the holes in the glass were holes at all. It required us walking right up to the hole and putting a hand through it to confirm.

Larry Bell’s cubes also held up surprisingly well. Perhaps it is his extraordinary attention to detail and use of glass as opposed to acrylics that carried them. Bell has been producing these glass cubes for decades now, focusing on the confusion of volume. Donald Judd in his essay Specific Objects (1965) sums up this emergent new form of Light and Space sculpture,

Abstract painting before 1946 and most subsequent painting kept the representational subordination of the whole to its parts. Sculpture still does. In the new work the shape, image, color and surface are single and not partial and scattered. There aren’t any neutral or moderate areas or parts, any connections or transitional areas. The difference between the new work and earlier painting and present sculpture is like that between one of Brunelleschi’s windows in the Badia di Fiesole and the façade of the Palazzo Rucellai, which is only an undeveloped rectangle as a whole and is mainly a collection of highly ordered parts.

On the left, Brunelleschi’s Fiesola façade. On the right, Palazo Rucellai sketch.

Judd aptly recognized early on, what was unique about the Light and Space movement, that is focused on volumes created by light and space as an object. In Brunelleschi’s Fiesola façade, the windows are illusory spaces that borrow from Persian geometry and leverage linear perspective to create dimensional complexity that is not inherent in the physicality of the façade itself, unlike the Palazo Rucellai, which relies on the standard formulaic divided space of windows and columns. Bell’s “ghost boxes” as they’re sometimes called, works off the same principal as Brunelleschi but advances it with 20th century material. The object becomes the volumetric space contained in the cube while simultaneously referencing an even larger dimension reflected and refracted in the glass that forms the cube itself.

At the downtown location, a lone painting (I’m using that term loosely) in a darkened room by Mary Corse called Untitled (Space + Electric Light) left me unsettled and full of delight. The piece is a 4’ x 4’ square of milk plexiglass with neon lighting behind it, but Corse deliberately tampered with the neon, causing the lighting behind this otherwise clean, white illuminated square to flicker and jitter. These disruptions were not the typical fluorescent transformer flickering, but something more potent. The quality of light gave the piece an alien quality. The buzzing and flickering left the viewer wondering if they were viewing something greatly advanced or a technological relic from the past.

An installation by Douglas Wheeler called DW 68 VEN MCASD 11, worked in a way I normally expect when experiencing a Turrell. In fact, when I entered the room I thought it was a Turrell. A wall with recessed neon white light emanating from all four sides at the end of the room made the entire room a light sculpture. Wheeler should be as famous as Turrell and Irwin, but for unknown reasons he has not achieved their prominence. Wheeler’s work uses light as a device for nullifying edge and transgressing the classic rectangle of painting. An obsessive artist with a mathematical precision to his work it must be considered largely off-putting by a generation of critics who support junk-assemblage postmodern punk works. Despite the fastidiousness of Wheeler’s work it was a joyful highlight of the MCASD exhibition.

Surface of a California hot rod (L) compared to "Untitled" by Craig Kauffman 1968 synthetic polymer vacuum-formed plexiglass with acrylic lacquer 23 x 51 x 12in.

The best of California Light and Space art, like all art, transcends time and provides as much of a platform for ethereality today as it did when first shown in the sixties. If some of the works materiality doesn’t hold up after four decades, we realize that our own environment hasn’t either. The utopian promise of the aerospace and industrial design that grew out of 1950s California often looks dated and beleaguered today, just as watching the original Star Wars does. A large number of mainly European artists owe their success today to the artist of the Light and Space movement of the sixties and seventies, Olafur Eliasson the most famous among them. The Pop art world swallowed much of the promises offered by Minimalism and the Space and Light movement, with its easy to digest accessibility. But now that the weight of decades of irony feels more like a desert found at TGIF’s—too sweet, too big and leaving you with a stomach ache after. The return of aerospace dominance, this time with a darker pretense in the form of unmanned drones and video-guided bombs, leaves an opening for revisiting the Light and Space movement. Our sense of phenomenon may have shifted more comfortably into CGI but our need for grounding in the wonders of the present will never leave us. A similar show at David Zwimmer in NYC in 2010 was eloquently summarized by the poet critic Peter Schjeldahl,

In the sixties, puritanical New Yorkers (me included) like to deplore the air of lotus-eating chic that Bell shred with other California minimalists. Today, after what seems an eternity of having been pummeled by the big-ticket swank of stainless-steel bunnies by Jeff Koons and tanked sharks by Damien Hirst, I find Bell’s slickness generously candid…There’s no crime in art’s looking like a luxury. It is a luxury. Meanwhile, the intellectual integrity of the cubes, merging Euclid and reverie, proves rock solid.

Our systems of knowledge are all built upon perception and the ontology of phenomenon. The only limitation to that knowledge is our denial of things greater than ourselves and our unwillingness to embrace the unknown and unknowable. Although at times quaint and dated, the Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface exhibition can still serve as a gentle reminder that wonder can be a gateway to modesty.