Rothko: The Late Series, recently ending its run at the Tate Modern, was, despite the crowds it drew, a rather empty encounter. This emptiness is, perhaps, not unexpected given what we have come to know of Rothko: serial blocks, grids and strips of colour, resistant to narrative, obdurate and unyielding. The Tate’s limited selection of a narrow palette, closely arranged, made for a puzzling and disenchanted kind of viewing. The familiar Seagram murals of the ‘Rothko Room’ put together with a selection from the Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art and Washington National Gallery of Art, formed the centre of this new exhibition, which branched into a set of smaller arrangements (the Black-Form series, the Brown and Gray works) and what seemed little more than a corridor display of preparatory sketches and cursorily-pencilled plans. Here, hastily hatched grids sketched on paper were displayed as though they might make a claim to be regarded as works in themselves, and though such studies might allow for an intriguing access into artistic process and preparatory meditations, here the prizing of Rothko’s preliminary sketches incurred a certain embarrassment. The display of these plans seemed an attempt to attest to the careful consideration given by the artist to the arrangement of his work; but for those who would willing enter this exhibition, it served as a clumsy and unnecessary assurance of his integrity that had almost the opposite effect. If you choose to engage with Rothko’s taciturn forms, those patiently repeated blocks of colour, then you must already believe in their integrity and attend willingly and trustingly with the belief that they will yield something. And this, ironically, is what the Tate Modern exhibition disclosed most efficiently, if unsatisfactorily: Rothko requires belief. You must believe in Rothko if only so that Rothko’s work might disclose to you an idea of belief that is perhaps the emptiest thing of all.

Rothko famously claimed that the people who wept before his paintings were undergoing the same religious experience he had undergone in their production, and this notion of a sacred kind of aesthetic encounter is one he repeatedly affirms in the late interviews and conversations that accompany the late work. The late works are profoundly religious works. Rothko acknowledged Kierkegaard’s Abraham as an important influence; the Brown, Black and Sienna on Dark Wine canvases of 1963 he explained as an evocation of Christ’s suffering; and the last triptychs for the Houston chapel (an installation he did not live to see), confirm that commitment. Religious expression, though, cannot take any demonstrable or explicit form in the late series – instead, the canvases are scrupulously resistant to that kind of articulation. Indeed, they assiduously abstain from any sure statement. Rather, Rothko seems to work instead at the sacrality of surfaces, the faith of a non-representational formlessness. Form fastens onto feeling, but formlessness too is its own means. Rothko’s late work seeks a feeling that is untethered to any form or thing; the broad, blank washes of surface colour sacrifice the suggestion of any object materiality for a more immediate expressive affectivity. If at times, those patiently worked surfaces intimate density, such intimations are illusory - the canvases stubbornly offer up surface as surface. When Rothko’s surfaces seem to conjure depth, conjure things, conjure a world even - the Brown and Gray series in particular sometimes resembles the austere diurnal motion of a northern hemisphere horizon, sometimes seems like the edge of the world or a moon - these passing impressions easily sink away as the painterly surfaces surface once more as surface. If Rothko’s late series achieves depth, then it is a depth born of reflection, but which insistently returns to its blanket surface. Rothko’s canvases determinedly conjure surfaces that belong to no object and under which there are no things. And yet it is precisely this resistance to objects, to things, to worlds, that renders these works profoundly religious.

 In his own late work, Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud recounts a letter from an atheistic friend who describes being, nonetheless, subject to a particular feeling of religiosity ‘of which he himself was never free, which he had found confirmed by many others and which he assumed was shared by millions, a feeling that he was inclined to call a sense of ‘eternity’, a feeling of something limitless, unbounded – as it were ‘oceanic’.  This feeling was a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; no assurance of personal immortality attached to it …  On the basis of this oceanic feeling alone one was entitled to call oneself religious, even if one rejected every belief and every illusion’.  Freud, though, remained unconvinced by this feeling, and diagnosed it as an error:  ‘…if I have understood my friend correctly, what he has in mind is the same as the consolation that an original and rather eccentric writer offers his hero before his freely chosen death: ‘We cannot fall out of this world’.  It is a feeling then, of being indissolubly bound up with and belonging to the whole of the world outside oneself.  I would say that for me this is more in the nature of an intellectual insight, not of course without an emotional overtone, though this will not be wanting in other acts of thought that are similar in scope’.

