Rothko Chapel

It's Morton Feldman.

He was commissioned to do a piece of music for the Rothko Chapel.

I have real feelings about Texas, like not great feelings, but this last time I drove through Texas, I went to the Rothko Chapel again.

It's in Houston and it's this amazing edifice that was built just for like a place of complacency and a place of recollection and a place of meditation.

And there are huge paintings done by Mark Rothko that were specifically made for the space.

And there's just a tone in the space that like you've never experienced before.

And it kind of changed my life.

So anytime I go through Texas now, I always make it a point to go to Rothko Chapel.

Yes, so we're looking at something more than just a work by Mark Rothko, but actually the idea of an entire environment that has been created to experience the works of Mark Rothko.

14 canvases in all in what's known as the Rothko Chapel.

So, Joost, talk us through this a bit more.

It was conceived by two very wealthy Texans, Dominique and John de Menil in Euston.

And they conceived of a non-denominational sacred space.

The chapel itself was devised by architect Philip Johnson and some of his associates.

Paul is talking about the idea of the letter, the Corinthians being a living letter, an epistle, and the idea of the written word versus the spirit, the grammar versus the numer.

And it's this idea that it's written on their hearts rather than written on tablet stone, something which is part of lived experience and which is more than.

That's where it gets wild.

How do you write the sound of a color? I go to Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel.

Deep cut.

Whole different register.

Most of the examples she gave linked white paint to racism.

In one, White supremacists spattered white paint outside the Rothko Chapel in Houston, in Houston, and, uh, and in 2018.

She went back...

How, how long ago? That's eight years ago now.

Uh, some allegedly White supremacists, and not very creative or, uh, uh, violent White supremacists, they splashed white paint outside of a chapel, the Rothko Chapel in Texas.

In another, white paint was used to vandalize a 100th anniversary memorial gallery to the Tus- Tulsa Race Massacre in 2021.

But, you know, the massacre was in, uh, uh, 1921.

Yeah, and that reflects both the logic of how you guys brought this show together, but also the way that Dana staged our interactions with images and paintings anyway as provocations in an ongoing dialogue and part of a kind of moving discourse in which they become fixed pivot points, but ones that you have to encounter physically to kind of make work.

And understanding, parenthetical, like, understanding just what a privileged scenario that is to, like, go to the Rothko Chapel or go to material or go to see these things in real life.

Like, that's the ideal phenomenological encounter.

It's not, like, required.

Both, I swear, were secretaries in training.

Once in the Rothko Chapel, I dozed off, waking not to black panels but the invisible thing inside me, the kaleidoscopic pulsing that won't stop, not even when my body stops.

I'm haunted by so many things, by wrecked cars and black holes, by the older brother my mother miscarried, by ragged beauty everywhere.

by my daughter's toddler Jojo in my kitchen sink, waving goodbye to draining bath water, whirlpool as elegy.