Chromophobia by David Batchelor.
Title: Chromophobia.
Author: David Batchelor.
Genre: Non-fiction, art, colour theory, philosophy.
Country: Scotland, U.K..
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2000.
Summary: Chromophobia - a fear of corruption or contamination through colour - has lurked within Western culture since ancient times. This is apparent in the many attempts to purge colour from art, literature and architecture, either by making it the property of some "foreign" body - the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar or the pathological - or by relegating it to the realm of the superficial, the inessential or the cosmetic, which in many cases amounts to the same thing. In this book, the author analyzes the history of, and motivations behind, chromophobia, from its beginnings through examples of nineteenth-century literature, twentieth-century architecture and film, to Pop art, minimalism and the art and architecture of the present day. He suggests how colour fits, or fails to fit, into the cultural imagination of the West, exploring such diverse themes as Melville's "great while whale", Le Corbusier's "journey to the East", Huxley's experiments with mescalin, Dorothy's travels in the Land of Oz and the implications of modern artists' experiments with industrial paints and materials.
My rating: 7.5/10
My review:
♥ At first, inside looked endless. Endless like an egg must look endless from the inside; endless because seamless, continuous, empty, uninterrupted. Or rater: uninterruptable. There is a difference. Uninterrupted might mean overlooked, passed by, inconspicuous, insignificant. Uninterruptable passes by you, renders you inconspicuous and insignificant. The uninterruptable, endless emptiness of this house was impressive, elegant and glamorous in a spare and reductive kind of way, but it was also assertive, emphatic and ostentatious. This was assertive silence, emphatic blankness, the kind of ostentatious emptiness that only the very wealthy and the utterly sophisticated can afford. It was a strategic emptiness, but it was also accusatory.
Inside this house was a whole world, a very particular kind of world, a very clean, clear and orderly universe. But it was also a very paradoxical, inside-out world, a world where open was also closed, simplicity was also complication, and clarity was also confusion. It was a world that didn't readily admit the existence of other worlds. Or it did so grudgingly and resentfully, and absolutely without compassion. In particular, it was a world that would remind you, there and then, in an instant, of everything you were not, everything you had failed to become, everything you had not got around to doing, everything you might as well never bother to get around to doing because everything was made to seem somehow beyond reach, as when you look through the wrong end of a telescope. This wasn't just a first impression; it wasn't just the pulling back of the curtain to reveal the unexpected stage set, although there was that too, of course. This was longer-lasting. Inside was a flash that continued.
♥ Not all whites are as tyrannical as this one was, and this one was less tyrannical than some: "Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way?" Next to the white that was Herman Melville's great Albino Whale, this white paled. Next to the deathly, obsessive white that insinuated its way into the dark heart of Joseph Conrad's Captain Marlow, this white was almost innocent. Admittedly, there ass some Conradian residue in this shallower white: "Minimalism", it seemed to say, "is something you arrive at, a development of the sensitivity of the brain. Civilizations started with ornamentation. Look at all that bright colour. The minimalist sensitivity is not the peak of civilization, but it represents a high level between the earth and sky." But this wasn't spoken with the voice of a Marlow; it contained no irony, no terror born of the recognition that whatever appeared before you now had always seen you before it a thousand times already. Rather, this was the voice of one of Conrad's Empire functionaries, one of those stiff, starched figures whose certainties always protect them from, and thus always propel them remorselessly towards, the certain oblivion that lies just a page or two ahead.
♥ To mistake the colourful for the colourless or white is nothing new. But it is one thing not to know that Greek statues were once brilliantly painted; it is another thing not to see colour when it is still there. This seems to speak less of ignorance than of a kind of denial. Not perceiving what is visibly there: psychoanalysts call this negative hallucination. But we have to tread carefully here, and we should be especially careful not to get drawn into seeing colour and white as opposites. White was sometimes used in Minimalism, but mostly as a colour and amongst many other colours. Sometimes, it was used alone, but even then it remained a colour; it did not result, except perhaps in LeWitt's structures, in a generalized whiteness. In these works, white remained a material quality, a specific colour on a specific surface, just as it always has done in the paintings of Robert Ryman. Ryman's whites are always just that: whites. His whites are colours; his paintings do not involve or imply the suppression of colour. His whites are empirical whites. Above all, his whites are plural. And, in being plural, they are therefore not "pure". Here is the problem: not white; not whites; but generalized white, because generalized white - whiteness - is abstract, detached and open to contamination by terms like "pure".
Pure white: this is certainly a Western problem, and there's no getting away from it.
♥ If Conrad punctures a generalized whiteness with numerous instances and examples of white things, Melville works in something like the opposite direction: he begins with one great big white thing and, at certain points, begins to wonder whether the terrible whiteness of this thing could be generalized beyond it and infect his more homely conception of white. "It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me", he admits, while at the same time noting that "in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own." He recognizes the gravity of the impasse and his confusion: "But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught." In the absence of an explanation, Melville, like many of us, compiles a list. His is a list of white things, in particular white creatures, which symbolize one or another kind of virtue: regal, imperial, religious, juridical, moral, communal, sexual... And yet, "for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honourable, and sublime", Melville insists that there still "lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than the redness which affrights in blood". For Melville, as for Conrad, there is an instability in the apparent uniformity of white. Behind virtue lurks terror; beneath purity, annihilation or death. Not death in the sense of a life ended, but a glimpse of death-in-life: the annihilation of every cherished belief and system, every hope and desire, every known point of orientation, every illusion... For both writers, one of the most terrible instances of whiteness is a still, silent "milk-white fog", which is "more blinding than the night". And for both, in the fact of such whiteness, colour appears intolerably, almost insultingly, superficial.
♥ It won't go away. Whiteness always returns. Whiteness is woven into the fabric of Culture. The Bible, again: "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow." We cant escape, but, as Conrad and Melville have shown, sometimes it is possible to unweave whiteness from within...
