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Surface Tension - Restoring Rothko - The Open College of the Arts

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Surface Tension – Restoring Rothko

Tate Modern has recently completed the work needed to restore Mark Rothko’s 1958 painting Maroon and Black after it was vandalised in October 2012. This fascinating video from the Tate website documents the task’s process and complexity and the care with which it was undertaken.
While I wouldn’t argue for any other course of action, it does offer the chance for us to think about the nature of expression and its relation to what might be characterised as the ‘artist’s hand’.
Few art movements are more closely allied with an idea of pure expression than Abstract Expressionism, of which Rothko was a leading light. Broadly speaking, the painters grouped by this term employed a radically non-linguistic approach, encouraging the idea that the work had come from a kind of secular communion with the ineffable. Fittingly each artist had a particular style, reinforcing the idea of individuality (and diametrically opposed to the unsigned ‘high’ Cubism of Braque and Picasso whose work is difficult to tell apart). Abstract Expressionism, Modernism’s last gasp, is still the paradigm for artists wanting to express themselves or make a case for art being a way of grabbing at something akin to the soul.
What might it mean, then, when a part of one of those paintings is painstakingly re-made after vandalism? The vandalism, in this case, is still there. Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota asks if the ink that soaked right through the canvas has been removed or is it ‘still there’. He’s told that it is, and that it’s just been removed from the surface. It might be a stretch to extend the idea of taking the painting at ‘face value’, but it’s clear that what viewers will see is something that looks like a Rothko, rather than being purely a Rothko.
The restoration is, of course, worth carrying out in order that the series can be shown in its entirety, especially given the significance of the artist and the value of the works in question. But what was once entirely the product of an intuitive and gestural practice is now partially replaced with something colder and more analytical, though it looks the same. Is that corner of that painting just a little less expressive than the other work in the same room? Does this raise questions for us as viewers and as artists. Where is the art in art? A Sol LeWitt wall drawing addresses this explicitly by being a set of instructions for technicians to execute, not requiring the artist’s presence at all. Despite his death in 2007 LeWitt drawings are still being made.
The irony is that only a work so tied to its maker can really (and inadvertently) raise these questions or misgivings so sharply. A work that sets out to undermine the authority / authenticity of the work enters into a well-rehearsed debate. It is in the tension between object and intention that we can test our thoughts. The obverse of this is that Sol LeWitt drawings can be beautiful and moving to experience.


Posted by author: Bryan

7 thoughts on “Surface Tension – Restoring Rothko

  • This is fascinating work. It’s such a shame that someone vandalised the work in the first place though.

  • I’m very grateful that Bryan and the OCA have included this note and especially the video on the vandalised Seagram painting. I took a close interest in the Rothko Late Series exhibition at the Tate in 2008-09 and a tangentially related exhibition of the Seagrams at Tate Liverpool just a little later. Bryan’s comments on how our knowledge of the incident may reflect our response to the visual and emotive intensity of these works are perceptive. Despite the fine work the Tate restoration team has done, it is another problem altogether to eradicate our collective memory of what has been done to this one work and so also to all the Seagram murals as a collective work. Our ideas of artistic intentionality are intricately involved in all this. How much is changed, for the viewer, first by the vandal’s intention and then by that of the restorers. I think it is going to take time for us to work this out and, interestingly, the main way it is going to be worked out is by a continuation of acts of close looking at the work. In what kind of new light will we see and respond to the Seagrams in the long run? I look forward to my next visit to Tate Modern, which may not be for some time yet. Thanks again for this particularly interesting post. Paul.

  • You’re welcome. You’re right in saying that it will take time for this to work itself out. My own interest is in using the incident as a yardstick to test our thinking. I remember first seeing these paintings at 16 and not getting them. Soon after I saw them again and was blown away. I’m not sure what I think now. I do know that there are always too many people in the room.
    Theres a fascinating article by Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe about the painstaking recreation of Veronese’s Wedding at Canaa for the San Giorgio church in Venice. The ‘original’ was removed by Napoleon’s troops and is now in the Louvre, facing the Mona Lisa.
    The argument is that the idea of ‘aura’ (after Walter Benjamin) is now somehow shared between the original and the facsimile.
    There’s a PDF of it on Latour’s website here: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/108-ADAM-FACSIMILES-GB.pdf

  • Thanks for the reply, Bryan. I can see the point of using the incident and its outcome as a ‘yardstick to test our own thinking’. This one has the potential to dig deep into our assumptions, asking what we expect from the Seagrams and from Rothko in general, and why. I’m travelling at present, so I shall look at the pdf link you provide once back at home – but the possibility of an original and its facsimile participating in a shared aura is interesting. Rothko’s works, not just the Seagrams and their present aura-anticipating display at Tate, are interesting and also clearly demanding something of us. Part of the interest is that many people, not only yourself or myself, are not quite sure what to make of them. It’s as though Rothko made a great effort to put his work ‘beyond words’, yet, in the practice of looking, they demand many words, much musing…
    Paul

  • I was recently in Florence. Of course, I went to Piazza della Signoria on my first evening and saw the David. I knew it wasn’t the real one, hadn’t had Michaelangelo’s hands all over it. I could still appreciate it, but wondered how I would feel seeing the real one in the Academia. Would it be so much better? Would I see it differently? Would Michaelangelo’s aura somehow change me? I don’t know as I wasn’t prepared to stand in the huge queue at the Academia and muscle in with all the other tourists. I had to make do with breathing in some of his aura at his tomb.

  • That’s an interesting comparison. Of course Michelangelo’s tomb is by Vasari and Lorenzi, whereas Lorenzo de Medici’s (in Santa Croce) is by Michelangelo. So where’s the aura? At the last resting place or at the work?

  • We don’t have this problem with Sir Christopher Wren who had the good grace to be interred in his own creation.

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