rothko reminiscence

Last week I stumbled across an old piece from the Guardian (linked to from Boingboing, of all places) that reminded me of an unexpected artistic moment I had a couple of years ago.

I was never much of a Rothko fan. Rothko, schmothko, I thought. I mean, okay, some of his pieces were kind of pretty. But in my mind color fields always cut a little close to that hazy line between art and...well, not art. I still have trouble (and probably always will) with canvases done entirely in black or white or off-mauve. And I still consider it a huge milestone in my maturation the day I looked at a Pollock and classified it on the art side of the line. Though whether that meant my aesthetic sense had improved or declined, I leave to the reader.

But Rothko. Didn't really get him. Didn't really care to.

That changed during my last trip to London, when I went to the Tate Modern for the first time. I was wandering through the galleries when I came to their Rothko Room, a set of nine pieces he did initially on commission for The Four Seasons here in New York. They are among the gloomiest pieces of art I've ever seen. They're kept in a room, with slightly low light, all by themselves, just as Rothko wanted, and (as the Guardian piece suggests) when I was there it seemed most people kind of passed through, from one brightly lit space to the following one, without wanting to linger.



For me, though, it was astonishing. Though there was much more museum waiting, I lingered. I saw more than I expected to see. I'd never even considered color field painting supporting any kind of narrative, and yet these paintings belonged together, complemented one another, told me a story. Actually, the latter is stretching it. Better to say that they almost told a story, like a dream that you don't remember anything about except that it was vivid and very, very sad.

I'm trying to avoid purple prose (pun intended) about the pieces themselves. The Guardian piece provides plenty of that, as well as a sense, maybe, of the content of Rothko's lost dream. More important to me is that it reminded me of my reaction to the space and the art, and how in some tiny, indefinable way I was a different person when I left that room than I was when I entered.

poor associations

I went to a concert last night, a Miller Theater (of Columbia U.) performance of Renaissance polyphony by the Flemish composer Jacobus Vaet (I'd never heard of him before I bought the ticket either), performed by the Vox Vocal Ensemble, which is a fine local choral group run by a guy named George Steel, who is also Executive Director of Miller.

Having grown up pretty middle class, in a town with few to no entertainment options beyond broadcast TV (outside of surfing and getting high, neither of which I did), I watched at least a bit of wrestling in the 80s, the heyday of Hulk Hogan, Rowdy Roddy Piper, and, yes, George "The Animal" Steel. And it's unfortunate, but whenever I go to any Miller Theater event, and this group's performances in particular, that is the first and primary association I have.



So I'm listening to this heavenly (literally) music, performed by highly talented, formally dressed people, in a church, and in my mind I see a grunting, hirsute, spandex-clad madman rampaging in their midst, throwing folding chairs and upsetting music stands, and it's all I can do not to start laughing hysterically. Very distracting and, as I said, very unfortuante.

This isn't a particularly gloomy post, or even a particularly funny one for most people, given the likely minuscule overlap between the Vox Vocal Ensemble audience and viewers of 1980s-vintage WWF.

I think, though, that it helps answer the question of why, given how miserable I seem to tend to be, I even bother getting out of bed in the morning. As a key survival skill, it takes very, very little for me to amuse myself.