Opening Inside Out Share: , Mark Rothko, Rothko Chapel Houston, Texas

Ellsworth Kelly, Austin, Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Texas

Voltaire said that heaven has given us two things to counter-balance the many hardships in life: hope and sleep. He might have added laughter… –Immanuel Kant, Critique of [the Power of] Judgment (1790)1

I attended one of Robert Irwin’s lectures at the University of Southern California in 1984, when I was in graduate school across town at the University of California, Los Angeles. He spoke of being a young painter and going to see Barnett Newman’s Zip paintings. He was blown away by them—the perfect and excruciating tensions between color, line, and plane. They mesmerized him; they made him want to give up painting and try to paint, again, all together and at once. He described the feeling as an overwhelming, even visceral, storm, one that took several days to recover from, whereupon he immediately went back to see the show again. This time, he couldn’t help noticing that the paintings were hung by wires from the gallery’s cornice (it must have been an old building), and he wondered, “Why don’t those matter, too?”

Irwin’s expanded field still makes me laugh.2 To my thinking, it effortlessly evacuates an oppositional pair very important to High Modernism: inside/outside. Inside is fixed and essential, even eternal. Outside is not part of the discussion. This pair speaks to selection, framing, focus—a sort of indexical hectoring: this, not that. It is in my mind no accident that all these terms circulate through the ways we speak of “the photographic.” Once in the net of language (alas, never out again, I know) “inside/outside” is inflected by related ideas: borders, boundaries, self and other, mine and yours, us and them.3 Oppositional pairs allow us to manufacture certainty in the face of possibly traumatic indeterminacy; they help to hammer the experienced and expressed world flat—this or that. Fear of indeterminacy anneals that flatness into habit, which hardens into position. Positions are defended, at times, like now, viciously.4

I object. None of it is that simple. This or that is so convenient, so perilously close to the kind of mindless digital difference that might make a social media algorithm run. I resist. I want to hold on to the gray and fuzzy complexities that feel like fault lines or undecidability or life. I want to be able to choose to lie in a hammock in spite of, and because of, the hurricane about to blow me away. I want to write of the inclusive grace of thinking through experience. I want to write of emancipatory laughter.

Irwin’s key opened all artworks for me that day, and has allowed me to drift, in the sense of Guy Debord’s Situationist dérive, outside the expected borders of any cultural experience and assemble the one I am ready to have.

I visited Texas in May 2018 and took the opportunity to see both the Rothko Chapel (1971), by Mark Rothko, and Ellsworth Kelly’s newly opened Austin (2018). These are two purpose-built buildings that draw from the legacy of Western European sacred spaces—explicitly Christian and, more to the point, medieval Roman Catholic architecture. Why? What purpose does this recycling of old forms serve today? Rothko was a non-observant Jew, and Kelly was a self-described atheist. I was particularly flummoxed by the presence in both buildings of 14 panels, and I am not alone in taking the number of panels to be a reference to the stations of the cross, a medieval Catholic meditation on the passion of Christ that arose out of the Crusades. Rothko’s subtle paintings are famously dark, brooding, and monumental, grouped in three triptychs (a Trinity of Trinities), with five single panels distributed between them. Rothko did not encourage the reverential Catholic associations, but Rothko Chapel patron, Dominique de Menil, certainly did, at least to the extent she claimed the paintings in the chapel were “able to bring us to the threshold of the divine.”5

Dominique de Menil at the dedication of the Rothko Chapel, Houston, 1971. Courtesy of Menil Archives, The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: Hickey-Robertson.

Kelly did not want Austin to be referred to as a chapel, but nearly a half century later, he accepted that it was inevitable.6 He did embrace the title Stations of the Cross for his 14 black-and-white marble panels. For many non-religiously affiliated artists of the sixties and seventies, the story of Christ supplied a rich metaphor for the contemplative aspirations of High Modernist painting. For an example, we only need to look (again) to Barnett Newman’s suite of paintings titled Stations of the Cross: lema sabachthani (1958–66).7

Practicing Catholics themselves, the de Menils were deeply influenced by the ecumenical turn of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). They were exceptional patrons and collectors, and unusual in the landscape of twentieth-century America. In 1964, the de Menils commissioned Rothko to make an unspecified number of paintings to furnish a consecrated Roman Catholic Chapel planned for the campus of St. Thomas University in Houston, Texas.8 The Chapel, as realized, instead sits in its own park-like grounds adjacent to the Menil Collection, in Houston. It is consecrated but ecumenical—neither explicitly Catholic nor even particularly Christian—and very actively in use.9

Rothko Chapel Floor plan. Courtesy of the Rothko Chapel.

