A friend sent me a copy of Tilda Swinton's speech and I wanted to share it with you on the blog.
2014 Visionary Award Gala
Fifty years ago, John and Dominique de Menil commissioned Mark Rothko to create a sacred place, a threshold to the divine. In a letter reflecting on the commission, Rothko wrote, “the magnitude, on every level of experience and meaning, of the task in which you have involved me, exceeds all my preconceptions. And it is teaching me to extend myself beyond what I thought was possible for me. For this, I thank you.” The Rothko Chapel is a singular place unlike anywhere else in the world.
On an international stage Tilda Swinton too stands alone. Her inimitable style, courageous performances and willingness to transcend aesthetic conventions have made her an icon in her own right. At times glamorous and playful, provocative and intense, Tilda Swinton is a creative force who challenges audiences to ask profound questions about who we are and how to surpass our perceived limitations.
On May 29, 2014 Tilda Swinton was presented with the Rothko Chapel Visionary Award at the Houston Country Club, in recognition for her talents.
Photo Credit: Jenny Anthill
Tilda Swinton’s acceptance speech:
“I had a dream last night that my brother told my father why I am here tonight and my father misheard the name of your most generous prize and declared those who honour me highly perceptive to be recognizing me with a Contrary Award.
I am sincerely humbled by any honour you do me.
Houston has felt like a heart’s home since I first came here four years ago: I met such friends here — the eternally glorious Lynn Wyatt, divine Michael Zilkha, my dear old pal William Middleton — found such beauty and complicity and fellowship, to be honoured by this house is something it’s hard for a shy child to swallow, I’ll be honest.
Discovering the landscape of a world inhabited by artists has been one of the miracles of my life. I can be no cooler about it than that.
To name the fellow travelers I number among my playmates is to count my blessings one by one.
That Wes Anderson might figure amongst them is a source of heart-busting pride for me. That he agreed to join us tonight in celebrating this inspiring institution is a proper thrill. Thank you, Wes, for coming home for us.
I was brought up in a world where art was something owned and insured - usually inherited: but seldom if ever made by anyone one knew.
I had an early inkling that there was fun to be had over the hill - like the feeling when faced with a sunset that someone’s throwing a mega awesome party just beyond the nearest cloud - and I set off to join the caravan. Let’s just say I was in search of company - headed towards the glow - and I found it.
I believe that all great art holds the power to dissolve things: time, distance, difference, injustice, alienation, despair.
I believe that all great art holds the power to mend things: join, comfort, inspire hope in fellowship, and reconcile us to ourselves.
Art is good for my soul precisely because it reminds me that we HAVE souls in the first place.
We stand before a work of art and our spirit is lifted by it: amazing that someone is like us! We stand before a work of art and our spirit resists: amazing that someone is DIFFERENT! Win-win every which way.
- These things I have learned from art
I have been in love with the trans-formative possibilities of cinema for most of my life. It’s true that the first feature film I can remember seeing was Herbie Rides Again..
Who needs more proof than that that the form transcends the subject..
It occurs to me on a regular basis that the cinema carries the potential to be perhaps the most humane of all gestures in art: the invitation to place ourselves, under the intimate cover of darkness, into another person’s shoes, behind another set of eyes, into another’s consciousness: the ultimate compassion machine, the empathy engine..
Here is the darkness
Here comes the light
When my children were ten, they came back from school elated one day to tell us they had started the supremely grown up business of learning science.
When we asked them about their first lesson, they proudly announced they were addressing the study of LIGHT.
When we pressed them to describe how their teacher had approached the topic, with the bemusement of those genuinely unaware that there could ever be any other way, they told us that she had closed all the shutters and that they had sat in the dark for an hour
A do-it-yourself Rothko Chapel for fourth graders.
Next year, in the new upper school that I am proud to have founded last year with other parents, now in the process of being built on a hill in view of the sea this summer, I am going to tell our teenagers about Houston and your treasure here - and about Dominique and John de Menil - as examples of integrated and authentic activists in art and life, head, heart and hand: preeminent examples of pioneering bearers of LIGHT.
Where I live in the far north of Scotland, the question of LIGHT is an axis central to every season, to every day. In the topmost branches of June, the skies turn navy blue just before midnight and hover there until about 3 when the sun comes blooming up again. At the turn of the year, on the other hand, a long lunch folds itself into the evening before you know it - and then into night-night blackness until way after the school bell in the morning.
