I feel the work in my body. I feel it. I don’t know how to exactly express that, how to translate that into language. But most people confuse emotions in art with sentiment, and I’m out to crack that one.
Giotto was a master at using visual devices that subtly control the viewer’s bodily movements. In order to experience the work, the viewer must walk along and by it. If one is visually sensitive, this viewing position mysteriously causes one’s body to function as part of the painting. As I walked down the corridor of the Basilica in Assisi, using my peripheral vision I watched out of the corner of my eye while Giotto’s diagonal lines within the panels seemingly changed their position as they defined the end of one Saint Francis story and the beginning of another. I, the viewer, had become part of an invisible line constituting the vanishing point. It was almost as though I were a camera and the work required my viewing of it in order to complete itself. What an exhilarating idea!
If the play between artwork, viewer and site figures big in your work, then what Dorothea Rockburne says about Giotto in Assisi ought to grab you with some force. More so, when you read that it’s Cy Twombly she’s really talking about —about Twombly’s installation, at Gagosian (SoHo) in 1994, of Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor:
When I walked into the gallery, strikingly, there was only one painting, which covered the entire south wall. It was impossible to view the work—Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor—from very far back. In fact, the gallery had moved a wall to separate the street entrance from the exhibition, making the viewing space narrower than it normally was. Therefore, the only possible way to view the work was to begin at one end and walk alongside it. “Hmm!” I thought. “Cy has been studying the Giotto corridor in the church of Saint Francis in Assisi.”
Giotto di Bondone, Basilique Assise, Legend of Saint Francis, Homage of a Simple Man. Credit: Wikimedia Commons. This image is included under the fair use exemption.
Robert Ryman had made a statement declaring that what to paint was never the problem. The problem is always how to paint. With that simple statement he managed to turn the phenomenological subject/object upside-down. … Omitted from Ryman’s statement was the knowledge, hidden structure, and many subterranean emotions which lay behind the frontal image of all great art. This may be subjective but it also contains a centuries long human pictorial language which continues throughout time.
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All of this was helpful. That implicating the viewer in the space of the work could heighten its emotional pitch —this much, we knew, was a given. We also knew that, to achieve this kind of engagement in our own work, we would need to look deeper, and differently, at art history and the strategies we were taking from it.
We met with Dorothea Rockburne in her SoHo studio early last month. We hoped that, together, we could unpack these ideas, then let the conversation take us further.
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DR It seems to me that the big changes in art, if you want to think about it, are spatial changes, they’re not changes in subject matter. Subject matter, still life, geometric abstraction, the human figure, more or less, remains the same.
TA Shifts between systems of perspective?
DR More, but yes. I think there was a tradition that was going on—and goes way back—that had to do with oblique geometry. Today, we’re unfamiliar with it. It’s in the Pompeii Room at the Met. Then, all of a sudden, the stuff just disappears. I think that if it was in Pompeii, it was an inherited tradition. And since there were no books, traditions were handed down pragmatically, from word of mouth —and doing. But it was all lost. There were remains of it, probably because artists are nosy and they’re nosy about the past. And probably Giotto, who certainly had a superb intelligence—that’s for sure—used that tradition, that kind of geometry, but not always.
TA But some traditions, some of these systems, carry into today, even though —
DR Yes, but mostly intuitively, not in any systemic way. Take David’s [Row] recent show. One of the things that really interested me is what he’s doing with topological geometry. We sat for a long time in front of that painting in the back, the black and white one [Gizmo, 1974], and I said, “It’s very hard to tip a plane in an ellipse. It’s very difficult to do that because you’re not dealing with the rules of perspective—at all. It’s difficult. I’ve done it accidentally myself a couple of times and I can’t figure out what I did [laughs]. That is, asymmetric geometry.
DR Well, I was writing about Giotto that the only way you could experience those frescoes in the corridor of the Assisi Basilica was to walk by them. Twombly knew all those things the Renaissance guys were doing. You could not stand back. You could only walk by them. It is a spectacular thing because, as you walk down that corridor, it’s your peripheral vision that is changing. It’s amazing.
TA You wrote in that article1 that you and Twombly shared a love of ancient history and ancient art. But for most at Black Mountain, that was not the case.
TA But when did this start for you, this interest in —
DR Not with art, actually. When I was a kid in Canada, we had a country house north of Montreal. In August at night I would lie in a field and look at the northern lights and think about astronomy as a child might. And, now, at the Morgan Library there’s an exhibition of “The Little Prince.”What would I do if I rode the northern light, etc., you know? I was probably about, 5 to ten or eleven, doing that and thinking about it. It became a more major part of me than what I learned in school, actually.
DR I was looking at Egyptian work most of my life. When I was a kid, my mother had these books on Egypt; and when I went to Beaux Arts later, I realized that everything I had been looking at was Golden Mean. And when I learned Golden Mean, and I went back to those books, I thought there’s something about the exquisiteness of the Egyptian mind. There’s also a lot of fooling around they did with space. There’s some work, I think in Luxor, where the wall is 10′ thick and you see the outline of the people on one side and, as though seeing through the wall, you see the back of them. They fiddled around with spatial concepts a lot. It was interesting to me, too—I’ve been to Egypt once—to think they had a concept of perspective. It was clear to me that the West hadn’t recognized it because it wasn’t Renaissance perspective.
TA And all this started coming together for you at Black Mountain?
