you, sir, are a space, too

the value of abstraction in an age of obviousness

The Mark Rothko gallery in Tower 1 of the National Gallery of Art’s East Building, Washington, D.C.

On a Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago, while E stayed home to chip away at homework for her master’s program, I took the Metro down to the National Mall to visit the National Gallery of Art. I went to the National Gallery partly because I hadn’t been there in months, and partly because I had seen somewhere—on a bus stop advertisement, perhaps—that the museum’s East Building was currently featuring an exhibit of Mark Rothko’s paintings, specifically his works on paper. Anyone who has been to the National Gallery, of course, knows that it is an enormous place in which one could easily spend an entire day wandering the galleries of just one of its two wings. I knew, though, that even if I came away from this visit having seen nothing else, I had to see this exhibit.

In terms of the overall arc of my relationship to art, this sense of urgency was the exception rather than the rule. As one of the foremost artists of the Abstract Expressionist movement whose most famous works consist of vast and deceptively simple blocks of color arranged on enormous canvases, Rothko epitomizes precisely the sort of ‘modern art’ that so often ends up being the butt of the joke when our popular culture sets the sights of its mockery on abstraction. When you imagine the kind of painting to which one might respond with snide remarks of “I just don’t get it” or “my kid could paint that,” it’s likely that a Rothko is what comes to mind. For much of my life I had echoed this disdain for so-called ‘modern art,’ insisting (like the archetypal philistine) that I simply didn’t ‘get it.’

This reaction, I think, has a great deal to do with the circumstances of my early artistic education. Like most Americans, I was raised with a rather contradictory understanding of art’s significance and the way I was meant to relate to it. On the one hand, I was taught from an early age that artistic creativity was the unique genius of our species, that our ability to create works of great beauty and meaning was among the primary attributes that set us apart from mere animals. (As one of the many saccharine posters that adorned the walls of my classrooms in elementary school reminded me, “the Earth without art is just ‘eh.’”) At the same time, however, this valorization of art was always accompanied with a stern note of caution that creativity was a dangerously ‘impractical’ pursuit—that it was all well and good to take up art or music or writing as a hobby, but pursuing these things in any more meaningful way than that was a surefire way to torpedo my own professional and financial future. As a result, the figure of the artist which was instilled in my juvenile imagination was one which occupied a role somewhere between that of a genius and a madman.

Still, my early art education, minimal though it was, contained no dearth of these mad geniuses. In elementary-school art class I learned the names and major works of figures like Michelangelo and Monet and Van Gogh, dutifully nodding along as the teacher explained to us that these individuals constituted the core canon of Great Artists, whose incomparable genius had powered their staggering contributions to the shared heritage of human (i.e. Western) civilization. And what made these men—for they were mostly men—so great, I learned, was their technical mastery of artistic representation, their ability to capture the world around them in the most fluent and expressive of ways. Look at the curves of this sculpture’s figure, I was told. Look at the way this painting plays with light. Isn’t there something about it that just feels so real?

A work of art, I was taught, derived its artistic value from the skill and innovation with which it managed to represent the physical, external world—those concrete, tangible people and places and things against which the artwork could be measured as a point of reference. Abstraction, while not wholly absent from my artistic education, occupied a sort of permanent second place compared to the vehemence with which the virtues of formal representation were extolled. The Pollocks and Mondrians and Kandinskys of the world were presented as the exception rather than the rule—for the most part, Picasso was about as abstract as my art education got, and even then I was taught that I could make out familiar forms in his paintings if I squinted hard enough.

Predictably, this constant emphasis on the depictive meant that I internalized all too easily the notion that representation was the most valuable quality a work of art could have. My attitude towards abstract art, on the other hand, hovered somewhere between confused disinterest at best and outright disdain at worst. Parroting without any critical thought or hesitation the scripts that permeated the culture around me, I confidently echoed that ubiquitous refrain: “I hate modern art.” What I meant by this, of course, was any art that was not immediately recognizable as representing some tangible, material aspect of the ‘real’ world—any art, in other words, which demanded anything at all of its viewer beyond the mere act of passively looking.

