Mark Rothko and the Period Eye

The weekend before last I attended the play reading series presented by Thus Spoke Ann Arbor, the Chinese Drama Club. The performance featured John Logan’s The Red, a two-character bio-drama about the postwar American painter, Mark Rothko. The two actors sat at the two ends of the table and read from scripts, with a girl facing us with her back reading the narrator’s lines. The costumes were simple and there were only a few props—a canvas displayed on an easel, a paint bucket, three lamps, and that’s all.

The two men engaged in intense discussion about the aesthetic of Rothko’s works, the works of his contemporary artists, the relationship between philosophy and art, the purpose of art making, and their past memories. It is interesting to observe how the relationship of the two changes subtly as the plot develops. In the first half of the play, Ken, Rothko’s (fictional) assistant, appears as a modest and deferential figure, who hardly dares to express any oppositions to Rothko’s arrogant harangues. However, in later acts, he becomes stronger and more mature and starts challenging Rothko’s aesthetic of art. In the final act, to repute Rothko’s disapproval and harsh comments on several pop artists, he criticized Rothko’s hypocrisy and self-approbation, and points out that Rothko’s art has become obsolescent.

I was shocked to hear someone describing Rothko’s art as outdated. As an art history student who is always stuck in the past, more often than not I look at medieval, even ancient stuff, or, at least pre-modern. Nineteen century is already called “modern,” when it is about 150 years ago. Thus, having never got the chance to take the modern and contemporary art class with professor Potts before, I always have the impression that artworks created after the 19^th century are just too “new” for me. I mean, of course I like them, Jackson Pollock, de Kooning, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein—he is definitely my favorite—not to mention the main reason I was attracted to this play was Rothko. However, I tend to group them together, even though I am aware that Warhol and Lichtenstein came after the former ones. It is hard for me to imagine the scenario when a pop artist raises his eyebrows when talking about Rothko and refers to him as “some old guy who plays with his color blocks.”

This reminds me of the concept of period eye in my Renaissance class. Baxandall developed this term to invite a viewer to consider the original cultural context when looking at an artwork—how the work was viewed and understood by its contemporaries. Imagine how striking would it be when linear perspective was experimented by artists like Brunelleschi, those Renaissance artists who we now call the “old masters.” Aren’t they the ones who pioneered new art forms in their times, forms that we deem as classical canons today? I should be more careful with calling something “the old stuff,” because they may be the most innovative inventions in their times.

It surely takes me long enough to finally realize the fascinating dynamism in the history of art.