A fisherman I know from a nearby village told me one day that he and his brothers had long ago pulled up a massive turtle, far from its tropical home, onto the deck of their boat in the North Sea off the east coast of Scotland: he described how it lay there, unfathomably exotic and helpless amongst the mackerel - and that he would never forget their discussion about its fate: ‘What is it? No idea. Let’s kill it’ - which they did.
He said he had never regretted anything so much in his life: that he knew something failed in them at that moment.
We know what threatens our humanity the most: we shouldn't need reminding. The capacity to project our own shadow onto others, to edit our understanding of our own frailty - to hold it at bay - to play tag with our vulnerabilities - You’re It, don’t touch me - Our attachment to an idea of malevolent foreignness, of malign darkness: this is our Kryptonite... we know this well.
Mark Rothko’s canvasses in the de Menil Chapel - tonight let’s say cinema of the soul rather than television for Zen Buddhists - invite us, encourage us, to own our own darkness, to make friends with it, to re-frame it as our helpmeet and staff: nothing less than this.
Over the weeks that my mother was dying the year before last, I went out into the nights and trained my eyes to see in the dark. It provided a particular kind of comfort undiscovered anywhere else at that time: by then I had sat in the Chapel and the serene witness of Rothko’s velvet abyss accompanied me on those night walks. The truth is, it’s never been very far away, ever since.
The last feature film my friend Derek Jarman made before [he] died of AIDS IN 1994 was BLUE - for many, his masterpiece - an Yves Klein-blue screen and a soundtrack.. a work made just as his sight was leaving him as he became blind.
Maybe most of all great art encourages us, as does this film, as does Rothko, not to stop at opening our eyes, but to go on to CLOSE them, as well; to go to what we know deepest, earliest and most clearly that we humans are, in essence, humane
fair
kind
gracious
light-filled
wise
and that our darkness is just what it is: an intrinsic and balancing ballast to all that loveliness..
Perhaps the most radical suggestion we can make about ourselves is NOT that we are not different. Or even that we ARE. But that we are BOTH.
I remember a very specific moment in my children’s development, around the age of seven, when the power of reason became the happening thing - as in ‘ No I can’t climb up a tree with you now because this dinner needs cooking… etc?’’
Along with this magical property came the anthem that still rules in our household to this day - the mantra of IT CAN BE BOTH.
‘Would I like the chocolate eclair or the fairy cake? Do I want to play with my Lego all night or, as it happens, go to sleep because I’m super tired?.. Do I like my twin brother /sister or - could it be - that I REALLY REALLY REALLY HATE HIM/HER?…
Light And Dark
Both at once
Welcome to the age of reason, welcome to life.
I first sat in the Rothko Chapel in 2010. I sat there again this morning. Like countless others, I have no doubt, that spaceship of the heart took me right home: I sat in the chapel, in the Texan summer daytime and I looked at those canvasses, and the night moors of the highlands looked back - and the scant stars and the heather underfoot, and the high sea and the wild wind.
And in a heartbeat, it becomes our own: I bet you a shilling a head that wherever you are alone with yourself most will show in that magic mirror and bear your heart witness - and keep you company whenever you need to draw on it.
We come. We take it home with us. We never really leave.
The Rothko Chapel is a sacred space because of precisely this capacity it has to re-bind, to re-balance, to re-store, to re-inspire the spirit in its simple and essential gesture of darkness held in light. Of art held in spirit. Of spirit held in LIFE and the living of life. It is a truly humane space for humans to find themselves in.
It takes us further and deeper and closer - a greater journey maybe even than any possible with Herbie - in the light of the day, quotidian in fact, it brings us, through the alchemy of paint and linen and understanding, to nobody’s shoes but our own.
Glamour is a word derived from the Scots, meaning ‘dangerous magic.’
The Rothko Chapel is glamorous beyond any glamour known to any Highland witch. ITS is a light that never goes out.
This community here in Houston that we are proud to be amongst tonight is founded on this light.
Your rocking community - built as it is on the foundation of shared passionate play between artists and patrons - a garden lovingly fostered by the de Menil family to whom we all - as it says on Hollywood film contracts ‘throughout the universe in perpetuity ‘ - owe an incalculable debt of gratitude - is sustained and tended into the future by you galaxy of dangerously magical beauties in this room . This community is a thumping masterpiece of art in itself.
To receive an award in the name of the extraordinary gesture that is the Rothko Chapel is beyond an honour for me. It is a familial embrace.
I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the kindness of your invitation. And for the inspiration of your fellowship.
Talk about a cloud party: this will keep me warm forever.”
