Mark Rothko's Garage.

Mark Rothko’s Garage
There’s a picture somewhere that shows an aging Mark Rothko, maybe somewhere around 50, sitting in his garage on a metallic chair, a brush in one hand and a painting in progress tilted in the other. Against the backdrop of shelves of junk and cluttered walls, he scrutinizes the painting he’s holding. The canvas is stained a deep blood red, and the outlines of a central lighter colored rectangle are just coming into focus.


The first time I saw the photo it stuck in my head for no good reason; only after a while did I realize what was bothering me about it. Mark Rothko was a painter of the ineffable, an artist that reached for a point in the infinite distance, his work attempting to find a pathway to spiritual utopia. He was proud of the fact that his paintings caused viewers to start weeping in museums.

So what was he doing painting in a garage?

Rothko, sitting in his garage, surrounded by the grey detritus of everyday life, looking suburban. And yet the painting he holds in his hand, roughly, by the canvas stretchers, is supposed to be a gateway to a plane above the human milieu, infinite calm. It doesn’t seem fair. It doesn’t seem right that this perfect object should be made by someone sitting on a rusty chair gazing critically at the thing like it was a disobedient dog. Don’t paintings like this get excreted unbidden from the walls of MoMA, pre-canonized? Mark Rothko in his garage. It was just too messy.


This is a problem about the innate humanity of art, the grit versus the glossy sheen that gets slopped on by the pedestal of modernism, the aura of a lot of money and the white box chapels that we keep our art in. Where do the dirty hands of the artist meet the finished product, prepped for viewers and critics and onlookers? Where are the blood and guts?

Art has to get made. The unexplainable, the floating-in-the-air, has to get processed down by some enormous act of will, fueled by pressure and insecurity and fallibility, into a thing that, in Rothko’s case, has the look of the infallible. No umbilical cord left, no blood and mucus-spattered squalling infant. Where do we make the jump from something made in someone’s sun-baked, dusty garage to the infinitely clean pinnacle of modernism that Rothko’s paintings make on a white wall? The artist was fond of calling his ethereal paintings “facades”; the term seems most appropriate describing this dichotomy of process and product.


Maybe gazing at the surface of a Mark Rothko painting for long enough will elevate you to the kind of spiritual state the artist had in mind. But then there’s the back side, the artist sitting in his garage. I tend to think that the garage is just as important for a viewer to see as the surface. Unfortunately, most museums don’t make it easy. The work looks resolved on the walls, set up into some unknowable cosmic order.


Every painting in MoMA’s modern galleries is a lady on the street but a freak between the sheets. Gauguin died of syphilis in Tahiti after leaving his wife and children and desk job in Europe for the myriad freedoms of more “primitive” nations. Mark Rothko died in a pool of his own blood slumped over his kitchen sink after he slit his wrists at the elbows, unable to sustain his pursuit of the ineffable. So much for infallibility. Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were alcoholics. We all know van Gogh cut his ear off and sent it to a prostitute and Picasso had mistresses till he died in his 90s. All this begs the question, how can these artists’ work possibly look pure and resolved when it’s on the walls? How does so much life end up dry? Dig a little bit and there’s always a garage that’s worth looking for. The pile of stuff in the background, the psychic detritus that art distills, is what makes the end result interesting. Go into a museum and look for the blood and the guts and the conflicts, because the infallible surface is never all there is.


*all pictures here are Rothko paintings culled from various sources on the internet, their titles aren't very descriptive, and I think looking should be enough anyway.

Going to middle school.

Going to middle school.

Every school that I’ve been to in China has a solid band of color painted to about 4 feet up the wall. It’s just something I’ve started to notice; my dorm has it, the high school across from our building has it, the middle school we visited in the countryside has it. It actually breaks up the space really well, and like everything else in China, the walls and the paint look old, but spotless and well used.

We went to this school to practice our Chinese as well as letting the middle school students practice their English on us, probably the first foreigners they’ve ever had a chance to talk to.


Walking up to the middle school, it looks devoid of life. At the start, it seems to be a massive gate marking a path to nowhere, a stretch of cracking pavement surrounded on either side by yellowed grass. The road turns a corner into a tiled courtyard, corralled by whitewashed walls. The school’s four basketball hoops preside over empty space.

Chinese has a particular word, nongcun, whose meaning includes everywhere that’s not within a modern city, including everything from Beijing’s suburbs to the most spare farming village in the vastness of China. It seems a little unfair to call the space the school is in “the countryside”, but my teachers continuously used that word, nongcun, to describe where we were going. Every classroom has a laptop and a projector descending from the ceiling, the school is only an hour and a half ride out of the center of Beijing, it’s modernized. So why “countryside”?


We foreigners took our turn first presenting a few aspects of American and Japanese culture to the middle school students. The topics we covered were mostly in relation to ordinary life, the routine of American middle school and college students, what after school activities are. There are differences between what we went through and what these middle school students are going through now that are easily overlooked.


For one, Chinese school’s emphasis on foreign language, specifically our own mother tongue, is a far cry from when I started Spanish in 7th grade. Talking to one of the students, I asked how long he had been studying English. Turns out he started when he was three.