Freud informs his friend that the ‘oceanic’ feeling of cosmic unity, a feeling of something limitless and unbounded was only the manifestation of a narcissistic ego - an ego that sees itself in all things and whose ‘feeling of religiosity’ is only an expression of that absolute narcissism.  For Freud, the oceanic feeling of religion reminds us of an ego that is bound up with the world, an ego that cannot fall out of the world, but which also understands itself in relation to all things.  This is an ego that is not just incapable of falling out of the world, but one who is originally in the world, who identifies with all things.  Rothko’s aesthetic religion though is the inversion of this.  The late series articulates an idea of religious belief that is resistant to things, which is not identifiable as any material thing in the world, but is, at its most sacred, only expressive surface.

 The Black-Form series is perhaps the emptiest and most effective of all Rothko’s arrangements insofar as this series articulates the determined resistance to things most profoundly.  Rothko’s religion is necessarily without things - the late series intimates this idea of a belief which cannot depend on things.  Rothko’s black grids resolutely reserve the presence of no thing.  Rothko’s abstention challenges his audience not to believe in things, in order that they may believe in more than things, or the feeling beyond things.  The ideality of belief requires this emptiness - a feeling not of absence or vacancy or loss, but precisely of something more than what might be seen in any given object, thing or world.  The late series, at the last, assert a belief in belief itself, a belief in something more.   

‘I was always looking for something more’    Rothko, 1970

The invasion of Beirut in 1982, the first and second Intifada, the Gaza withdrawal, an attempted assassination of Saddam Hussein, the Battle of Fallujah; almost every one of Israel’s major military tactics in the mid-East region over the past three decades was performed in advance here in Chicago, an artificial but highly realistic Arab town built by the Israeli Defense Force for urban combat training.

Chicago stands in the middle of the Negev desert. It is a ghost town whose history directly mirrors the story of the Palestinian conflict. To create this alternative universe, Palestinian architecture has been carefully scrutinized. Roads and alleyways have been constructed to mimic the layout of towns like Ramallah and Nablus. In one corner, the ground has been covered in sand, a reference to unpaved refugee camps like Jenin. Graffiti has been applied to the walls with obscure declarations in Arabic: “I love you Ruby” and “Red ash, hot as blood”. Burned out vehicles line the streets.

It is difficult to pinpoint what it is about this place that is disturbing. It is perhaps the combination of the vicariousness and the violence. It’s as if the soldiers have entered the enemy’s private domain while he’s sleeping or out for lunch, sifting through all his private belongings with too much curiosity. It’s a menacing intrusion into the intimate.

The military technique of “worming” attests to this sense of intrusion. Worming refers to the Israeli military technique of navigating urban areas by moving through walls, instead of along streets and alleyways where the soldiers are most vulnerable. This is achieved by the use of ultrasound devices which ‘see through’ the walls of houses. Once the soldiers have determined a space is safe, they blast a hole through the walls, creating channels through bedrooms and living rooms. Almost every wall in Chicago is punctured by a star-shaped hole, the stamp of a controlled explosion.

The clean lines and empty spaces devoid of the mess of human presence make it simpler for the trainee soldiers as they navigate the streets and buildings, emptying cartridges into false walls.

According to the Israeli Defense Force, Chicago was not based on a specific town, but is a generic ‘Arab’ place, designed by the soldiers themselves, building on their intimate experience of the minutiae of ‘Arab’ cities. This convention of using the name ‘Arab’, rather than Palestinian, effectively obscures identity, and in this sense Chicago as a ghost-town evidences the thread of denial that runs through much of Israeli discourse about relations with Palestine.

Walking through Chicago is akin to visiting a decommissioned film set, the props and furnishings stripped away to reveal its most basic components – the walls, the apertures for doors and windows, the streets. And it is here, in this parallel world, that the occupation of the Palestinian territories is played out by generations of Israeli soldiers, over and over again.

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin have been collaborating for over a decade and are still friends. They have produced six books which in different ways examine the language of documentary photography. For more information see www.choppedliver.info

The above is an extract from Chicago (Göttingen: SteidlMACK, 2006), originally exhibited at Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, with the support of Arts Council England. How to Live will be featuring images from Chicago throughout February.