Cultures of Colour: Visual, Material, Textual

By Chris Horrocks

Colour permeates contemporary visual and material culture and affects our senses beyond the superficial encounter by infiltrating our perceptions and memories and becoming deeply rooted in thought processes that categorise and divide along culturally constructed lines. Colour exists as a cultural as well as psycho-physical phenomenon and acquires a multitude of meanings within differing historical and cultural contexts. The contributors examine how colour becomes imbued with specific symbolic and material meanings that tint our constructions of race, gender, ideal bodies, the relationship of the self to others and of the self to technology and the built environment. By highlighting the relationship of colour across media and material culture, this volume reveals the complex interplay of cultural connotations, discursive practices and socio-psychological dynamics of colour in an international context.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Jun 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780857454652

Book preview

PART I

COLOUR AND VISUAL CULTURE

CHAPTER 1

AD REINHARDT: ‘COLOR BLINDS’

¹

Michael Corris

‘A color in art’, wrote the American painter and cartoonist Ad Reinhardt in ‘Art-as-Art Dogma, Part V’ in 1965, ‘is not a color’. Similarly, ‘colorlessness in art is not colorlessness’ (Rose 1975: 66).² The process of symbol formation teaches us to expect that colour may signify something other than a visually perceptible hue. Colourlessness, too, may serve to express metaphorically, signifying non-aesthetic attributes like lassitude or the proclamation of a defiant nonconformity. Reinhardt took great pleasure in this interpretive loophole provided by polysemy, fascinated by what he called the ‘mysterious delights of multiple meanings’. But it was really pure colour – that is to say, colour drained of its meaning – that appealed to him. We revel in the linguistic perversity of those inventive and maddening texts of Reinhardt in the 1960s known as ‘art-as-art dogma’, wherein hues and their possible references couple and uncouple at will. For Reinhardt, the directness of the visual experience of pure colour that lurked in the infinite cultural complexity of the colour sign was nothing less than beautiful.³

Reinhardt ‘makes of black something witty and perverse’, but the black in Reinhardt’s paintings does not appear black; rather, an extremely dark, matt grey (Reinhardt 1974: 7). Yet Reinhardt did not immediately abandon the lusciously glowing chromatics of the blue and red monochromes of the early 1950s for the dark paintings that really came to dominate his production a decade later. Rather than make a decisive break with un-greyed hues, Reinhardt lingered for close to four years on the problem of how to make a painting nearly ‘black’ or very dark. Discussions of Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings tend to concentrate on the series inaugurated in 1960, where uniformity of size and schemata complement the single-mindedness of the artist’s project. Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings constitute a radical reinvention of the art of painting because of the sheer novelty of the painting’s unfolding optical effects.

The rectilinear, geometric format adopted by Reinhardt from the early 1950s onwards is absolutely crucial to the generation of these optical effects. In paintings completed between 1949 and 1950, we can see Reinhardt’s ambivalence towards the adoption of a strictly geometric structure. Red and blue hues – utilized separately for monochrome paintings and in combination to produce visually dissonant canvases – were the means Reinhardt chose to eliminate illusionist space. These works were greyed or ‘un-done’ from 1952 to 1953. With the greying also came a change of heart concerning the scale of the paintings, so there are no dark grey canvases in Reinhardt’s body of work to match the heroic scale of his 1952 Red Painting.

To account for the radical ‘draining of light from color’ that characterizes Reinhardt’s work from 1953 onwards, it has been suggested that the artist was responding negatively to the strong figure-ground illusion present in Josef Albers’s series, Homage to the Square. At Albers’s invitation, from 1950 to 1952, Reinhardt was a visiting critic at Yale University School of Art, working mainly during the summer terms. It seems likely that this contact with Albers was instrumental in convincing Reinhardt of the need to revisit geometry and to develop a more analytical approach towards colour. In Albers’s work, these two aspects went hand in hand; without the stable, straightforward armature of the mise-en-abyme of square-within-square, the relativity of colour perception could not be convincingly demonstrated.

