1

Art museums are meant to be discursive spaces (cf. Arthur Danto), and here are

two artworks that are very clearly having a conversation: Mark Rothko’s No 1. White and Red

(1962) and, competed only four years later but a lifetime apart, Yoko Ono’s Forget It (1966).

There is a sense of comedy in their visual dissimilarity: the first is a sombre painting; the other

consists of a steel pin placed upright atop a pedestal. But juxtaposed they possess between them

an almost uncanny level of tension and attraction. My research shows that the artist behind these

two distinct works each created their object in response to the same (and very important)

question: what is humanity’s spiritual place in the world? But despite their symmetrical origins,

analysis of the meanings of each artwork shows that they each represent completely divergent

answers (again, it’s that old dispute between the Platonic sublime versus Aristotelian

practicality). The key to understanding the relation between these two pieces lies in Heidegger’s

statement that "the mere object is not the work of art."1 Whereas we tend in everyday discourse

to refer to artwork as being material things (ex: we often say something like “the work of art is

on the wall”), what Heidegger is suggesting is that in essence art is always a call to action. He

puns on the meanings of artwork (object) and work (effect) to show that the real ‘art work’ is the

work that art does on us, or the work that art calls us to do.2 This is the first thing that unites No.

1 White and Red and Forget It. In a more profound way than other art objects, these two

artworks each give the viewer a task to complete. In order for them to exist as successful art, the

viewer cannot just look at them but must actually do something. For the Rothko, this is to wait in

quiet anticipation for the painting to begin working on you: to surrender to it and allow it to

(hopefully) give you a glimpse into the realm of the spiritual infinite. For Ono’s art it is the

opposite: her work commands us to give up these same transcendental aspirations, while her

1
A concept key to the argument of Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art
2
Mark Kingwell helpfully explains this point of Heidegger’s during a lecture he gave at the AGO
 2

materials allow us to perceive a model of ideal clarity, which is for Ono the true path to spiritual

enlightenment. My essay describes both artworks, compares their meanings, critiques their

answers, and shows that neither artist’s solution is completely correct.

I. No. 1 White and Red

This painting is a paradigmic example of Mark Rothko’s mature style in which the

spiritual themes of his work are most obvious. It is a painting done on a large canvas about 8 feet

high and 6 feet wide3, painted with a dark background over which float three different coloured

horizontal rectangles, each positioned above or below the others in secession from top to bottom.

The top rectangle is a billowy, cloud-white, the middle rectangle is a heavy near-blood red, and

the bottom rectangle is a dark chocolate brown. There is a depth to the painting that lies not in

any use of linear perspective (which is completely absent) but created through the use of

atmospheric colour and the unity created through the repetition of shapes, colours, textures and

linear directions. The hues are set against one another in a very precisely calculated way. As a

result, a definite chromatic chord emerges from this combination, and it in turn is supposed to

produce a psychic, emotional effect. This effect is the waited-for coup de foudre of the painting,

but while the colours themselves are the main drivers of the work, Rothko said that "If you are

only moved by color relationships, then you miss the point. I'm interested in expressing the big

emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom."4 No less than the exploration of the most epic and deep

seated emotions would satisfy Rothko, who was a deeply spiritual man committed to the belief

that there was a hidden grandeur to the world and that this hidden, higher awareness must be

searched for and found. It is thus fitting that Rothko said his painting begin an unknown

adventure into an unknown space.5 The horizontal boxes look like they are physically coming out

3
Unfortunately, the gallery card does not give exact dimensions.
4
MoMA
5
Simon Schama, Power of Art
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of the painting’s black background, creating a scene that can be described as a sort of landscape

view of the absolute, an un-Earthly panorama with its own visual vistas and aural attributes (in

musical terms, to reiterate the cliché of comparing abstract works to music, the painting does

seem to emit a hum, a noise something akin to the feeling of György Ligeti’s Requiem). In the

same way that Walter Benjamin remarked that ideally “the praying man is more silent than God”,

ideally this painting too should speak, unlocking a part of the viewer that has before remained

quiet. “The people who weep in front of my paintings are having the same religious experience I

