Rockburne's Wager

"Rockburne’s Wager"

by Robert Storr

Essay to accompany the catalogue for the exhibition

New Paintings: Pascal and Other Concerns

March 5 - April 2, 1988

André Emmerich Gallery

New York, NY

"Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it." -Pascal, Les PensŽes

Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century religious philosopher, is not someone one would have expected to crop up in debates over the direction of contemporary art. The bane of every French schoolboy’s existence—"A certain Blaise Pascal, etc. . ., etc. . . " runs, in its derisive entirety, Jacques Prevert’s poem "Stupid Bets"—his astringent mysticism would, on the face of things, seem hardly relevant to the critical discussion presently being held under the collective aegis of French thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard. Yet, Dorothea Rockburne now adds Pascal’s name to that long list. It is an eventuality by no means so far-fetched as it may at first appear. For the central question he posed is anything but anachronistic, and his answer not in the least recondite. On the contrary, they are singularly timely and singularly clear.

Of primary concern to Pascal—who found himself equally at odds with mechanistic skepticism and the politically expedient pieties of the Church—was the relation of faith to reason, intuition or spirit to the analytic mind. The problem is far from academic. Never in the history of modernism has that relationship been under greater scrutiny. On all sides, painting is beset by a crisis of faith, and in no sector of the art community has that loss of faith been more profound, nor come as more of a surprise, than it has among abstract painters. This shock is understandable. For the past seventy-five years, while Expressionism, Realism, Surrealism and various other pictorial or narrative modes have addressed themselves to the anomalies of human consciousness and the imperfections of human existence, abstraction has seemed to embody the hopes of a progressive if not utopian modernity. In all its various manifestations, non-objective art pictured the world not as it was but as it might be.

Admittedly, there has been little agreement on the exact substance of that hope. This has been true even for those whose work would seem to share common formal affinities. Thus the strict geometries of Russian Constructivism were meant to adumbrate an ideal but feasible new social order, while those of Surprematism, starting from a comparably humanistic materialism, veered off toward fertile contention. Meanwhile, Piet Mondrian discovered in the grid structures underlying Cubism the key to an art of total abstraction and perfect spatial and spiritual equipoise. Tipping that grid, Theo Van Doesberg, Mondrian’s erstwhile "De Stijl" colleague found a template of Machine Age dynamism—without, of course, any literal depiction of machine parts. In this country, Formalist painting set aside such explicit political or metaphysical agendas in favor of an art historical agenda concentrating entirely upon the isolation and dissection of painting’s unique aesthetic attributes—surface, support, color and gesture. Wise-guy-mystic Ad Reinhardt went further still. Scorning conventional art talk, dispensing with the notion of stylistic development, but most importantly, denying painting any symbolic content, he fought quixotically to purify abstraction of all worldly referents and encumbrances. But, however much these various credos have remained a matter of dispute, for virtually all factions, abstraction has always been an art of "essences" and the expectation that such essences would in the end reveal themselves, a shared article of faith.

Today that belief is being challenged. Periodically, of course, painting has been declared "dead", but this time despite much evidence to the contrary, the announcement has struck a deep nerve, and the arguments used to buttress the assertion have gained wide currency. Unlike the past the challenge does not emanate from the "philistines" who have always viewed abstraction as an aberration. Instead, it has come from within the ranks of the critical avant-garde which has traditionally supported abstract art, and from artists making what superficially might be considered abstract paintings. Under attack of course is the credibility of any notion of "essential truth". Rather questions regarding painting’s social and historical context and the mutability if not cynical manipulation of that context have come to overshadow nearly all attempts to define or redefine the basic tenets of a coherent or comprehensive modernist aesthetic. A queasy revisionism has taken the place of the messianic optimism that once inspired non-objective art.

The analytic method employed in this demystification of modernist abstraction has, ostensibly, followed the example set by the literary and social scientific exponents of post-structuralist or deconstructivist theory. And, though the subject of its discourse involves concepts of sexuality, madness and "otherness," its logic is rationalist to the core. What matters, ultimately, is what can be said, what language can accommodate within its arbitrary but seemingly all determining structure. Thus, while the traditional criteria and authority of "truth" have been undermined by evermore subtle and relentless casuistry, the "text"—as the disjunctive genre of post-modern writing is known—has assumed its full dominion. In this climate geometric abstraction is now being reinterpreted in terms of myriad faddish hypotheses, most notably that which views it as synonymous with "late capitalism," a "high style" logo for the closed systems of control otherwise symbolized by the corporate flow chart and the micro-chip.

It is the last metaphoric inference that begs for Pascal’s belated entry into the fray. And, for those enthralled by the complacent and soulless fictions of the perfect computerized "hyperreality," his participation promises swift and definitive poetic justice. Of significance, here, is not only the substance of Pascal’s philosophical contribution but the complex genius of the man and its varied applications. A mathematical prodigy—at age twelve he re-invented the basic propositions of Euclidean Geometry—Pascal was also the inventor of the first calculating machine, hence the computer language that bears his name. Nor were his skills confined to strictly scientific endeavors. The scourge of the Jesuits, Pascal mercilessly lampooned the opportunistic sophistries by means of which they ruled the French Church in a mock-correspondence published as Les Lettres Provinciales. It is one of the great polemics of all time.

