Fans of Mark Rothko’s color field paintings frequently comment on the spaciousness, immersiveness, and liminality of those works: the way you can stand in front of them and feel as if you are being bathed in some transcendent force that is irreducible to anything else. Great art is (supposed to be) like that: it simply is what it is, and it takes you somewhere else, different from where you start.
This is what I meant by the Zone in my book Ecologies of the Moving Image, except that with Rothko and his kin (Hilma af Klint comes to mind), the Zone itself is stable — it is simply there in its presence and its vibrant materiality — even while its effect is destabilizing. In the open alterity of its static image, a Rothko painting (or one of the more geometically pure af Klint works) beckons the viewer into itself, where it stands without deviation. Any motion in the image is something that happens in the relation between image and viewer; it occurs at the level of vibration, not of narration. You stand there, and you begin to vibrate with it. It opens you.
In perilous times — times, for instance, of a destabilizing pandemic (with intimations of worse things to come; more on those things below) — artistic works and/or spaces that provide that kind of “transcendent stability” can be reassuring and comforting. The best such works do not simply reassure us in the status quo; they take us out to a place different, from which we can get a different glimpse at the present. The pandemic is like that: if we think we will simply go back to “normal,” we’ve missed what it brought us.
Music is arguably more direct in its effects than painting. Morton Feldman may be the composer most often compared to Rothko, largely because of the friendship between the two and Feldman’s dedication of several works to Rothko’s chapel, but fans of ambient music know that it’s really their genre that holds the key to musically unlocking the “Rothko effect.” In naming and initiating the genre, they might say, Brian Eno intended just that… Except that he didn’t. Eno wanted ambient music to be unobtrusive, “as ignorable as it is interesting” — not something to plunge head-first and lose one’s head inside, but something to add a thoughful, clarifying tint to one’s everyday perception. (Chillout music provided that for the dance scene.)
Rothko’s more likely musical analogues, by this measure, would be the more powerfully immersive, even “monumentalist” post-minimalist works like John Luther Adams’s climate-change themed Become Ocean. Except that that’s too programmatic — too much about the ocean and its potential or imminent rise. Which raises the question: how do you keep a work of abstract art from becoming about something, especially if you name it to do that?
Given the spiritual contours of much Rothko exegesis, comparisons with the “holy minimalism” of Arvo Pärt and John Tavener may seem apt as well, but the practitioners of musical holiness hardly avoid the above-mentioned problem of predetermining audience response by programming it in for them.
With their more cryptic naming practices, some second-generation electronic postminimalists may manage to avoid that problem: I’m thinking here of artists like Stars of the Lid, Windy and Carl, William Basinski, Eluvium, Loscil, and others like them. Add a beat to that and we start to get to industrial ambient, illbient, and other forms of abstract post-rock and post-industrial music. (But then we’ve gone all programmatic again, the program being a celebration of late capitalist urban-industrial darkness. Add some anarchist revolutionism, and you get Godspeed You! Black Emperor, which is about as teleological as music gets.)
Where I’m going with this is to suggest that to really grasp a situation — to become fully open to something that’s taken up residence on our collective horizon, whether it be the Covid-19 pandemic or the challenge of climate change — we have to open up to it without preconceptions, kind of like the ideal Rothko viewer, submitting to the force of the image without conditions, expectations, or desired outcomes.
Let’s pursue this line of thought.
We may think the pandemic is gradually wrapping itself up, more or less tamed by vaccination with just a minimum of casualties. But, as the U. S. National Intelligence Council’s newly released Global Trends 2040 report underlines (and as I’ve been assuming for a while now), the pandemic is only a preview of where we’re heading. The report begins by arguing that the pandemic
has reminded the world of its fragility and demonstrated the inherent risks of high levels of interdependence. In coming years and decades, the world will face more intense and cascading global challenges ranging from disease to climate change to the disruptions from new technologies and financial crises. These challenges will repeatedly test the resilience and adaptability of communities, states, and the international system, often exceeding the capacity of existing systems and models. This looming disequilibrium between existing and future challenges and the ability of institutions and systems to respond is likely to grow and produce greater contestation at every level.
The five themes emphasized throughout the report are “global challenges — including climate change, disease, financial crises, and technology disruptions”; “fragmentation within communities, states, and the international system”; “disequilibrium”; “contestation”; and “adaptation.” If you notice, only the last offers any hope for humanity somehow squeezing through (and it’s an “if”).
There: by sharing that, I’ve just programmed a response to the looming figure on the horizon, the figure that Tim Morton might call the hyperobject of a climate-changed future (which I prefer to call a hyper-event, or Event). It’s a treacherous figure, one we could try to probe with our fingers, to get a feel for its scale and immensity. (And to convince ourselves it is real.)
But it’s not one that gives itself to taming. We are best to treat it as a kind of Edward Goreyesque doubtful guest, but one that is here to stay, and that we will have to learn to live with and take responsibility for. It may be an unexpected guest, but it is our guest.
There’s no question that we can learn much more about this horizonal figure (or set of interacting figures) — about the causal factors contributing to it (colonialism, industrialism, capitalism, and so on), and about the unjust distributions of risks embedded within it. But our response to them, to It, remains open and ought to be cultivated in that openness, the open spaciousness of not knowing what has come upon us, only that It is here. It is now. It is Real.
It is, as Peter Gabriel sang (referring to the lead character of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway), Rael. (Any name qualifies. Yours especially.)
We name it as ourselves, and we take it on. We dive head-first into it, realizing that it is the new reality, which brings new responsibilities to us. (Even as the world disintegrates around us.)
(Play both of the Basinski pieces together for the full effect.)
Image credits: Yellow Over Purple, by Mark Rothko; Doubting Thomas, by Mark Tansey
