Aesthetic Absorption: On the Effects of Lingering with Rothko

The Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris exemplifies the worst aspects of the art world: its overt and excessive displays of wealth, its perpetuation of a model of aesthetic experience as consumer experience, and its thorough imbrication with the global capitalist market.¹ Naturally, its well-publicized and self-professedly grand exhibitions attract large numbers of visitors. The crowds a viewer must navigate further shape the forms of aesthetic experience available, an experience already circumscribed by viewing works of art in museum spaces. Many within these crowds insist on dominating the ideal spaces before each canvas with larger and larger iPhones in their extended hands to take a photo of the artwork, a photo whose quality cannot yet exceed that of the professional photos readily available online. Yet such photos seem to be meant not to reproduce the art, but to mark the event of beholding it. Other viewers interested in looking at the artworks without the mediation of their phones must navigate such obstacles in order simply to see, let alone experience, the artworks on display. 

Despite these mitigating factors, the many impressive works from the Mark Rothko exhibition at the Foundation (October 2023–April 2024) encouraged an aesthetic experience of dissolving absorption the longer one lingered with them. While not unique to Rothko—one might consider the aesthetic responses to Béla Tarr’s “slow cinema” or to Thomas Bernhard’s long monologue style in his novels—Rothko’s canvases seem to insist on this experience rather consistently. In his classic Absorption and Theatricality, Michael Fried describes an experience of absorption that fixes attention, paradoxically, “by negating the beholder’s presence.”² In other words, absorption “implies a lack of awareness of being beheld.”³ According to Fried’s discussion of the beholder’s position, “only by establishing the fiction of his absence or nonexistence could his actual placement before and enthrallment by the painting be secured.”⁴ My own intervention is more modest, in that I am less interested in what Rothko intends or in the status of a Rothko painting than in the particular effect a Rothko painting might have on a viewer. In other words, I want to describe in critical terms the form of “enthrallment” evoked by a Rothko canvas due to its absorbing pull.

Fried begins his own work by discussing figures of and obsessions with absorption in a range of paintings before turning to absorption as an experience of the viewer. Absorption depends on a “lack of the capacity for inwardness.”⁵ An absorptive state is therefore marked by the “suspension of activity and fixing of attention.”⁶ To be absorbed by a painting is to have the experience of giving “oneself up to it with all one’s thoughts without allowing oneself the least distraction.”⁷ Such a state occurs because of a relation between the viewer and the art object; it is precisely not available from a reproduction of Rothko’s paintings, no matter how high in quality, in part because such reproductions flatten the complexity and density of Rothko’s color painting and its effects of light. These reproductions also rarely enact the scale of a Rothko canvas.

Several of Rothko’s canvases on display in the Foundation Louis Vuitton produce a sense of absorption: No. 8 (1949), Green on Blue (Earth-Green and White) (1954), the Seagram Murals (1958-1959), and the Blackforms from the mid-1960s onward. Yet the total dissolution implied by absorption in Fried’s sense of the term—that is, of feeling oneself fully taken in by an object—does not seem quite right in the case of Rothko. Instead, Rothko’s canvases, in the best of conditions, produce an experience in the viewer akin to free indirect style, or what Ann Banfield calls represented speech and thought.⁸ I transpose this literary critical term to describe the aesthetic experience of a visual art object because it captures the unique form of absorption produced by Rothko’s canvases. Glossing Banfield, Kevin Ohi writes that represented speech and thought “is a third-person enunciation whose locus is not to be confused with a speaker. For Banfield, the narrative sentences of represented speech or thought are ‘unspeakable’; they are utterances of the non-person.”⁹ When I find myself absorbed by a Rothko canvas, it is as if I “see” myself experiencing the canvas from a third-person perspective. I come to sense myself sensing the painting, but the “I” being absorbed by the painting differs from the “I” that performs a second-order, self-conscious sensation of that absorption. In other words, the experience of absorption entails a self-dissolution and a belated perception of that dissolving activity, such that the dissolution was not—and cannot be—total. 

Such an experience is quite close to the one described by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit in their reading of Rothko, for it also involves the transgressions of aesthetic boundaries that potentially “immobilize the spectator.”¹⁰ Yet rather than failure—or “aesthetic impoverishment”—absorption before a Rothko involves the spectator’s awareness of their own momentary immobilization.¹¹ Following Bersani and Dutoit, the viewer’s absorption by a Rothko disrupts “the fiction of a closed-off self” so that “we experience consciousness otherwise.”¹² This stems from the viewer’s perceptual encounter with the excess and the plenitude of Rothko’s color and light. The viewer’s self-reflection is marked by a startling difference and hesitation between perspectives that the analogy to free indirect style emphasizes.

