Shapes of Desire

"Shapes of Desire"

by Brian O’Doherty

Essay to accompany the catalogue for the exhibition

Dorothea Rockburne, A Personal Selection of Paintings 1968-1986

February 15 - March 28, 1986

Xavier Fourcade, Inc.

New York, NY

In Dorothea Rockburne’s remarkable compound work, Group/And (1970), six vertical falls of paper and chipboard tumbled slowly down from each top board unambiguously nailed to the wall. The natural declension of the eye identified with the process of falling. The paper falls, reverses, momentarily climbs and, in one segment, rolls onto the floor. The board is suspended, trapped, offered. Its weight is exactly estimated and felt. Surface, material and density become nouns. Falling becomes a verb. The work’s parts articulate similar sentences saying—through relocation of subject and object—the same thing, but differently. A linguistic virtuosity is restrained by a passion for precision. Though language seems to have generated structure, the words have been filled in with blanks. What remains is the syntax of process now staring at its own point of arrival.

This and other works were very new then. Of course they were read according to the zeitgeist—as conceptual, serial, minimal. When the work recedes into the past we have three contents to deal with—the intrinsic content of the work and the content donated to it by context then and now, a matter much confused by the interfusion of all three. As the context changes, the work travels into other frames of reference. Work trapped by its content looks period—indeed that is the definition of period. Strong work, looked at now, contributes to a redefinition of its period.

What was masked in the early Rockburnes was the emotional impetus of the work. The nature of that emotion lies in an implacable fusion of will and desire, which builds intensity by setting limits and then rehearsing the actions taken within them. Rockburne’s rotations, extensions, relocations, interruptions—had a very deliberate character exactly mirrored in the completed work. The emotion is in the certainty, not the search. To that degree it is choreographed. Speaking of a dancer, Jerome Robbins said that when she danced, you could see every step—each step was clarified. In the early Rockburnes you could see every step.

Process is of course the finished work’s memory, and the way in which these early work’s "remembered" themselves was in dialogue with their point of arrival, their present state. This is a painterly characteristic, to some degree an expressionist one. So that Rockburne’s work has implicit in it a kind of expressionist paradigm, though the paradigm lessens as process is turned into procedure. It is always surprising how constants renew themselves in disguise. Back then, Rockburne’s work in its daring, its intensity, its balance of sensibility and will, its sense of all or nothing seemed to have studied closely the generation of the fifties.

In Scalar, rectangles of paper and chipboard rotate from vertical to horizontal; papers, soaking up oil so that each develops its own geography, resolve a process that is elegantly spare in idea and rich in frugal substance. Set against the wall and resting on the floor, the work mobilizes these two coordinates into its internal dialogue. The wall is bared in two unequal internal pillars, the edges thrust into the wall space like buildings. Within the papers the arbitrary stains talk back to and across their confining edges. Scalar embodies so many issues of the day (gravity, materials, process, set theory, walls and floor) and survives—indeed buries—them. In their lulls and progressions many of these early works look as classic as Poussin. In Group/ And the white paper glows in the light; the dark chipboard painted with graphite and oil, then polished, absorbs the light. The blooming and contraction of light inscribes yet another theme on the slow downward roll of these formal certainties. There is a hard will at work that seeks resistance and with ruthless politeness forces it into what is desired. Back then, materials had a nature, a natural resistance to anything outside their own intrinsic substance. Process put them through the desired shapes, indeed the shapes of desire.

The defining characteristic of this early work was the insistence with which its mode of arrival, the "How it got this way." The clear-headedness about a matter easily obscured by period mystiques made her work stand out then. It arrived fully certain of itself and its rational argument about its own strangeness gave it an unmistakable stamp. You would know a Rockburne anywhere. This early work was impermanent, or at least situational; like much work of this order, it is haunted by the shadow of its artificer who can make it happen again. This impermanence did not seem to me to issue a challenge to history’s false gods. It was simply the only way you could make it. This early work looks better than ever now.

