Nothingness Made Visible

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Nothingness Made Visible: The Case of Rothko's PaintingsAuthor(s): Natalie KosoiReviewed work(s):Source: Art Journal, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Summer, 2005), pp. 20-31

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Mark Rothko. Untitled, 1952. Oil on canvas.953/< x 817/8 in. (243.2 x 208 cm). Privatecollection.? 2005 Kate Rothko Prizeland Christopher Roth ko/Artists RightsSociety (ARS) New York. Photograph:Bob Kolbrener.

The word "nothingness" frequently appears in writings about twentieth-centuryart. Yet how can we perceive nothingness or know what it is? Everywhere welook we can see, feel, or think something. Ifwe shut our eyes and ears, we canalways 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 thatthere is no such "thing" as nothingness; hence, to associate an artwork, which

is always something, with nothingness seems absurd. In theNatalie Kosoi following, Iwill show that such a relation is possible andnot absurd. By considering two philosophers who pondered

NothingriGSS M3.Q6 ViSlblC the notion of nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre and MartinHeidegger, Iwill first address the problem of how we canI ne w3.Se O? KOTIIKO S understand nothingness and then show how the works of

_ %Mark Rothko represent it.d.1 II LI I lgs 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 anexperience of it. He argues that because any being is finite, nothingness formsbeings and as such is a prerequisite of everything that is.

Many commentators on Rothko invoke the word "nothing" in describinghis paintings. James E. B. Breslin, in his biography of Rothko, writes, "Rothko'sartistic enterprise was, after all, a something that was dangerously close tonothing."1 Barbara Novak and Brian O'Doherty, in their essay "Rothko's DarkPaintings: Tragedy and Void," also assert that Rothko's work is "very close tonothing" and that nothing is indeed its very content.2 Robert Rosenblumdescribed Rothko's paintings as "images of something near to nothingness."3These are only a few examples among many.

The common characteristic of these writings, although not always explicitlystated, is that Rothko s paintings?because of his reduction of painterly means(figure, line, space, and eventually even color), which resulted in almost mono

chrome paintings?are on the verge of "nothing." As such, they reflect the way inwhich we are accustomed to think about nothingness, as the negation and absenceof 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 1950s,Iwill argue thatRothko's paintings are not only on the verge f beingnothing butthat they also represent nothingness, which corresponds to Heidegger's concept.

Jeffery Weiss, in his essay "Rothko's Unknown Space," particularly associatesRothko's paintings with Sartre's thinking, using the story of Pierre from Being andNothingness to interpret Rothko's paintings.4 In this story Sartre arrives at a caf? to

meet Pierre, but the latter is not there. The caf? 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 amoment of Sartre's attention (is this Pierre?),isolated and standing out against the background, and shortly after sinks againinto the background (it is not Pierre). Sartre calls the successive disappearanceof these objects into the background "original nihilation." On the surface ofthis original nihilation another nihilation occurs. Since Pierre is nowhere to be

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1.James E. B. Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 7.2. Barbara Novak and Brian O'Doherty,"Rothko's Dark Paintings: Tragedy and Void,"inMark Rothko, ed. JefferyWeiss, exh. cat.(Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1998), 281.3. Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the

Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko(London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 10.4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans.H. E. Barnes (New York:Washington SquarePress, 1992), 42.


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found, his absence haunts the caf?. Thus, Pierre presents himself as "nothingnesson the ground of the nihilation of the caf? . . . the nothingness which slips as anothing to the surface of the ground."5 Sartre calls Pierre's perpetual absencefrom the caf? "double nihilation." Weiss writes:

Certainly Rothko's almost ineffably subtle manipulations of figure andground (or the center and the edge) can be characterized in Sartrean termsas a "double nihilation" whereby the absent figure is experienced as presence, or the apprehension of nothingness, and plenitude is experiencedas ground.6

Although Sartre argues that nothingness is the origin of negation and notthe 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 Pierreillustrates: that a negative judgment, "X is not," stems from nothingness as anonbeing, 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 athing or a person.

