Empathy, Embodiment and Abstract Art

My first experience of an empathetic response to a work of art happened in the second floor galleries of SFMOMA when I encountered Mark Rothko’s prosaically entitled No. 14, 1960. I was magnetically drawn to this 9 x 9 foot painting that seemed to project its presence from across the room. I felt compelled to enter the gallery and seat myself on the bench in front of it. What happened next was totally unexpected and slightly unsettling. After I calmed my mind and focused on what was directly in front of me, I experienced the sensation of literally falling, tumbling directly into the artwork. It wasn’t that the art had become an extension of myself or that I had disappeared and had merged with it, it was more that I had entered the universe that the painting had opened up to me and that I was experiencing this new world from within the frame.

Reproductions of this work do it no justice. I was aware of myself sitting on the bench but at the same time I felt enveloped, almost smothered, by the hot stickiness of Rothko's glowing golden rectangular. I was inside this fiery mass looking out through its orange-red skin. I could smell the dusky, smoky, sweetness of honey in beeswax and could feel the sensation of heat, like the hot summer sun, on my body. I felt as if I could explore the outer contours of this viscous but fluid mass by swimming through the channels created by the artist’s brushstrokes until I slipped through one of them and plunged into the deep indigo blue below. I hit the cold, brown bedrock beneath it that silenced all sensations and I continued to slide right out of the painting. I could imagine that the drips and splashes on the surface of the work were the traces, the visible evidence of my presence.
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What came to mind immediately was Icarus of Greek mythology who was able to fly using wings made of wax and feathers. In his exhilaration with flight he ventured too close to the sun, his wings melted, and he plunged to his death into the sea below. Icarus became my own personal title for this painting. I learned later that in an earlier Surrealist and more figurative stage of his career, Rothko’s interest was in developing an art based on myth. It was later that he began to create softly contoured rectangles of luminous color that seemed to float within their monumental canvas enclosures of which No. 14, 1960 is a prime example.

I didn't realize it at the time, but in a contemporary art museum, I was creating my own narrative that connected an ancient Greek myth, 19th century German aesthetic theory, and an American abstract painting. Robert Vischer and his theory of empathy has given me a framework for understanding my own experience. I've learned that the experience of an artwork does not have to be limited to the intellectual and visual, but can be fully embodied in unanticipated and rewarding ways that can open us to a greater understanding of the world beyond our limited view of self.