The de Menils independently commissioned architect Phillip Johnson to design the building to house Rothko’s paintings. When the architect and the painter clashed, the de Menils gave Rothko the last word. Johnson’s plan for a towering superstructure was never realized. In fact, the Rothko Chapel is often cited as a commission that conferred on the artist boundary-busting control over how the building and its contents came to be realized, including the number of paintings. Therein hangs another tale: Rothko was so concerned about the quality of light under which he wanted the paintings to be seen that he insisted the chapel contain an exact replica of the skylight in his studio on 69th Street, in Manhattan, where he painted and conceptualized the hanging of these great works. I wonder what Rothko would have thought of Texas light. It is corrosive in ways he may never have anticipated, and conserving the paintings has kept engineers and conservators at work for years. The chapel’s skylight is now shrouded and baffled to give indirect light, and the docent said there are plans in the works to re-engineer it.

Phillip Johnson, elevation of the Rothko Chapel and the University of St. Thomas Colonnades, with freehand markup by Mark Rothko, 1956–64. © PJAR Architects / © 2018 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. By kind permission of PJAR Architects, courtesy of the Rothko Chapel and Menil Archives, The Menil Collection, Houston.

Much of the literature speaks of the building as an octagon, which the interior volume, where the paintings hang, certainly is, but the building is a Latin Cross, a form that evolved from ancient Roman architecture. The entrance is at the long end of the cross, the one that, in a fine Roman house in the age of Constantine, would have had an atrium with a reflecting pool. Later, as those house forms were adapted to serve as early Christian basilicas, the reflecting pools were repurposed for baptisms. In Houston, the vestigial “baptismal font” has been moved outside, opposite the chapel’s entrance, in the form of the dark reflecting pool designed by Johnson and dominated by Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk (1963–67, which was installed and dedicated to Martin Luther King here in 1970).

Barnett Newman, Broken Obelisk, 1963/67. Cor-Ten steel, 312 x 126 x 126 in. In front of the Rothko Chapel, Houston, TX. © 2018 The Barnett Newman Foundation/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Hickey-Robertson.

Deferring for a moment the implied processional drama of the site, I walked all the way around the outside first. The entrance doors are low, hooded by a sort of porch under a heavy black lintel, leading you into the hushed vestibule with a visitor’s desk and books for reference. Photographs are expressly forbidden. I signed the guest book and entered. Upholstered cushions are scattered on the floor among the austere, backless benches, furnishings for a rather Brutalist space that feels both trembling and vulnerable, like the surface of my skin. On the Sunday I was there, the cushions—one in front of each panel in the largest of the three triptychs—were occupied by flexible bodies in perfect Lotus poses for the duration of my visit. People came and went in front of the 14 vast purple, black, gray, bloody monumental paintings—oops, there’s a picture.10 At 15 feet tall and hung a couple of feet above grade, they easily put me, at my near six-foot height, in my proportional place inside their lambent Golden Ratios, inviting contemplation and surrender. The literature, for example, James Elkins’s 2001 book, Pictures and Tears, suggests that the invitation still works, and that it is the result of a way of looking.11 The chapel is cave-like and, in feeling, famously dark. The chapel and the paintings in particular are often, and I think apocryphally, associated with Rothko’s suicide in 1970, a picture indeed.

Rothko Chapel interior with original uncovered skylight, Houston. Barnstone and Aubry, Architects, completed 1972. Courtesy of the Rothko Chapel and Menil Archives, Houston. Photo by Hickey-Robertson.

Rothko Chapel interior with covered skylight, Houston, TX. Photo: Runaway Productions.

Michael Fried assigned an ahistorical presentness to the project of abstract painting itself and called it “grace.” Almost 30 years later, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe complained: “Language, as the code of codes, irreversibly erodes or obliterates the visual, precisely because of its dependence on visual imagery, which turns everything one sees into a metaphor.”12 I am convinced by my encounter with the chapel that the whole experience is intensely “theatrical,”13 in all the ways Fried deplored at the advent of Minimalism. Those paintings waited in ambush for me, and like the hurricane and my hammock, I kept my eyes open and my arms locked outstretched, holding their imposing grace at bay and finding freedom and meaning in my refusal.

On the outside, as I reconnoitered the entire building, I made a discovery. In addition to the human-scale entrance doors, hunkering in their low, unprepossessing porch, two other sets of double doors lead into the chapel on the east and west transept arms. They are very tall—12 or 16 feet. (Sixteen feet might be big enough to take the paintings out, no? I read somewhere that the largest of the paintings were installed through the sky-light.) These doors’ exteriors are mottled and dark too, like the paintings inside. Once institutional black, their paint has organically faded in that caustic Texas sun, and, in a seeming minor key, the doors clearly display the patterns of use for the building other than meditation or interiority: the simple joy of kicking soccer balls against a backstop in a park, a remaking akin to that initiated by opportunistic skateboarders in drought-empty swimming pools. Inside the hushed rotunda, among the reverent benches and the lotus poses, I liked thinking about those other doors. They lightened the pressure of the place. I heard the hollow drumming, the Houston-humid splat of soccer balls against the steel, the satisfying, percussive extension of foot-ballers’ legs until exhaustion or distraction moves them on. A knock on the door, a let-me-in of play.

The Michael Fried of 1967 looks with me here too, saying no to this outside, no to this hollowness for practicality—storage, utilities, the banalities of bodies and things in space—this theater and my presence, my playing of the parts I choose today, a transcendence of my very own.

Side exterior doors of the Rothko Chapel, Houston, TX. Photo: Ellen Birrell.

In Dominique de Menil’s remarks at the opening of the Rothko Chapel, she suggests the paintings are a threshold for whatever comes to you there, in the chapel, when you sit and cordon off whatever outsides you have brought in with you, which is, I suppose, a working definition of her word “divine.” Clearly Rothko found great convergent resonance with his own pursuit of the sublime in the commission, but I don’t think or believe that it is possible to compel or choreograph anyone else’s transcendent experience without relying on some problematic assumption of who the “we” being addressed are or, worse, ought to be.14

I can fathom the generosity of the Rothko Chapel, but I have struggled to understand fetishized abstraction, particularly that of abstract painting, in High Modernism since reading Fried for the first time in the early 1980s. I told this to a friend when I came home, and she, far more generously than I, offered that surely there is nothing wrong with places that allow people to cry or feel, and that there are probably far too few of such without moral entanglements attached. I agree, but that day I was there with my Irwin eyes—the ones that insist on the outside too, the ones that rupture the complacent conviction of inside matters, the ones that apply the project of art making and deep critical thinking to the job of breaking out of cultural habits: political, positional, or polemical.

In High Modernism, paintings were never pictures and photographs always were. As an artist, I chose pictures. Pictures are transitive, they tell about the world, they are garrulous and chatty. Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin is a picture, a Romanesque-styled, stained glass ornamented, architectural folly—a white crusader’s Mission—a time traveler playing the score of history’s forms come to earth in the brash and boastful light of Austin. Photographs are emphatically encouraged.

Austin, Kelly’s only building, is sited at the Blanton Museum on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. It began life in 1987, as a commission for Kelly’s friend, the art collector and television producer Douglas Cramer, to be sited on Cramer’s Santa Ynez Valley vineyard.15 Too expensive to be realized even then, it survived as an architectural model in Kelly’s studio until 2012, when Kelly and his long-time partner Jack Shear ran into the Houston art dealer Hiram Butler and mentioned the commission. Butler tried to place it on the campus at Rice University. When that proposal lost traction, Butler contacted the collectors Jeanne and Mickey Klein, who brought in Simone Wicha, then recently appointed curator of the Blanton Museum. Twenty-three million dollars and six years later, the design, now christened Austin, opened in February 2018. Kelly authorized each and every construction detail before his passing in 2015.

Ellsworth Kelly, Austin, 2015. View of interior, facing south. Artist-designed building with installation of colored glass windows, black and white marble panels, and redwood totem, 60 x 73 x 26 ft. 4 in. © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. Courtesy of Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin.

