Susan Rothenberg

American painter (1945–2020). On the wiki, Rothenberg is the case study through which Caleb Faul (2024) argues for an interactive ontology of painting — a thesis about painting and the perceptual world that uses Rothenberg's 1990 painting Three Heads (three intertwined serpentine horse-necks over a watery field) to render the activity-passivity confusion in painter-and-painted phenomenologically visible. The wiki's interest in Rothenberg is not art-historical but philosophical: she is the painter whose practice and self-understanding (per Joan Simon, Susan Rothenberg 1991) authorize Faul's connection register — painting horses as neither copying nor projecting but connecting with particular animals in a particular place.

Key Points

  • Career trajectory relevant to the wiki: Famous in the 1970s for monumental, pared-down horse paintings (silhouettes against vast monochrome fields, often with diagrammatic lines). The horse subject then receded; her work moved through non-figurative phases. After moving to New Mexico in 1990 and becoming personally acquainted with flesh-and-blood horses, she returned to the horse subject — but her later horse paintings (including Three Heads) are less recognizable as horses than her 1970s ones.
  • Why the later horse paintings are less recognizable, not more: This is the puzzle Faul's reading turns on. Personal acquaintance with horses did not produce realism but the opposite — what Faul (citing Deleuze on Bacon's "visual clichés") interprets as a scrubbing of inherited mimetic conventions, leaving an ephemeral suggestion of horse-form rather than a depicted horse.
  • Self-understanding (the "connection" register): "I used to think of [horses] as flat, quiet images. Now I know they're all muscle and gristle and each one's different. They step on your foot — it hurts" (Rothenberg, in Simon, Susan Rothenberg 1991: 169). Joan Simon characterizes Rothenberg's New Mexico paintings as "a connection to and a way of locating herself in the new landscape" (Simon 168). The connection vocabulary is Rothenberg's, not the philosopher's.
  • Critics' paradoxical formulations: "An ambiguous balance between personal expression and objectified form" (Karl Ruhrberg, Painting 2005: 383); "as inscrutably private as they are publicly accessible, as formal as they are magically expressive, as figurative as they are abstract" (Joan Simon, Susan Rothenberg 1991: 9); the New Mexico paintings as "both the purest abstraction Rothenberg has yet made and also her most realistic, intimist work" (Simon 169). Faul reads these formulations as registering — without resolving — the activity-passivity confusion her work makes visible.

Three Heads (1990)

The focal painting in Faul (2024). Faul's description (drawing on Simon 1991: 170 for reproduction):

Most of its expansive canvas is covered by a field of grayish blue–green, reminiscent of water in its shimmering play of light and the faint suggestion of reflection around the edges of that which intrudes into the field. This intrusion comprises a trio of intertwined serpentine forms, two entering from the left side of the canvas, one from the top. These forms move toward the middle of the canvas, each terminating in what appears to be a head, these heads themselves being layered atop one another as if viewed from above, perhaps in differing stages of bending down to drink.

The serpentine necks are so unhorse-like that Joan Simon suggests the image is "equivalently abstraction or representation" (Simon 169). The painting does make sense as a painting of three horse heads — but the horse-form is barely recognizable, requiring the viewer to grasp horses through a deformation of the perceptual sense they have had hitherto.

What the Wiki Does With Rothenberg

The wiki's engagement with Rothenberg is mediated by Faul (2024) and is therefore philosophical, not art-historical. Three things follow:

  1. Rothenberg as test case for institution-extension: Faul reads Three Heads as the painting in which MP's institution-logic, applied to the painter-world relation, becomes phenomenologically audible. The horses' "muscle and gristle" first-person register (via Rothenberg's quote) and the painting's resistance to photorealism together do the structural work Faul's interactive ontology requires. See interactive-ontology §"Stakes" for how the case-study works.
  2. Rothenberg as supplier of the "connection" register: The wiki's connection concept (positionally load-bearing in Faul) traces to Rothenberg's own first-person account of her practice — not to a philosophical vocabulary. This is documented as a Silent Key in the Faul source page / extraction note. The register is practical-relational, embodied, situated — distinct from Buberian I-Thou, Bachelardian hermeneutic-reverie, and Latourian actor-network framings (false-friend cautions in Open Questions below).
  3. Rothenberg as the polemical target's case study: Karl Ruhrberg's "ambiguous balance" framing of Rothenberg is what Faul argues against — not because it is wrong but because it accepts the subject/object distinction it should challenge. The wiki picks up this polemical-target relation rather than treating Rothenberg as a settled art-historical figure.

Connections

  • is the case study for faul-2024-ontologically-interactive-painting — the wiki's only source on Rothenberg; the page is mediated, single-source, and should not be cited on other pages as a settled art-historical reference.
  • is the test case for interactive-ontology — Faul's coined term takes Rothenberg's painting as the case in which the metaphysical thesis becomes visible.
  • supplied the *connection* register — Rothenberg's first-person description of her practice as connection with particular animals authorizes Faul's third-mode reading (neither copying nor projecting).
  • is structurally adjacent to the case studies in vansorge-2025-painting-as-framing (Katharina Grosse, Amy Sillman) — both van Sorge and Faul build their arguments around contemporary women painters whose practice resists Greenbergian medium-essentialism. The structural parallel is recorded on interactive-ontology §"Connections."
  • contrasts with Rosa Bonheur as a comparison painter — Faul mentions Bonheur (raw line 68 / p. 196) as a painter of horses who would yield a different "perceptual sense of horses" than Rothenberg, registering that the institution-logic produces divergent nuances across painters. (Bonheur is not currently a wiki entity.)

Open Questions

  • What is the relation of Rothenberg's stated connection register to her actual studio practice? The wiki's account is mediated by Simon (1991) and Faul (2024); a future ingest of Rothenberg's own writings or interviews could test whether the connection register is consistent with how she described her work elsewhere.
  • Does the same reading extend to Rothenberg's earlier (1970s) horse paintings? Faul (footnote 54) suggests his analysis "could be extended even to the most representational or abstract paintings"; whether the 1970s horses (more clearly horse-formed) yield the same institution-extension reading or a different one is unaddressed.
  • False-friend cautions on the connection register:
    • Rothenberg's "connection" ≠ Buberian I-Thou. Buber's framework presupposes two subjectivities (or a subject and a quasi-subject); Rothenberg's connection is practical-relational with particular animals, not a doctrine of intersubjective address.
    • Rothenberg's "connection" ≠ Bachelardian hermeneutical reverie. Bachelard's reverie is poetic-imaginative; Rothenberg's connection is embodied-practical (the foot-stepping detail registers as bodily, not poetic).
    • Rothenberg's "connection" ≠ Latour-style actor-network theory. ANT presupposes a flat ontology of actors; Rothenberg's connection is non-symmetric — she is the painter, the horses are not.

Sources

  • faul-2024-ontologically-interactive-painting — the wiki's only source on Rothenberg. Faul's Part 2 (pp. 192–195) is the primary engagement, with Joan Simon's Susan Rothenberg (Harry N. Abrams, 1991) as Faul's principal mediating source — Simon supplies biographical context, the Three Heads reproduction (p. 170), Rothenberg's own quotes (pp. 168–169), and the critical formulations (p. 9, p. 169) Faul polemicizes against and with. Karl Ruhrberg's Painting (Taschen 2005, p. 383) and André Malraux (cited only via Ruhrberg p. 10) are Faul's polemical targets on the "ambiguous balance" framing.