Objectifying Expression

On being photographed and Mark Rothko

I was a person in front of a painting, until I was an image.

My hearing isn’t the best (in my left ear, it’s basically shot), but what’s left of it seems to be particularly sensitive to the clicks of camera shutters. It’s not hard to hear the difference between a film camera and a digital camera and the camera on a phone, where the shutter only sounds if the phone is Japanese or the owner is a Baby Boomer afflicted by their generational inability to set a cell phone to vibrate. Being photographed is something you can feel, it was something I felt inside the art museum, my being flattened into an unwitting actor in someone else’s tableau, an image created for purposes beyond my knowledge. The first time I had my photograph taken, I asked if they could delete the pictures, unnecessarily justifying my request with the explanation that I just wanted to look at paintings and not serve as fodder for someone’s social media profile or Squarespace portfolio. One woman excitedly tapped my shoulder to show me the pictures of me she had taken, sitting on a wobbly folding chair in front of a painting by Mark Rothko. All the photographs were of Mark Rothko paintings, because we were attending a Mark Rothko retrospective. And yet, despite walking through a dozen rooms filled with massive canvases, it was not painting which captured the focus of the large majority of patrons, instead their attention laid mostly in photographing the paintings. A patron would stand a few feet behind a painting, only seeing the canvas through the light of their phone screen, moving on to the next as soon as a suitable photograph had landed in their camera roll, always ensuring their sight is never raw, always digitally mediated. Among the young, thin, beautiful patrons with bad tattoos and garishly large belt buckles, an identical aversion towards art-viewing in favor of image-making was apparent, poorly concealed behind the mechanical aesthetics of the film camera, equally cynical in its desire to turn art and audiences into a collection of objects populating a sharable image. 

Having my photograph taken often incites me to cry. 

My friend Ryann has large, beautiful hair. We have a tendency to sit in comfortable silence together, and we have boys’ names despite not being boys. We met in the woods of upstate New York, where so many of my strange and fine friendships began, we met in the winter and we would walk through the pine trees looking for deer bones and moss and jagged beams of sunlight on the snow. We would make photographs in Ryann’s basement, usually of me, heavily costumed in vintage polyester while The Kinks played on a bluetooth speaker. We briefly dabbled—and failed—at furniture-making. I like these photographs, pieces of make-believe and performance, where my emotions sit sturdy and lacquered and complicated like the Shaker furniture that fills all the Hudson antique stores. I like images, collections of signs and signifiers bound inside frames. Including things. Excluding things. Pictures are objects of intention, like paintings and text messages.

I like photographs which depict contrived narratives. Cameras make something impossibly permanent, so upon viewing photographs we become so uncomfortably conscious of the impermanence of our beings. The heavily staged photograph reminds us that all photographs, all memories, are staged in some way or another, that we’re all posing ourselves for lenses and frames, real and imagined. I like abstract paintings because they evoke the same anxiety, forcing us to humble ourselves to environmental affect. Portrait photography and abstract expressionism both require creators and audiences alike to subsume themselves to the process of deeply feeling, eliciting emotions that cannot be edited into frames with finite edges. This consciousness of being looked at is perhaps why women dominate both genres: Cindy Sherman, Nadia Lee Cohen, Helen Frankenthaler, and Elaine de Kooning are all masters of forcing viewers into emotional submission through the manipulation of nostalgia, melancholy, and mood. And while we live among many, many images, we do not live inside images. We live inside our lives and our perspectives, even though there is a palpable desire to shove everything into a frame, a square, a photograph. Creating art is empowering because it is a process so unlike living; it would be so easy if all our feelings and experiences were nameable and photographable and capturable and framable and shareable. 

The (fake) Rothko in “The Golden Violin,” Mad Men. “It must mean something.” “Maybe it doesn't. Maybe you're just supposed to experience it.”

