The Materiality of Paint

"Inside the Museums
Infinity goes up on Trial"

- Bob Dylan

In the heart of the otherwise apallingly laid out, thematic, impersonal pick-n-mix that is Tate Modern, there is a cavernous room with no windows, dim underlighting and a single long bench. In this gunmetal-grey crypt Mark Rothko's Seagram Murals hang from the walls, like the stations of the cross. The lights are way down, and as you pass from mural to mural, the highlights of each colour field seem to follow you around the room, like the eyes of the Gioconda. And in the room the women come and go, talking, but not of Michelangelo. As they enter, they tend to fall silent. Most leave. Frequently you can sit alone on the long, gently convex central bench, undisturbed.

It is a far cry from their intended destination, the fashionable restaurant on the ground floor of the Seagram Building in Manhattan. This was a huge commission for Rothko, and he set about fulfilling it. And it was only once Rothko had seen his paintings, so to speak face-to-face, only once he had completed his journey towards the incarnation of them, that he realised he could never hang them in a fancy restaurant "Where the richest bastards in New York will come to feed and show off."

It was seeing the murals in the flesh, so to speak, that changed Rothko's mind. Coming to know them, as one would another person. Of having a relationship with them. And it is the physical presence of the canvases, the materiality of the paint, the relation in which they stand to your own body, that makes the murals. The comparison with flesh is apposite, for these are not, nor are ever with Rothko, mere blocks of colour. Each has a texture, a play of light and a weight of the paint itself, to match any forehead by Rembrandt or cloth-of-gold by Fra Angelico. No reproduction of the murals, no conception of them, is comparable to being in the room and seeing them float above you, like windows into the back of your own head.

You can compare this one to the womb, this one to a forest, that one to a pair of ghostly skyscapers, but ultimately what they depict is what they are. Luminous, many-layered oil-based paint on a large expanse of blank canvas. In a sense like Pollocks, they tell the story of their own making. You can glimpse the underlayers of paint, the trickles and splashes from where they were hoisted up and turned around in the converted boxing gym where Rothko had his studio. And what better setting for an artist to go ten rounds against Infinity? Each canvas is a bout against an invisible opponent, what T.S. Eliot called "another raid on the inarticulate". These canvases do have subjects. Just no objects. They are not depictions, they are things in themselves.

Sure, the dark columns float above an eerie, light-and-dark redd, apparently mottled but, on closer examination, full of shapes, shadows, half-figures in the half-light. The giant pause-sign of the two pale skyscrapers, edges blurred as if by wind and rain, here an empty square bulges and sags like a sweeping theatre curtain or a doric arcade, tapered at the top to suggest compression, great weight.

It is all a bit heavy. But the colours pull you in unanswerably. Reds burn around the edges of blacks, blacks glow in their dark hearts with barely-suppressed crimson, crying out like the fire hidden inside the coal, waiting to burst forth. Verticals loom out of the swirl of brushstrokes like the trunks of trees, seen by a blind man, lost in the forests of the night.

If you meditate for long enough on any object (which I have found a useful way of freeing the mind from its ttachment to flitting thoughts, a precursor to beginning to empty it - pick an arbitrary object, place it in front of you, and focus on one angle, one facet or reflection of it) you find the world around it beginning to become strange, and luminous. Blacks become white, whites turn black, as the patterns of your sight becomes a kind of screen burn on your retina. The room around you grows darker, and the object before you begins to glow with its own inner light. I associate this with the inching open of Blake's doors of perception, or with a breaking down of the unconscious filters which protect the conscious mind from being overwhelmed by the detail, the beauty and the strangeness of every moment of life. If we were to see all of it, whole, at once, we would be paralysed, like Funes the Memorious.

But inside each of Rothko's bleak rectangles, just at the edges of perception, hidden or revealed in the veil-like layers of paint, they crowd - every conceivable (and inconceivable) figure, scene, expression, structure and symbol. All latent, half- or un-formed, like the form of Michelangelo's Torso of a Slave waited, poised, enclosed in its square block of marble, for the artist to excavate it. But all that is latent in a Rothko, all the minute particulars, will never be excavated - and this is their beauty. They remain forever potential, poised, waiting. But sometimes, when you don't look directly at them, you can suddenly catch a glimpse. Then you look harder, and you are back with the physicality of the paint, the rich oil-based pigments, the spatters and strokes of a long-dead brush.

And you decide that your mind - or Rothko - is playing tricks on you.