had when I painted them,” stated Mark Rothko, demonstrating the ambitious scope of his

intentions to effect the viewer.6 He asserted in one of his formal statements in the 1940s ‘that the

subject matter is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.’ “For

his aim was to recreate the sense of awe, dread or numinous presence that had been associated

with the human figure in art (and lost, he thought, in the Renaissance); but to do it in an abstract

manner.”7-8 It is not for no reason that the borders of his rectangular colour fields are not sharply

defined edges but instead are hazy, cloudlike. His creations are poised as objects holding the

answers to unknown questions about an unknown God, a force you can find only if you

concentrate hard enough while gazing earnestly into his delicate nebulas of colour and form.

II. Forget It

Which leads us to Ono, with her steel pin literally shattering the aura of sacred enclosure

that surrounds the Rothko. Her creation is a five foot high square pedestal of clear Plexiglas that

has been topped with an upright two and a half-inch steel needle. The top right corner of the

pedestal (which is ambiguously situated between being a part of the artwork and being a separate

but crucial part of it) is engraved in black with the artists name, the title of the work, and the year

6
Tomkins
7
Hughes, 241
8
When one does not represent things, a place remains for the divine.” – Piet Mondrian
 4

of its creation: Yoko Ono Forget It 1966. Her object is the very absence of colour, of tone, and of

composition. What could such a visually ambiguous object mean? In the audio-visual media

presented beside the work, Monika Lenke, a young woman affiliated with the AGO’s youth

council, aptly suggests that this work represents the opposite of obfuscation, the needle that

comes without the proverbial haystack. With its clear and direct material existence it is an actual

personification of the clarity of mind Ono ascribes to, which ties in directly with the work’s

spiritual underpinnings. As an atheist, her spiritual assertion is that there is no God. The Spartan

brevity and bravado of her completely non-transcendent statement to Forget It is completely

anathema to Rothko’s attitude of reverent, elegiac quietude, and her work signals her dislike of

the idea of God with the upright needle indicating towards God and acting like a permanent

middle finger, as the inherent violence of the needle alludes to the ‘destructive’ power of her

claim (i.e. the evisceration of the idea of God). Furthermore, the needle’s upward orientation

represents our desperate need to attain unity with the infinite. The text signals the possibility of

release from that need.9 “By saying Forget It”, she has written, “we free ourselves from that

impossible journey. We can go forward, then, hopefully, without looking back.”10 Unlike Rothko,

who stews in his existential angst, looking to God/the Void to save him, Ono suggests that we

just forget the whole idea because it’s a worthless waste of time. In a 1966 statement about her

artwork, she goes on to argue that one should “abandon what you have as much as possible, as

many mental possessions as the physical ones, as they clutter your mind....It is nice to keep

oneself small, like a grain of rice, instead of expanding.”11 As Rothko justly or unjustly burdens

his viewers with feelings they may not have known they had, Ono encourages us to parse down

9
Hendricks and Munroe, 118
10
Ibid.
11
Ono, To the Wesleyan People
 5

our lives, the better to enjoy it to the full. These are the answers the artist’s present to the

problem of relating spiritually to the world. Their answers are mutually exclusive, which begs

the question of whether either of them are right.

III. Critique of Answers

Two unrelated real-world events lead the viewer to cast doubts on the accuracy of both of

their solutions. The first: “On the morning of Febuarary 25, 1970, Mark Rothko’s body was

found in the bathroom of his studio in New York. He had done a thorough job of killing himself

the night before; first gulping done an overdose of barbiturates and then hacking through his

elbow veins with a razor. He lay, fat and exsanguinated, clad in long underwear and black socks,

in the middle of a lake of blood.”12 After years spent finding no cure (spiritual or otherwise) for

his depression, he could no longer fathom living. The second: a decade after Rothko’s suicide,

and occurring outside an apartment building found 12 blocks due west of Rothko’s studio, John

Lennon, the husband of Yoko Ono, was shot dead by a deranged fan.

Whereas Rothko’s suicide is perhaps the most powerful argument in support of Ono’s

warning regarding the dangers of excessive attempts at overcoming the physical with appeals to

the transcendental, in the same way, John Lennon’s death is proof that it is just not possible to

simply Forget It, and ‘abandon what you have as much as possible.’ What is the purpose of

contemplation if it will not free you from the difficulties of life, but may instead magnify them?