♥ For Blanc, colour could not simply be ignored or dismissed; it was always there. It had to be contained and subordinated - like a woman. Colour was a permanent internal threat, an ever-present inner other which, if unleashed, would be the ruin of everything, the fall of culture. For our contemporary chromophobic architect, colour also represents a kind of ruination. Colour for him signifies the mythical savage state out of which civilization, the nobility of the human spirit, slowly, heroically, has lifted itself - but back into which it could always slide. For one, colour was coded in the feminine; for the other, it is coded in the primitive. For both, colour is a corruption, a lapse, a Fall.
..There are many ways to fall: head first, feet first; like a leaf or a stone; on a banana skin or off a log; in a blaze of glory or in the darkness of despair. A fall can be trivial or dangerous; falls have a place of honour in comedy, in the circus, in tragedy and in melodrama. A fall may be biblical or farcial or, perhaps, both. Many of the different stories of the descent into colour are stories of a fall from grace. That is to say, they have roughly similar beginnings and ends; we know very generally where they are going to finish up. In that sense, they are not mysteries. But the manner and details of the falls are what's interesting: the terms used to describe the descent; the stages and locations; the twists and turns; the costumes ad props; and, finally, the place where the falling stops, the place of colour.
♥ It is here, in the figure of the rainbow, that Blanc's creation theory meets modern colour theory, that God meets Newton. It is science that has allowed us to gain access to the mind of God, or at least to a small, relatively minor part of it, and through science, colour can be made finally to "conform" to the higher requirements of the Idea.
..And where does that leave us? Fallen. From a lofty place tantalizingly close to God, we have fallen down flights of steps, past furry animals and gaudy birds, through a tangle of stuff and oriental knick-knacks - "cushions, slippers, narghilehs, turbans, burnous, caftans, mats, parasols" - and ended up face down among the lower forms of nature.
For Blanc, there were only two ways to avoid the Fall: abandoning colour altogether or controlling it. Both had their risks. He is a little vague about the first option; at times, colour is "essential" to painting, but in the same breath it might be only "almost indispensable". Elsewhere, he convinces himself that "painters can sometimes dispense with colour," yet a little later on it is reinstated: "Colour being that which especially distinguishes painting from the other arts, it is indispensable to the painter." Blanc appears to have been genuinely uncertain about colour; it shifts from being essential to being dispensable, from being low in the order of nature and representation to being the very essence and uniqueness of painting as an art. But for the most part, Blanc accepted that colour cannot be willed away; the job therefore is to master it by learning its laws and harnessing its unpredictable power: "...let the colourist choose in the harmonies of colour those that seem to conform to his thought."
Conform, subordinate, control: we are back with Adam and Eve, back in a universe populated entirely by unequal opposites: male and female, mind and heart, reason and emotion, order and disorder, absolute and relative, structure and appearance, depth and surface, high and low, occident and orient, line and colour...
♥ To this day, there remains a belief, often unspoken perhaps but equally often unquestioned, that seriousness in art and culture is a black-and-white issue, that depth is measured only in shades of grey. Forms of chromophobia persist in a diverse range of art from more recent years - in varieties of Realism, for instance, with its unnatural fondness for brown, or in Conceptual art, which often made a fetish of black and white. And it is in much art criticism, the authors of which seem able to maintain an unbroken vow of silence on the subject of colour even when it is quite literally staring them in the face. Likewise, when Hollywood discovered colour, it was deemed suitable mainly for fantasies, musicals and period pieces: drama remained a largely monochrome issue. Then there is the question of architecture, which we have already touched upon. But this is to get ahead of the story...
♥ Where do we find the idea of the Fall in contemporary culture? One answer would be in the image of drugs - or drug culture - and the moral panic that surrounds it. The fall-from-grace-that-is-drugs is often represented in a way that is not unlike the descent into colour described by Blanc. Sensuous, intoxicating, unstable, impermanent; loss of control, loss of focus, loss of self... Now it turns out that there is a rather interesting relationship between drugs and colour, and it is not a recent invention. Rather, it too goes back to Antiquity, to Aristotle, who called colour a drug - pharmakon - and, before that, to the iconoclast Plato, for whom a painter was merely "a grinder and mixer of multi-colour drugs." The best part of two and a half millennia later, it appears that little has changed.
♥ Cézanne, it has been argued, subscribed to the idea that a new-born child lives in a world of naïve vision where sensations are unmediated and uncorrupted by the "veil of... interpretation". The work of the painter was to observe nature as it was beneath this veil, to imagine the world as it was before it had been converted into a network of concepts and objects. This world, for Cézanne, was "patches of colour"; thus "to paint is to register one's sensations of colour."
♥ And when Dorothy's release from greyness arrives, it is itself a maelstrom of grey: "It is out of this greyness - the gathering, cumulative greyness of that bleak world - that calamity comes. The tornado is the greyness gathered together and whirled about and unleashed, so to speak, against itself."
For Rushdie, we are not so much caught up in a Fall as in an uprooting and displacement into colour. Within the yearning in Judy Garland's voice
is the human dream of leaving, a dream at least as powerful as its counterbalancing dream of roots. At the heart of The Wizard of Oz is a great tension between these two dreams... In its most potent emotional moment, this is unarguably a film about the joys of going away, of leaving the greyness and entering the colour, of making a new life in the "place where there isn't any trouble". "Over the Rainbow" is, or ought to be, the anthem of all the world's migrants, all those who go in search of the place where "the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true". It is a celebration of Escape, a great paean to the Uprooted Self, a hymn - the hymn - to elsewhere.
Falling or leaving: these two metaphors of colour are closely related. Their terminologies - of dreams, of joys, of uprootings or undoings of self - remain more or less the same. More than that, perhaps, the descent into colour often involves lateral as well as vertical displacement; it means being blown sideways at the same time as falling downwards. After all, Blanc's "impassioned colourist" falls from the rational Academies of the West into the market stalls and bestiaries of the East, and numerous other accounts, chromophobic and chomophilic alike, describe something similar. In the end, Dorothy has to return from colour - to Home, Family, Childhood, Kansas and Grey. "East, West, Home is Best." So she chants (in the book), albeit without a chance of convincing anyone who has taken a moment to compare the land of Oz with the grey-on-grey of Kansas, as Rushdie points out. Perhaps the implications of not returning, of not recovering from the Fall into colour, were too radical for Hollywood to contemplate.
