Watching the Skies

Art in America, April, 2000 by Lilly Wei

Science has long fascinated abstract artist Dorothea Rockburne. A recent show of drawings followed her exploration of astronomical themes over the last decade.

In 1991, while Dorothea Rockburne was in residence at the American Academy in Rome, an event occurred that made a lasting impression on the artist. During a visit to a 17th-century villa, which, mysteriously, she has never been able to locate again, Rockburne came upon a room ornamented by a breathtaking fresco of the skies, of the planets and their orbits, constellations, stars. Looking at this celestial diagram, she heard a "devil" in her head say, "Rockburne, you can do that." Then she heard another, cautionary voice, an "angel," she presumes, that said, "Don't go near it."

From blowups of the photographs she took of that magnificent room, cut up and collaged within an ellipse, Rockburne made Open Sesame: Sky Chart (1991-99), a work on paper she tinkered with for years, citing it as the impetus for her present body of astronomical works, some of which were featured in her recent show "Ten Years of Astronomy Drawings 1990-2000" at Lawrence Rubin Greenberg Van Doren Fine Art in New York. The red colored-pencil ellipse that circumscribes the photographs in Open Sesame: Sky Chart refers to Kepler's first law of planetary motion, which states that planets travel in elliptical, not circular, orbits.

Rockburne's "exhaustive, empirical enterprise," as Robert Storr once characterized it, has long been propelled by issues that, for her, are most aptly and arrestingly discussed within the context of mathematics and the sciences. Coming out of two antithetical schools of thought--those of the Beaux-Arts and Black Mountain[1]--Rockburne has argued that the arts and sciences originate from a single source and are informed by the same reality. However, she emphatically identifies herself as an artist, a maker of art whose ideas are necessarily visual, who just happens to be "always fiddling" with science, always fascinated by questions that pertain to the nature of the physical world and its creations.

It is in mathematics and astronomy, as well as in music, that Rockburne finds harmonies, correspondences and patterns that constitute her idea of ultimate beauty and metaphysical significance. These manifestations of how the world works indicate that no shape is arbitrary or isolated, that each part resembles the whole. The ramification of such connections forms the true subject of her art. In the 1970s and 1980s, Rockburne relied heavily on a wide range of mathematics: set theory, the Fibonacci series, Mandelbrot's equation, golden section rectangles, Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry. She also looked to Pascal's research and to the mathematics of chance as outlined by the French physicist and mathematician Henri Poincare. At the same time, she continued to draw inspiration from Giotto, Piero, Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the spatial and coloristic dissonances, deformations and disjunctions of late Mannerism. In the years leading up to her encounter in Rome, she had become deeply immersed in astronomy and astrophysics, referring, in her work, to Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Heisenberg, Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking, as well as drawing on data from observatories around the world.

By 1992, evidently not heeding her Roman angel, Rockburne created her own interpretation of the heavens in the regal Northern Sky and Southern Sky, two labor-intensive murals at Sony Music headquarters in New York. More recently, she completed the electrifying Euclid's Comet (1997), a fresco secco in the Media Union of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Juxtaposing early Renaissance with late Mannerist spatial systems, this is a high-stepping performance in which she plays her dazzling sense of color to great effect.

Much of Rockburne's recent production has been extrapolated from the abundance of bedecked and bejeweled images transmitted from the outer reaches of space. The work in "Ten Years of Astronomy Drawings" is no exception. Mostly moderate in size, it is characterized by an explosion of vibrant hues and forms, the cosmos decanted into a teacup, as it were, and all the more clarified for its concentration, raising the question: At what scale can the magnitude of the universe be matched? What scale glory?.

The key to Rockburne's works on paper was her "discovery" in the early '70s that paper had not only width and length, front and back, but also depth. This led to a series of two-sided drawings--it didn't matter to the artist which side was shown--that explored what she calls paper's "natural geometry." At this juncture, she began to make her much-praised folded pieces, which were mathematically deduced and, as Rockburne puts it, had "nothing to do with origami." As well, she added the golden section rectangle to her repertory of forms; its proportions (the division of a line so that the lesser of the two lengths stands in relationship to the greater as the greater does to the sum of both), she believes, "plays a part in everything." This geometrical phenomenon has also inspired her to observe: "The universe has an up and down; I'm convinced that the shape of the universe--when they determine what it is--will be based on the golden section."