And, alternately, how can one respect and cherish the memory of the one you love who has been

stolen from you without engaging in contemplation and quiet heartache (or, without doing

exactly the opposite of forgetting it)? While the two artists were no doubt supremely confident in

their answers at the time they made their art, the actual circumstances of life are never as neat

12
Hughes, 233
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and tidy as our opinions. This above critique evaluates the two artists solutions through appeals

to the non-objective elements of the work (the mythos around them), and the same results are

reached via a more concrete, physical comparison of the stated aims of the artists with the visual

facts of their work.

Ono wants to command attention with her sculpture, but situated directly beside an

enormous and highly colourful Frank Stella painting, Ono’s is an easy piece to miss and/or feel

underwhelmed by and just walk right past (I saw it occur repeatedly in the gallery while I was

taking notes). The irony is that for all her work’s brash confidence and uncaring flippancy (her

title can easily be interpreted as a command to look away from the artwork itself, and then purge

your memory of it), only the sensitive observer is able to comprehend the totality of what she is

attempting to do. Taken literally, only the viewer who doesn’t obey her command can remember

that they saw the work at all. But of course we don’t even have the cognitive power to listen; it’s

just not possible to Forget It at will.

Rothko’s paintings are meant to aid us reach beyond the now in a quest for the absolute;

however, a number of physical factors work against this intention. Rothko prepared his canvases

with a primer made of traditional Rabbit skin glue, which due to age and humidity is decaying,

and his paint, due to light exposure, is losing its vibrancy.13 Furthermore, his textured paint layers

collect dust atop the canvas, which, in a catch-22, is difficult to remove due to the fragility of the

actual painting (and thus it remains: a thin but very visible patina coats the AGO’s Rothko).

Finally, the Rothko, which depends so much on the viewer experiencing it in a state free of

distractions, is located beside the stairway to the fourth floor, as well as immediately around the

corner from where the elevator doors open with regularity, each time with a ding, a swoosh, and

13
Schama, Power of Art
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an ensuing crush of people walking in front of you. Streams of transcendentalist rhetoric have

been what has always greeted Rothko’s work, but the paintings deterioration and un-ideal

placement in the gallery shows it to be completely human. In a profound way that is at odds with

its intended effect, the painting is very much tied to the room, and cannot, for all its calls to the

vasty deep, escape the here and now.

IV. Conclusion

Hamlet:
Do you see nothing there?
The Queen:
Nothing at all; yet all that is I see.
Shakespeare: Hamlet, Act III, Scene I V

The Queen’s statement functions as the motto to both artworks. Entirely non-mimetic, in terms of

objective visual representation they each portray nothing but attempt to shed illumination on

potentially everything. While they position themselves in opposition, neither one expresses the

absolute answer. They both fail where the other succeeds. For Rothko, the emptiness of his work

is not the deliberate, polemic emptiness of Minimalism, but a sort of yearning vacancy, a sense

of waiting for an epiphany that may never come.14 Ono tries to supply that epiphany with her

sage advice to forget it and just live, and yet this waited for advice/intervention does not

completely satisfy, for it has been offered too quickly, without demanding enough effort and

expectation from the viewer to lend that conclusion credence. Which brings us back to

Heidegger. Both art objects create different effects; and yet, since neither satisfy’s completely or

consistently, we cannot choose just one; we must choose both. In order to make sense of the

immense and multifaceted nature of life, the two artworks must ‘work’ together. There are two

leather benches in front of the Rothko. The room with the Ono has not one bench at all. You are

14
Hughes, 241
 8

encouraged and expected to sit in front of and sink into the Rothko. For the Ono, one must (as

was intended) remain on ones feet moving around – there is no rest there, only forward motion.

The weight of life and tragedy means that sometimes we need to sit on those benches lost in

reverie, and sometimes we need to just walk around with our minds unencumbered. All the

possibilities for understanding are contained between those two options. There’s almost nothing

to it, yet that is all you need.

Bibliography

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