How Context Matters for Viewing Art
We're talking about Rothko and NYC and DC and - for some reason - Houston very briefly.
Context is important and setting is important, and I know you know this but I gotta start these things somehow, so let’s kick off with first principles. There have been countless – not really, it’s probably four – examples of ‘famous musician plays in subway and no one notices’. It’s a neat little gimmick because it makes us think about context.
In 2007, Joshua Bell played in a DC metro station and someone from the Post recorded it. Bell, dressed in a t-shirt and baseball cap, played some surely impressive music and everyone just wandered past. He made about $52 in tips and apparently $20 came from one lady who recognized him from the night before when he played a show in DC.
Every year, I'm the Man Who Discovered Spring. “It was hot last week and now it’s cold!” “I can’t wait for the weather to settle down, you know?” “I just don’t know how to plan with things so up and down.” What a numpty.
It’s tempting to say people don’t understand beautiful music – which isn’t quite where the author landed, but it comes up along the way as a potential explanation for the fifty-two bucks – but it’s also important to think about the context of the thing. In the article, the author talks to a Kant scholar – because why not, I guess – and the guy points out that Kant’s take on aesthetic beauty needs to allow for people to see things in the right conditions. A world class violinist sitting in the place where a dude probably puked the night before might not be those conditions.
Visual art is the same. If you’re in a museum and the lights are weirdly bright and the art is behind glass in a way that makes it impossible to see the whole thing, it’s difficult to appreciate even really lovely pieces. The Mona Lisa is constantly surrounded by people holding up phones, so you never get to see it in a calm and contemplative environment.
Different art also has different ideal settings. Seeing David from an elevated position is neat and you get a chance to understand some of the details in the work that you might otherwise miss. Seeing David looming 20 feet over you is a different thing entirely. It’s inspiring and quieting and it maximizes the impact of the sculpture, which was made to be viewed from below.
Let’s look at someone closer to home – Mark Rothko. Again, I know you know he was the focus because you read the title, but transitions are also a thing we’ve gotta get through together. I’ve seen Rothko in a few different settings. I want to walk through them from worst to best and talk about how the context of the viewing played into my experience.
Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper at the NGA
Paintings on Paper was actually an amazing retrospective on Rothko hosted by the National Gallery last year. It covered Rothko’s entire career, from the pretty boring early works to the well-defined later works. As a biography, it was amazing.
As a way to actually view Rothko, I found it lacking. The exhibit had you wandering through multiple rooms and two floors to see everything – again, amazing – but there was no place to sit and appreciate the works. They were also lit in the same way you’d light a middle school cafeteria. It did what it set out to do, but it wasn’t going to make anyone who didn’t already like Rothko really get into the work, as far as I can tell.
The shortfall was in the overwhelming presentation of the works with no space to sit with the pieces. Rothko was apparently a real jackass about how his work was displayed, because he thought there was an ideal context or environment. I dunno about his recommendation of standing 18 inches from the works, but he had a vision and I don’t think it involved bright lights and tons of unrelated works hung in the same room.
Now the NGA didn’t do anything wrong here. The goal of the exhibition was to explain Rothko’s move from ‘guy who paints Oregonian landscapes that are kind mid’ to Rothko the giant. It’s a story that, based on the attendance levels, resonates with viewers. Rothko’s journey was really interesting and worth diving into.
In the end, it’s a bit like listening to Joshua Bell’s third grade recital, high school band performance and most recent sold out show all in one sitting. You would end up with a robust understanding of his trajectory, but you might not walk away thinking, “That was how you’re supposed to listen to Joshua Bell.”
Room 403 at the MoMA
I was gonna call this the Rothko Room at the MoMA, but they don’t call it that and the Phillips Collection – coming later, spoiler alert – does use the term. 403 is the room on the fourth floor where the MoMA displays seven of Rothko’s works.
Unlike in the NGA exhibit, six of these are mature Rothko works created over the span of a decade and one was made at the end of his life. That temporal grouping is already a great start. The room has nothing else in it besides the Rothkos and there’s a little bench in the middle where you can sit and stare – bonus points.
It’s still overly bright and large, but much less formidable than the multistoried event at the Nation Gallery. You can sit and be quiet and take in the paintings all by your lonesome. I was there in November last year and had the room basically to myself for plenty of time.
Rothko talked about his works as evoking emotions and reactions instead of being seen as representations of any worldly thing. You’re not supposed to look at the yellow one – probably called Untitled 54 (Yellow on Ochre) or something equally infuriating – and think it looks like a beach. At most, you would see the piece and think of a beach because it makes you feel warm and relaxed and like you want to murder a seagull.
There has to be a series of academic papers on this kind of stuff, but I don’t know where they live. I’ve spent enough time with academic journals to know that every single topic has been covered – “Revenge for Alethic Nihilism”, anyone? – but I haven’t found the art equivalent.
To get those reactions clear in your head can take some time. You might feel something as soon as the painting comes into view, but what that something is may take time to uncover. You might go through a few different options as you discover that you’re not feeling or perceiving an emotion but in fact many different emotions.
The MoMA is a good setup for reflection and the paintings are well situated to make it a holistic – I dunno if that makes sense here – experience. It also benefits from being a permanent display, which means it’s smaller and more focused and can solve for ‘a good Rothko experience’ instead of for some broad educational goal, as the NGA exhibition had to do.
Solid four alligator rating for this one.
Tower One in the NGA East Building
National Gallery, back in the mix for another go. This time, it’s the Rothko installation on the top floor of Tower One in the East Building. This is the permanent – but rotating, says the website – collection of Rothkos in the National Gallery’s collection. Pieces cover a few periods of his creative life and three decades of his lived life, but all of them are from his mature years.
It has some of the same downsides as the MoMA pieces, which is just to say that it shows things in a big room with lots of light because both of those institutions are trying to move a lot of people through every year – 3.8 million a year at the NGA and 2.8 at MoMA.
The broader range of timelines means there’s a little less cohesion in the overall feeling of the paintings, but they’re well-situated in the room. I think it helps that you first walk through Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross before you see the Rothkos. Stations isn’t a work that I had any familiarity with before the NGA and I don’t know of any other Newman works off the top of my dome, but it’s a perfect series to get you in the mindset for Rothko.
The MoMA and the NGA galleries are about on par. I like the National Gallery option because a) it’s local and b) it’s usually empty, which is a big Rothko boon. It helps being way up the guts of one of the towers, making it not on the way to anything and kind of a pain in the ass to get to. For lots of stuff that would be detrimental, but for Rothko – and Newman, I think – it’s a good thing. Room 403 is stuffed in the middle of the David Geffen galleries and is almost a hallway.
You know, now that I’m thinking more about it, the National Gallery has the edge here. Not by a mile, but not by nothing.
The Rothko Room at The Phillips Collection
I’m a biased jerk and you’re going to have to live with that. I like The Phillips a lot and, of the things in the museum, the Rothko Room is probably my favorite. Supporting my personal prejudice is Rothko’s own hand. The Rothko Room was viewed by Rothko in 1961 and he had Duncan Phillips lower the lighting and change the seating to a single bench.
It’s a tiny little room with just four paintings in it, all from a five year period in the mid-1950s. The museum only lets eight people in at a time and you end up just a few feet out form the paintings, in almost darkness, quiet and engrossed. Some people really hate it, I think.
All of that is only possible because Phillips had the foresight to make it happen and because The Phillips gets a fraction of the yearly visitors of the MoMA and National Gallery – just about 110 thousand. Lower foot traffic and a history with the paintings as central pieces of the collection makes for a very focused experience.
Even with the occupancy cap, you can sit in there, all alone for a nice chunk of time, depending on when you’re at the museum. I think I’ve had to wait once or twice, but I was the entirety of the line.
The ability to sit with the pieces is really what makes it. You can have each painting – there’s a single painting on each wall in the room – take up your entire field of vision and let your eyes wander idly or with purpose across the canvas. It’s very much like looking up at a massive sculpture, in that you’re seeing it the way the artist intended and you get the feeling of awe that can come with that.
Yeah, I haven’t been there
The Rothko Chapel in Houston is apparently pretty amazing. As it turns out, I never go to Houston. I don’t think I’ve ever been to Houston. If you go, let me know if you like the Chapel and how it compares to The Phillips.
There are plenty of other artists who have work that thrives or suffers based on its display. I’ve really enjoyed, for instance, seeing how Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais changes in different settings. I’m pretty excited to see the statue put back into the Hirshhorn’s garden when its never-ending renovation is finally complete.
If there are any artists whose work you’ve seen in better or worse conditions, lemme know. I’m fascinated to figure out why all these things work the way they do.
I need to get back upstairs in the East Building