This isn’t exactly surprising, I suppose, when you consider the milieu I was brought up in. As a child of America in the early 21st century—the era of pop stars and plastic and People magazine—I had been raised by a culture for which convenience was a paramount virtue, in which I was taught to expect instant gratification from every aspect of the world around me. The food I ate, the clothes I wore, the media I consumed—all of it was designed to be immediate and seamless, to contain as few complications and to demand as little of me as possible. Why on earth wouldn’t I want my art to be the same way?

• • •

Until quite recently, Rothko’s paintings never did very much for me. It’s not that I didn’t find them beautiful, or that I didn’t appreciate their technical mastery—it’s just that even though I had long since abandoned my juvenile disdain for ‘modern’ art, something about Rothko’s work always felt lost on me. All this changed, however, back in January, when E and I visited the Phillips Collection in Dupont Circle. Tucked away on a sleepy stretch of 21st Street just north of Massachusetts Avenue, the Phillips is a private collection of modern art, housed in a 19th-century mansion that once belonged to the museum’s namesake, art collector and critic Duncan Phillips. The second floor of the museum is home to the Rothko Room, which is exactly what it sounds like—a room, the first of its kind in the country, dedicated entirely to Mark Rothko’s work. The room, which contains just four paintings (one on each wall), is small and intimate (the museum’s founder, Duncan Phillips, once referred to it as a “chapel”). The lighting in the Rothko Room is low—lower than one might expect in a museum, given how important adequate light is to one’s ability to truly appreciate a work of art—but as it turns out, this was in fact an intentional decision, made at the suggestion of Rothko himself, who visited the Phillips in 1961 and requested that the lights in his namesake room be dimmed to encourage more introspective reflection.

The Rothko Room at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. (Source: The Phillips Collection’s Experiment Station blog)

When E and I visited the Phillips in January, we stopped in at the Rothko Room—not so much out of any particular affinity for Rothko himself as due to the fact that the Phillips is a small museum, and there’s only so much to see there. Another couple was exiting the gallery just as we arrived, so that when we entered the room we found ourselves alone in the presence of these four immense canvases—free to engage with them at our own pace and leisure, without the uneasy presence of anyone else to distract or rush our contemplation.

There, in the Rothko Room’s dim, cavelike silence, something changed. As I stood in front of each painting and gazed into its depths, the colors which covered the canvas in massive, imposing blocks began to stretch and deepen, revealing their secrets to me more and more with each passing second. Despite their superficial simplicity, the paintings seemed to be in constant motion, shifting and transforming before my eyes into something far more complex and significant than mere paint on canvas. Far from being simple or two-dimensional, I quickly realized that these vast fields of color in fact contained entire worlds within them—worlds which, it was clear, would only reveal themselves to me if I was willing to humble myself, to sublimate my expectations of instant gratification in order to meet the paintings on their own terms.

In a recent essay for their Substack, my friend

charlie squire

describes the experience of encountering a Rothko in the flesh (Rothko’s paintings feel so raw, so dynamic, so alive when viewed up close that they might as well be, literally, in the flesh). “The painting,” Charlie writes,

must move through you. When you spend enough time with one of these paintings, you’ll notice how they buzz and hum, not like telephone wires but like insects, moving, undulating, somehow producing noise and a faint tingling sensation on the skin. Some colors, even some whole paintings blend together, while others remain impossibly separated and irreconcilable. The paintings, with their base colors and base forms, evoke the most base concepts of life—weather, water, wounds—yet each painting is inlaid with its own unique nuance. It’s an uncomfortable process, and a public one, which may explain why so many people are unwilling to shrink themselves in the presence of other spectators. Rothko’s work requires a degrading level of vulnerability; critics of abstract expressionism are perhaps most averse to the necessary penetrability (and, therefore, femininity) required to “get” it. 

