ROHTKO | Lukasz Twarkowski

Once witnessed, never forgotten. Like Rothko’s paintings.

A Chinese restaurant, with hanging lanterns and cooks standing over pans of noodles, an all-white New York gallery with neon signs, the messily unmade double bed of an artist from Latvia who would go on to change the course of contemporary art history, and three giant screens on the Onassis Stegi Main Stage. This setting – a cross between a film set and a video art project flooded with loud, atmospheric beats – is to be inhabited by famous painters and Chinese cooks, gallerists, art dealers and forgers, patrons of the art world and food delivery drivers.

At the heart of it all is the true story of an art forgery: a painting by the pioneering abstract expressionist artist Mark Rothko, which sold for the astronomical sum of 8.5 million dollars. As it turns out, the painting was a forgery, making the affair one of the most scandalous instances of fraud in contemporary art history.

Can a forged painting still move you?

What do originals matter in a time of NFTs and blockchains?

Who decides the value of a work of art?

How free is an artist?

What is art, at the end of the day?

What does art matter – what does life itself matter – now that virtual realities exist?

A series of such questions are threaded through this four-hour performance by the up-and-coming European director Łukasz Twarkowski, appearing in Onassis Stegi for the second time to present an epic, masterful, and singular story about our troubled times.

• Note the misspelling of Rothko’s name in this work’s title. This is not a typo but rather a deliberate distortion contrived by the creators of the show to comment on the booming trade in counterfeit goods imitating famous labels under such names as Adibas and Dolce Banana.
  
• Born in present-day Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire), Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz – the son of a Marxist pharmacist who had emigrated to the United States at the turn of the 20th century – was forced to cut the Jewish suffix from his name in 1938 when he was made an American citizen. Hitler’s rise to power and the surge of antisemitism that culminated in the Second World War meant he had to “hide” behind the name Mark Rothko.
  
• Twarkowski’s inspiration for this production was the book “Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese” by the South Korean-born philosophy professor Byung-Chul Han, who is widely read in Europe. The term “shanzhai” is a Chinese neologism that means “fake”, originally coined to describe knock-off cell phones marketed under such names as Nokir (in place of Nokia) and Samsing (in place of Samsung). These cell phones were not crude forgeries but rather as good as or better than the originals. This practice, which spread across China and was applied to thousands of products, reproduces the Chinese philosophy that an original material or product is destined to be deconstructed and transformed over time. In the West, this is seen simply as “piracy”.
  
• The legendary Knoedler art dealership in New York closed in 2011. This was brought about by one of the biggest art world scandals in modern American history that saw the gallery’s president, Ann Freedman, put more than 30 fake paintings attributed to famous abstract expressionists (Pollock, Rothko, and Motherwell) on sale over a period of 15 years. It turned out these paintings were the work of the painter and mathematician Pen-Shen Qian from Queens, New York. This forgery scandal was chronicled in the Netflix documentary “Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art”, which streamed on the platform in the winter of 2021 following screenings at various film festivals.

Lukasz Twarkowski's theater experience continues in June. The prominent Polish director returns with "Respublika," a six-hour rave party and a hybrid spectacle where techno music, theater, performance, dance, cinema, visual arts, and DJ sets blend into one.

Respublika will take place from June 13 to June 15 at Terra Vibe Park in Malakasa. Ticket presale will begin on Tuesday, March 12, at 17:00. Stay tuned to onassis.org for all the latest updates on the performance.

NFT―NON-FUNGIBLE TOKEN is designed to prove ownership of immaterial things in virtual reality. When two things have the same function, they are fungible, like, for example, money. Two different Euro coins are fungible. Nonfungibility means that you cannot exchange one thing with another, which makes that one thing unique. Through the unique NFTs, the digital artists (celebrated in likes so far) can sign and sell their works (memes, gifs, tweets, and any kind of digital work that anyone can still copy). They retain the copyright and reproduction rights. To put it in terms of physical art collecting, anyone can buy a Rothko print, but only one person can own the original.

BLOCKCHAIN is a system of recording information in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to change, hack, or cheat the system. A blockchain is essentially a digital ledger of transactions that is duplicated and distributed across the entire network of computer systems. It is cryptographically secure and decentralized. Blockchain is transparent at the level of data flow but, at the same time, allows users to remain anonymous. Blockchain has enabled a proven method of operating a digital currency (cryptocurrency) to appear―independent of central banks and financial institutions.

PROVENANCE is a record of ownership of a work of art that traces the history of its ownership, helping to verify its authenticity and value. In the NFTs field, provenance appears as a blockchain―it provides tracking and tracing of digital items, their authenticity, and their source.

RADICAL CARE is an intentional process of producing relationships between humans and non-humans or artificial intelligence that increases compassion and encourages sharing social capital (and any other capital) and a level of intersectional awareness. It seeks to empathically demonstrate experiences, needs, and desires in order to build a community based on mutual caring. It aims to raise awareness of the interdependence of all of us; it means to care about those who are not us.

DAUGAVPILS is a state city in south-eastern Latvia, located on the banks of the Daugava River, from which the city gets its name. It is the second-largest city in the country after the capital, Riga. Daugavpils is the birth city of the artist Mark Rothko and houses the Mark Rothko Art Centre. Born in Daugavpils in 1903, Mark Rothko immigrated to the United States at the age of 10.

SHANZHAI literally means “fake.” It’s a Chinese neologism initially describing forgeries of branded products. But shanzhai adapt very fast to new conditions and exploit their potential to improve. These products are inspired by the original, then depart from it only to mutate into the new originals by themselves. Shanzhai undermined the power of the original, authority, and expertise. It deconstructs creation as an act of making things ex nihilo and inherits a playful, anarchic energy.