♥ ..Le Corbusier's awakening occurs within the dream. His dream-awakening dream is the Acropolis: "To see the Acropolis is a dream one treasures without even dreaming to realise it." Yet, realized, this dream is no less a dream. Stuck in Athens for weeks because of a cholera outbreak, Le Corbusier reflects: "Days and weeks passed in this dream and nightmare, in a bright morning, through an intoxicating noon, until evening..." He is entranced, captive to its absolute spell: "Nothing existed but the temple;" it was "an ineluctable presence"; "the Parthenon, the undeniable Master"; "Admiration, adoration, and then annihilation".
Annihilation? Of what? There could be several answers to this. On the one hand, Le Corbusier is surrounded by a cholera epidemic he sees the dead being taken from their houses; perhaps he sees his own death in the dead around him. But I suspect he had a bigger death in mind: self-annihilation in the face of the incomprehensible sublime force that was the Acropolis, and with it the annihilation of all that came before this overwhelming experience: annihilation of the Orient and everything that was the dream-journey that preceded and led to this moment of revelation; annihilation of confusion; annihilation, perhaps, of desire. For once he had seen the Acropolis, Le Corbusier immediately decided that he had no further need of the East; the rest of his journey (not described in the book) would be through Italy and back to France: "I will see neither the Mosque of Omar nor the pyramids. And yet I write with eyes that have seen the Acropolis, and I will leave with joy. Oh! Light! Marbles! Monochromy!"
East, West, Home is Best.
♥ The "architectural" aesthetic of painting was concerned with the unified representation of volumes (whereas the clothes-dyers' aesthetic was limited to flat patterns); colours of the "major scale" were strong and stable insofar as they served and emphasized this representation of volume. The same logic applies to the "painterly" aesthetic of Le Corbusier's architecture: the function of coloured planes in a space is to render the volumes and spaces more balanced and coherent, more exact and, in the end, more white: "To tell the truth, my house does not seem white unless I have disposed the active forces of colours and values in the appropriate places." White must be whiter than white, and to achieve that, colour must be added.
It doesn't much matter whether this hierarchy of colours is coherent, any more than it matters whether Blanc's cosmology of colour makes any real sense. What matters is the show of force: the theoretical subordination of colour to the rule of line and the higher concerns of the mind. No longer intoxicating, narcotic or orgasmic, colour is learned, ordered, subordinated and tamed. Broken.
♥ Figuratively, colour has always meant the less-than-true and the not-quite-real. The Latin colorem is related to celare, to hide or conceal; in Middle English "to colour" is to embellish or adorn, to disguise, to render specious or plausible, to misrepresent.
♥ For Plato, the medium for his image of rhetoric was the dangerous trivial of cosmetics: "A fraudulent, baseborn, slavish knave; it tricks us with padding and makeup and polish and clothes, so that people carry around beauty not their own to the neglect of the beauty properly theirs through gymnastics."
♥ As these quotations attest, Western philosophy is used to dealing with ideas of depth and surface, essence and appearance, or basis and superstructure, and this just about always translates into a moral distinction between the profound and the superficial. So where does colour lie along this well-worn path? Well, if colour is make-up, then it is not really on this path at all, and perhaps this is a part of the colour problem. If surface veils depth, if appearance masks essence, then make-up masks a mask, veils a veil, disguises a disguise. It is not simply a deception; it is a double deception. It is a surface on a surface, and thus even farther from substance than "true" appearance. How things appear is one thing: how things appear to appear is another. Colour us a double illusion, a double deception. It is not just that colour is at the wrong end of a moral opposition; it is, perhaps, just beyond the wrong end.
♥ While cosmetics can both enhance beauty and conceal ugliness, they can also suffocate life. They really are against nature; they can be used to decorate a corpse, but they can also make a corpse of what they decorate.
♥ In at least one sense, all painting is cosmetic. All painting involves the smearing of coloured paste over a flat, bland surface, and it is done in order to trick and deceive a viewer, a viewer who wants to be tricked and deceived into seeing something that is not there. And behind the make-up which is painting, there is nothing. There is no substance beneath the surface, no depth behind the appearance. The same is true, of course, for film, which to our eyes is often a more mystical cosmetic than painting. Behind the dancing coloured light, there is just another flat screen, a monochrome-in-the-world of which we are reminded at the beginning and end of every movie.
♥ But as Mandy Merck has noted, "the transvestite has often been named as the central figure of Warhol's work," and there is perhaps no-one for whom make-up is more important than the drag queen. The figure of the drag-queen is marked, like the figure of rhetoric was for Plato, as a simulacrum, a copy without an original, something entirely artificial and uncertain. In this sense, it is much like cosmetic colour: its aim is to confuse and seduce, to fake and cover up.
♥ Colour is often close to the body and never far from sexuality, be it heterosexual or homosexual. When sex comes into the story, colour tends to come with it, and when colour occurs, sex is often not too far away. In Color Codes, Charles A. Riley notes a tendency to associate colour with male homosexuality.
♥ "Normality" is clothed in black and white; colour is added and, for better or worse, it all begins to fall apart. Colour may or may not have homoerotic content, but its association with irregularity or excess of one kind or another is quite common and, in some cases, quite explicit. In Flatland, Edwin Abbott's 1884 science-fictional, two-dimensional world inhabited entirely by lines and geometric shapes, everything is order, hierarchy and regularity. This is a determinist universe in which a fixed social and biological order prevails. On the lowest rung of the evolutionary ladder are straight lines (women); we ascend slowly through the male scale of isosceles triangles (workers and soldiers), equilateral triangles (tradesmen) and squares and pentagons (professionals), and arrive at a polygonal nobility and circular priestly order. The world is flat, linear, monochrome and more or less stable. Until, that is, colour is discovered.
..A year had not elapsed before the habit spread to all but the very highest of the Nobility.
