Red by John Logan

Author:John Logan [Logan, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849432214
Publisher: OBERON BOOKS Ltd

SCENE FOUR

KEN is alone, building a wooden canvas stretcher/frame. He is a good carpenter.

A Chet Baker jazz record plays on the phonograph.

He works quietly.

Beat.

Then the sound of a slamming door from outside surprises him.

ROTHKO rages in, flinging off his overcoat and hat.

ROTHKO: THEY’RE TRYING TO KILL ME! I swear to God they’re trying to kill me! Those prosaic insects! Those presumptuous, counter-jumping, arriviste SONS-OF- BITCHES! – These are same goddamn walls where I hang! You appreciate that?! My gallery! My walls! Polluted now beyond sanitation, beyond hygiene, like the East River, choked with garbage, all that superficial, meaningless sewage right up there on the wall! The same sacred space of de Kooning and Motherwell and Smith and Newman and Pollock and…

He stops.

ROTHKO: What is this music?

KEN: Chet Baker.

ROTHKO: Just when I thought this day couldn’t get worse…

KEN: It’s jazz.

ROTHKO: Like I care. When you pay the rent, you can pick the records.

KEN takes the record off.

ROTHKO fumes.

Beat.

KEN: So…how did you like the exhibit?

ROTHKO is not amused.

He lights a cigarette.

ROTHKO: (Seriously.) These young artists are out to murder me.

KEN: That’s kind of extreme.

ROTHKO: But not inaccurate.

KEN: You think Jasper Johns is trying to murder you?

ROTHKO: Yes.

Beat.

KEN: What about Frank Stella?

ROTHKO: Yes.

KEN: Robert Rauschenberg?

ROTHKO: Yes.

KEN: Roy Lichtenstein?

ROTHKO: Which one is he?

KEN: Comic books.

ROTHKO: Yes.

Beat. Then the coup de grace:

KEN: Andy Warhol?

ROTHKO doesn’t even answer.

KEN: You sound like an old man.

ROTHKO: I am an old man.

KEN: Not that old.

ROTHKO: Today, I’m old.

KEN: If you say so.

KEN goes back to working on the stretcher.

ROTHKO gets a Scotch.

ROTHKO: My point is… People like me… My contemporaries, my colleagues… Those painters who came up with me.

We all had one thing in common… We understood the importance of seriousness.

Beat.

KEN: You’re too much.

ROTHKO: What?

KEN: You heard me.

ROTHKO turns and really looks at him.

This challenging tone is new from KEN.

ROTHKO: What did you say to me?

KEN: Who are you to assume they’re not serious?

ROTHKO: Look at their work.

KEN: I have.

ROTHKO: Not like you usually look at things, like an overeager undergraduate –

KEN: I have.

ROTHKO: Then what do you see?

KEN: Never mind.

ROTHKO: No. You look at them, what do you see?

KEN: This moment, right now.

ROTHKO: In all those flags and comic books and soup cans?

KEN: This moment, right now, and a little bit tomorrow.

ROTHKO: And you think that’s good?

KEN: It’s neither good nor bad, but it’s what people want.

ROTHKO: Exactly my point.

KEN: So art shouldn’t be popular at all now?

ROTHKO: It shouldn’t only be popular.

KEN: You may not like it, but nowadays as many people are genuinely moved by Frank Stella as by Mark Rothko.

ROTHKO: That’s nonsense.

KEN: Don’t think so.

ROTHKO: You know the problem with those painters? It’s exactly what you said: they are painting for this moment right now. And that’s all. It’s nothing but zeitgeist art. Completely temporal, completely disposable, like Kleenex, like –

KEN: Like Campbell’s soup, like comic books –

ROTHKO: You really think Andy Warhol will be hanging in museums in a hundred years? Alongside the Bruegels and the Vermeers?

KEN: He’s hanging alongside Rothko now.

ROTHKO: Because those goddamn galleries will do anything for money – cater to any wicked taste.

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