DR Well, when I was at Black Mountain, I was doing student work. And I was learning about what other painters were doing and I wasn’t on the same page as most of the other painting students. I don’t know why. I certainly was when I was in Montreal and going through Beaux Arts and then later at the Museum School. But at Black Mountain, I felt everyone was doing Abstract Expressionism and that was kind of left over from Surrealism. It was all muscular, masculine, kind of stuff. And I had absolutely no interest in it, whatsoever. I mean, I did some work like that because it was de rigueur at the time, but I really had no interest in it. When I came to New York, I had Max’s books with me and I kept reading them and looking at them and going to where they led me.
TA Max Dehn-
DR Max Dehn. Everyone called him Professor Dehn, but since I knew him well, I called him Max at his request. He did significant work in topology. He was teaching in Frankfurt and also in Berlin, I think, when the whole Nazi experience broke out, and he was arrested [and later released2]… [Eventually,] he got to America. Albers had somehow been in touch with him and enabled Dehn to go to Black Mountain. Max was in Seventh Heaven at Black Mountain. He taught me about the underlying geometries in nature and art. His classes affected me profoundly3.
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The conversation traveled. We walked through her studio, looking at new work and at a wonderful carbon paper drawing from 1973. Fingerprints—trace evidence of the artist’s handling of the carbon paper—suggested surface, while everything else about that drawing suggested depth.
TA You’ve said elsewhere4 that engagement in the work should be sensuous, that it should involve the way the body senses feeling from visual impact.
DR I feel the work in my body. I feel it. I don’t know how to exactly express that, how to translate that into language. But most people confuse emotions in art with sentiment, and I’m out to crack that one. It’s not sentiment. Your emotions are something you’re almost born with a complete set of, and most people spend their whole life denying their emotions. But if you develop them, it’s not sentiment, it’s strength.
1“At Black Mountain College everyone was always rebelling, both in their lives and in their work, and it struck me at the time that it was only Cy and I who were not rebelling against the history of art. We both shared a love for ancient history, ancient art, and the poet Rilke. (It was impossible to come out of Black Mountain College and not love Rilke.)” (Artforum, November, 2011) ⇑
2Dehn was among the 30,000 Jews arrested in Germany in the days following Kristallnacht. He was released on condition of exile and forfeiture of property. After brief stays in Copenhagen and Trondheim, Norway, he and his wife, Antonie Landau, made their way to the United States (October 1940). He began at Black Mountain in 1945.⇑
3“Mathematics was a peculiar experience for me. I went to a very girl’s school where you were trained to be a “lady,” basically, and science was home economics, etc., etc. I know it sounds like the year ‘one’ but that’s what it was. I was very shy in those days, and [Max] sat at lunch with me for several days and I must have spoken up about something, after which he said, ‘I would like you to take my mathematics class.’ And I was appalled, because there were people there from Harvard and Yale who were there just to work with him. And I said ‘I have no background to take your class,’ whereupon he said, in his heavy German accent, ‘Well good, you haven’t been poisoned. I will teach you.’ And every morning for 2 years, we took a walk and he talked to me about mathematics in nature. And I’m sure he talked to me about the skies, about astronomy. I’m sure it played in the background… You know we would look at a tree and he would say, ‘you have to imagine the roots underneath the ground are the same as what you’re seeing above ground in equal proportion. And you can track the way it’s going to grow according to probability theory.’ Then in class he would take me aside and teach me the equations for probability theory, which led me later to be able to understand chaos theory. He was so precious with me. All my teachers were.” (Dorothea Rockburne, in conversation with Connie Bostic at Ashville, NC, 19 April 2002.)⇑
4“The whole process of using carbon paper lines to reflect the light, to draw the line and then flip it … That’s also an engagement with time. It’s not direct, it’s indirect. It’s a sensuous involvement with the wall, your body, and your mind … Looking at it … The viewer is being asked to relive its making and feeling.” (Dorothea Rockburne, in conversation with Natasha Kurchanova, Studio International, 10 July 2013.)⇑
Richard Benari Lauren Henkin Dorothea Rockburne
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Dorothea Rockburne’s recent exhibition, Drawing Which Makes Itself, ran at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from September 21, 2013 – February 2, 2014. Other recent solo and group exhibitions include Dorothea Rockburne: Indication Drawings From the Drawing Which Makes Itself series, 1973 from October 1 – November 16, 2013 – at Jill Newhouse Gallery, Pliage/Fold at Gagosian Gallery Paris, February 28 – April 29, 2014, and Abstract Drawing at the Drawing Room Gallery February 20 – April 19, 2014. Her current project, Folded Sky, Hommage to Colin Powell, a 41 foot tall mural of the night sky as it looked at the time of Colin Powell’s birth, will be installed later this month at the U.S. Embassy in Kingston, Jamaica, a commission by the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies. Dorothea Rockburne is represented in New York City by Van Doren Waxter Gallery.
Richard Benari Lauren Henkin Dorothea Rockburne
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Read the digital catalogue, accompanying the 2013 Jill Newhouse Gallery exhibition, Dorothea Rockburne: Indication Drawings From the Drawing Which Makes Itself series, 1973, with an essay by Anna Lovatt, here.
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I like a painting that does something, like a machine does something: you turn it on and it functions “Since Courbet, it’s been believed that painting is addressed to the retina.…The retinal shudder!” — Marcel Duchamp1 shudder // shutter The click of the shutter, the click of the cliché, but lets come back to that […]