And, interestingly, to women, who with the priests "remained pure from the pollution of paint." This time came to be known as the Colour Revolt; it brought out fledgling democratic and anarchist tendencies in the lower classes; lowly triangles claimed parity with more complex polygons on the basis that everyone had equal capacity for Colour Recognition. As a "second Nature", colour, it was argued, had "destroyed the need of aristocratic distinctions", and thus "the Law should follow in the same path and henceforth all individuals and all classes should be recognised as absolutely equal and entitled to equal rights." In the name of this radical democracy, even priests and women "should do homage to colour by submitting to be painted". Declaring a Universal Colour Bill, the revolutionaries demanded specifically that women and priests be painted the same two colours (red and green) - the unstated aim being to gain the support of the former group and undermine the power of the latter. Tree years of agitation and anarchy followed; the introduction of colour threatened to topple the entire social order: "With the universal adoption of Colour, all distinctions would cease; Regularity would be confused with Irregularity; development would give way to retrogression." Colour, its opponents argued, would cause "fraud, deception, hypocrisy" to corrupt every household. A violent battle ensued; many lives were lost. Eventually, the status quo prevailed and the Laws and Constitution of Flatland were upheld. "Chromatic Sedition" was suppressed. Colour was abolished.
Abbott was a schoolteacher who originally devised his tale to instruct his pupils in the basics of geometry and the ideas of dimensions - it goes on to introduce a three-dimensional world, "Spaceland", and to hypothesize others. And yet the narrative soon exceeds its initial purpose and becomes as much social satire as "spiritual parable". Abbott's two-dimensional universe bears more than a passing resemblance to Blanc's monochromatic world in which a fall into colour was an ever-present danger, except of course that this time the world is expressed in a social rather than biblical way. Colour threatens - or promises - to undo all the hard-won achievements of culture. It threatens - or promises - chaos and irregularity. Colour threatens disorder - but also promises liberty.
♥ At best, these men were described as free-thinkers and mavericks; at worst as fools and wasters. At best, they were independently minded participants in a culture that rewards conformity - dutiful, cynical, hypocritical, whatever - above just about everything else. Colour here connotes the slightly wild. Inconsistent in their thinking, perhaps, and therefore unpredictable and confusing, but in another sense consistently true to themselves. As in Flatland, these two individuals represented the disobedient, the eccentric, the irregular and the subversive. But, unlike Chromatistes, they were not quite dangerous. Well, not quite safe either, but always more of a danger to themselves and therefore a danger contained. Roguish. Entertaining. Dissenting, Irritating. Attractive. But, when push came to shove, dispensable, supplementary and, finally, cosmetic. Clowns. Court jesters. To be called colourful is to be flattered and insulted at the same time. To be colourful is to be distinctive and, equally, to be dismissed. The main consolation is the colourlessness of the culture from which the colourful are exempted, the greyness of those for whom colour is a mark of exception. In the colourless Flatland of Parliament, colour only ever seems to engulf the colourful. They burn brightly, and then they die. The colourful illuminate their surroundings, but they consume themselves in the process. That is perhaps why people rush to write such fond and smiling obituaries. Such testaments are brimming with jolly anecdotes and amusing memories, and then garnished with appropriate notes of sadness. But their unspoken moral is surely that the embryo of their death was also in their colour. Such peoples' obituaries are smiling with the knowledge that the colourful do not survive. (We knew they wouldn't.) They pay the price of their colour. (We knew they would.) And in knowing that, we know that for all our own greyness we will at least have the last word.
♥ Pleasantville is for the most part a light and very funny satire on the sentimentality of television and on American nostalgia for a mythical world untroubled by dissent from within and disruption from without. If such a world had ever existed, it would have been a kind of purgatory, the film tells us. Colour is uncertainty, doubt and change, but without it there is only the Law and Home. But there are also moments and images in the story that far exceed the film's more obvious subject matter. Many of these coincide with a technically brilliant use of reflections, in particular reflected colour: from the moments at the beginning and at the end of the movie when the teenagers see their own reflections in the switched-off television screen, to the brief scene when a group of obnoxious and disapproving old men stare off-screen at a young woman whose beautiful reflection is glimpsed momentarily in the shop window behind them - a momentary and indirect flare of colour in an otherwise monochrome world. But by far the most moving scenes in the film concern the teenagers' 1950s mother and her growing awareness of her body and her repressed sexuality. After the facts of life have been explained to her (by her daughter), she runs a bath, lies in it and begins to masturbate. As he arousal grows, one by one the bathroom ornaments and decorations dissolve into colour, and as she climaxes, a grey tree in the monochrome garden outside the bathroom spontaneously bursts into Technicolor flames. She comes in colours, but the arriving firemen and onlookers, entirely mystified by the flaming tree (the firemen have previously only ever rescued cats from trees), only catch the glow of the fire on their stunned grey faces.
There is another very beautiful scene in Pleasantville that is also a beautifully original reversal of the conventional image of colour and make-up. It is the centrepiece of the movie, and again its focus is the mother figure. Having reached her state of coloured awareness, having become other to Pleasantville while remaining in Pleasantville, she is faced with the prospect of confronting her husband, the Father, the Law. Alarmed and uncertain, this time she seeks the advice of her '90s son. Together, they hatch a plan, and, as the camera moves in on her face, he slowly and gently begins to apply a layer of grey make-up to her pink cheeks and red lips. Colour, again, is shown as permanent and irresistible, it cannot be rubbed out, only hidden beneath a monochrome mask, and only for a while...
♥ But whichever way we have come at it, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that colour is a very peculiar other, and that it is almost never less than other. We usually expect or demand of otherness that it be marked in some way, the better to distinguish it from our fine and cherished selves. As often as not, that has come to mean a physical mark of some kind, in order that a spatial separation can be made, at least in the imagination. The other is over there: geographically or physiognomically distinct. But the other that is colour is everywhere: around and in and of us, a part of everything we see every day in our every waking moment. Even night fails to shroud or abolish colour entirely, as for many of us colour seeps into our dreams. Perhaps that is the point: the other that is colour can only be imagined away. And this may be one reason for all the attention given to it in certain types of philosophy or art, in certain theories of art or environments, or in certain kinds of stories. Because it is only in these realms that colour can be fully and finally eliminated: wished away by pure thought or washed away by pure form. In literature and the movies, we can picture the world without colour; the rest of the time, in our daily lives and nightly realms, we are stuck with it. We are not just surrounded by colour; we are colour ourselves.