As an architectural idea, Kelly’s Austin is no less explicitly referential and arguably far more complete than the Rothko Chapel. It too is a Latin cross with a pronounced semicircular apse—that part in a church where the crucifix and the altar stand. Kelly’s building consists of two intersecting barrel vaults, the Romanesque arch form extended in space, and is clad in white limestone. Before entering, I stood with my back to the hand-hewn oak entry doors and was offered an enfilade view of the pink Texas capital building, a vista as self-aware and challenging as any offered by the mall in Washington, D.C.

The entrance façade sports a stained glass window, but instead of a pastoral scene or an angel, such as Louis Comfort Tiffany might have provided, Kelly gives us what can now only be a picture straight out of High Modernism: a grid, a form he often worked in.16 Kelly had the glass mouth-blown to exacting specifications by artisans at the Franz Mayer architectural glass studio, founded in Munich in 1847. The three exquisite stained glass windows in Austin comprise the only ornaments on the south, east, and west façades. In addition to the grid on the south, there is a clock-like circle, which Kelly called “tumbling squares,” and another in the form of a “starburst” on the opposite transept arm. All the glass is wavy and super-saturated with colors that bleed and dance around the interior as that bright Texas sun travels around outside—a glorious play indeed. A docent told me that on an early site visit, Kelly explained that tumbling squares was lifted directly from the north transept rose window at Chartres Cathedral.17

Ellsworth Kelly, Austin, 2015. View of west façade. Artist-designed building with installation of colored glass windows, black and white marble panels, and redwood totem, 60 x 73 x 26 ft. 4 in. © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. Courtesy of Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin.

The starburst reminded me of that most unhelpful “progress cog” on my computer, which I have dubbed “the dazer of death.” It means that my machine is working on producing my made-to-order revelation in mysterious ways that I must simply take on faith. In Artforum, Harry Cooper commented on this too, calling it a “throbber,” and claimed Kelly could not have “seen” this reference, because it was not invented until the 1990s; an odd claim, as Kelly was fully in this world until 2015. My guess is that an additional reference or two would not have bothered him at all. Kelly’s overall strategy as an artist was to take forms and simplify them; evacuating their references, compressing them to simple shapes, color, and spacing. In a familiar exercise of Euro-centric Modernist privilege, Kelly was not concerned with conserving whatever meanings the forms may have originally evolved to contain, nor with whatever referential outsides a viewer might bring to them.18 Looked at historically, his choices can be valued as genius or condemned as arrogant, even provincial, repression. Looking forward, I think what is left is also an opportunity.

Both round windows—starburst and tumbling squares—use a twelve-color rainbow palette that I associate with the famous color theorist Albert Munsell. Kelly made a great deal of work inspired by Munsell, including a group of drawings and paintings called Spectrum. These windows are, in my opinion, a magnificent apotheosis of that project. Watching those lovely colors dance across the space, I also thought of the rainbow-hued LGBT Pride Flag from 1978.

In the apse, Kelly placed one of the sculptures that he referred to collectively as “totems.” To insist on the outside connections of the word for a moment, totem comes to us from the Ojibwe language “spoken by the Algonquian tribes who lived around the shores of Lake Superior.” It referred to a tradition of heraldic tribal or clan devices that were often represented in painted wooden carvings, for example, the monumental totem poles we associate with the tribes of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. In other words, they symbolize and express identity.19 Art Historian Robert Storr, interestingly, describes The Berlin Totem (2008) as a form from early, not to say primitive, Greek sculpture called a stela, an erect human figure that is usually commemorative in nature.20 All of Kelly’s works in the totem series are oddly blank, like his abstract paintings, where shape and form have been tautologically hammered flat. The one in Austin is shaped out of a reclaimed redwood log resurrected from the bottom of a river bed, where it had languished since being logged in the nineteenth century. Its shape is described as “correspond[ing] to a segment of an imaginary circle with a radius of 3,079 inches.”21 At 18 feet, Kelly’s totem in Austin is taller than Rothko’s paintings, and it expresses a curved and flaring shape that both reaches out and hovers over the visitor, offering an inclusive embrace. It is placed in this building where we would expect to find the devotion of altars and the suffering of crosses.

