Driving, looking or crying without GPS

                                        Underground Fantasy, Mark Rothko (1940)

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​Mark Rothko, if he wasn’t dead already, might have wanted to kill himself. Smoking a cigarette, despair darkening the grey wisp, he leans against Louis’ - Vuitton not the Sun King - white wall. He studies the swarm of phone wielding visitors flying through his current retrospective in Paris. What’s the point he thinks as he heads for the exit one more time.

I didn't see him go. I was standing before one of his enigmatic early paintings of the New York subway, when an arm, then the torso of a woman slid around me to hold her phone directly in front of the painting. Oblivious to having obstacled my seeing, she took two pictures and slipped away. I turned to watch her go.
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                                                                                   ©️ theincorporeal

​Rothko worked tirelessly to create work that touched, or spoke to what is essential in each of us. He took his and others’ art seriously, striving, as Christophe Rothko states, “to communicate on an elemental level.“ He does.

Many people have wept - quite a familiar response, according to his son - stood before his paintings. Some have shrugged and carried on walking. Others remain outraged at the high regard held for his colourful nothingness. Although two friends who have seen this exhibition have been taken to tears, I was too distracted to get lost. The place, the playground, where I might have danced and wept, was too often invaded by the wielders.

Whether his work speaks to you or not, if there is no time for a dialogue, or deep engagement, with a work of art, then what are we doing there. Sprinting or shuffling from picture to picture, taking photo after photo  is our new way of seeing. But does this capturing, this collecting,  lock us inside ourselves? 

​In our divided societies, it is easy to dismiss anyone who questions the merits and consequences of the ways we live now as a technophobe or Luddite. But, as Kyle  Chayka writes in an article on the new Luddites,
        
                  In the era of A.I., we have another opportunity to decide whether
                  automation will create advantages for all, or whether its benefits
                  will flow only to the business owners and investors looking to
                  reduce their payrolls. One 1812 letter from the Luddites described
                  their mission as fighting against “all Machinery hurtful to Commonality.”
                  That remains a strong standard by which to judge technological gains.


Without an examining of how we live, are we abdicating responsibility for the ways in which existence unfolds? Whose life is it anyway? Are we puppets for the profiteers, or actors in an absurd drama where we might be able to edit a slice of the script? Is the only remaining purpose of art: to furnish us with images we can reproduce and post. Kerching for our cultural capital and lucre for the tech companies to which we are enthralled.

​If you believe the brilliant and polemical art critic, Jed Perl, the hurly burly’s done, the battle lost. In a recent article in the NYRB,  -  well worth a read if you care about such things -  starting from a Supreme Court decision to rule against photographer, Lynn Goldsmith, getting any credit for her photograph of Prince that was cropped and coloured by Andy Warhol, he writes about the triumph of organisation over transformation. How the Warholisation of art has already taken place:  “After Warhol, confronting Picasso’s (art’s) enigmas may seem as retro as taking a car trip without GPS.”

Enough of my stiff rambling, I’ll end with one of my daily poems - I’m still going - from the journey to Rothko on Eurostar whilst reading his son Chrisropher’s book…

                                                             
                                                              On reading Christopher Rothko

                                                              travelling on lines
                                                              of filial love
                                                              from London
                                                              to Paris

                                                             there is no time
                                                             given to the aches
                                                             of enforced distraction
                                                             I am lost

                                                             thick thoughts
                                                             rallied and railed mind
                                                             taken to a pulling
                                                             together of loss

                                                             the father he
                                                             never had
                                                             resurrected
                                                             in the playground

                                                             where canvas
                                                             and unfettered
                                                             human heart
                                                             dance in a coupling 

                                                             a turning wrought
                                                             from the soul’s
                                                             tragic rhythm
                                                             strain sung out

                                                             from beyond
                                                             suicide’s knot
                                                             a father lost
                                                             what could
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                                                             have been
                                                             could be
                                                             stirred in
                                                             the looking

                                                            arrival to another       
                                                            land goes unnoticed
                                                            these windows
                                                            hold no light

                                                            the dark glow
                                                            of his rectangles
                                                            more fertile
                                                            than moonlit field
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                                                            his son stands
                                                            before them
                                                            in raw love
                                                            weeping and writing