The Rothko Room

I’m having a sick day of sorts, and as such decided to finally dig into the new novel I bought a few weeks back, The Late Hector Kipling by David Thewlis. As some of you may be aware, Thewlis is an actor first and foremost (artsy types might recall his Cannes-winning performance in Mike Leigh’s Naked, but it’s probably just easier to point out that he’s the dude who plays Lupin in the Harry Potter films) but he also happens to be a sharp little thinker with a keen perspective on contemporary British art, which forms the basis of his first novel here.

The following dialogue is graciously pulled from the book’s first scene of Hector and his buddy Lenny wandering the Tate Modern:

‘Lenny, it’s not a joke and it’s not rhetorical. I’m just asking you, plain and simple, man to man, as one artist to another, why does Mark fucking Rothko always get his own fucking room?’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘Well?’
‘Er, well…’ and he sets about stroking his cheek as though the answer might be written in Braille on his pale and gorgeous chops. ‘Because he killed himself?’
‘No! No, no, no. Van Gogh fucking killed himself, he doesn’t get his own room.’
‘Sometimes he does.’
‘Only in fucking Amsterdam, or if there’s a retrospective.’
‘Everyone gets their own room if they’ve got a retrospective.’
‘That’s my point.’
‘Well, I don’t know, what the fuck, Hec? Because he’s spiritual?’
I do a little dance. ‘Spiritual? Because he’s spiritual?’ I say. ‘I’m fucking spiritual, but I don’t get my own fucking room.’
‘Maybe if you killed yourself.’
‘Maybe if I killed myself?’
‘Yeah, Hec,’ and he smirks and straightens up his back, like he might have a point, ‘maybe if you killed yourself.’
‘Yeah,’ I say and stick out my gut, ‘or maybe if I killed you.’ And I leave it right there.

And I have to admit to being stung by that exchange - not by the underlying cynical reality of Hector’s outrage, but by the knowledge that I myself have been repeatedly seduced by the very room that Thewlis is describing in this scene. Back when I still lived in the UK, I scarcely passed up the opportunity to visit the Tate Modern’s Rothko gallery whenever I found myself in London. Sitting in that dimly-lit space and gazing at those maroon canvases at ungodly lengths was my personal equivalent of church-going, and being reminded in this dismissively scathing bit of writing of the potential pointlessness of that experience just drives the similarity painfully close to home.

I know there’s a contrivance at work when the Tate chooses to hang these paintings (originally commissioned for a restaurant, if my memory is serving today) in a hushed, separate arena and turns the lights low to create that experience. I know I’m being suckered to a certain extent when I fall for the show. But I think the stage-dressing works. And I’m not sure if it would work with a whack of Van Goghs in place of the Rothkos. I think you need something as monstrously uncertain as those particular Rothko paintings to pull off the illusionistic hush.

Critically speaking, that still makes the room a sham. Critically speaking, that sham still opens up a space for asking why the sham works. That does, at least, make it something more than just spiritual. Thank god for that.

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