Certainly, if nothingness is represented in Rothko's painting, the comparisonto 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 somethingparticular. The application of Sartre's theory of nothingness to Rothko's paintingstherefore seems to me problematic, as it poses the question: what in particular do

we expect to find in Rothko's paintings, or any other painting? This questionremains unanswered inWeiss's text. I believe that a perception of nothingnessas that which constitutes beings, one closer to Heidegger's than Sartre's, corre

spondsto

nothingnessas

representedin Rothko's

paintingsand

mightindeed

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 ismerely a nonbeing, which stemsfrom human consciousness, while for Heidegger, nothingness is also an affirmation of beings as it is the limit imposed on all beings. Heidegger maintains thateverything in this world, including ourselves, is finite, and hence nothingnessconstitutes the being of all that exists, and as such forms everything in the waythat it is.Without it, entities could not be. Yet it is even more acute in the case ofhuman beings, since humans die, while according toHeidegger other beings,such as animals, plants, and objects, simply dissipate into nothingness and perish. He maintains that death, our own impending nothingness, is not simplysomething that happens at the end of life. Our awareness that we might die atany moment pervades and shapes our life. Thus, because death?the possibleimpossibility 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 momentsduring 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 nothingnessthat constitutes our being.

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5. JefferyWeiss, "Rothko's Unknown Space," inMark Rothko (National Gallery of Art), 323, refersto Sartre's Being and Nothingness, 42.6.Weiss, 323.


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The difference between anxiety and fear is that we fear a particular anddeter minable being, whereas anxiety lacks a de terminable object. If a person isasked what he or she is anxious about, the answer, according to Heidegger, willbe: nothing. Nothingness is revealed through anxiety neither as a being nor asan object, nor as a negation of beings. Rather, in anxiety nothingness is known"with beings and in beings expressly as a slipping away of thewhole."7 By "the

whole" Heidegger means all entities, whose meaning for us and our relation towhich compose our world. Because we are anxious about our being, which isa being-toward-death, we flee from ourselves and from facing this fact, towardthese entities that supply our world with meaning and thus enable us to forgetthat 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 nolonger 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 itsvery basis, is defined; and this basis itself is as thrownness into death."8

It iswell known, and often repeated, that Rothko thought that art shoulddeal with the human drama or tragedy and should intimate mortality.9 Suchintentions correspond to the role that Heidegger?who thought of poetry asthe 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 themoon, is hiddenfrom us, invisible to us in our everyday life. Heidegger explains, "This affirmation, however, does not mean to turn the No into aYes; itmeans to acknowledgethe 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?"10We 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 indeedable to present our mortality to us, then how can we recognize it? MauriceBlanchot, 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 itsorigin. But, contrary to Heidegger, he believes that art attempts not to presentdeath but rather to negate it. He argues that it is a generally accepted idea thatart stems from the desire not to die; as an example he quotes Andr? Gide, who

wrote in his journals (July 27, 1922) that his reason for writing is "to sheltersomething from death."

" However, we cannot hold death at a distance, if deathis not possible, and Blanchot, contrary to Heidegger, maintains that death isimpossible. Obviously, we all know that we will die. Yet we cannot know itfor certain:

What makes me disappear from the world cannot find its guarantee there;and thus, in away, having no guarantee, it is not certain. This explains whyno one is linked to death by real certitude. No one is sure of dying. No onedoubts death, but no one can think of certain death except doubtfully. Forto think death is to introduce into thought the supremely doubtful, thebrittleness of the unsure. It is as if in order to think authentically uponthe certainty of death, we had to let thought sink into doubt and inauthenticity, or yet again as ifwe strive to think on death, more than our brain?the very substance and truth of thought itself?were bound to crumble.I2

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7. Martin Heidegger, "What IsMetaphysics?" inBasicWritings, 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 (InMemory of RobertGoldwater)," inMark Rothko, Paintings 19481969, exh. cat. (New York: Pace Gallery, April

1983), II.10.Martin Heidegger, "What Are Poets For?" inPoetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter(New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 125.I I.Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature,trans. A. Smock (Lincoln: University of NebraskaPress, 1955), 94.12. Ibid., 95.


