"his art was located at a very dangerous place --beyond representational art but before nothingness, by which I mean the place where there are no images at all. And if I may speculate, Rothko’s art --which was a visual medium --had nowhere to go but into the realm of absolute nothingness. In his life’s journey, he could not return to representational forms, particularly mythological and religious ones, because, as his earlier artwork suggests, he believed that they had lost their potency. As a result, he already had dedicated his life to looking for a new mythology for the rest of us to experience. The only alternative left was for him to go forward, so to speak, into a type of visual nothingness and therein lies the beginning of a tragedy.
To survive going into the experience of absolute nothingness --which is a total annihilation of the ego -you must leave behind the material world, including visual art. It is at this point that visual art stops and it is at this point we see the tragic limits of what Rothko called the “religious experience” of his art. From what I can glean, the only way to go into the experience of absolute nothingness and return is not a function of art because you go beyond all sense perceptions . Instead, such a journey can only be found in the religious world of apophatic contemplation --the contemplative world where the goal is to go beyond all sights, sounds, and images. As a few examples of many, it is the world of Buddhist monks, the Trappist way of Thomas Merton and, in my opinion, the contemplative aspects of Satmar. It is a total rejection of the material world substituted by a complete reliance upon the spiritual. For some, this is an immersion into the spiritual void, a land of complete silence." Sidney O. Smith III
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I think that Sidney O. Smith III has made a comment on Rothko and art in general that is so important that it deserves a space of its own. pl
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