After we finished our reports, the middle school students one by one went up to the podium, loaded their powerpoints into the overhead projector through the laptop in the desk, and started speaking.

Powerpoints? Overhead projectors? Granted, it’s the Future now, and it wasn’t when I was in middle school, but half the time our college classrooms’ projectors broadcast a lovely blue and little else.


The students’ topics ranged from their Best Friends, how much they love their parents, how they don’t study hard enough, all the way to Basketball. Basketball is something of a religion among Chinese guys, and the middle school kids were no exception. Clearly some things aren’t too different from our respective hometowns. “Kobe Bryant is my hero,” said one student falteringly, “that’s why my English name is Basketball Star.”


As far as the students’ English went, it was pretty good, especially considering they’re in middle school. The kids’ faces were visibly pained as they struggled through the words, often slipping into a mix something like Chinese syllables strung into English sentences. We probably looked the same way to them. We foreigners, not wearing the middle school track suit-uniform, trying to speak to a bunch of Chinese middle school students in their own language while they tried to speak to us in ours.


When the classroom presentations were finished we all left together to take a picture outside of the school. The sun glared off the paving stones and the wind blew Beijing’s dry cold through the doorways. As our teachers took the photos, standing next to me was one kid I had been talking to for most of our time at the school. He was tall for his age and tall for China and gangly as any middle school boy. He looked out into the sun and squinted his eyes and said into the air, “so you’ll be going back to America soon, right?”

“Have you liked living in Beijing?”


China has a countryside, a nongcun where people make their living farming. It’s not here, though. Here is Beijing. I would be willing to bet within 5 years the city will encompass this middle school and the students will spend the rest of their lives working in the city, for the city. Right now they’re just still growing up.

The Bird's Nest.

The Bird’s Nest.

Visiting the Olympic Garden in the Northern part of Beijing these days is a little bit like going to a mausoleum. The park, contrary to its present lack of TV coverage, still exists, scattered with the enormous remains of this year’s Games. The newly opened subway lines, in place to ferry guests back and forth between venues, are newly closed. There are no more reporters, no more athletes, no more photo finishes, no more medals to be awarded, so what’s left? For one thing, there are more fences.

But if you had to choose one building to symbolize the voracious energy of this year’s Olympics, set in a country trying desperately to prove itself to the world, you could do worse than the Bird’s Nest. I would be willing to guess that the majority of people on the planet have seen it at least once, a latticework of steel beams, graphic and iconic, with a characteristic dimpled top.

Countless wide-eyed critics have noted the building’s embrace of “openness”, the way it allows the eye to travel from the exterior to the interior and back freely, a consequence of its exuberant yet simple façade. They cite the fact that the Chinese government consented to this design as a symbol of China’s own increasing “openness”, openness to the West, openness in an economic sense, openness in a social sense. You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t take them at their word. There are times when it pays to look a little deeper into the context of such a place instead of linking the façade, literally and figuratively, to the changing ideology of the country it’s built in.

Still, the Bird’s Nest is undeniably a loose building. It’s a little shaky, a little more of a laugh than a frown. The photos that have been widely published, a far off perspective, a wide-angle lens, don’t do the building’s spirit justice. The Bird’s Nest dances around you as you walk through it. A few steps into the stadium, the geometric flatness of the façade becomes a riot of crisscrossing lines going everywhere in all 3 dimensions, a Dr. Suess landscape in a metallic future.


The color palate of the building, a fitting deep red mixed with the gray of steel, also enlivens the interior stadium. A surprisingly small playing field surrounded by seats colored the same deep red, the space doesn’t quite match the epic scale it had on the television screen. More than color though, what brings the Bird’s Nest its exuberance is the slicing interplay between light and shade just inside the façade. The shadows are sharp enough to cut yourself on, and the patches of light beam down in heptagons.

The rhythms play themselves like a symphony of synthesizers.


The Bird’s Nest is a great piece of architecture. Still, we don’t have to take this postmodern smiley face at first blush. The team that designed the stadium is a bit of a surprise: the always great, always willing to embrace the new, architectural firm of Herzog and De Meuron, working with the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, a known provocateur who once filmed himself dropping Ming Dynasty vases onto his studio floor, smashing them into pieces. In this more civilized role, he was labeled a 'design consultant'.

The two have worthy reputations as artists, and it’s a credit to the Chinese government that they were willing to support the team in building such an avant garde structure. And yet, looking a little deeper still: in the process of building, Ai Weiwei renounced any involvement with the project, reviling his involvement with the Chinese government and loudly criticizing China’s continued human rights problems.

Herzog and De Meuron haven’t commented apart from reaffirming that Ai Weiwei was an incredible help and influence on the project. Architects are said to be colorless in the face of such international politics as long as the money is there, and many have faced criticism for building in Communist China.


