Entering the Rothko Room at Tate Modern, I have the strangest feeling that everyone here is waiting for a bus.
I keep my headphones on but turn off the music. Everything is overwhelming today. I elected to come here for the sake of some tranquillity; maybe that’s what everyone else is waiting for as well. It does not arrive. People linger here with nowhere to go.
There are nine Seagram murals. They sit against the walls like radiators. It is uncomfortably warm.
The room empties and I press play on Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel. The radiators become spectrograms of the bodies of bowed violins, distorting under the energy of their own vibrations. Or portals into fog. Or x-rays into crypts. Or splayed heart valves, postmortem. Or WTC 1 and 2.
A man in gym clothes with a North Face rucksack gets as close as possible to the brightest of the nine. Every few seconds, he vigorously and yet subtly shakes his head in a micromovement. After a minute of this, he turns his back on Rothko to check his phone with a look of concern that suggests a private disaster is unfolding for him. Maybe I am projecting.
Projection interrupted. Celluloid bridges between frames rushing past. Zoetrope slits. Autopsy tables. Peep holes. Cinder blocks. The aftermath of a withered floral arrangement. Silent Hill Georgia O’Keefes.
Two women get as close as possible to the brightest of the nine and gesticulate, tracing phantoms in the brush strokes. The proximity alarm sounds three times.
Dread and overwhelm and a bootlegged propranolol. Name five things you can see. I’m trying…
The horizontal paintings at the far end of the room are dead letterboxes. More tables of dissection. Mouths chewed out from within. Bit lips. Gingivitis. All gum, no teeth. Royal Mail red. Bloody Valentines.
Balistraria. Loophole. Crenel. Embrasure.
The walls themselves are off-white and almost green. Floorboards overbuffed, underpolished, and dull. Each corner of the room strikes me as the loneliest place in London.
Rothko Chapel 4 begins with falsetto cooing in my ear. My eye is drawn repeatedly back to the brightest of the nine. Deep red vocal cords in full vibrato flutter in front of city mists. There is a Turner here somewhere. Not an old warship, but a modernist abstraction tugged to her last berth to be broken up.
A security camera stares blankly into the room via two strips of red LED lights. The illusion fades as the murals stare back. I head for the exit.