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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 deathin its incomprehensibility and, therefore, "it hovers between death as the possi

bility of understanding and death as the horror of impossibility."I3 The writer, heargues, is likeOrpheus descending into death to bring his Eurydice into the light

of day.And likeOrpheus thewriter necessarily fails in his or her task as he or shesucceeds in capturing not the certainty of

death but the "eternal torments of Dying."14

Visual Representation ofNothingnessAlthough both Heidegger and Blanchotfind a fundamental relation between deathand writing, they disagree as to its ability torender 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 foundin abundance in the tradition of Western

painting. Does it succeed in presenting "theother side" or does itmerely render the"eternal torments of Dying"? In the following examination of two possible ways ofrepresenting death visually, I bear in mindthat there is a fundamental difference

between visual and conceptual experience:we can know what we see but not necessar

ily understand it, while conceptual experience must first be understood in order tobe known.

The most obvious way to render deathin a painting, and the one that has been

most commonly employed, is by the representation of a corpse. In TheDeath of theVirgin,for example, Caravaggio based his representation of the body of Mary on an actualcorpse?that of awoman drowned in theTiber. Jean-Luc Nancy in his book The Muses

observes that this painting situates us on the threshold before death. He findsthree such thresholds. We, the dying creatures, are the first one. The second isrepresented by the virgin's corpse?dead, but still existing as a thing?and thelast 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

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Caravaggio. Death of the Virgin, 1605-06. Oilon canvas. 145 4 x 96^ in. (369 x 245 cm).Mus?e du Louvre, Paris. Photograph: ErichLess?ng/Art Resource, NY.


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if that were the subject of this painting: there is never death 'itself'" but only athreshold before death.l5

Itmight be argued that this painting in fact represents death only as itwasperceived by a religious society, that is, as a threshold between worldly and otherworldly life. Because a corpse is always something, no matter how realisticallyit is represented in a painting, it does not present death as absolute nothingnessin the way that it is commonly perceived today. Indeed, Heidegger argues, whensomeone dies we experience loss, but loss is a feeling on the part of those whoremain. Nevertheless, even in this painting the anxiety that there might be nothing beyond resonates. The group of the disciples situated behind theVirgin's bedseems to be disappearing into the darkness of the background. This disappearing,the "slipping away" of the figures from the grasp of our perception, as Iwillshow, will become the subject matter of Rothko's paintings.

A similar yet subtly different attempt to represent death may be foundin Gerard Titus-Carmel's work ThePocketSizeTlingitCoffin,which is discussed inJacques Der r ida '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 coffin. Theway this work renders death resembles the traditional way of representing it?

that 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 andnot someone else. Seeing ourselves lying in a coffin, though, is still far fromexperiencing our own death as nothingness, because, as was mentioned earlier, acorpse is something and not nothing. In addition, as Der rida observes, the sightis intended to induce a feeling of "calming one's own terror, of dealing withalterity, of thus wearing down alterity," a feeling that is enhanced by the smallsize of the coffin.l6 Hence, instead of making us face our mortality, it negates it.

Rothko's Representation of NothingnessThe 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 andboth evoke a similar feeling. Nothingness evokes anxiety and the sublime horror

mixed with pleasure. However, there is a fundamental difference between thetwo. The sublime, whether it is a quality of an object (in Edmund Burke's senseof theword) 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 thereare 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 orimmediate threat to our existence, according to Burke, or because we discover

our superiority over our finite nature, according to Kant. The encounter withnothingness offers us no such redemption. On the contrary, it points to theimpossibility of any salvation, as our impending nothingness is also what constitutes us.

In their book Arts of Impoverishment,eo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit argue thatRothko began to subvert the readability of forms depicted in his painting alreadyin the 1950s, and this tendency reached its peak in the fourteen Rothko Chapel

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13. Ibid.,244.14. Ibid., 119.15. Jean-Luc Nancy, TheMuses, trans. P. Kamuf

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 59.16. Jacques Derrida, The Truth inPainting, trans.Geoff Bennington and IanMcLeod (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1987), 191.


