Rothko at the Tate

On Friday I visited the Tate Modern. That’s one of the great perks of this trip. I’m able to see all the major museums in four large cities without actually being on an art history off campus trip. Unfortunately the Kandinsky exhibit at the Tate had just closed. It seems that every time we show up in a city the exhibits close- we missed the Dadaism exhibit at the MOMA in New York. At the Tate they were installing a new exhibit into the Turbine Hall so we weren’t allowed inside. Carsten Höller is installing a series of slides throughout the Turbine. However looking at the space through the viewing windows was amazing. Its so overwhelming and large. To design a work for the room must be incredibly challenging. There is such a vast collection of work at the Tate that missing the Kandinsky really didn’t matter and I might try to go back to check out the slides.

I was particularly impressed with the small room of Mark Rothko paintings. He had originally painted them for The Four Seasons restaurant but had realized their dark tones weren’t really suitable for a commercial restaurant. So he sold them to the Tate instead. They were large-scale color studies of maroons, blacks and reds. The room was small and low lit so they were incredibly powerful and massive. His brushstrokes were gestural and confident. The rough rectangular shapes created the impression of bricks. Rothko said we was inspired by Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence, which he described as powerful rich reds that “made one want to but his head against the wall.” The sense created by the library was oppressive to Rothko. The closeness of the room at the Tate and the low lighting created a sense of dream-like intensity. It was passionate but calm. The tension between the muted reds and the largeness and grandiosity was interesting to me.

In the room I was thinking about the sense of oppression Rothko was going for quite a bit. I realized what made the room rather oppressive for me was an element he couldn’t have foreseen- the surveillance camera. While its standard practice to install cameras in museums, it is not generally standard for them to be fixtures on every street corner. The average Londoner gets caught on surveillance camera over 300 times a day. Cars moving in and out of central London and the movements of commuters on the underground are all tracked. The ubiquitous surveillance here is overwhelming; everywhere I go I see signs for CCTV. I wonder if its more surprising that we don’t have surveillance in America like this or that Londoners don’t really care that they’re being monitored constantly.

Comments

[Mike]

Sometimes it pays to be numb of the existence of mini spy camera if it means being safe from crimes.

[EstadsSitseeta]

It was a effusively crass sensation. As I did I complected his debt as my attackand breathed deeply, classifying from his seesaw job.