Ellsworth Kelly, Austin, 2015. Southeast view. Artist-designed building with installation of colored glass windows, black and white marble panels, and redwood totem, 60 x 73 x 26 ft. 4 in. © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. Courtesy of Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin.

Inside Austin are 14 panels. They are not painted, but they are still reminiscent of Kelly’s 1970s paintings, in which the field of color is synonymous with the limits of each canvas. The Austin panels divide an ur-square, not monumental in scale, by fusing a piece of black marble to a piece of white marble, with the exception of one solid black square and one solid white one. The panels seem to follow the logic of some obscure mathematical progression or chart an endless territorial struggle between something black and its opposite, something white. I couldn’t help but think about that most ubiquitous oppositional pair in American English’s convenient flatland: black/white. They are arrayed evenly, one by one, throughout Austin, but, standing in for the paintings or sculptures that typically do the work of the stations, their black-and-white marble is like finding the right building material where you expect to find it—inside a Romanesque Italianate building, for example—but applied to the “wrong” job. I see the Stations’ material shuffling as a metaphor for the entire Austin experience—a redeployment of historical forms invigorated by the energy of new meanings—my meanings, and yours. Kelly’s meanings, whatever they may be, do not fix the work in any essential way.

In the 1980s, when I was reading Fried and others and arguing with my graduate school peers over what is now so easy to dismiss as a very small patch of ground, I witnessed a detonating transformation: Edward Weston’s photographs of his son are not the same after Sherrie Levine.22 Likewise, my pre-September 11 snow globe of downtown Manhattan, featuring the World Trade Center Towers, can no longer support its original cheery touristic intention. Meaning is always context sensitive. Take, for another example, Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid’s deft flipping of the deferential “taking a knee”23 or Confederate statuary in the age of Black Lives Matter.24 The evacuation of historical use by repetition of form—for example 14 paintings inside a “chapel,” or the Latin cross structure itself, or stained glass windows, totems and barrel vaults—opens out onto what I can only think of as representation, the terrain of pictures, language, laughter, and play, which is pretty much exactly what Clement Greenberg roundly condemned as “kitsch” in 1939,25 while facing the ascendance to power of both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, a time I think about a lot these days.

Ellsworth Kelly, Untitled (totem) for Austin, 1986/2015. Redwood, 216 x 31 x 5 1/2 in. Edition of 1. © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. Courtesy of Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin.

Writing this, thinking about the sublime, I turn to Immanuel Kant and find laughter there, too. In Kant’s Critique of [the Power of] Judgment (1790), laughter stands at a distance and both expresses and acts through surprise. At first, Kant associates it with a category he calls the agreeable, as opposed to the beautiful or the sublime, and he gives the example of the pleasures of a lovely dinner party accompanied by chamber music to which nobody is supposed to actually listen.26 He talks about joking, as around that sociable dinner table, and the laughter it produces: “Laughter is an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing.”27 That nothing is a gap, a suspension of expectation. He follows with this: “The very concept of the universal communicability of a pleasure carries with it [the requirement] that this pleasure must be a pleasure of reflection rather than one of enjoyment arising from mere sensation.”28 With reflection, we are in a mirror (stage), complete with floating sardine cans (a Lacanian joke),29 the symbolic order, and, I would add, reflex cameras, pardon the pun.

There is a gap, then, a moment perhaps, between sensation and reflection. Feeling, sensation, is different from reflection, which Merriam-Webster defines as “a thought, idea, or opinion formed or a remark made as a result of meditation.”30 Charles Sanders Peirce would call the sensation a “firstness,” and the relationship between sensation and reflection a “secondness,” by which he means it’s a kinetic, reactive, and productive train of thought, unstable until brought into at least temporary equilibrium by a “thirdness,” which could be either a thought or an action that can drive the train of thought forward again, and so forth. In Peirce’s universe, the sensation, reflection, thought, and the whole train of thought, as well as any actions it produces—laughter, tears, language or more art—are all meaningful signs. Meaning—signification—is always the result of interpretation, of reflection.31 Peirce would admit no substantive difference in the oppositional pairs I started with: Irwin’s inside/outside and, I think especially, Gilbert-Rolfe’s visuality/language. They are all, as experienced in your busy, meaning-making human mind, made of the same substance: thought.

