ASHES TO ASHES, DUST TO DUST

“Time is not a straight line, it’s more of a labyrinth, and if you press close to the wall at the right place you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walking past on the other side.”

“To be spectral is to be ghostlike, which, in turn, is to be out of place and time. Ghosts, as noted above, violate conceptual thinking based on dichotomous oppositions. They are neither fully present nor absent, neither living nor dead. The ghost is the mark or trace of an absence”

Rothko wanted to paint basic human emotion. So he painted red over red over red. Behind the colour he was looking for light. In 1942 he painted The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, where Iphigenia is not a girl, but a black pine already resined in grief. Above her the amnesia of light, an umber sky, shadows spilling white, the only motion the white hands of the wind. The story of Iphigenia was never about the girl, but the men who called for the blood of a girl knowing that the winds would one day change. The forest charred, the air stilled, deranged, and the truth beneath it all is fear, was always fear, the open grave, the charcoal line, the dead growing out of the living like lichen, the pine a blood-eyed child, the pyres loose stones and living rooms. Dress it up in the white hands of the wind. Call it need. Call it necessity. Rothko wanted to paint basic human emotion so looked behind the light and found blood rushing to no end and no knowledge of end.