There is also therefore a temporal predicament to this aesthetic experience, for the absorption that dissolves the self also inaugurates a splitting of that self, such that the dissolution can be experienced as if from a third-person perspective. D.A. Miller argues that in free indirect style, “narration comes as near to a character’s psychic and linguistic reality as it can get without collapsing into it, and the character does as much of the work of the narration as she may without acquiring its authority.”¹³ Free indirect style maintains the difference between narration and character even as they approach each other asymptotically. When absorbed by a Rothko painting, the viewer figuratively occupies these two positions: they are the “character” experiencing an encounter with the painting and they perceive the “narration” of that character’s experience. Yet these two positions remain simultaneously entangled and independent. For, as Miller insists, “free indirect style gives a virtuoso performance, against all odds, of the narration’s persistence in detachment from character, no matter how intimate the one becomes with the other.”¹⁴

When “I” am absorbed by a Rothko canvas, “I” recognize this belatedly as an experience of someone other than myself. That is, there is a disconcerting yet pleasurable effect of feeling dissolved in and by the painting. There is also the disconcerting question produced by this experience: who was it that “I” recognize belatedly as being absorbingly dissolved? Replicating the classic predicament of temporal finitude—the present can only be experienced as such through a re-presentation after the fact—absorption evokes the non-coincidence of the subject of aesthetic experience and the subject of thought. I am, in a sense, not thinking when being dissolved in and by a Rothko canvas, and yet the aesthetic experience occurs because I recognize that I had just been in this state of not-thinking.¹⁵

This experience of being dissolved in and by the painting is enabled most obviously by Rothko’s density of color, its “vibrational layering,”¹⁶ even though this color is framed by Rothko as a means to an end, as is clear in a quotation the Foundation cited on one of its walls: “I’m not interested in color. It’s light I’m after.” Max Kozloff elaborates on this relation: “Rothko has so etherealized the paint that it is impossible to see it as simple, inert matter. It gives, rather, the unlikely but inescapable impression of light, and thus drives home the discrepancy between two separate species of vision. What is more, this light, this incommensurable element, is reified in color so delicately that it is impossible to tell whether color is being dissolved in light, or light is being tinted and suffused with color.”¹⁷ The disconcerting entanglement of light and color in a Rothko canvas, which provokes a confusion of cause and effect, allegorizes the entanglement of the split perception of the beholder before the painting. 

With this experience of aesthetic dissolution, of a free indirect sense of one’s own absorption, I borrow from the two most traditional aesthetic categories while also departing from them in important ways: the beautiful and the sublime. As a viewer being dissolved in and by Rothko’s canvases, I desire to linger with this experience, and yet this desire is borne out of the disconcerting sense of its already having ended. Immanuel Kant associates this desire with the aesthetic of the beautiful: “We linger in our contemplation of the beautiful, because this contemplation reinforces and reproduces itself.”¹⁸ Despite Rothko’s insistence on the frame and acts of framing—evident in the at once organic and geometric rectangles and squares of his mature color paintings—the paintings also produce a feeling of “unboundedness,” which Kant associates with the sublime.¹⁹ In spite of—or perhaps because of—their insistence on the frame, the colors and lights that compose a Rothko canvas seem to exceed that canvas. 

The pleasure of lingering with Rothko, then, has to do with the alienating effects of this aesthetic experience, which differs from the alienation produced by technological mediation and consumer models of art with which I began. Aesthetic absorption before a Rothko canvas disrupts the fiction of a beholder in control of their own aesthetic experience, a fiction that produces an effect of what Anna Kornbluh calls immediacy, as if the beholder announces in their photograph that I am here, now, experiencing this painting in an authentic way.²⁰ Such a fiction denies free indirect style’s asymptotic relation between character and narration. With their photograph of the canvas or with their selfie in front of it, the beholder aims for a self-control characterized by a fantasy of unmediated presence produced through the highly mediated forms of the camera lens and chic museum backdrop. Yet the dissolving absorption before a Rothko canvas rends the subject in two, drawing their attention to a fissure in themselves that can be neither sutured nor sustained.  

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1. The Foundation, in le Bois de Boulogne, was designed by Frank Gehry in collaboration with French manufacturers. In 2023, activists associated with Extinction Rebellion targeted the Foundation as a symbol of wealth in Paris. 
2. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 103. 
3. Ibid., 121.
4. Ibid., 103. As he clarifies later, “The paradox is that only if this is done”—that is, the process of neutralizing or negating “the beholder’s presence”—“can the beholder be stopped and held precisely there” (108).
5. Ibid., 41.
6. Ibid., 56.
7. Diderot, Encyclopédie qtd. in Fried 184n.6.
8. See Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction (Boston: Routledge, 1982).
9. Kevin Ohi, “Trans Pronouns, Transference, and The Ambassadors,” The Henry James Review 45, no. 1 (Winter 2024): 10.
10. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment : Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 125.
11. Ibid., 2.
12. Ryan Dohoney, “Renunciation,” Syntax of Thought: Reading Leo Bersani, special issue of differences 34, no. 1 (May 2023): 210, 215.
13. D.A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003): 59.
14. Ibid.
15. Paul North’s sense of distraction in The Problem of Distraction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012) as a form of non-thought, of a different kind of receptivity, is close to my description of a self-dissolution that one perceives to be happening but cannot make sense of in real-time.
16. Bersani and Dutoit, 124.
17. Max Kozloff, “The Problem of Color-Light in Mark Rothko,” Artforum 4, no. 1 (Sept. 1965): 39.
18. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, translated by Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 68.
19. Ibid., 98.
20. For more on this effect of immediacy, see Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy: Or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2024).

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  Matthew Scully

  Matthew Scully is Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of Lausanne. He is the author of Democratic Anarchy: Aesthetics and Political Resistance in U.S. Literature (Fordham UP, 2024). Scully’s work has also appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as the Journal of Modern Literature, Diacritics, African American Review, American Literature, Postmodern Culture, and MELUS.