Mark Rothko and the Politics of Aesthetics

Mark Rothko's work is usually understood as art "beyond" politics, an art that has consciously rejected not just political identification but figuration in favor of a universalized experience verging on transcendence. Like many of his colleagues, Rothko was politically engaged on the left in the 1930s, but drastically broke with it in 1939 after the Hitler-Stalin pact. In the decades to come, he would always stress his distrust to politically engaged practices in art. But does this really mean that his art was or is a-political? This lecture will present a historical overview of the politics surrounding the New York School and its instrumentalization in the Cold War, and will go on to ask what political meanings we can find in Rothko today.

Lecturer

David Riff (born 1975, London) is an art critic and writer.He is a member of the workgroup Chto delat/What is to be done. Numerous contributions to magazines and journals on contemporary art (Moscow Art Magazine, Flash Art, Framework, Site, springerin, Rethinking Marxism, Third Text). From 2007 to 2010, David Riff was contributing editor of the art section of OpenSpace.ru. He teaches at the Rodchenko School of Photography and Media in Moscow