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paintings at St. Thomas University, Houston, in which the differences betweenforms, background, and even the paintings themselves are almost completelyobliterated. They argue that the sameness of the paintings in the Rothko Chapelhas a twofold effect. First, it renders visibility unnecessary, as there is nothingto see, and therefore it induces a kind of blindness. Second, by obliterating theforms in the chapel paintings, Rothko creates an example of what Friedrich

Nietzsche called Dionysian art, inwhich one's individuality is lost as the bordersthat constitute the individual by differentiating it from its environment collapse.

They maintain that the chapel encourages the viewers to remember and repeatthe experience of primary narcissism, which they define as "the experience of a

pleasurable shattered consciousness having become aware of itself as the objectof its desire." '7We can experience again such a shattering of the self's coherenceonly in death and, to a lesser degree, in sex.

Yet all of this can be said about almost any monochrome painting. YvesKlein's blue monochromes and Ad Reinhardt 'sblack paintings offer just twoexamples. Furthermore, the moment of blindness is much more prominent inRobert Ryman's white paintings. In these, the brushstrokes create forms, buttheir 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 1950s, Bersani and Dutoit write:

Rothko's work is retrogressive: it returns us to the moment of looking wehave always skipped, to an effort to establish boundaries that a certain economy in human evolution may have succeeded in sparing us. What we havebeen spared, however, is the very work of being, the renewed possibilitythat presence might not take place.,8

Thinking of Rothko's paintings in this way associates them with the notionof the sublime rather than with nothingness.

In his essay "The Sublime and theAvant-Garde," Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard relates the sublime to the horror that nothingwill happen and the relief that it is happening.I9 If this interpretation is correct, viewing Rothko's paintings should produce a feeling of delight, since thisis a feeling related to the sublime. However, I believe that any observer cannotfail 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 themas "objects of emotional or spiritual awe"; while Robert Goldwater writes, "Itis significant that at the entrance to this room one pauses, hesitating to enter. Itsspace seems both occupied and empty"; and Peter Selz writes, "The spectatorcontemplates an atmosphere of alarm . . ."2? There is evidence to suggest thatRothko himself wanted his paintings to evoke anxiety. Rothko said to a reporterthat 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 tobutt their heads forever against the wall."21

Inwhat follows Iwill demonstrate how Rothko's way of intimating mortality

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17. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts ofImpoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1993), 142.18. Ibid., 121.19. Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, "The Sublime and the

Avant-Garde," inThe Inhuman: Reflection on Time,trans. Geoff Bennington and R. Bowlby (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1991).20. Rosenblum, Modern Painting, 199;Weiss,"Rothko's Unknown Space," 305; RobertGoldwater, "Reflections on the RothkoExhibition," and Peter Selz, "Mark Rothko," in

Mark Rothko, exh. cat. (Basel: Kunsthalle Basel,1982), n.p.21. Mark Rothko, quoted inJohn Fischer, "MarkRothko: Portrait of the Artist as an Angry Man,"

Harper's Magazine, July 1970, 16, quoted inWeiss, "Rothko's Unknown Space," 321.


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in his works?namely, by undermining our ability to read the colors of theforms depicted in his paintings as well as the space in which they are situated?is 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 betweenus 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 ourbeing, remain, while our connection to them is severed, leaving us with onlyourselves 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.

SpaceFrom about 1950 Rothko concentrated on producing rectangular forms floatingon a surface. The floating sensation was created as Rothko eliminated from hispaintings 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-dimensionalspace. One is by means of a perspectival representation where figures becomegradually smaller according to their distance from the observer. A second, anaerial 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 thegradual modification of light and shadow, which reproduces the look of a threedimensional form. Another is a juxtaposition of colors: some colors have thequality 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 nearerto 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