Rothko Chapel, Houston, TX
2014 Visionary Award Gala
Fifty years ago, John and Dominique de Menil commissioned Mark Rothko to create a sacred place, a threshold to the divine. In a letter reflecting on the commission, Rothko wrote, “the magnitude, on every level of experience and meaning, of the task in which you have involved me, exceeds all my preconceptions. And it is teaching me to extend myself beyond what I thought was possible for me. For this, I thank you.” The Rothko Chapel is a singular place unlike anywhere else in the world.
On an international stage Tilda Swinton too stands alone. Her inimitable style, courageous performances and willingness to transcend aesthetic conventions have made her an icon in her own right. At times glamorous and playful, provocative and intense, Tilda Swinton is a creative force who challenges audiences to ask profound questions about who we are and how to surpass our perceived limitations.
On May 29, 2014 Tilda Swinton was presented with the Rothko Chapel Visionary Award at the Houston Country Club, in recognition for her talents.
Photo Credit: Jenny Anthill
Tilda Swinton’s acceptance speech:
“I had a dream last night that my brother told my father why I am here tonight and my father misheard the name of your most generous prize and declared those who honour me highly perceptive to be recognizing me with a Contrary Award.
I am sincerely humbled by any honour you do me.
Houston has felt like a heart’s home since I first came here four years ago: I met such friends here — the eternally glorious Lynn Wyatt, divine Michael Zilkha, my dear old pal William Middleton — found such beauty and complicity and fellowship, to be honoured by this house is something it’s hard for a shy child to swallow, I’ll be honest.
Discovering the landscape of a world inhabited by artists has been one of the miracles of my life. I can be no cooler about it than that.
To name the fellow travelers I number among my playmates is to count my blessings one by one.
That Wes Anderson might figure amongst them is a source of heart-busting pride for me. That he agreed to join us tonight in celebrating this inspiring institution is a proper thrill. Thank you, Wes, for coming home for us.
I was brought up in a world where art was something owned and insured - usually inherited: but seldom if ever made by anyone one knew.
I had an early inkling that there was fun to be had over the hill - like the feeling when faced with a sunset that someone’s throwing a mega awesome party just beyond the nearest cloud - and I set off to join the caravan. Let’s just say I was in search of company - headed towards the glow - and I found it.
I believe that all great art holds the power to dissolve things: time, distance, difference, injustice, alienation, despair.
I believe that all great art holds the power to mend things: join, comfort, inspire hope in fellowship, and reconcile us to ourselves.
Art is good for my soul precisely because it reminds me that we HAVE souls in the first place.
We stand before a work of art and our spirit is lifted by it: amazing that someone is like us! We stand before a work of art and our spirit resists: amazing that someone is DIFFERENT! Win-win every which way.
- These things I have learned from art
I have been in love with the trans-formative possibilities of cinema for most of my life. It’s true that the first feature film I can remember seeing was Herbie Rides Again..
Who needs more proof than that that the form transcends the subject..
It occurs to me on a regular basis that the cinema carries the potential to be perhaps the most humane of all gestures in art: the invitation to place ourselves, under the intimate cover of darkness, into another person’s shoes, behind another set of eyes, into another’s consciousness: the ultimate compassion machine, the empathy engine..
Here is the darkness
Here comes the light
When my children were ten, they came back from school elated one day to tell us they had started the supremely grown up business of learning science.
When we asked them about their first lesson, they proudly announced they were addressing the study of LIGHT.
When we pressed them to describe how their teacher had approached the topic, with the bemusement of those genuinely unaware that there could ever be any other way, they told us that she had closed all the shutters and that they had sat in the dark for an hour
A do-it-yourself Rothko Chapel for fourth graders.
Next year, in the new upper school that I am proud to have founded last year with other parents, now in the process of being built on a hill in view of the sea this summer, I am going to tell our teenagers about Houston and your treasure here - and about Dominique and John de Menil - as examples of integrated and authentic activists in art and life, head, heart and hand: preeminent examples of pioneering bearers of LIGHT.
Where I live in the far north of Scotland, the question of LIGHT is an axis central to every season, to every day. In the topmost branches of June, the skies turn navy blue just before midnight and hover there until about 3 when the sun comes blooming up again. At the turn of the year, on the other hand, a long lunch folds itself into the evening before you know it - and then into night-night blackness until way after the school bell in the morning.
