Rothko Chapel
Rothko Chapel is a temple to death, the great obliterator-transformer. Death rambling, in wounded dialectic with life: Nietzsche’s nihil, Adorno’s negation. Produced during Rothko’s late “dark” period, the fourteen large canvases contained in the chapel surround the viewer like the arresting monoliths of Stonehenge. Three triptych arrangements adorn the dominant square walls, four single paintings occupy the canted corners of the square-cross building, and a final field painting unifies the panorama. Despite no perfect symbolic syzygies, the groups of fours and threes feel mystically loaded, like the four cardinal directions, the Holy Trinity, or the four seasons of three months.
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Dean Kissick’s Downward Spiral chronicled the art world’s contradictions with the breathless urgency of an end-times prophet. Now, with the column closed and the critic in semi-exile, the question lingers: was he a voice of his generation, or just another scenester burning out on his own myth?
Tim Burns’s art blurs fiction and reality, often staging disasters before they happen. His 1972 Ghost Train redesign eerily foreshadowed the 1979 Luna Park fire, just as his 1977 film Why Cars? uncannily prefigured 9/11. Through rupture, collision, and shock, Burns’s work remains less prophetic than provocatively attuned to history’s unfolding disasters.
