Unfinished Business

This video turned up as part of a course I am taking on Abstract Expressionism. It is provocatively symbolic. It announces the room where the Rothko's given to the Tate by Rothko will hang, without showing any of the works.

The backstory is this... Rothko repudiated his agreement to provide 600 square feet of paintings for the the new Four Seasons restaurant at the Seagram Building in New York. Rothko later gave nine of the paintings that he had intended for the Four Seasons to the Tate, insisting on an exclusive room for his paintings. On the morning he died, after slitting his arms, creating a a pool of blood roughly the same size as and as abstract as his own paintings, the works arrived at the Tate.

At the request of Rothko, The Tate, like the Phillips Collection, has created a special room to view the works. This video was created to announce the "Room."

We might all agree the color and luminosity of Rothko's works have a transformative power. As distillation of human experience, his works are not just abstract exercises. So...can this video be re-contexturalized as a post modern abstract exercise? An "abstracted" commentary, devoid of color, luminosity, and human experience, on the packaging of art?

Stripped of all content, yet referencing it, Rothko repackaged and absent — an unfinished installation and unfinished Beethoven too. How modern can you get?

A slender ray of light

'The Seduction of Light: Ammi Phillips/Mark Rothko Compositions in Pink, Green and Red', open until March 2009 at the American Folk Art Museum is one of those ideas held by a very slender thread. The correspondences the curator sees in the works in looking at the effect of light through such elements as color and form and in color mixing by artist's hand could be applied to any number of painters. She further stretches the thread by referencing the rapturous pinks of European religious painting and suggests a reference in these two painters, one of whom never left an early America. Linking painters throughout history who love the art is certainly democratic, but this show has too slender a premise for me. That being said, you should run up and see the show, one glorious painting after another, a slender ray of light enormously satisfying and illuminating.