‘You take a picture then move on’, the man says curtly in a German accent. I am paraphrasing from someone else’s recollection, but it hardly matters; the point is there is no moving on with obsession when you sense its presence, conversely, those who cannot sense it do not understand why others linger in it. People abhor being alone, and it is so evident here in the exhibition. Even near paintings they move to crowd the spaces between, immediately in front of, yet the contradiction—the inherent dissatisfaction of humanity—lies in the fact that alongside that fear, they cannot remain with a thing, a person which immediately shows them their true selves. If they do not recognise themselves in the real, they sense it in the abstract, and if one cannot sit with the self in the shape they are, how could they possible sit with the self which is there to reflect their unbearable nuances?
I count the precious seconds where there appears emptiness before the paintings. I cannot go further than four. Four seconds before the unbearable sense that to be alone must be conquered; four seconds is all the restless mind and eye can bear before it captures without seeing what it beholds.
It is the obsessives I have always had time for. The fuck-you-get-on-with-it types like Mark Rothko or Rainer Werner Fassbinder, where blood and paint or cinema or whatever the poison is is the same, where everything is too much and not enough, and more often than not—because obsession is like a car with no brakes—they do not stop as much as crash, in the end. It is not a glorification of that well-abused word, genius, as much as an acknowledgement that life is sometimes about one thing with not enough time, the horrible contradiction being in the time you cannot be fully about that one thing, time drags and sometimes you along with it. What presents as preventable cliché is also, occasionally, an unpreventable reality of the obsessed. When the terrible space is there, you fill it—it fills you— with depression and anxieties, drugs and alcohol, love or whatever most resembles it, or worst of all, nothing; all that a poor substitute for your one true thing.
Obsession is every colour in the world at once. The way they made us paint colour charts in art school so we would learn about complement and theory and it was enough to drive everyone a slightly mad: crying at 2am over blends and tones and what went where—what could go where—and the sheer impossibility of calculating nuance until it felt as if it were instinctive, second nature, even supernature. But you did it, and when you were finished, you found you had crossed a line; you knew you could be that kind of obsessive, could be the kind of person who lost days and nights over the slightest change, infinite possibilities with never enough time to fulfil them.
The banner quote high on the entrance wall for the exhibition: ‘I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions …’, said Rothko.[i] Contrast it with Giorgio Agamben (on Bonnard), ‘I saw that colour—which is the form of ecstasy—is also intelligence and constructive reason’.[ii] And Jean-Luc Nancy, writing about listening, says ‘timbre opens, rather, immediately onto the metaphor of other perceptible registers: color (Klangfarbe, ‘color of sound’, the German name for timbre), touch, taste, even the evocations of smells’.[iii] But in the reverse, what is the sound of colour, the touch, taste, scent of what surrounds me? What is one is necessarily the other, because obsession demands saturation: the possibility of filling every sensory space with its presence which leaves us with nowhere to go but to it and ourselves in varied aural, oral, olfactory, gustatory, tactile dimensions. I wish I could tell you I am a synaesthete but I am not; the entirety of this exhibition, and so too this essay, is haunted by Ormonde Jayne’s Xi’an, its nutmeg and rhubarb, musk and sandalwood the equivalent of olfactory plumes of holy incense, nuance and shadow.
This is the point of it: obsession reduces the universe to these two things, which in contradictory turn reveal their vastness. Intrusion and reflection. Contraction and expansion. The former: Ian Penman says in Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors, ‘in many of Fassbinder’s 1970s films we find the garish colour schemes of the new consumer society run riot. As if everyday life were itself drugged’.[iv] Rothko bleeds into World on a Wire (1973)—made for television—an unmistakeable presence in the vivid orange, blue, and pink blocks and lines of the claustrophobic future’s background. And the latter: taking in Rothko becomes the sensory and cerebral equivalent of free diving, an extreme meditation. The immersion into the obsessional colours of No.16 (1951), with its blurred block of forest green set in green-shadowed gold, or the censorious grey-blue-black stripes of No.5 (1949). In an essay by Eleanor Nairne, she quotes the artist:
‘The whole problem in art is how to establish human values in this specific civilization.'
And,
‘My … pictures are involved with the scale of human feelings the human drama as much of it as I can express.’[v]
The new worlds of Fassbinder and Rothko are ones of revelations and redactions; to emerge knowing we found something of ourselves within. But it is also the case that sometimes, we find that we were never there; that too, is revelatory.
On the train through France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, I have been reading the Penman book; between this and the exhibition, it solidifies the idea of intrusion and reflection as symbiotic, as if the secret of life lies in these poles of obsession. The obsession with someone else and their obsession. The obsession with wanting to be saturated by the things which possessed them; not exactly mimesis, but the colour chart keeps coming back to mind: where does one fit into someone else’s colour scheme? What tone or nuance are we, and what do those particular shades represent? It is not as easy as thinking, I am a chameleon, all that is required of me is to be in juxtaposition to them and their work, our biological pigments arranging themselves accordingly so that we become the thing we are witnessing. According to a 2014 article:
‘An excited chameleon might turn red by fully expanding all his erythrophores, blocking out the other colors beneath them. A calm chameleon, on the other hand, might turn green by contracting his erythrophores and allowing some of the blue-reflected light from his iridophores to mix with his layer of somewhat contracted yellow xanthophores.’[vi]
If only we could move through life with such seamless emotional transition. Christopher Isherwood suddenly comes to mind: ‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking’.[vii] No. This is the logic of the irritated fellow exhibition-goer, though in a way I understand and empathise with the sentiment. It is the safety of the distance of observation, the removal of the self in the presence of possibility that becomes desirable over the thing itself. But if we choose otherwise, we learn to expand and contract our senses and emotions in the face of fear and impossibility; a simultaneous capturing and adaptation which shows us that obsession lies somewhere between the chameleon and the camera. Regardless of our choice, Rothko’s canvases become the tangible embodiment of Freud’s psychic topography.
I spend more time sitting down in front of the sometimes wall-to-ceiling expanses of Rothko’s canvases than I do standing. When I stand, I am more often than not leaning back, pressed against a corner so that I might take them in in multitudes, a deliberate oversaturation—overdose—of colour and emotion. Still, there is no escaping that to take them in means the horizons of his work are consistently broken by the insistent verticals of restless bodies passing to and from. The broken always emerge. I am trapped in No. 5/No. 22 (1950) for some time, lost in the fine, almost out-of-character white lines which interrupt a wider stripe of red enclosed in an almost artificial orange and shades of mustard yellow. A chart, a measurement, a path … this is obsession. To follow a broken line, thinking it will nevertheless lead you to a place you want to—need to—go.
Take a picture and move on. I am a camera. This is the slightly mocking inner voice that interrupts my reveries, my hands gripping the bench or clenching in my coat pockets before I think again of colour charts and chameleons, of what René Girard refers to as ‘mimetic desire: you desire some thing because someone else does. That person’s desire, in turn, is reinforced by your desire’.[viii] This circle of obsession is almost violent: in my head I am moving from colour fields obsessed by emotion to the numbered fragments of Penman’s obsession of a man obsessed with cinema, to Girard’s telling of the projection of Salomé’s mother’s obsessional desire for revenge onto her daughter. Bring me heads and emotions, colours and images. Bring me possibilities. My desire is both born from and borne on infinite desiring, and so the cycle continues.
Penman: ‘it’s not the idea of total surveillance that is so frightening as the sub rosa implication that we might all secretly desire such a thing’.[ix] It is hard to ignore the obvious in an exhibition, but here in this one, more so, where the artwork is so abstracted, devoid of characters and narratives outside of the beholder’s mind. I am watching people look at paintings while security is scattered through the rooms watch us. I am looking the security people and wondering what goes through their heads, if anything, beyond their specific instructions. In quite a different way, we are all obsessed here: on watching and looking and the performance of them, if we are not actively and directly engaged in them. This is a fractured panopticon, but a panopticon nevertheless, and not an untrue measure of self-perception, of others, and of the aesthetic. What irony is there in knowing that what should be the openly sensory is also openly suspect in such a place? Surveillance lives and breathes on the oxygen of others; again, we are expanding and contracting in this space in multiple ways, multiple obsessions.
I was startled on seeing Rothko’s quote on entering the building, having had used it in my own book on Michel Leiris and Édouard Manet’s Olympia as a reference to the erotics of modernity and destruction. Somehow this reminder brought his reds into sharper focus in person, partly from knowing I had been bleeding again; with it, another possibility gone—not usefully over a canvas or a page it is true, but is there a difference between a red of value and a red of without? Vast blocks and swathes of it represent destruction, rebirth, and desire all at once, whether passive or active: Petra’s cluster of scarlet flowers on a wide black ribbon round her throat and her painted lips in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), the red pompom on Querelle’s sailor cap in Querelle (1982). Fassbinder collides spectacularly with Olympia, and so with Leiris and myself, which lead us back again to Rothko, bound up as we are in his ultimate reds: here are our essences, our cycles and desires laid bare on these walls, to read and listen, project onto. Obsession is, put simply, the infinite taking of an emotional inventory.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
[i] From the Mark Rothko exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, December 2023.
[ii] Agamben, Giorgio. What I saw, heard, learned . . .. trans. Alta L. Price (London, Calcutta, New York: Seagull Books, 2023), 34.
[iii] Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 42.
[iv] Penman, Ian. Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors (London: Fitzcarraldo, 2023), 56.
[v] Eleanor Nairne, “The Friction In Between,” in Mark Rothko 1968: Clearing Away (London: Pace Gallery, 2021), 35.
[vi] Bates, Mary, “How Do Chameleons Change Colors?”, WIRED, April 11, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/04/how-do-chameleons-change-colors/.
[vii] Isherwood, Christopher. Goodbye to Berlin (New York: New Directions, 2012), 3.
[viii] Girard, René. All Desire is a Desire for Being (UK: Penguin Classics, 2023), 121.
[ix] Penman, Ian. Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors (London: Fitzcarraldo, 2023), 66.
Image: Tomoé Hill, from the Rothko exhibition, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris.