Seeing Stars

Dorothea Rockburne

Astronomy can lay claim to the oldest science. At least it was the first to wonder at humanity's place in the universe. It joins painstaking observation and leaps of the imagination, material properties and mathematics. What it might seem to exclude is guesswork.

One could say the same thing about Dorothea Rockburne. Along with such luminaries as Merce Cunningham, she passed through Black Mountain College on her way to New York, but it introduced the Canadian to math rather than to dance. For at least twenty years, that fascination has led her to science—but science as a window onto the cosmos and the past. Once she titled a series of paintings Guardian Angels. Now when she looks to the heavens, she sees stars.

Have mathematics and Minimalism ended up as natural science or mysticism? One could ask the same thing about lots of contemporary painting, caught between sensation and conceptual art. One thing, however, is certain. For Rockburne, a dedication to abstraction has become a dedication to color. Her "Astronomy Drawings" put painterly media through their changes. And her "Homage to Colin Powell" shows an artist in her late seventies still able to tackle the scale of a mural—and the time scale of natural history.

Two ideas of abstraction

Rockburne's signature work nearly excludes the human hand. In her Egyptian Paintings of around 1980, she prepared the ground with chalk, glue, and gesso—and added nothing. Folded paper, canvas, or linen determines its own geometry, and only its shadow breaks with fields of white. Sometimes a penciled rectangle frames the overlapping triangles, as if she were calculating and measuring where they would fall. Her biography insists on her study of mathematics. In an interview accompanying a small show at the New York Studio School, she keeps coming back to her interest in a ratio called the golden section.

The "Astronomy Drawings" themselves, however, look like anything but a textbook. The brightest primaries, against the broadest fields of white, form clean curves like galaxies, but in broad daylight. Dry brushwork, in acrylic and other media, leaves individual points of color like stars. Darker paired diamonds might suggest a night sky, but with uncanny bursts of light. Other works look like worlds in collision seen up close or within. Washes and drips obey or defy the laws of gravity, but here on planet earth.

Of course, art often overstates its basis in science. Realism long did, and new media still do now and again. Artists turn to nature for truth, but also for visions, metaphors, and traditions. Rockburne paid tribute to ancient natural histories this past summer, when she overlaid a constellation on that resplendent, near-abstract mural. The golden mean has more to do with classical proportions than higher mathematics anyway. And Rockburne has long earned the right to claim them as her own.

David Cohen, gallery director at the Studio School, notes similar tensions in the idea of abstraction. It "abstracts away" from reality to theory, or it returns to the sensory. By grounding painting in its material essence, Clement Greenberg managed both, at least in his own mind, and Rockburne always has. She started with an art form grounded in intuition, studying dance as a child. She worked at Black Mountain College alongside Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, shared in the first "happening," and hung out with the Beats. Yet her early paintings long seemed like a progressive pursuit of rigor.

They also track their time. Born in Montreal, she settled easily into New York, give or take separation and divorce. She assisted Rauschenberg in his studio, when his combine paintings were treating painting as anything goes. Yet she and others started thinking again at the boundary between two and three dimensions. In the 1960s she interrupted a single color for only the white outline of a rectangle. By the 1970s the color had gone, in favor of gritty assemblies that spilled over into surrounding space, like Robert Smithson in earth or Richard Serra.

Rockburne introduced the golden section soon after, a time of geometric abstraction for others as well. These paintings reintroduced oil, but in burnished tones and off-kilter shapes that still link to Minimalism. They also mark her first admixture of ground metals. The Egyptian Paintings parallel shaped canvases by Frank Stella, David Novros, and Ellsworth Kelly, to name a few. All along, though, one can see the traces of the artist. The first rectangles quiver with the mark of a brush, the assemblages earn their grit with tar on paper, and the geometric series embrace gradations.

Night and day

They were long my idea of the artist. To turn to the "Astronomy Drawings" is like night and day. The drawings, from the early 1990s to the present, mark an explosion of color and materials. In fact, it is a stretch to call them drawings, just as it took chutzpah to call the Egyptian Paintings paintings. The drawings include pretty much everything under the sun except oil, all identified meticulously by brand name. As ever, whether with intuition or geometry, Rockburne does not trust to chance.

Here, too, the drawings gain much of their impact from surprise. The largest and most recent works, with overlapping fields on the scale of Hans Hoffman in oil, are watercolors. The most watery, from 2006, are acrylics brushed or spilled over polyester. Imagery, too, draws attention to contrasts and paradox, as do titles like Wave and Particle. The paired diamonds from 2002 hold twin moons—one a white crescent of water-soluble acrylic on blue, the other of roughly textured copper. In Summer's Nighttime Sky of 1993, the horizon has the color of sunset, while the foreground has the color of night.