And then there are the fences. The Olympic park is now crisscrossed with high white fences, blocking off the natural flow of people in and around the mammoth structures. A ticket to get into the Bird’s Nest is 50 RMB, about 8 USD, which doesn’t sound like much, but for an afternoon outing it really is prohibitively expensive for a lot of Chinese. Across from the Bird’s Nest is the Water Cube, another 30RMB to even get close to; the fences start 100 feet away.


The problems, the political flashpoints and the are still there, they’re just not immediately clear. The Bird’s Nest is an incredible experience for those that can get in. It’s a shame that some of the artistry and the public accomplishment of the Olympic venues have been lost to politics and profit.

But still, the taste the stadium leaves in your mouth is like skittles.


PS: Hiroshi Sugimoto is my best friend.

Snapshots.

Snapshots.

I've been a little busy to write longer pieces lately, but I wanted to put a bunch of random stuff up anyway. It's from the past few weeks, our trip to Harbin, around our school. I hope it's like a little bite of information, a little less like a message and more like free association.


An older Chinese woman sits outside in a park, on a stone bench overlooking a lake drenched by weeping willows. She's retired and lives with her son's family.


Twins walking down Chegongzhuang road, stopping to compare the shoes below their identical tights.


A tiger in the Harbin tiger reserve, "wildlife" shot through with van tracks to ferry tourists to and fro. The tigers take up most of the space of the reserve, with small areas for lions and, inexplicably, cheetahs.


A little girl in a panda hat on the way to Xizhimenwai subway station.


Passing the mic at KTV in Harbin, karaoke in one room equipped with comfy couches and monitors, good for any number of people to get drunk and/or sing songs in private.


A meat stall in the evening. November gets dark pretty early.


Manikins legs in the trash dump.


Hannelore waking up on the train to Harbin.


St. Sophia Church, one of the last remaining truly Russian buildings in Harbin. The bottom has been turned into a horrifying tourist trap, but the ceilings were left unrestored and mesmerizing.


A kid in the amusement park at the edge of one of Beijing's gardens.


Walking down Chegongzhuang road.

Barack Obama.

The day that Barack Obama won the presidential election, in Beijing. We sat under the trees, watched the branches sway and stared to the sky for some sign of the heavens moving.

Boys and Girls in Beijing.

Boys and Girls in Beijing.


What do you get, coming out of high school with a head full of cheesy pop songs, a thousand movies about cliché romances and, thanks to the Chinese government, more than a working knowledge of contraception?

Not all that you’d guess, it seems.


One of the best things about our program here in Beijing is that we have a much deeper understanding of what things are like here in China for the kids, if just for the simple reason that we live with a bunch of twenty-year olds. So obviously we talk to them about things we have in common: boys and girls, girls and boys, taking sides.

What does that entail? All the crushes are still there; after all, we are a bunch of college students thrown together into one building. This includes any combination you could think of, you’re as likely to hear Chinese girls gossiping about the American boys as you are to hear the American boys discussing which Chinese teacher is hottest.


My roommate’s friend, another roommate here, has a boyfriend. They are interminably cute together. He wears goofy glasses and walks arm in arm with her as they head off to school, not too far away from our dorm. Every so often they exchange kisses on the cheek or something slightly more serious of an evening. The thing is, I’m not sure how far it goes beyond that.

The other day, as we were heading out to eat dinner, we ran into the couple. The girl was annoyed. Our shifu (doorman/handyman/house dad) wouldn’t let her boyfriend into the building. The reason? “He told me it’s too late,” the girl said, “he told me that there’s class tomorrow so we should be studying.” She laughed when I said that the shifu wasn’t her dad. So how are the Chinese kids supposed to get it on?


I suppose there’s always the clubs. Alcohol and dancing! Drinks and not very many clothes! Too bad there are the same problems here that we find everywhere. Does he like me? Is this just tonight? Why is she with that other guy?

Why are there so many Europeans? And why is everyone drunk?


I’d have to guess that it’s a little bit of a change for some of the Chinese students that didn’t really go out like that before. This past weekend was Halloween. A group of 30 CET students and roommates went out to a club and then came back at 5 the next morning. One of my friends, a Chinese girl, was worried that the way she danced made the other girls, American and Chinese, think badly of her. “A lot of Chinese girls can dance like that,” she said, “but they just don’t in public.”

This is also about double standards. A girl, dancing with all the guys, seen too often with different people? A little too open-minded? Telling some that they have a kaifang sixiang, literally an open way of thinking, is tantamount to calling them a slut. The same classification doesn’t really apply to guys. I guess it’s the same in America.


There are still the same non-intersecting lives. Girls are pretty much foreign territory to some of the Chinese guys, my roommate included. Do you want a career? Do you want a successful life? Maybe it’s best if you don’t have a girlfriend in college. Maybe it’s best to focus on what’s really important: learning. Drowning in textbooks, you can curl up in bed with your English primer and go to class in the morning.


The battle lines are laid like this: All the guys want the prettiest girls. All the guys want the girls that are unspoiled, and they all hope that it’ll be their First Time. Is it usually? I don’t know, I don’t really know if that kind of thing is quite open to discussion. As for the girls? Sometimes they’re still just dancing to have fun.


“Do you want to come dance with me?”

“Sure.”