There is, I think, a tendency in the way most of us engage with art to think of paintings as mere objects—inert, lifeless things that hang on the wall for us to look at and passively absorb for a moment or two before moving onto the next thing. (If you doubt this, observe your fellow patrons the next time you visit an art museum and count how many paintings they spend more than a minute looking at. Or even better, pay that same attention to yourself.) But as Charlie points out in their essay, there’s nothing passive whatsoever about the experience of looking at a Rothko painting. It would, in fact, arguably be more accurate to say that you don’t really ‘look’ at a Rothko; rather, you experience it—and more importantly, it experiences you. If you gaze for long enough into the depths of one of Rothko’s canvases, sooner or later you start to get the feeling that, like Nietzsche’s abyss, the painting is gazing back into you. It knows something you don’t, and what you quickly realize is that whether or not the secret is divulged simply isn’t up to you.

From Ad Reinhardt’s “How to Look at Art, Arts, and Architecture” (1947). Source: Twitter

Perhaps you’ve seen this image before. It’s a cartoon by the abstract expressionist artist Ad Reinhardt, a contemporary of Rothko who similarly embraced color-field painting and whose best-known works are the ‘black’ paintings that he produced throughout the 1950s and 1960s. I don’t remember when I first encountered this cartoon by Reinhardt (I know it was on social media somewhere, probably on Twitter), but every time the algorithm decides to push it back onto my feed, it stops me in my tracks. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else encapsulate quite so powerfully or succinctly just what makes abstract art, if done right, so revolutionary—it is precisely its non-representation (at least in the visual sense) that forces the viewer to bring some part of themselves to the table, to engage in the intellectual work of introspection and interpretation without the aid of obvious visual guides or signifiers. The power of abstraction, in other words, lies in the way it forces us to find meaning in the superficially meaningless.

• • •

These days, it’s become something of a meme for anyone with even a passing interest in 20th-century art history to point out that abstract expressionism played an important ideological function for the United States during the Cold War, its openness to interpretation and emphasis on individual expression standing in stark contrast to the style of socialist realism that dominated the art scene in the Soviet bloc. From the 1970s onward, a number of books, essays, and articles began to proliferate which alleged that the CIA, through the innocuously-named ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom,’ had promoted and funded the international exhibition of abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko—sponsoring showings of these artists’ works in European cities as a way of exercising soft power and countering the cultural influence of Communism. While the extent of the United States’ involvement in promoting abstract expressionism as a tool of cultural imperialism is contested, it certainly seems well within the realm of possibility that the same CIA fronts which covertly funded anti-Communist literary journals like Encounter would have had a vested interest in shifting the art world’s center of gravity to the United States—which is precisely what the mid-20th century rise of abstract expressionism accomplished.

This history is, I think, part of why I remained so skeptical of abstract expressionism for so long, even after I had long since abandoned my childish belief that representation was a necessary quality for something to be considered ‘real’ art. As a member of the American left, whose political coming-of-age took place in an ideological atmosphere that was suffused with a Chomsky-esque suspicion of anything that had even the remotest whiff of U.S. empire, I found it difficult to separate the artistic value of, say, a Rothko from its ideological dimensions—even though, of course, the problem was not so much the intrinsic ideological content of the art itself as its political instrumentalization in service of cultural imperialism. In the naive, black-and-white logic which characterized my worldview during my adolescent and early college years, it seemed difficult—if not impossible—to square an appreciation of this art with my own left-wing political commitments.

But as an art historian friend of mine recently pointed out in a conversation about Rothko and the CIA, art has always served an ideological function—namely, to preserve the image and serve the interests of those who already hold power in a given society. The masterpieces of the Renaissance, they reminded me, were the product of efforts by extraordinarily wealthy and powerful families—the Medicis, the Sforzas, the Borgias—to further cement their own social status and political power through artistic patronage. For centuries, aristocrats and royalty across Europe commissioned oil portraits—portraits which now hang in the world’s most prestigious art museums—to extol the illustriousness of the paintings’ sitters. And conservative hand-wringing notwithstanding, landscape painting has long been used as a tool to foster nationalistic romanticism by harkening back to an idyllic and imagined national past.

In other words, abstract expressionism is no more and no less inherently ideological than any other artistic form or movement. Considering the political functions of this style of art—like any other—should enrich our understanding and appreciation of it, rather than turn us away from it. It would clearly be a mistake to view abstract expressionism in some imagined apolitical vacuum—but it would be an equally grave error to allow its instrumentalization in service of ruling-class interests to diminish its artistic worth. This is, I think, especially important in light of the ideological function that abstract art has come to serve today—not in terms of the art itself, but in terms of how we are taught to see it. By now, it’s almost become a cliché to point out that we live in an era of profound anti-intellectualism—a deeply alarming cultural theme which manifests in everything from the far-right’s relentless assault on higher education in the name of fighting ‘wokeness’ to a culture of online discourse which shames any invocation of complex or theoretical language as ‘inaccessible’ and insists, in response to even the most measured attempts at critical or nuanced analysis, that ‘it’s not that deep.’

This culture of widespread resistance to any form of critical thought or serious artistic inquiry is emblematic of the fact that we live in what might be called an age of obviousness, in which critical analysis is discouraged and virtually every facet of our culture is designed to reinforce and validate our assumptions rather than challenging them. It’s not difficult to see why those in power would have a vested interest in promoting a culture so hostile to critical thought—a public which not only refuses to see beyond the surface level, but which mocks and dismisses those who try to do so, is a dream come true for the ruling class and its efforts to preserve the status quo of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and empire.

This, of course, cannot be separated from what Charlie refers to in another essay as our collective “crisis of contentization”—the collapsing of boundaries between art, which is created with the intent to convey some fundamental message about society or the world or the human condition, and mere ‘content,’ whose sole purpose is to deliver algorithmically-determined doses of dopamine-fueled instant gratification in order to keep us scrolling for more. Unlike art, whose meaning ultimately derives from its inherent openness to analysis, interpretation, and thoughtful critique, the defining feature of content is its overwhelming shallowness—a complete and utter lack of substance to critique in the first place.

In this age of obviousness, where everything has been reduced to content and any inclination to seek out the deeper meaning in art is derided as a symptom of pretension, abstraction emerges as a powerful counter to the idea that the only level of analysis worth considering is the superficial. An abstract painting is unique in that it forces the viewer to look beyond the surface, its lack of apparent representation stripping away the comfort of the familiar on which we usually tend to fall back. No wonder, then, that our popular culture spends so much time disparaging so-called ‘modern’ art, belittling its value and significance on the grounds that it ‘doesn’t mean anything.’ Wouldn’t it be convenient for those in power if that were true?

• • •

The visit I took with E to the Phillips Collection’s Rothko Room back in January profoundly transformed me. As I moved, trancelike, from one canvas to the next, I found myself being pulled into a sort of blissful oblivion, consumed by the vast fields of color and placed entirely at the mercy of the indescribable emotions they stirred within me. (It’s telling that even now, after staring at my screen for several minutes, the only word I can come up with to characterize these emotions is ‘indescribable.’)

Altogether, E and I spent fewer than fifteen minutes in the Rothko Room, though it easily could have been several hours. When I emerged, I felt renewed—like something had shifted within me, some part of my psyche that defied definition or identification but which I knew could never go back to the way it was before. I, as it turned out, was a space, too.

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culture shock is a blog by the Indian-American writer, essayist, and cultural critic Pranay Somayajula. Click the button below to subscribe for free and receive new essays in your inbox: