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An Affective Comparison of John Taggart and Mark Rothko Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy “You Do Feel Something, Right?” An Affective Comparison of John Taggart and Mark Rothko 2015 – 2016 Supervisor: Dr. Sarah Posman Paper submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of “Master in Taal- en Letterkunde: Engels” by Michel Vandenbossche 2 3 4 5 Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy “You Do Feel Something, Right?” An Affective Comparison of John Taggart and Mark Rothko 2015 – 2016 Supervisor: Dr. Sarah Posman Paper submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of “Master in Taal- en Letterkunde: Engels” by Michel Vandenbossche 6 7 Word of Thanks I would very much like to thank my parents, for their never-ending and unobtrusive support. Their love and faith keep pushing me towards ever greater things. Also, my best friends, who have sat through months of me bothering them with my troubles and writer’s blocks. They are the ones who have kept me going. And last but not least, my supervisor, Sarah Posman, for always being approachable, for replying quickly to all of my questions, and for being the rock on which this dissertation has been built. 8 Table of Contents 1 Introduction 10 2 Contextual Chapters 15 2.1 Affect Theory: A Terminology for the Arts 15 a) The Field of Affect Theory 15 b) Affect, Feeling and Emotion, Mood: Altieri 18 c) Affect and Modernist Abstraction: Sontag and Greenberg 21 d) Weak Affects: Sianne Ngai 23 2.2 Giving the Abstract a Look: Rothko and the Abstract Expressionists 25 a) Abstraction in the Visual Arts 25 b) The Abstract Expressionists: Historical Context 26 c) Mark Rothko, The Seagram Murals, and the Rothko Chapel 29 2.3 John Taggart: Abstract Poetry and Affect 32 a) John Taggart: Short Biography 32 b) Poetic Abstraction 33 3 Affective Comparison of Taggart and Rothko 39 3.1 The Interesting: Repetition and Deviation 40 a) The Interesting as Affect 40 b) Repetition and Deviation in Taggart and Rothko: Singular Entity 43 c) Repetition and Deviation in Taggart and Rothko: Unity 49 3.2 The Monotony of Interest: Repetition and Circular Temporality in “Slow Song for Mark Rothko” and the Seagram Murals 55 a) The Monotonous as Mood 56 b) Monotony in “Slow Song” and the Seagram Murals 59 9 3.3 Presentness: The Intensification of Interest in “The Rothko Chapel Poem” and the Rothko Chapel Paintings 64 a) Presentness as Mood 64 b) Presentness in “Chapel Poem” and the Chapel Paintings 66 c) Presentness and Monotony: Complimentary Moods 70 4 Conclusion 72 5 Bibliography 76 6 Appendix 80 Word Count: 23,344 10 1. Introduction Jane: So it’s smudgy squares, huh? That’s interesting. […] Ken: I don’t think it’s supposed to be explained. Maybe you’re just supposed to experience it. Because when you look at it, you do feel something, right? It’s like looking into something very deep. Mad Men, “The Gold Violin” In the episode “The Gold Violin” from the second season of the AMC drama series Mad Men, a group of workers at a New York advertisement agency sneaks into their boss’s office to go and look at a painting that has all of their colleagues buzzing. When they enter, one of them realizes it is a Rothko. What follows is a short scene of them musing about the meaning of this abstract expressionist canvas. Just as this was the first time experiencing a Rothko painting for these office workers, so it was for me when I first watched the episode back in 2010. Ever since, I have been discovering more and more about this mid-twentieth century American painter. So, this past summer, when I borrowed a book from my local library on Rothko, I was thrilled to find out that there had been a couple of poems written inspired by his paintings by an American poet called John Taggart. I decided to look further into the relation between the works of these two American artists. The question arose into what these poems could do to change, or at least nuance, our reading and understanding of Rothko’s “smudgy squares”, and to try and pinpoint what exactly it is we “have to feel” when we are encountered by either painting or poem. Over the past half century since Rothko finished his last paintings and committed suicide, his works have been met with popularity and academic interest. Rothko’s paintings are constantly on display in the most prestigious modern art museums, such as the MoMA in New York or Tate Modern in London. Over the past five years he has had solo retrospectives in galleries such as the Gemeentemuseum in Den Haag and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, near where his much lauded Chapel is located. Nevertheless, not everyone shares the excitement about Rothko’s paintings. In 2012, a painting by his at the Tate Modern museum was vandalised with black graffiti, taking a specialized team over a year to fully restore. The abstract expressionist movement, of which Mark Rothko was an important member, has as a whole known a revival over the last couple of years, with a 11 large retrospective at the MoMA (AB EX NY) in 2010 and with a future exhibition at the Royal Academy in London in the fall of this year. A Rothko has also become a highly valuable investment in the art world. Over the past years, Rothko’s paintings at auction have gone for sums as high as 82 million dollars (“No. 10”, at Christie’s in May 2015) or 78 million dollars (“Orange, Red, Yellow”, at Christie’s in May 2012). It is clear that Rothko has not lost its popularity among a broad audience. Nonetheless, his paintings continue to be somewhat of an enigma to people, who oftentimes describe the confrontation with Rothko’s canvasses as a religious experience. What I intend to do throughout this dissertation is see what we can learn about Rothko’s work, in particular the way it has affective powers, when we approach it through the eyes of a poet. For this venture I will look at two of Rothko’s most popular achievements, and the only of his paintings which are still hung the way Rothko’s controlling nature exacted it. These are two series of paintings; the first Rothko executed in the late fifties for the Four Seasons Restaurant in Manhattan, but eventually declined hanging them there. Instead these “Seagram Murals” were donated to the Tate Modern Museum in London, where they are still hung together in one dedicated Rothko Room. The second is one of his final works before his suicide, and was commanded by the Texan De Menil family: the now infamous Rothko Chapel in Houston. Contrary to Rothko and his fellow abstract expressionists, the poet John Taggart (°1942) is fairly unknown in the literary world. Nonetheless, his work (both academic and poetic) have been rewarded a number of times, by institutions such as the Chicago Review and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has been actively writing poetry since the early 1970s, and in 2010 a selection of his poems, called Is Music, was published. His poetry has mainly been influenced by objectivist poets such as Charles Olson and George Oppen, as well as by his love for jazz and modern classical music. Among his prolific work, are two poems inspired by Mark Rothko. One called “Slow Song for Mark Rothko”, another called “The Rothko Chapel Poem”, which is directly inspired by the painter’s final masterpiece. The main body of this dissertation will compare these two poems by John Taggart with two of Rothko’s series of paintings. This comparison will serve a two-fold purpose. Firstly, to deepen our understanding of Rothko’s painting, and even more so of Taggart’s poetry, which has been relatively little discussed in academic publications. Secondly, it will show how affect theory can serve as the basis for an abstract ekphrasis. 12 This comparison between poetry and painting is an old one, dating from Horace’s Ars Poetica, in which he claims that poetry is to be like painting (ut pictura poesis). For centuries the poetic practice of ekphrasis, writing poems about particular paintings, has endured. It has met with complications, however, since the rise of abstract art, which brought with it the elimination of figuration and mimesis in painting, an aspect which had up to that point been vital to the ekphrastic tradition. This dissertation argues, however, that this does not have to mean the end of ekphrasis, but that the change in painting simply demanded a similar change in ekphrastic poetry. Since poetry can no longer rely on the depictions of reality, or of realistic figuration, it has lost the possibility write about mimetic reality; not if it wants to be a true representation of the painting in question. This new kind of ekphrasis has another field to tackle than realistic representation. I argue it can be reinvented through poetic representation of aesthetic experience, of how the poet is affected by the painting he intends to translate into poetry. Therefore, the way through which to approach ekphrasis of abstract painting is through the field of affect studies, which looks at how people are being affected by objects in their surroundings, among which works of art. Affect theory investigates and maps the feelings and emotions we undergo when confronted with objects such as a painting or a poem. This field of research first saw the light of day in the psychological research of Silvan Tomkins, who wrote extensively on the subject from the sixties onwards.
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