Page 313 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Chapter VI
well as heavy smoking, were a kind of collateral consequence of an immensely demand- ing and thus for him unbearable ascetic mission.
But why is it important to studiously consider Rothko’s systematic enquiry into the ineffable levels of truth regarding human existence? Yannis Tzavaras, the translator of Heidegger’s book The Origin of the Work of Art (from German to Greek) notes that on the copy of the 1960 publication of this book, next to the question “But how does truth oc- cur?”13 there is a handwritten note by Heidegger which says: “The answer does not exist, because the question remains: What is that which occurs through the ways of exist- ence?”14 This note written by Heidegger seems to imply that we can only speak of truth in relation to a human experience of existence – and not independently from it. There- fore, it is the way in which particular humans ‘pass through’ this world in search for a higher meaning, that projects the picture of what humanity really is and what it could possibly become. Accordingly, in view of its overall uniqueness and authenticity, we can say that the classic style of Mark Rothko’s painting, entails a projection of a hidden-kind of potentiality of man: a potentiality to contemplate the higher meaning of his/her exist- ence, a potentiality to converse with and about the divine. This kind of potentiality is reminiscent of the liturgical purpose of Byzantine art.
When approaching the lightness, darkness, simplicity, absoluteness, and the numi- nous in Rothko’s abstraction, the observer reconciles, or in any case contemplates, the antithetic and delicate relationships which exist between the equivalent qualities of their inner, psychological world. But if a merely subjective self-reflection was all that Rothko’s painting had to offer to its observers, then a case for a Byzantine interpretation would have much poorer grounds, and the experience of observing his work would have little difference to the concept of the Rorschach test.15 On the other hand, it should be men- tioned that the transcendental dimension of Rothko’s work has in the past been bluntly disputed by certain critics as well as admirers of his work.16 As we shall elaborate in the
13 Our translation of the question in Greek: «Αλλά πώς συμβαίνει η αλήθεια;»
14 Our translation of the following sentence in Greek: «Δεν υπάρχει απάντηση, γιατί το ερώτημα παραμένει: Τι είναι αυτό που συμβαίνει μέσα σε τρόπους (ύπαρξης);» See: Μάρτιν Χάϊντεγγερ, Η Προέλευση του έργου τέχνης, μετά- φραση και εισαγωγή του Γιάννη Τζαβάρα (Δωδώνη, 1986), 92.
15 The Rorschach or inkblot test was developed by a Swiss Freudian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Herman Ror- schach (1884 – 1922). For the purposes of this test, a small amount of ink is poured on one side of a sheet of paper, and then, the same sheet is folded in half – thereby pressing the ink in the middle and creating a symmetrical, abstract inkblot. Subsequently, subjects’ perceptions of the inkblot are analysed and psychologically interpreted. This test is employed especially in cases where patients are reluctant to describe their thinking process openly.
16 One particularly clear example of this is cited below. The citation below is an excerpt from a published interview conducted on May the 8th 1997, where Jeffrey Weiss is interviewing the abstract artist Robert Ryman.
Weiss: “The idea that there was a metaphysical side to abstraction and to Rothko’s kind of abstraction is, you think, an overinterpretation, or simply the wrong way to look at the picture?”
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