1952, for example, ismade up of a large, red, rectangular form on top, separatedby a dark green, almost black stripe from a somewhat smaller, green, rectangularform 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. Thered rectangle is prominent and its edges are clearly distinguished from the background. The emphasis on the edges produces a sensation of a floating form overthe background, which is also emphasized by the dark green stripe underneathit, which could be perceived as a shadow cast by the red form. This floatingsensation is amplified by the gradation of the background color, which changesfrom 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 itslower part. But a daub of dark green color on top of the lower edge of the redform makes it look as if the dark green stripe is in front of the red. As the greenform's edges are blurred and dissolve into the background, the form withdrawsfrom the viewer. However, a narrow stripe of green covering a small area of the

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dark green stripe above the green form makes it look as if the green form isnearer to the viewer than the dark green. The red form looks as if it advancestoward the viewer and the green as if itwithdraws. Simultaneously, since thegreen is also in front of the dark green stripe and the red behind it, it cannot bedecided what is in front and what is behind. The moment one thinks oneselforiented in the pictorial space, one perceives at the same time the contradictionsin 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 betweenforms in the pictorial space, to distinguish between what is distant and what isnear, 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 anyattempt at a conventional reading of space and to eliminate any coherent spatialsensation from his paintings.

ColorAs he subverted our reading of space Rothko also undermined our ability toread colors. His paintings blur the differences between the colors and theirboundaries, a difference that disappears almost completely in his dark and almostmonochrome paintings. In No. 27 (LightBand) from 19^4,Rothko depicts threemain rectangular forms over amainly blue background. Each of these forms

contains more rectangles, as if echoing the main form, which are distinguishedfrom it by gray, sometimes almost black, contours. As the color of the contouris not uniformly applied, being sometimes thicker or thinner, sometimes wider

or narrower, even disappearing, the edges of these forms are blurred, making itimpossible 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 ofthe main forms are blurred as well, making them seem as if they are dissolvinginto the background. This sensation is enhanced by the similarity of the form'scolor to that of the background, dark blue at the top, turning lighter and gradually becoming darker, somewhat purple, toward the bottom. The rectangular formnearest to the top is mainly blue daubed with gray. It turns darker at the edges,making 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 ismainly white with daubs of yellow. It is lighter in the center, turning blue anddarker toward the edges, and the one at the bottom is gray?lighter in the centerand 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 colorsis deliberately confused. The first problem the observer encounters when standing before Rothko's paintings is the impossibility of locating the precise contoursof the form, making it difficult, if not impossible, to discern where precisely itbegins and the background ends. This problem entails another: the number offorms actually depicted in the paintings is uncertain. Thus, the forms depicted onthe canvas evade the grasp of our perception and create the impression that theyare slipping away from us.

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Mark Rothko. No. 27 (Light Band), 1954. Oilon canvas. 81 x 86% in. (205.7 x 220 cm).Private collection. ? 2005 Kate RothkoPrizel and Christopher Roth ko/ArtistsRight Society (ARS) New York.Photograph: Michael Bodycomb.

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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 experienced "with beings and in beings expressly as a slipping away of the whole,"22

meaning that in anxiety the entities in the world recede from us and we cannotget 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 onhis canvas as escaping the grasp of our gaze. The forms are there, but we cannotreally perceive or be certain that we accurately perceive what exactly is there. Inother words, by blurring the readability of space and colors, Rothko reenactedand represented in his paintings what according toHeidegger 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, itsexistence cannot be scientifically proved but only assumed. Ifwe, however,assume that there "is" something that we call nothingness, and that we encounteritwhen anxious, we can also assume that nothingness iswhat Rothko's paintingsshow us. Although itmight be that it is not experienced by all, such an experience nonetheless is shared by many. In any case, the fact that Rothko wanted tointimate mortality and theway 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, atleast insofar as it concerns nothingness.

Covering NothingnessRothko not only wanted his paintings to intimate mortality, our impendingnothingness, but, as he told Werner Haftmann, he also wished his paintings to"cover up something similar to this 'nothingness.'"23 Indeed, Rothko covered hiscanvases with colors. He put layers of color one on top of another, concealingand revealing the colors underneath, making the process of covering transparent.

With no other content represented in his paintings, the covering becomes thesole content of his art.

