Art Formula

Mark Rothko, at Pratt Institute in November 1958, proposed:

The recipe of a work of art—its ingredients—how to make it—the formula.

1. There must be a clear preoccupation with death—intimations of mortality… Tragic art, romantic art, etc. deals with the knowledge of death.

2. Sensuality. Our basis of being concrete about the world. It is a lustful relationship to things that exist.

3. Tension. Either conflict or curbed desire.

4. Irony, this is a modern ingredient—the self-effacement and examination by which a man for an instant can go on to something else.

5. Wit and play… For the human element.

6. The ephemeral and chance… For the human element.

7. Hope. 10% to make the tragic concept more endurable.

“There is more power in telling little than in telling all,” Rothko commented on developing his art formula above ¹. This recipe was more of a tip of an iceberg, adequate for a particular period of Rothko’s belonging to his times when it was necessary to recover from shard⁄nihilism (after Auschwitz, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima after decolonial liberation wars and destructions).

Still, what could be read here is that besides a formula for creating art, there is another one for being involved in avant-garde art as a modus vivendi. This is why I bring Rothko: through parallel development of meaning in creating art, archives are also a piece of creation or a creative process. As an act of amassing and gathering various pieces in UbuWeb through the backdoor, avant-garde archives were not only on the verge of becoming just another form of hoarding. What makes a difference is the process of providing meaning to this specific form of collecting. You take Marcel Duchamp as your lawyer or not. In this sense, an archive, whatever is archived, is contaminated with knowledge of the end, sensuality, tension, irony, and ephemeral chance of never ever being used for future forms of creation.

Invisible to the bustling crowds at the main entrance on Fifty-Third Street, it’s desolate except for the occasional noisy school group or quiet academic researcher entering and exiting. There’re no admission fees or snaking queues, only a lonely intern sitting at a desk. If you sign in and take the elevator to the top floor, you’ll find the MoMA Library. It was there in the late 1970s that a librarian named Clive Phillpot created a policy unlike any other in the history of the museum. Without asking permission, he decreed that anybody could mail anything to the MoMA Library, and it would be accepted and become part of the official collection. There was no limit to what could be sent, nor were there specifications of size, medium, or provenance. No judgments were made about quality either. The artist could be world famous or completely unknown—it made no difference.²

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