When Rockburne began to fold paper and canvas into overlays, doublings and triplings the work became more hermetic about its own history. However complex the results, all are based on a simple origin—the square and rectangle of the golden section, the reciprocal directions of which tuck into each other in a kind of conceptual folding. Folding all available axes generates a profusion of shapes. A key to this lies in where the incisions to allow further foldings are made. In one series, The Egyptian Paintings, the square is placed in the center of the rectangle, mobilizing further possibilities. The resulting shapes in this all white series are then loosely folded and secured so that delusions of color may infiltrate pools of shadow. Folded into their own past, the works begin to obscure it. The process is as logical as before in that the steps taken are distinct as series of doors slamming in an empty corridor. The results begin to look illogical, somewhat arbitrary, unless you trust the authenticity of the process buried within them. The relation between process and its issue has changed. Where once the steps were clear, or decipherable, they are now partly lost in the clenched knuckles, angles, and violent flattening of the folded layers. Process becomes a murmur, then a silence, then an object. The color alters the densities of each shape, introducing another system which both confuses and partly reveals the reading of a shape as it over and underlaps itself. These works, with their jagged edges and complex layerings, lie a little uneasily on the wall as if they had peeled off part of its surface and then returned it folded into a conundrum.

What does all of this mean? The formalities of process in relation to shape, material in relation to process, color in relation to edge and plane, over in relation to underneath, shape in relation to wall, are informed by a common factor. It is something pungent, unyielding, irritable in the sense that when you look at these works they argue, and the argument is one that wants to win. For all its frequent sweetness (the color sometimes pretends to be nice) there is a combative streak here that in the context of geometric art (that limp category) doesn’t let the work settle down. This is legible in the work’s obstinacy, relentless pursuit of its own logic, disgust with easiness, strange harmonic contrasts. This work does not advertise emotion; it disguises it, and sends it out to be deciphered. It is thus in the classic tradition of modernism—art conceived as a matter of intensely felt difficulty resolved by the requisite formalities. The disguises include the sense of process, the deception of calm of the color, abstraction itself. The sixties discovered and the seventies codified how emotion could present itself in cool dialectical disguise. To achieve this the means must first be modified into areas of paradox and contradiction—a major achievement of the best post-war American abstract painting. Rockburne’s work often appears luxe, calme, but is ultimately, I believe violent.

It hasn’t been read that way, but it no more about geometry than a Malevich is. As Rockburne herself put it: “I thoroughly want the experience of this paint, this structure, this feeling to be known to me before I make this painting. Then when I begin again so much is known to me that I can ’stand outside myself’ and enter a state of ecstasy.” Nothing illuminates more clearly that the process must be thoroughly clarified by trial and error and then passed through a series of moves in a labyrinth while the detached spirit, above the pattern, “supervises” the unimpeded run. The empirical is sweated into the transcendental, the absent self is rehearsed, the work executes itself as the emotion—ecstasy, if you will—is deposited as planned. I emphasize the intensity of Rockburne’s work because it is often missed, thus forestalling as much writing as it has stimulated. This art is not tractable to language, indeed is antagonistic to it—disarming, since a lot of good art solicits its artwriting shamelessly.

In a remarkable work, Interior Perspective; Discordant Harmony, the structures arise out of the usual foldings. Square, rectangle, triangle, organize themselves on different levels. But now the surfaces are painted in frankly dragged brushstrokes. “Careless” bands of red and greens against white fusing with a membranous pink travel diagonally across each square. Rockburne’s surfaces have shown signs of restlessness since about 1980, as if paint would not take the surface lying down. At first glance, this rough painterliness disrupts the expectations of several years. New art is read according to what it is trying to escape, and thus is often thought to be moving backwards © Brian O’Doherty when it is moving forwards. But while the paint is discomforting, it does not break faith. It now comments on the structure, manifest and hidden shapes are extended, echoed, indicated but not illusionistically. The “memory” is partially painted back in. The work keeps going forward even when it is uncomfortable. Teleology comes out of the sweat of making it new, of constantly renovating what one is doing.