Rothko's paintings cover nothingness in another sense as well, one thatis close to Heidegger's notion of nothingness. By eliminating most of the com

ponents 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,24 as it draws our attention to the factthat they simply are, that they are something rather than nothing, and in thissense they conceal nothingness. Paradoxically, this concealing is also a revealing,first, because for Heidegger, nothingness iswhat makes it possible for us to beaware 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

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22. Heidegger, "What IsMetaphysics?" 102.23. Werner Haftmann, quoted inAnna C. Chave,Mark Rothko: Subjects inAbstraction (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1989), 193.24. Many critics, aswell as Rothko himself, notedthe paintings gave the sensation of being andpresence. Inhis Pratt lecture, when describing thedifference between himself and Ad Reinhardt,Rothko said, "The difference between me andReinhardt is that he's a mystic. By that Imeanthat his paintings are immaterial. Mine are here.Materially. The surfaces, the work of the brushand so on. His are untouchable"; quoted inDoreAshton, About Rothko (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1983), 179.25. Heidegger, "What IsMetaphysics?" 103.


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heretofore concealed strangeness as what is radically other?with respect tothe nothing." That is, nothingness reveals beings because "they are beings and

not nothing,"25 and the more we are aware of the presence of a thing, the morewe are made aware of its radical other: nothingness. Among all the things in theworld it is the presence of an artwork that we are most aware of. Because aworkof art, no matter what kind, is, simply by reason of its presence and continuingendurance, even when we no longer are, it stands against nothingness as its radical other. And this, for Heidegger, is the difference between artworks and otherhuman products, which disappear in use, sinking into the nothingness from

which they came, while the work of art is preserved. The less that is depictedin awork of art, the less our attention is distracted from its bare presence, thestronger our realization that this work is, and the greater our realization thatthere could be nothing instead. Heidegger writes:

The more solitary thework, fixed in the figure, stands on its own and themore cleanly it seems to cut all ties to human beings, the more simply does

the thrust come into the open that such awork is. . . . the more simplydoes

it transport us into this openness and thus at the same time transport us outof the realm of the ordinary. To submit to this displacement means to transform our accustomed ties to world and earth and henceforth to restrain allusual doing and prizing, knowing and looking, in order to stay within thetruth that is happening in thework.26

The word "nothingness" is not mentioned here, but the citation nonethelessmanifests 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 andour world, it is also nothingness that gives us access to beings and makes usaware of their presence, that each thing is,27 and again, it is the encounter withnothingness that transports us out of our ordinary everyday life and makes usreevaluate our situation in the world, facing

the fact that we are going to die andthat 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 beseen as masking and unmasking. . . .What is behind the mask? Another mask, afallible human presence?or nothing?"28 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 negationand an absence but also what designates the limit of human existence, and assuch, it is also what defines and constitutes it. In other words, Rothko's paintingssimulate what we experience when encountering nothingness and thus make usface what we normally try to repress: that it is the certainty of death that makesus the way we are.29Natalie Kosoi teaches aesthetics at the Shenkar School of Design and Art History inthe Open Universityin Israel. Her PhD dissertation is titled "Nothingness inArt: Mark Rothko, Robert Ryman, Anish Kapoor,and Eva Hesse."

3 I art journal

26. Heidegger, "TheOrigin of theWork of Art,"inBasicWritings, 191.27. Derrida, inthe last part of The Truth inPainting(378), similarly argues that for Heidegger to sayabout something that it is,we first must have theexperience of nothingness: "That which is,as thebeing of the existent, isnot (the existent). A certain thinking, a certain experience of nothingness(of the nonexistent) isrequired for access to thisquestion of the being of the existent, likewise tothe difference between being and the existent."Therefore, itcould be said that any painting,because it is, by itsvery existence points to nothingness. However, this does not indicate hownothingness can be (re)presented ina painting.28. Novak and O'Doherty, "Rothko's DarkPaintings," 274.29. For one of the possible effects that facing ourmortality and accepting itmight have on us, seeWilliam Haver's most enlightening essay "ReallyBad Infinities:Queer's Honour and thePornographic Life," Parallax 5, no. 4 (1999).

Nothingness Made Visible

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