A fisherman I know from a nearby village told me one day that he and his brothers had long ago pulled up a massive turtle, far from its tropical home, onto the deck of their boat in the North Sea off the east coast of Scotland: he described how it lay there, unfathomably exotic and helpless amongst the mackerel - and that he would never forget their discussion about its fate: ‘What is it? No idea. Let’s kill it’ - which they did.
He said he had never regretted anything so much in his life: that he knew something failed in them at that moment.
We know what threatens our humanity the most: we shouldn't need reminding. The capacity to project our own shadow onto others, to edit our understanding of our own frailty - to hold it at bay - to play tag with our vulnerabilities - You’re It, don’t touch me - Our attachment to an idea of malevolent foreignness, of malign darkness: this is our Kryptonite... we know this well.
Mark Rothko’s canvasses in the de Menil Chapel - tonight let’s say cinema of the soul rather than television for Zen Buddhists - invite us, encourage us, to own our own darkness, to make friends with it, to re-frame it as our helpmeet and staff: nothing less than this.
Over the weeks that my mother was dying the year before last, I went out into the nights and trained my eyes to see in the dark. It provided a particular kind of comfort undiscovered anywhere else at that time: by then I had sat in the Chapel and the serene witness of Rothko’s velvet abyss accompanied me on those night walks. The truth is, it’s never been very far away, ever since.
The last feature film my friend Derek Jarman made before [he] died of AIDS IN 1994 was BLUE - for many, his masterpiece - an Yves Klein-blue screen and a soundtrack.. a work made just as his sight was leaving him as he became blind.
Maybe most of all great art encourages us, as does this film, as does Rothko, not to stop at opening our eyes, but to go on to CLOSE them, as well; to go to what we know deepest, earliest and most clearly that we humans are, in essence, humane
fair
kind
gracious
light-filled
wise
and that our darkness is just what it is: an intrinsic and balancing ballast to all that loveliness..
Perhaps the most radical suggestion we can make about ourselves is NOT that we are not different. Or even that we ARE. But that we are BOTH.
I remember a very specific moment in my children’s development, around the age of seven, when the power of reason became the happening thing - as in ‘ No I can’t climb up a tree with you now because this dinner needs cooking… etc?’’
Along with this magical property came the anthem that still rules in our household to this day - the mantra of IT CAN BE BOTH.
‘Would I like the chocolate eclair or the fairy cake? Do I want to play with my Lego all night or, as it happens, go to sleep because I’m super tired?.. Do I like my twin brother /sister or - could it be - that I REALLY REALLY REALLY HATE HIM/HER?…
Light And Dark
Both at once
Welcome to the age of reason, welcome to life.
I first sat in the Rothko Chapel in 2010. I sat there again this morning. Like countless others, I have no doubt, that spaceship of the heart took me right home: I sat in the chapel, in the Texan summer daytime and I looked at those canvasses, and the night moors of the highlands looked back - and the scant stars and the heather underfoot, and the high sea and the wild wind.
And in a heartbeat, it becomes our own: I bet you a shilling a head that wherever you are alone with yourself most will show in that magic mirror and bear your heart witness - and keep you company whenever you need to draw on it.
We come. We take it home with us. We never really leave.
The Rothko Chapel is a sacred space because of precisely this capacity it has to re-bind, to re-balance, to re-store, to re-inspire the spirit in its simple and essential gesture of darkness held in light. Of art held in spirit. Of spirit held in LIFE and the living of life. It is a truly humane space for humans to find themselves in.
It takes us further and deeper and closer - a greater journey maybe even than any possible with Herbie - in the light of the day, quotidian in fact, it brings us, through the alchemy of paint and linen and understanding, to nobody’s shoes but our own.
Glamour is a word derived from the Scots, meaning ‘dangerous magic.’
The Rothko Chapel is glamorous beyond any glamour known to any Highland witch. ITS is a light that never goes out.
This community here in Houston that we are proud to be amongst tonight is founded on this light.
Your rocking community - built as it is on the foundation of shared passionate play between artists and patrons - a garden lovingly fostered by the de Menil family to whom we all - as it says on Hollywood film contracts ‘throughout the universe in perpetuity ‘ - owe an incalculable debt of gratitude - is sustained and tended into the future by you galaxy of dangerously magical beauties in this room . This community is a thumping masterpiece of art in itself.
To receive an award in the name of the extraordinary gesture that is the Rothko Chapel is beyond an honour for me. It is a familial embrace.
I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the kindness of your invitation. And for the inspiration of your fellowship.
Talk about a cloud party: this will keep me warm forever.”
