Murray - Rothko

Forty years after the death of Rothko Murray rides his pushie over his giant, domed church. The vast salt disc that his tyres crunch into is the largest of its kind in Australia. It is a world divided in two; between the land and the sky. The peregrination across the salt pan is his sublimation into the sublime. Slowly melting into the horizon. 

With the fall of modernism, the great narrative of progress holding us together, the profound and the transformative fled from the occidental conurbations. The wind was punched out of the muscular abstract expressionists. Their 'big-ness' was lost in translation. There was no canvas large enough, or painterly technique that could encapsulate terrible physical exertion, mantric hallucinations or the great masculinity of the American male. Emotional febrility cooled as the paint was left to dry. Rothko knew this. His life's work was a failed experiment in translating the transcendent. He watched New York descended into Warhol's banality and then killed himself. 

All the while, as New York modern art whale fall was devoured by postmodern scavengers, the sky passed over Lake Eyre. Every once and a while someone would take notice. Thousands of years ago the Mungo Man would have seen crimson horizons lighting a tundra of sodium chloride on fire. British scientists would have witnessed their nuclear mushroom clouds dwarfed by distant desert storms. This is where the old, masculine, modernist painters have fled to; the edge of the earth rise. 

With his shabby beard and billy-can Murray peddles across Lake Eyre. Sometimes he comes across a carcass, fish bones scattered by the sermon of the wind or spots a Wedge Tail floating away on the thermals. Every once and a while he takes a photo and thinks of his friends in the distant city. 

Courtesy of Murray Fredericks