To this extent, Pascal’s natural inclinations would seem to have reflected the modern intellectual bias toward the analytic and the practical. The opposite was, in fact, the case. Rather, his objective was to strike a balance, or better, open and preserve a mental space, between radical doubt and naive or presumptive rationalism. Consequently, unlike Descartes who attempted to "prove" God’s existence, Pascal, in Les Pensées, maintained that no such proof was possible or appropriate. Instead he proposed that faith in anything that transcended human reason must in effect be approached as a wager, for by definition reason could not give us reliable information about things which exceeded it. Faith, therefore, meant accepting the "truth" of something that can neither be positively demonstrated nor definitively dismissed by argument; it constituted a metaphysical guess, which though qualified by profound uncertainty was at the same time wondrous in its capacity for revelation.

By thus using analytic thought as a means of establishing the limits of philosophical discourse—and so protect both the integrity of philosophy and access to what lay outside its scope—Pasca’Õs position approximates in several respects that taken by the 20th-century thinker, Ludwig Wittgenstein, language could address only those things that could be formulated as statements subject to logical verification. Questions of ethics, religion, and aesthetics being predicated on "supernatural" or intuitive premises or on incommunicable perceptions, were in a strict sense "meaningless". That did not imply, however, that they were insignificant. For Wittgenstein, as for Pascal before him, the boundaries of language were at the same time the frontiers of a wholly different dimension of knowledge and experience.

It is easy to see how such a proposition recommends itself to an artist of Rockburne’s sensibility and background. Furthermore, its ramifications with regard to current debate over the historical aims and supposed failures of abstraction are no less obvious or far-reaching. Refusing to fall either into a credulous "spiritualism" or a sterile criticality, Pascal’s dialectic steers one away from nostalgic, "table-tapping" modernism on the one hand, and on the other frames a perfect rejoinder to the Jesuits of the 1980s who, for the sake of intellectual convenience or the prerogatives of power, would reduce painting to a word game.

To be sure, Rockburne’s concern is not to illustrate Pascal’s idea but to resolve complementary dichotomies and work out parallel intuitions about the creative freedom toward which they point. Well known, of course, is Rockburne’s own interest in mathematics—set theory, and subsequently the proportional systems of the Golden Section provided the procedural and compositional paradigms of her early "minimalist" work. Though present, those influences are by now fully assimilated. But Minimalism, at least in its American expression, did not easily tolerate doubt nor did it have much use for the concepts of beauty or transcendence. Infused with the reductive "factualism" of logical positivist thought—that is to say Wittgenstein’s these stripped of their poetics and the religiosity which they acknowledge like a phantom limb—formalist artists insisted that only what one saw was there. The work of art’s claim to "seriousness," meanwhile, was measured by its puritan restraint.

Though in the 1960s and 1970s Rockburne produced drawings and installations that seemed in full accord with such assumptions, by the beginning of the 1980s she found herself pushing against the strictures they implicitly imposed. She had, moreover, long since turned away from the linear or "progressive" notions of art history that had inspired them, searching the past for art of rigor and amplitude in accord with her own aspirations. This found in Italian Renaissance painting, particularly that of the Quattrocento masters, and in the work of 16th-century Mannerist Jacopo Pontormo, whose synthesis of perspectival complexity and ecstatic light, has more than any been the precedent for Rockburne’s own.

Correspondingly, once severe in its facture and virtually monochrome, in the past decade, Rockburne’s work has been characterized by a pronounced painterliness and an astonishing chromatic richness. These qualities operate in close synergy. Veils of dilute but saturated pigments are brushed across the discrete segments of her canvases resulting in intense but extraordinarily subtle optical mixtures. (In Pascal’s Provincial Letters, for example, these spectral layers are variously seductive and acidic, in accordance with the tone of their namesake’s elegantly disputatious style.) Thus, glazing, a Renaissance technique largely abandoned in modern times for the immediacy of a la prima application is back. But if, as a corollary, the theater of "spontaneity" has been voluntarily forsaken, gesture has not been sacrificed. To the contrary, Rockburne’s gesture, at once sweeping and exact, is everywhere active in the articulation of her otherwise seemingly disembodied compositions. Moreover, in some of the most recent works, the artist has annexed the wall, juxtaposing the delicately grained skin of her reliefs to the flat, uniform coats of paint that cover their mural ground. In this regard, Pascal’s Provincial Letters and Mozart and Mozart Upsidedown and Backward not only look back to Italian fresco, but to Rockburne’s own wall pieces of the past such as Neighborhood.

