2010

4.75 × 6.25 inches; 96-pages
Pocket paperback with green newsprint interior

‘Hirsch E.P. Rothko by Hirsch E.P. Rothko,’ a memoir of a year spent in the mountains living and working in a license plate shed, is a dramatized account of a lived experience. The nine-chapter narrative also contains a polemic about regional painting's relevance in a world in which the United Sates might be a regional, rather than international, power, and in an artworld in which established methods of critical art—predicated on negation, subversion, parody and deconstruction—seem increasingly ineffective. Instead, it proposes a kind of creative critique based on invention and synthesis, the privileged form of which is fiction. In Rothko's own words: “Regionalism is not a style, but a mode of and model for making. It not so much suspends the viewer’s disbelief as it enables an artist to suspend his selfconsciousness. The respite from criticality opens a fictive space where a conceptual artist can be a painter, a painter a writer, an art dealer a publisher.... Regionalism is the protective shell that allows us to be real artists again."