I suppose the last thing I should say about Rothko is that I always derive from his work a tremendous sense of place –the canvas as an inhabitable pictorial situation, that I could almost live inside his paintings. There is a sense of personal geography or cultural loss in his work, or sometimes just this sense of place that makes itself felt as a very intensified or compressed geographical location. This imaginary location, that sense of what his work does on that level, is perhaps what I feel has been his biggest gift to me.Rothko’s paintings are very, very demanding. Not only were risky to make but they’re risky to look at, because you don’t know exactly quite what you’re letting yourself in for. The thing I liked about the installation in Washington D.C. was it’s cave-like quality. The shape of the exhibition was quite wonderful, with these hairpin turns: it was labyrinthine in a very beautiful way. I was just in Texas last week, teaching at the University in Austin, and I drove to Houston to see the Rothko Chapel. The paintings reverberated for me, just as this cave-like quality in Washington—it’s as though they’re the final palimpsest: as if the cave had reached its point of no return. It is almost as thought every gesture and image and icon and work of art that Rothko ever thought about is somehow embedded into those works. They are fading into blackness due to the density of the experience that this man felt in his life and which was somehow being put down onto the canvases. That was the feeling I had.I have always thought of Rothko as an artist who somehow embodied a standard. I don’t know quite how to describe this. It has to do with the way he used paint: the materiality of the work, the scale, the scratching into the surface, the labor, allowing the weave of the canvas to come through, drips going in the wrong direction. All of these details say so much to me about this man, his sensibility, as someone who is almost – I don’t want to say guru, but it’s something like this. He had this supreme thoughtfulness about making the work. I’m speaking only from my own practice, just in terms of my own sense of what I wanted to do with a surface.This issue of the spiritual in art is a very tough question. You almost have to approach it in a negative way. Rothko’s work is affirmative of the spiritual but in a negative way. It would be dangerous and even foolhardy to address such issues in a direct way. It’s got to be indirect, so there is always this remarkable sense of indirection to what he does This is very tough work. If you think of Rothko’s painting in its own historical context, it’s very tough work to make, to behold, to have a relationship to.[Audience Question to PT about Rothko’s personality.]PT: Well you know I said that the closest I ever came to meeting Rothko was meeting Dore Ashton. I had no personal history with Rothko so I’m loathe to judge the personality of someone that I have never encountered in my life.Audience: But painting is a physical act!PT: I’m not forgetting that at all. I wouldn’t dream of forgetting that.Q: Earlier there was a discussion about a stroke in the red square that goes outside the shape. do you think that’s a mistake?PT: No.Q: Do you feel he just played out this formula over the last 20 years? Other artists have said he repeated himself quite endlessly…PT: I always had the sense that he was living out a kind of ritualistic practice, the repetition and the continuing of the same format. And it became ritualized because he wanted to break that ritual, because he wanted to find ways of what it meant to go through with this practice, day after day, year after year. This was an important experiment for him. That’s how I read it.Q: How do you see his work in relation to color field painting?PT: Well I think this raises an interesting question because another thing that I admired about Rothko was the fact that he always denied that he was an abstract painter, or that he was an abstractionist—this was the word he used. He was more interested in subject and myth and emotion and I would say that color field painting is something that emerged afterwards that had a kind of systematic approach to understanding how a painting could be made, so it’s mechanical in the sense that it’s taking into consideration a whole different set of principles. These are not like that at all. No.Q: Rothko’s late work is sometimes described as nihilist—do you agree with this?PT: I think that it has to do with the negativity in affirmation. It’s a psychological and emotional reality that one has to unravel and come to terms with in the work. There is something scathing about them – searing. There’s a mind that is trying to arrive at something. He’s worried about a lot of things. And it’s something that you either get or you don’t. You have to feel these things, you have to devote a lot attention to trying to come to terms with them. I think it’s the uncompromising nature of the work. I feel like these things we are saying are clichés … it’s hard to talk about them. It has to do with what you expect from a work of art. That has a lot to do with it…