♥
♥ Why is it that so many colour stories, chromophobic and chromophilic alike, get caught in the spell of gems and precious stones? One answer would be that, for some, these natural fragments are extremely convenient. Specifically, they come from the "East", or thereabouts. And they come from the "earth". Le Corbusier: "...one discovers and dislodges from beneath the piles of coarse earth the most sumptuous nuggets of the East..." That is to say, these nuggets are found rather than made or crafted; they do not speak of skill or the human spirit so much as of good fortune - or perhaps greed, power and lust. Their brilliance does not connote a brilliant culture. On the contrary, possession of such stones (outside the noble and civilized centres of Europe, of course) is usually taken as a symptom of despotism and corruption. They may occur naturally, but they connote artifice and decadence. Here, for example, is Bernard Berenson, aesthete, classicist and chromophobe's chromophobe: "The princes of Ormuz and of Ind who pass their fingers through sackfulls of precious stones, not only for the pride of power which great possessions give, but also for the touch, and perhaps chiefly for the gaiety and sparkle of colour, will scarcely be credited with enjoying them as works of art." Clearly, there is much more to these stones than that. For many, their preciousness is not really the issue - after all, it didn't much matter to Des Esseintes whether his tortoise was coated in real of fake gems. Rather, as even Berenson noted, their chief value lies in the sparkle and luminosity. Here, colour is active; it is alive. Colour projects; it is not a passive coating of an inert object; light appears to shine from within; colour seems to have its own power source. Perhaps this is why gems often stand for colour-in-general. They represent the point at which colour becomes independent and assertive - or disruptive and excessive. For the tripping Aldous Huxley, colours became so intense that "they seem to be on the point of leaving the shelves to thrust themselves more insistently" on his attention. For Le Corbusier, colour was explosive. For Barthes, colour could be "like a pinprick in the corner of the eye"; it had the power to "lacerate". For Baudelaire, colour had the capacity to think, speak and dream. In Des Esseintes' dream, the colour-flower-woman came towards him and threatened to engulf him. In each case, colour moved forward; it advanced; it was a disturbance, a danger, a threat. It could explode in your face or lacerate your eye. More than that: it was as if colour was looking at you.
♥ Klein's account is a very sketchy historical elaboration of the principal that underpinned his entire output as an artist, namely that "colour is enslaved by line that becomes writing." That's a good phrase. Articulating more than a simple inversion of the standard disegno-versus-colore opposition, Klein also inverted the assumption implicit in many academic accounts, that language precedes drawing, that the idea precedes the mark. Like Huxley and Blanc, Klein understood colour as a reminder of a remote and original state of being. As for Huxley, for Klein this was also a kind of unspoilt earthly paradise. But unlike Huxley and Blanc, who began their accounts in their presents and worked back to the moment of colour, Klein began with a screen of pure, uninterrupted colour - first white, then yellow, then red, then a deep ultramarine blue - and proceeded to disrupt it, scene by scene, with linear images of one kind or another - prehistoric hand prints, cave drawings, animals, hunters with bows and arrows, abstract engravings, hieroglyphics and so forth.
♥ And it is through colour that (with Cézanne and others) "Western painting began to escape" the regimes and hierarchies of Academic art. And of course, the idea of an escape through or into colour is one way of describing just about all the stories we have looked at: escape from the West and from words; escape from Kansas and from concepts; escape from sanity and from the self; escape from angels, angles and architects.
♥ Silence. The silence that colour may provoke is a mark of its power and autonomy. Silence is how we have to voice our respect for that which moves us beyond language. "Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent," said Wittgenstein, who also saw in colour the outer limits of language. Silence is spoken by the body, through our gestures and postures. The body is one of the means by which we express ourselves when we run out of words. Colour is thus connected to the body in at least two ways: it is applied to the body as make-up, and it is allied with the body in its resistance to verbalization. Moreover, with make-up we not only make our bodies more visible and vivid, we also make them more expressive and articulate.
We often confront the world with a wave rather than a word, by showing rather than saying. Pointing. Sampling. Picking things up and putting things down. Even our words betray our dependency on mute gestures of one kind or another: when we explain something, we "point it out"; when something is explained, we "grasp" it. How often, when it comes to colour - when, that is, we need for some reason to be specific about color - do we revert to a gesture? How often do we find ourselves having to point to an example of a colour? Dulux, a division of Imperial Chemical Industries and one of the largest commercial paint manufacturers in England, ran a series of television advertisements to promote their extensive range of household colours. Significantly, they were silent films; there was no dialogue in the group of scenes that made up each of the short narratives. These were films about pointing. In one, a young woman was seen on a bus; a few rows in front of her sat a man wearing s bright yellow hooded sweatshirt. An idea silently spread over the woman's face; she manoeuvred to a seat directly behind the man. The next scene saw the man and the woman leaving the bus and walking off in different directions. It was raining, but the woman was smiling and seemed so happy that she didn't notice - unlike the man, who hunched his shoulders and put his hood up to keep the rain off. As he did so, he revealed (to us but not to himself) a mini-disc-sized hole in the top of his hood. The woman, meanwhile, had gone into a hardware shop and was showing the bright yellow mini-disc of sweatshirt to the man at the counter. The final scene showed the woman back in her flat (happy, of course, but now it was getting irritating), painting the room the bright yellow sweatsuit colour.
A second version of the advertisement showed a pair of pale lavender underpants on a washing line. We saw the underpants as they were taken by a lone anoraked figure... and we ended up in a pale lavender front room. The same point was being made, obviously enough. But beneath the commercial drive of its surface narrative, the stories of the yellow shirt and lavender underpants were also philosophical tales about the inadequacy of words. They asked how it is possible for us accurately to represent colours to each other, when verbal language had proved itself entirely insufficient. And they suggested that, almost automatically, we reach outside language with the help of a gesture. We point, sample and show rather than say. And in our pointing, sampling and showing we make comparisons. In doing this, we call for the help of something outside ourselves and outside language, and in the process we expose the limits of our words. However complex and sophisticated our powers of description, these films tell us that they are no match for the greater complexities of the world and colour.