Peirce was deeply influenced by the study of Kant’s philosophy. The beginnings of American Pragmatism lie in Peirce’s restless reflections on Kant, a train of thought he was still riding on when he died in 1914. Through the lens of Peirce, Fried’s final sentence in “Art and Objecthood”—“Presentness is grace”—is a demand to stop thought in its tracks, to insist on an unstable singularity, a brittle Peircian firstness, a two-dimensional schema in flatland, like a Romanesque or Gothic arch that needs a lot of buttressing to stand up.

Ellsworth Kelly, Austin, 2015. View of interior, facing west. Artist-designed building with installation of colored glass windows, black and white marble panels, and redwood totem, 60 x 73 x 26 ft. 4 in. © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. Courtesy of Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin.

In his chapter on aesthetic judgment, Kant gives us a definition of freedom: “By right we should not call anything art except a production through freedom, i.e., through a power of choice that bases its acts on reason.”32 Freedom, then, is an action based on reason, and with that definition, we have just boarded Peirce’s moving train of thought. Freedom is a sign of a reason-based choice, for example, both my laughter and your tears.

Above I spoke of binary oppositions, calling them a flattening shorthand for the undisciplined dimensionality of the experienced and expressed world, a shorthand that becomes annealed into the habits of language. In a 2017 essay, “Making Reason Think More,” Patrick T. Giamario suggests that the void thought confronts in that emptying of a tense expectation, the gap Kant identifies with laughter, is the stimulus that makes reason think around, through, and beyond habit. Laughter is the very engine that drives both Kant and Peirce’s train.33

Totalitarianism is a system where truth is always a matter of the latest and loudest rhetorical assertion. It rewrites the map of history by its deafening and relentless imposition of “alternative facts”34 and holds the very project of history hostage. Can laughter defeat totalitarianism? I don’t know, for all that the confrontation is producing great late-night television. When I watch Saturday Night Live or Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, I laugh and feel better—even if that midnight laughter simply tempers the immediately appalling into the snarkily agreeable. But that is only part of the emancipatory laughter I am trying to think through here.

In the introduction to the 1983 book The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, critic Hal Foster articulated another way out of the collapse of hegemonic modernism: “…a resistant postmodernism is concerned with a critical deconstruction of tradition, not an instrumental pastiche of pop- or pseudo-historical forms, with a critique of origins, not a return to them. In short, it seeks to question rather than exploit cultural codes, to explore rather than conceal social and political affiliations.”35

I drank the heady, bookish Kool-Aid of the early 1980s, before we lost so many great thinkers to fighting and dying from “the gay plague,” not to mention the murder of John Lennon by a “crazy white guy with a gun” on the streets of Manhattan—sound familiar?36 In my current exhausted despond, I return to the promise of Foster’s critical postmodernism, especially in the face of brazen American “firstness” buttressed by bombast, and the tone-deaf flaunting of insulated privilege on an “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” jacket.37

Is Kelly’s Austin an “instrumental pastiche of…pseudo-historical forms,” as Foster might argue? Is the Rothko Chapel? Sherrie Levine’s occupation of Edward Weston’s photographs of his son Neil is far more aggressive and frank, and might constitute a rule of thumb for the difference between criticality and pastiche. But, unlike the assumptions behind the conservative project of histories and canon building, fixed meaning is not a given of any art work. Surely what we see in artworks is always about us looking, in the present tense, rather than what is intended or thought to be built in, true and fixed as the North Star, in the work itself.38

Kelly has taken all of these historical forms: barrel vaults, totems, stations of the cross, and stained glass windows, not to mention the very idea of an ancient chapel as a place of refuge, and he has remade them. Possibly you could say “in his own image,” and you would not be wrong, but I think you would have settled for an old habit and missed the opportunity to board the train of thought to someplace else. Yes, I laughed in Austin, the sheer cheeky beautiful chutzpah of it all. It took my breath away, and begged the question: “So what is my remaking of the world?” I ask you, what is yours?

Let’s blow those gaps—the ones we recognize by our laughter—wide open.

Ellen Birrell is an artist and lemon farmer, and one of the founding editors of X-TRA. Footnotes

Immanuel Kant, Critique of [the Power of] Judgment (1790), trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 203–5. Italics in the original translation.↵ For the expanded field, see Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986).↵ I know this because I read Charles Sanders Peirce, Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic by Charles Sanders Peirce; Ferdinand de Saussure, The Course in General Linguistics; and Jacques Lacan, Écrits, a Selection.↵ I am excited to find in my research for this essay a book that addresses Charles Sanders Peirce’s very fecund ideas of “habit”: Donna E. West and Myrdene Anderson, eds., Consensus on Peirce’s Concept of Habit: Before and Beyond Consciousness (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2016).↵ “Images, which were never acceptable to Jews and Muslims, have become intolerable to all of us today. It may be an important sign that we cannot represent Jesus or his apostles anymore. Any representation that is not naïve is unbearable…. Nobody is visually naïve any longer. We are cluttered with images, and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine.” Dominique de Menil, Opening Address, Rothko Chapel (1971), quoted in Courtney Bender, “The Architecture of Multi-Faith Prayer: Rothko Chapel,” The Social Science Research Council Forums, August 4, 2014, http://forums.ssrc.org/ndsp/2014/08/04/rothko-chapel/↵ “The artist in fact turned down an o er to construct the work at a Catholic University because they asked that the building be consecrated, according to Kelly’s partner of 32 years, Jack Shear, who described Kelly as ‘a nonbeliever’ and ‘a transcendental anarchist.’” M. H. Miller, “Ellsworth Kelly’s Temple for Light,” New York Times T Magazine (February 8, 2018), https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/t-magazine/ellsworth-kelly-austin-last-work.html.↵ Those last two words are a transliteration from the Aramaic for Jesus’s reputed cross-side lament: “Lema Sabachthani—why? Why did you forsake me? Why forsake me? To what purpose? Why? / This is the Passion. This outcry of Jesus. Not the terrible walk up the Via Dolorosa, but the question that has no answer. / This overwhelming question that does not complain, makes today’s talk of alienation, as if alienation were a modern invention, an embarrassment.” Barnett Newman, “Statement,” Barnett Newman, The Stations of the Cross, lema sabachthani (New York: Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, 1966), unpaginated.↵ I emailed the Menil Archives about the specifics of the commission, and I received a reply that reads, in part: “Yes, there was a written contract with Mark Rothko. …The number of paintings was not specified. There are 14 paintings installed in the chapel and six alternate panels. …The 14 are installed according to the final plan he recorded upon completion of the paintings.” Lisa Barkley, in correspondence with the author, June 14, 2018.↵ See, for example, the monthly calendar of spiritual events: http://www.rothkochapel.org/experience/twelve-moments-series/.↵ In the talk “Vision’s Resistance to Language,” Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe makes an extraordinary plea that criticism should not employ pictorial metaphors to describe abstract or non-representational painting, because metaphors infest the visual with stories in ways that can never be undone. See Gilbert-Rolfe, “Vision’s Resistance to Language,” Beyond Piety: Critical Essays in the Visual Arts, 1986–1993 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 35–43.↵ James Elkins, Pictures and Tears (New York and London: Routledge, 2001). See in particular Chapter 1, “Crying at Nothing but Colors,” 1–19; passages at the end of the book, where he returns to Rothko, 202–4; and in the final chapter, “Envoi: How to Look and Even Possibly Be Moved,” 210–12.↵ Gilbert-Rolfe, “Vision’s Resistance to Language,” 38.↵ Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967). A PDF may be accessed at http://atc.berkeley.edu/201/readings/FriedObjcthd.pdf.↵ Now more than ever , “we”—a truly collective we of American citizenship and its aspirants, regardless of color, creed, gender, sexual preference, or ethnic origins—need to understand these words as provisional and aspirational, never done and dusted: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence (1776), https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript.↵ Douglas Cramer is referred to as a “soap opera producer” in a Vanity Fair piece about the opening of Austin last February. Nate Freeman, “How Austin Became the Home, and Namesake, of Ellsworth Kelly’s Final Masterpiece,” Vanity Fair (February 23, 2018), https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/02/ellsworth-kelly-austin. He may also be remembered as a founding trustee of Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art. See Suzanne Muchnic, “Douglas Cramer Strikes His Santa Ynez Set,” Los Angeles Times, April 27, 1997, http://articles.latimes.com/1997-04-27/entertainment/ca-52842_1_santa-ynez-valley.