Rockburne has incorporated other Renaissance devices as well, most conspicuously the use of gold leaf, which in the newest paintings is more prominent than ever before. In part her use of gold is thematic; the "purest" of metals, here as in traditional sacred art it alludes to a comparable purity of mind. It is moreover a substance with physical properties especially suited to Rockburne’s formal pictorial needs. Possessed of a wide range of tonalities—there are as many golds as there are yellows and the artist is acutely attentive to their nuances—gold-leaf is opaque and reflective, bouncing light back into the viewer’s space and so reinforcing oneÕs sense of the density and "objectivity" of her reliefs, qualities further accentuated by the increased depth and volume of the panels she uses. Further, by glazing over gold-leaf so that it shines from within her translucent oil based hues or by using the glow that gilt segments casts upon adjacent color areas, Rockburne has exploited gold’s luminosity to integrate her compositions and optically fuse their many painterly and structural layers. As was the case in antiquity, then, she never uses gold merely as a decorative effect, but always a fundamental element of the formal syntax of her work.

While Rockburne’s new paintings are, thus, notable for the sensuousness if not luxuriousness of their materials, the artist’s use of those materials remains as tough-minded as when, previously, she confined herself to grease, paper, and other more "impoverished" means. And, inasmuch as this flushed painterliness constitutes the flesh of her paintings, its bones—intricate planar dynamics achieved through superposition and internal division of polygonal panels and made explicit in preparatory folded paper and watercolor drawings—remain consistent with the strictest traditions of non-objective art. In fact, far from wishing merely to dazzle the eye, Rockburne has sought to demonstrate that "beauty" is not only compatible with "serious" aesthetic purpose but intrinsic to it. This, fundamentally, is the lesson she has drawn from the gilt and lapis-lazuli enriched altarpieces of the Renaissance. There again, one is reminded to recite the catechism to experience in antique religious art the rare integration of the profound and the marvelous they evoke. And, although in its iconoclastic phases, abstraction has frequently foresworn delight, it does not follow that art which is austere is inherently more valid than that which is frankly splendid.

Thus reconciling the distant past with the present, Rockburne’s recent work also suggests an unexpected rapprochement between two of the modernism’s most influential but still least well understood pioneers. For to the degree that the basic tropes of contemporary criticism and contemporary art practice are informed by ironies of Dada and the insurrectional manifestos of Surrealism, Constructivism and related tendencies, neither Matisse’s desire for "luxe calme et volupté," nor Mondrian’s pursuit of "dynamic equilibrium," have any real place. Yet despite the obvious distinctions between these two men—Matisse was a disabused and unapologetic bourgeois whose stated aim was to make pictures for the tired businessman, while Mondrian, indifferent to middle-class comforts, viewed painting as a mystical but likewise democratic enterprise—in a period of almost unrelieved conflict each envisioned an art of ideal harmony.

Engaging formal problems confronted by both these antecedents, Rockburne shares that same ambition. With its complex and deliberately incongruent framing of rectangle within rectangle and its uncertain nexus the pictorial equivalent of Pascalian contradiction, I Am Pascal would appear to deviate from Mondrian’s precise formal canon. Yet the black bars Rockburne uses and the overall balance toward which the painting tends make clear reference to the formal armatures and asymmetrical poise of the Dutch master’s work. Glory of Doubt, Pascal, by its title and sheer pictorial devices, reiterates I am Pascal’s concern with the interdependence of ambiguity and exaltation. Meanwhile, I Am Pascal’s subtle chromatic dissonances, an allusion to the elusiveness of enlightenment, remind one of the edgy brilliance of Matisse’s windows for the "Chapel of the Rosary" at Vence.

Despite an awareness of such precedents, however, Rockburne has never indulged in the grandiose art historical apologetics to which some of her peers have resorted in their attempts to respond to the malaise presumed to be plaguing abstraction. And, although decidedly systematic in her studio practice, neither has she succumbed to the temptations of sheer programmatic manufacture. Most of all she is free of the bitterness which infects the thinking of the many painters who accept their critically assigned status as disenfranchised modernists. In sum, Rockburne has not set out to prove—or disprove—anything. Instead, she has used her mind and her talent to clear a space for an imaginative grace to fill.

To proceed as if such a space could indeed be established is where the issue of faith enters in. To suppose that such a thing as creative grace exists entails even more of a leap. For many the idea that there can be a realm of thought or experience which escapes and disrupts the binary symmetry of the seen cannot necessarily be said and something intuited cannot be explained much less literally depicted, is even more so. When forced to entertain these notions in discussing the work of Mondrian, Kandinsky and Malevich and others, there is a tendency to explain them away as if they were restricted to an era other than our own, the result of some quaint ideological misunderstanding or the expression of special historical circumstances from which we are forever cut off. Uncertainty embarrasses us. So does possibility. We prefer our pinched by nameable prospects to such amorphous challenges. But, as Pascal would argue, grace—that is self-transcendence—is at all times equally close at hand and equally remote, and belief always a gamble. Rockburne’s paintings radiate no less compelling a conviction.