♥ We have to shift the ground a bit, however, and begin to talk less of "colour" and more of "colours". What is the difference? If colour is single and colours are many, how can we have both? Plotinus said colour is "devoid of parts", and this is probably among the most significant things ever said on the subject. For Plotinus then, colour was single; it was indivisible. But in being indivisible, colour also put itself beyond the reach of rational analysis - and this was exactly his point. To analyze, after all, is to divide. If colour is indivisible, a continuum, what sense can there be in talking of colours? None, obviously.... except that we do it all the time. Colour spreads flows bleeds stains floods soaks seeps merges. It does not segment or subdivide. Colour is fluid. Barthes thought so, and that is how it appears in Shock Corridor. Colour is indivisibly fluid. It has no inner divisions - and no outer form. But how can we describe that which has no inner divisions and no outer form, like a fog seen from within?
Colour may be a continuum, but the continuum is continuously broken, the indivisible endlessly divided. Colour is formless but ever formed into patterns and shapes. From at least the time of Newton, colour has been subjected to the discipline of geometry, ordered into an endless variety of colour circles, triangles, stars, cubes, cylinders or spheres. These shapes always contain divisions, and these divisions, as often as not contain words. And with these words, colour becomes colours. But what does it mean to divide colour into colours? Where do the divisions occur? Is it possible that these divisions are somehow internal to colour, that they form a part of the nature of colour? Or are they imposed on colour by the conventions of language and culture?
♥ The human brain can distinguish minute variations in colour; it has been said that we can recognize several million different colours. At the same time, in contemporary English, there are just eleven general colour names in common usage: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, grey. A lot has been said about these. They coincide with the hypothesis, put forward by the anthropologists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay in 1969, that all natural languages have between two and eleven basic colour terms. Furthermore, the Berlin-Kay hypothesis maintains that there is a consistent hierarchy within these terms: if a language has only two colour terms, they will be black and white; if it has three colour terms, they will be black white and red; if it has four colour terms, they will be black, white, red and yellow or green; if it has five colour terms, it will include both yellow and green; and so on through blue and brown until purple, pink, orange and grey, for which Berlin and Kay found no consistent hierarchy in their test results.
..The linguist John Lyons has summarized and developed some of the criticisms that have been made of the Berlin-Kay hypothesis, although he contends that the main problem lies not with the hypothesis itself but with careless popularizations of it. Much of Lyons's critique is developed using the example of Hanunoo, a Malayo-Polynesian language, although he also shows that you don't have to travel very far to find other anomalies. Literary Welsh, for example, has no words that correspond exactly with the English "green", "blue", "grey", or "brown"; Vietnamese and Korean make no clear distinction between green and blue; and Russian has no single word for blue, but two words denoting different colours. Then there is purple. Newton had a problem with it, which we will return to, and so do the French, as they also do with brown. Violet and brunviolet corresponds to our "violet", it would seem that it is not quite the same as our purple. Likewise, their brun might more or less correspond to our " brown", at least in the abstract, as a colour term; but when used descriptively rather than referentially, when applied to things in the world like shoes, hair and eyes, brown and brun part company. French shoes may be brown, but they aren't brun so much as marron. And French hair, if it's brun, is dark rather than brown.
..If French basic colour terms appear not to have exactly the same basis as English basic colour terms, it is as nothing compared to Hanunoo. This language has four basic and rather broad colour terms, which nevertheless correspond in their focal points to our black, white, red and green. It is thus consistent with the Berlin-Kay hypothesis. So far so good. However, citing the research of the anthropologist Harold Conklin, Lyons points out that chromatic variation does not in fact seem to be the basis for differentiation between the four terms. Rather, "the two principal dimensions of variation are lightness versus darkness, on the one hand, and, on the other, wetness versus dryness, or freshness (succulence) versus desiccation." This sounds odd; it requires some effort of the imagination to picture a language that makes no essential distinction between colour and texture or, more specifically, between variations of colour and degrees of freshness. Or does it?
Perhaps from time to time we all speak Hanunoo. Certainly, there are artists and even the occasional philosopher for whom there is nothing at all strange about it. Hokusai, for example: "There is a black which is old and a black which is fresh." Or Ad Reinhardt: "Matte black in art is / not matte black; / Gloss black in art is gloss black / Black is not absolute; / There are many different blacks..." Or Wittgenstein: "Mightn't shiny black and matt black have different colour names?" Or Adrian Stokes: "An object is red or yellow, on the one hand, on the other it shines, glitters, sparkles."
For Lyons, the lesson of Hanunoo and other languages is that colour names are so tied into cultural usage of one kind or another that any abstract equivalence is effectively lost. In some cases, they cease to be colour names in the ordinary sense. To conceive of colour in terms independent of, say, luminosity or reflectiveness is in itself a cultural and linguistic habit and not a universal occurrence. Ditto the separation of hue from tone. Indeed, Hanunoo and other languages have no independent word for "colour" at all. Such basic colour terms as we have, to put it another way, even terms like "colour", are the products of language and culture more than the products of colour. Lyons: "I am assuming... that colour is real. I am not assuming, however, that colours are real. On the contrary, the main burden of my argument is that they are not: my thesis is that they are the product of the lexical and grammatical structure of particular languages." A similar argument is made by Umberto Eco in his essay "How Culture Conditions the Colours We See". He too brings on Hanunoo and, like Lyons, uses it to help account for the perceived lack of it between the colour terms of different languages, such as Latin and ancient Greek, and of our own. He concludes that in these languages "the names of colours, in themselves, have no precise chromatic content: they must be viewed within the general context of many interacting semiotic systems."