↵ See the title essay in Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), particularly 7–11, http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/kraussoriginality.pdf.↵ It is the ring of squares that depict the Kings of Judea; see http://www.medievalart.org.uk/Chartres/121_pages/Chartres_Bay121_key.htm.↵ Harry Cooper, “The Whole Truth,” Artforum 56, no. 9 (May 2018), https://www.artforum.com/print/201805/harry-cooper-on-ellsworth-kelly-s-austin-2015-75048.↵ See “totem,” Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/totem.↵ Robert Storr, “Robert Storr on Ellsworth Kelly,” from Artist at Work Video Series, Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies, US Embassy Berlin Videos (2012), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2nVFysfVrQ.↵ Blanton Museum of Art, “Austin Fact Sheet,” 2018.↵ I am referring here to Sherrie Levine’s photograph, Untitled (After Edward Weston, ca. 1925), 1981, and the book by Howard Singerman, Art History, After Sherrie Levine (Oakland: University of California Press, 2011).↵ Eric Reid, “Why Colin Kaepernick and I Decided to Take a Knee,” New York Times, September 25, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/opinion/colin-kaepernick-football-protests.html.↵ See the view from Breitbart earlier this year: Warner Todd Huston, “Black Lives Matter Demand Removal of Confederate Prisoner of War Dead Marker in Chicago Cemetery,” Breitbart, April 8, 2018; and Eric Foner, “Confederate Statues and ‘Our’ History,” New York Times, August 20, 2017.↵ See Clement Greenberg, “The Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review (1939), http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/kitsch.html. “A society, as it becomes less and less able, in the course of its development, to justify the inevitability of its particular forms, breaks up the accepted notions upon which artists and writers must depend in large part for communication with their audiences. It becomes difficult to assume anything. All the verities involved by religion, authority, tradition, style, are thrown into question, and the writer or artist is no longer able to estimate the response of his audience to the symbols and references with which he works.” And, “Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money—not even their time.”↵ Kant, Critique of [the Power of] Judgment, 172–3.↵ Kant, Critique of [the Power of] Judgment, 203. Italics in the original translation.↵ Kant, Critique of [the Power of] Judgment, 306. Emphasis mine.↵ Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book Eleven: The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, London: W. W. W. Norton, 1998).↵ “Reflection,” Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/reflection.↵ C. S. Peirce, “What Is a Sign?” (1894), Peirce Edition Project, ed., The Essential Peirce, Volume 2: Selected Philosophical Writings (1893–1913) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/peirce1.htm.↵ Kant, Critique of [the power of] Judgment, 170.↵ “Laughter is the cloth from which both the beautiful and the sublime are cut. The beautiful transforms laughter’s discordant relation between the understanding and the imagination into a harmonious relation, while the sublime transforms laughter’s discordant relation between the imagination and the understanding into a discordant relation between the imagination and reason…. Laughter, considered from a transcendental point of view, constitutes the most basic aesthetic judgment in Kant.” Patrick T. Giamario, “Making Reason Think More,” Angelaki 22:4 (2017), 161–76, DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2017.1406055. Italics in the original.↵ Emily Tess Katz, “Kellyanne Conway’s “Alternative Facts” Comment Sparks Internet Memes,” CBS News, January 23, 2017, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kellyanne-conway-alternative-facts-internet-memes/.↵ Hal Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press. 1983), xii.↵ Calling the AIDS epidemic “the gay plague” was a very efficient example of the suppression of an entire group of citizens by asserting an isolating essentialism. As for Lennon’s assassination, see Chet Flippo, “The Day John Lennon was Shot” Rolling Stone, January 22, 1981. For those who think that was all long ago and far away, former Beatle, Sir Paul McCartney, attended the March for Our Lives, in 2018, in memory of Lennon. See CNN WIRE, “Paul McCartney Attends March for Our Lives in NYC, Near Site of John Lennon’s Fatal Shooting,” KTLA Channel Five News, March 24, 2018.↵ Ted Robbins, “This Jacket Caused a Racket: What, Exactly, Does Melania Trump Not Care About?” Analysis, National Public Radio, June 21, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/06/21/622410485/whats-up-with-melania-trump-s-i-really-don-t-care-do-u-jacket.↵ What we call the North Star today is not, after all, the same star “the ancient tribes of Araby” used to navigate the great deserts.↵