You can’t photograph a Mark Rothko painting. You can point a camera at a Rothko and produce an image, but that image is not a painting, it’s an image of a painting. If you want to “get” anything from a Rothko painting, you must work for it. All of the melancholy and magic of his work must be mined by the viewer; these paintings demand the use of wobbly fold-out chairs tragically under-utilized at museums.  

The paintings are funny, sad. At its core, abstract expressionism, despite its association with pretension and black turtlenecks and natural wines, is about letting go of your ego. You must forget yourself and your opinions and your experiences, you must be empty to make space for the painting to move inside you. The painting must move through you. When you spend enough time with one of these paintings, you’ll notice how they buzz and hum, not like telephone wires but like insects, moving, undulating, somehow producing noise and a faint tingling sensation on the skin. Some colors, even some whole paintings blend together, while others remain impossibly separated and irreconcilable. The paintings, with their base colors and base forms, evoke the most base concepts of life—weather, water, wounds—yet each painting is inlaid with its own unique nuance. It’s an uncomfortable process, and a public one, which may explain why so many people are unwilling to shrink themselves in the presence of other spectators. Rothko’s work requires a degrading level of vulnerability; critics of abstract expressionism are perhaps most averse to the necessary penetrability (and, therefore, femininity) required to “get” it. 

Screenshot from the Louis Vuitton Instagram geotag location

I sat in front of these paintings for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes each. There’s no way to really see them all in a day. The exhibition was at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, a grossly corporate venue whose probable purpose as a tax write-off generator with an influencer-friendly logo makes it the ideal factory for turning people and paintings into content. I don’t particularly care about museum patrons taking a discrete photograph or two, especially of representational art which depicts something strange or interesting or ugly or true, these personal photographs creating a digital archive for future artistic reference. But we weren’t looking at pictures of things, we were looking at objects, objects whose magic depth cannot be captured, regardless of the resolution of the photo. I’d hear another camera click, look behind me and find the barrel of a Nikon lens pointed straight at my head. If I moved away from the painting, the photographer would inevitably give me a disappointed scowl and move on, only interested in creating the image if a person was unwillingly cast in their composition. I was upset, almost to the point of rage, nearly to the point of standing on top of my borrowed folding chair and yelling,

These paintings can’t be captured by your iPhone camera, or your professional SLR, or your parents’ old Olympus rangefinder! They can’t be captured by anything, really—at their best, they’ll capture you! But that can only happen when you sit in front of them, which you have the opportunity to do right now, but you’re not, because you’re only focused on taking pictures of unphotographable paintings for… what reason? To prove you were here? To produce some sort of digital footprint? To inspire jealousy in your friends? To affirm to yourself that you are cultured, educated, well-read, because you lack security in your sense of self? Because if it's a sense of self you’re lacking, you’re in the presence of an immersive, pious experience that can help you work through some of these feelings, if only you put down the lens!!!! And please, STOP TAKING PICTURES OF ME! 

The more upset I became, the more I felt that my sensitivity towards the paintings was the same sensitivity I held when I was the subject of the photographs. The uncomfortable, complex, and often difficult intimacy of the paintings characterizes their timeless humanity. The photograph of these paintings is just a collection of symbols, of words in quotes: “painting,” “Paris,” “culture,” “art,” “color,” “emotion,” “Rothko,” “museum,” “participation.” When I am photographed, I too become a collection of symbols, a condition that is a source of voice and power when I decide on the symbols and an act of domination when it is imposed on me. The difficult, illogical, intimate parts of myself that are knowable only through the vulnerable, frightening process of intimacy are flattened and compressed into a frame. If the public around me is only capable of forming their own identity through signifiers, unwilling to engage with the complexity of the art they chose (and paid) to be around, how will they conceptualize others? What lies behind identities constructed out of images? What happens when there is no patience, no desire to understand what lies within the frame, much less beyond it?

I cried at the Mark Rothko exhibition. Twice. The first cry began because I could not escape the camera shutters and the process of objectification that they incite. The second cry began because, despite all my frustrations with my fellow patrons, I fell inside of the painting in front of me, immersed, uncertain, humbled.