Russian, we are told, has two words for blue. That is to say, Russians appear to deal with blue in roughly the way we deal with red and pink. Certainly, what we call light blue is optically as distinct from dark blue as pink is from red, perhaps more so, and yet our language allows no such independence for bits of blue. "Pink" is the only basic colour term in English that also denotes a specific part of another basic colour term, one end of "red". But there seems to be no necessary reason for this in terms of our experience of colour. When we see light blue, do we see something different from what a Russian speaker sees? And while we are on the subject of light and dark, what about dark yellow? Yellow is certainly the lightest of the spectrum colours, but when yellow is darkened, where does it go? Does it get wrapped up in a kind of brown? Or is it lost to the insecure empire of orange? And if we can just about imagine yellow drifting and darkening towards orange and brown, why can't we imagine it turning towards green in the same way? What happens to yellow as it travels towards green? And how distinct is green from yellow? More distinct than orange is from yellow and purple is from blue and from red? Probably, but then why don't we have a name or names for the colour-space between green and yellow?
♥ "Light itself is a heterogeneous mixture of differently refrangible rays", noted Isaac Newton in 1665, in the middle of a remarkable century which provided much of our modern understanding of optics. Newton wasn't alone in his investigation of the properties of light: the law of refraction had been discovered nearly 50 years earlier by Willebrand van Snel van Royen, and the same law had been formulated independently by René Descartes, whose "Origin of Rainbows" had published in 1637. If, with Pierre de Fermat, these scientist-philosophers provided the first clear outlines of a systematic theory of light, Newton's great contribution - at the age of 22 - was to colour it in,
When Newton refracted white light through a glass prism and produced a coloured spectrum, he was doing science. But when he divided the result into seven distinct colours, what we now call the colours of the rainbow, he was doing something else. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet: there is something wrong with the tail end of the list; it doesn't sound quite right; it's confusing, to children, adults and Berlin-Kay alike. Either Newton's English had a different set of basic colour terms or something else was at stake. In fact, it is known that Newton had a strong interest in musical harmonies, and that he divided the spectrum into seven colours in order to make it correspond to the seven distinct notes in the musical scale. For Charles Blanc, it made more sense to divide God's palette into six colours, as it did for the designer of the Apple Computer logo, whose partially eaten spectrum gazes at me every time I sit down to write. The spectral Apple has horizontal bands which begin with green at the top and end with blue; when Ellsworth Kelly made a series of multi-panel paintings entitled Spectrum, he used thirteen vertical bands with a (different) yellow at each end. The highly observant John Constable, on the other hand, often settled for a three-colour spectrum in red, white and blue rainbows. Newton, as John Gage has noted, thought of settling for five colours; painting from the medieval period and since has represented the spectrum sometimes in two colours, sometimes in four, sometimes in more. For me, the rainbow spreads its colour evenly at both edges but has a kink in the middle, where yellow meets green, were Kierkegaard met his tramp, where colour has no name.
♥ In the same way as there are basic colour terms there are basic colours. They are universal - but they are also contingent. Colour is universal, and colours are contingent. Is that right? The world is colour, and it is full of colours. We see in colour, and we see colours. Colour is nature, and colours are culture. Colour is analogical, and colours are digital. Colour is a curve, and colours are points on that curve. Or colour is a wheel, and colours are the infinite and infinitely thin spokes inserted in the wheel. These spokes, rotated in another dimension, Flatland-like, become planes (as on a Rolodex), those flat areas of individual colour that we see around us all the time. These may be bad analogies, but there aren't any good ones. And it doesn't really matter anyway, as we seem to get by. Colour is Dionysiac, and colours are Apolline. How does that sound? Colour is Nietzschian "primal oneness" and colours are the "principal of individuation". This at least doesn't sound too distant from the ways in which Cézanne, Corb, Huxley and Kristeva wrote about colour.
Colour is in everything, but it is also independent of everything. Or it promises it threatens independence. Or is it the case that the more we treat colour as independent, the more we become aware of is dependence on materials and surfaces; the more we treat colour in combination with actual materials and surfaces, the more its distinctiveness becomes apparent? There is a belief that objects would somehow remain unchanged in substance if their colour was removed; in that sense, colour is secondary. I might just as easily say that colours remain the same even when objects are removed; in that sense, colour is primary. When colour is more than tinted chiaroscuro, when it is vivid, it is also autonomous. It separates itself from the object; it has its own life. That car may happen to be bright yellow, but no more than that bright yellow may happen to be a car. I can imagine the car another colour, but no more than I can imagine the yellow another shape. William Gass again: "shape is the distance colour goes securely." And "...every colour is a completed presence in the world, a recognizable being apart from an object." Stephen Melville again: "We... know colour only as everywhere bounded... But the colour repeatedly breaks free of or refuses such constraint..."
♥ I was expecting to write a book about art, if only because most other things I have written have been about art, and one would think there is a lot to say about art in a book about colour. It just hasn't turned out that way. The more I have written, the more the art has got pushed further and further back. I have mentioned at least as much literature, philosophy and science as art theory, and I have said much more about films, architecture and advertisements than painting or sculpture. Fair enough: colour is interdisciplinary. Except that I feel uncomfortable casually passing something off as "interdisciplinary". I want to preserve the strangeness of colour; its otherness is what counts, not the commodification of otherness. The interdisciplinary is often the antidisciplinary made safe. Colour is antidisciplinary.
♥ This is what I want to argue: that something important happened to colour in art in the 1960s. On the one hand, many painters continued to use artists' colours, call themselves colourists and have at their disposal an established language of colour in painting. Push and pull, hot and cold, that sort of thing. On the other hand, an entirely distinct and unrelated use of colour occurs in the work of those artists who were identified, for the most part, with the emergence of Pop art and Minimalism. This was an entirely new conception of colour, and it was put into words, tentatively, by Stella, during a 1964 radio interview, when he said: "I knew a wise-guy who used to make fun of my painting, but he didn't like the Abstract Expressionists either. He said they would be good painters if they could only keep the paint as good as it is in the can. And that's what I tried to do. I tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can"
"To keep the paint as good as it was in the can". It's a simple enough phrase on the face of it: direct, unambiguous, deadpan and not unlike Stella's paintings themselves of the time. But it's also a phrase which, behind its flat tones, carries a kind of resonance. It acknowledges that something important had changed in art. And, as it does so, it also betrays a kind of anxiety. The change in art it acknowledges may not seem so big: it says that paint now came from a can. That is, from a can rather than from a tube: whereas artists' paints usually come in tubes, industrial or household paints are normally stored in cans. Artists' paints were developed to allow the representation of various kinds of bodies in different types of space. "Flesh was the reason oil painting was invented", said De Kooning. Industrial paints are made to cover large surfaces in a uniform layer of flat colour. They form a skin, but they do not suggest flesh. They are for paint-jobs more than for painting-proper. They are different technologies harnessed to different worlds: in short, to use paint from a can rather than from a tube may not seem much, but it carries with it the risk - or the promise - of abandoning the entire tradition of easel painting, of painting as representation. If this idea, and this risk, were hinted at in Europe with Dada and Constructivism, they were again taken up after the war by Pollock, and in the early 1950s by Rauschenberg. By the time Stella had said his piece, a generation of artists was trying out a range of more-or-less recently developed industrial paints, finishes, supports and other materials.