Actually, the explosion of color began before the "Astronomy Drawings," with Rockburne's compositions at their most geometric. Series like Guardian Angel of 1982 added bright oils and watercolors to the three-dimensional folds of the Egyptian Paintings. I would make them the centerpiece of a retrospective, should a museum finally offer one. They may also help explain why she has never had one. They did not give people what they expected, about painting or about her. They were anything but delicate or austere, and they came just as others were rejecting abstraction for broken plates and appropriation.

A whole generation of women experienced something similar—always active and often exhibited, but still on the fringes. Look up color-field painting today in Wikipedia and see if you find Rockburne in its long list of artists. Women often peak later, too, while working and raising kids, which does not help. She had entered her fifties by the time of Guardian Angel, in an art scene that already valued youth. Feminism in art became overtly political, too. Painting, people started to say, was dead.

One can see her painting as gendered anyway, starting with the parallels to her more confrontational male contemporaries. Paper and transparent sheets stand in for Serra's molten lead and shredded rubber. The mix of metal and pigment in the Golden Section paintings also relate them to decorative arts. The white paintings allow the fabric to speak for itself, like a weaver or a dancer. Their shadowy folds may even evoke labia. The tension between intuition and deduction raises questions of identity and gender as well.

However, her turn toward subjectivity and the cosmos predicts changes in art, too. Painting did not die after all, but narratives of progressive refinement surely did. In a show of "Drawing Connections" at the Morgan Library, Rockburne paired her work with Renaissance artists. And she chose not classicism but the Mannerism that followed, much as art today uneasily follows Modernism. Reasonable or not, Rockburne also takes her astrophysics seriously. If it has more to do with metaphors for spiritual crises and insights, that, too, seems contemporary.

Homage to the Milky Way

Rockburne's exhibition the summer before looked explicitly to the past as well as the sky. So did my own visit to the World's Fair grounds, as a native New Yorker. Unlike me, however, her vision of history has two scales, one personal and one cosmic. If that sounds pretentious, the artist does not treat a human life as a window onto eternity. Rather, she uses the stars to measure out the progress of a lifetime.

For her Homage to Colin Powell, Rockburne works big. The painting measures forty feet tall. It also spans the Milky Way. Its broad white diagonal crosses a larger field of blue, representing the night sky at Powell's birth. At completion, the mural made its way to the American embassy in Jamaica, the birthplace of Powell's parents. By then, she had added the constellations, as well as a ram's head signifying one.

Artistically, the Queens Museum does not often think big, but it does worry about its place in the community. Its concurrent show of art about the Middle East, "Tarjama/Translation," pointed to New York's diversity, which also includes a sizable Jamaican population. (Powell grew up in Harlem.) Along with its remarkable panorama of New York City, the museum has a relief map of the watershed, now in restoration. Its remaining exhibition the day of my visit, by Damon Rich on the housing crisis, lay somewhere between art, education, and propaganda. Charmingly, a public museum charts the failure to rein in the private sector.

With Rockburne the local focus includes the work's making. Starting in early July, she was painting on-site, and it adds another layer of concrete personal history. (And here you thought that only Rirkrit Tiravanija, Carsten Höller, and "relational esthetics" treat a museum as an open studio.) On a Sunday in August, I had the museum's tall triangular gallery to myself. I could not see the artist at work, but I could see paint marks where she has taped the canvas to the wall. Feathery brushstrokes filled out the simple blue and white fields of color.

Rockburne again thinks rigorously but intuitively. Homage to Colin Powell makes me think right off of geometry, although in a distinct tradition from American abstraction—Josef Albers and Homage to the Square. She has appeared in "Color Chart," which even sounds like science lab. Do some of her best-known work look like color-field painting held to the discipline of origami? Instead of folded canvas, recent work may surround geometric shapes with loose fields of color. Yet she still talks of them as manifolds.

As part of her temporary studio, she brought a bookshelf to Queens for reference. It included astronomy alongside art history, such as a volume on the Mexican muralists. The painting may not turn mural painting on its head, but it does turn its dimensions sideways. A study next to it would make a large abstraction all by itself. In Rockburne's late work, I still look for folds and shadows within the glorious color. I sometimes miss the sense of a self-creating art object, and I worry that the overlay of Powell's horoscope may add a fussier composition (or prove that Aries foretold war in Iraq). For a while, though, one could experience painting again as ambitious, unadorned, anything but austere, and in the making.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Dorothea Rockburne's "Astronomy Drawings" ran at the New York Studio School through May 1, 2010, "Homage to Colin Powell" at the Queens Museum of Art through September 16, 2009.