Vienna Festival

Stylistic twitter about the wrong Mark Rothko

Filmed art debates among ten guests in a New York Chinese restaurant

(Bild: Wiener Festwochen / Arturs Pavlovs)

Theater for arthouse cinema? A fake painting by Mark Rothko is discussed at great length in the latest Festwochen production. However, this endless debate in the semi-darkness of a Chinese restaurant can only be experienced as a live film.

The piece is actually called "Rohtko", not "Rothko" like the Latvian-American painter prince who died in 1970. Because the painting that fetched 8.3 million dollars in 2008 was also wrong: a Chinese man had painted it in his New York garage, and it was great. The resulting debate about the relativity of the original and the effects of AI would undoubtedly have made for an interesting essay. The picaresque play would also carry a one-act farce; Yasmina Reza demonstrated this with "Art".

 Lukasz Twarkowski's Latvian project, however, looks as if Reza had fallen into an endless loop in the wake of a spasm of verbosity. For four hours, the actors debate in the semi-darkness of a Chinese restaurant, barely visible, but with all the cinematic finesse of a stage-wide video screen.

This is partly amusing and stimulating, but never answers the question of the stage value: Why didn't they make a movie in the first place? And what arthouse cinema in the world would have an audience that wanted to see four hours of close-ups in Latvian with surtitles and face microphones?

A stylistic hermaphrodite. Rothko himself appears very clichéd. Someone should dare to put such a roaring genius impersonator with a pale shadowy wife on stage today in Hauptmann's "Michael Kramer" or Ibsen's "When We Dead Awake"! But the audience liked it.