Not only did this type of paint come in a can, it looked good in the can.
♥ Much painting since the 1960s is related in its evasion of oil paint and, more to the point, in its evasion of the protocols and procedures, conventions, habits of thought, training, techniques, tools, effects, surfaces and smells that went with it. Why? What motivated this turn by artists against a technology which had been developed, over three hundred years or so, exclusively for the use of artists? There may be any number of answers to this question. There is an argument - one that was very prominent around the time of Stella's remark - that in order to survive, continue and develop, painting has to distinguish itself from all the other arts and equally from all that is not art. But the evidence of many artists' work at the time and since suggests something like the opposite has happened. That is, painting has been continued by constantly being tested against that which stands outside painting-as-art: the photograph, the written word, decoration, literalness or objecthood. In other words, painting has been continued by being continuously corrupted: by being made impure rather than pure; be being made ambiguous, uncertain and unstable; and by not limiting itself to its own competences. Painting has been kept going by embracing rather than resisting that which might extinguish it, and this has included embracing the possibility of painting becoming all but indistinguishable from a paint-job. It has also included the possibility of paintings becoming all but indistinguishable from objects, photographs, texts and so forth. But while painting has shown itself to be capable of absorbing these things, it is always equally possible that painting itself might be absorbed by them. That is to say, it is a story of the corruption of painting as the continuation of painting, but one that has no guarantee of a happy end, because the corruption of painting must also contain the real possibility of the cancellation of painting. Paint itself is one of the characters in the story. Perhaps one of the differences between a painting and something merely painted is - or, for a while, was - the difference between types of paint. Perhaps artist' colours and materials were art's guarantee, a kind of certainty, art's pedigree in a universe of aliens, impostors and mongrels, its received pronunciation in a world of strange and irregular voices. Perhaps this was the attraction of commercial paints: they seemed to contain the possibility for both the continuation and the cancellation of painting. And perhaps that is why they looked so good in the can.
♥ Then there is the other great modern philosopher of corruption and renewal, Mikhail Bakhtin. (Bakhtin, it should never be forgotten, smoked one of his own books. This may not be entirely relevant, but it is still a very good story. At some point in Russia during World War II, after a bomb had destroyed the publishing house containing one of his manuscripts, Bakhtin ran out of cigarette papers - but not of tobacco. You have to picture it: there was this tobacco, but no means to smoke it; there was this manuscript, and no obvious means to publish it. What would you have done?)
♥ For Bakhtin, carnival was a great, if temporary, upturning. A dethroning, a usurping of the official by the unofficial, a corruption of the refined by the vulgar. And it was laughter, all the loud, riotous laughter that went with seeing the powerful and the pompous get their come-uppance. Laughter is many things, of course; it is, among other things, a wordless language spoken by the body when our standard vocabularies desert us. Carnival is the Fall as comedy. For Baudelaire, writing in "The Essence of Laughter", it was "certain that human laughter is intimately connected with the accident of a ancient fall, of a physical and moral degradation." But, at the same time, in this Fall there was also always a renewal, a renewal found, as Bakhtin put it, in laughter's "indissoluble and essential relation to freedom".
♥ And Judd, together with most of his contemporaries, abandoned the spectrum, the pure unbroken continuum, for the most localized, contingent, materially and culturally specific colour event. In the process, they abandoned painting. Not paint, not colour applied to a surface, but painting as a technique practised in a studio by an artist. Judd again: "The achievement of Pollock and the others meant that the century's development of colour could continue no further on a flat surface... Colour, to continue, had to occur in space."
The kinds of materials that Judd and his contemporaries looked towards were, like paints in cans, also readymades and also available in a range of colours and finishes which were usually flat and often shiny. Flat and shiny: this is one of the paradoxical attractions of commercial paints and materials: the double quality of the dead and the dynamic, the bland and the brilliant. A shiny surface gives depth to flatness at the same time as it emphasizes that flatness. But it is a kind of depth which is entirely the opposite of the atmospheric depth of traditional easel painting. This is an inexpressive, mechanical depth. It is not psychological or emotional, at least not in the traditional sense, not deep and not heavy. Indeed, any light-reflecting surface will always convey lightness (which is why mirrors can feel abnormally heavy when they are carried). A shiny surface also reflects not an imaginary inner world but an actual external space, the contingencies of the environment in which the work is situated: the viewer's space. But it is vivid, nonetheless. It is sharp, hard and live, in a vulgar kind of way, and its vulgar sharpness is part of its attraction.
Often flat and shiny, but always intense.
♥ Colour is excess, but colour in art is also the containment of excess. This is unavoidable.
♥ Finally, there is Goethe, in his Theory of Colours at the end of particularly strange discussion of "Pathological Colours":
...it is also worthy of remark, that savage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great predilection for vivid colours; that animals are excited to rage by certain colours; that people of refinement avoid vivid colours in their dress and the objects that are about them, and seem inclined to banish them altogether from their presence.
That passage was written during the first decade of the nineteenth century, yet it brings us back to exactly the place where we began. Back to the cold light of refinement, back to a world banished of colour and all that comes with it, back to a rageless, fleshless, colourless whiteness. Back to the late twentieth-century whited sepulchre where the illusion of culture without corruption can be acted out as if it were real.