The question that remains is, quite simply, ‘Why black?’ It is undeniable that Reinhardt had already encountered the lyrical black monochrome paintings of Edward Corbett during a 1950 summer residency at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), San Francisco.⁴ Shortly thereafter, Reinhardt saw the controversial series of monochrome paintings by Robert Rauschenberg: the white monochromes at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1951, the black, glossy monochromes at Stable Gallery in 1953, and the red monochromes at Charles Egan Gallery in 1954.⁵ Many of Rauschenberg’s monochromes are gestural, collaged paintings where paint is applied over newspapers (one important exception is the artist’s four-panel white monochrome). As examples of monochrome painting, the works of Corbett and Rauschenberg were suggestive but not necessarily seminal to Reinhardt’s project. In the artist’s view, Rauschenberg’s white monochromes were a kind of sceptical nihilism, while the black glossy monochromes committed the cardinal sin of being reflective and thereby allowing the introduction of distracting, art-negating elements into the experience of looking. In contrast to Rauschenberg’s Neo-Dadaist gesture, Reinhardt’s monochromes are constructive, in that the possibility of painting, rather than its utter negation, prevails. Nevertheless, coming to terms with these various conceptions of monochrome painting bolstered Reinhardt’s conviction of the fundamental correctness of his resolve to adopt an unmotivated geometric format to structure monochrome painting. It also strengthened his resolve to present his work in a manner that emphasized its distance from the everyday. It was black that most effectively negated hue while allowing for sufficient subtle variations through the use of progressively deeper tonalities.

The aesthetic issues that Reinhardt had attempted to work through during the early 1950s included the all-over composition as a marker for non-illusionist, shallow painterly space and the use of formal symmetry to destroy hierarchical or dynamic composition. The monochrome enabled Reinhardt to reduce the number of variables in his painting so that he could concentrate on the matter of colour. The charge of ‘minor key Orientalism’ levelled against Reinhardt’s paintings of this period, while harsh, underscores a common perception about the lack of resolution in the artist’s body of work at this time. It remains the case that for several years during the early 1950s, Reinhardt was groping towards a solution that was only partially revealed by any given work of the time. These paintings showed Reinhardt what would not work within his scheme. Having worked through red and blue and white, the problem of affecting optical resonance using close-valued hues based on black was the only untested option. Once that decision was reached, Reinhardt gave free reign to his vivid comic imagination as he explored the manifold and suitably gothic cultural associations of black in his studio notes that reflected on his practice of painting.

There’s something nice about religious points of view in which the central meanings can’t be pinned down.

(Reinhardt 1991: 27)⁶

When Reinhardt complained in an undated, untitled note, ‘what’s wrong with the art world is not Andy Warhol or Andy Wyeth but Mark Rothko’, he added: ‘the corruption of the best is the worst’ (Rose 1975: 190). Reinhardt’s invective was prompted by Rothko’s decision to take up a commission to decorate the De Menil chapel in Houston, Texas. From the early 1950s, Reinhardt – something of an expert on the contemporary question of art and religion – had been chastizing New York colleagues such as Robert Motherwell for accepting a commission to decorate a synagogue, and Barnett Newman for aspiring to religious painting in his series Stations of the Cross.⁷

While Reinhardt was mounting these attacks he was, along with Robert Motherwell, a trustee on the board of the New York-based Foundation for Art, Religion and Culture (FARC), an organization that encouraged dialogue between artists and theologians for the purpose of developing a more modern understanding of the relationship between religion and avant-garde art. Reinhardt’s reasons for maintaining an interest in religion are encapsulated in a series of remarks made in 1959 while lecturing at the Dayton Art Institute:

A great many people are trying to make art a religion or have it replace traditional religion in which a god or the central essence can’t be pinned down and named. But pure abstract art is very limited as to what can be read into it. Abstract Expressionist art, on the other hand, is very open, in that people can read their own wishes and fantasies and subjectivities into it. Pure abstract art doesn’t permit that. (Reinhardt 1991: 27)

Reinhardt rejected left-wing criticism of Abstract Expressionism as an art devoid of meaning. On the contrary, he sought an antidote for the glut of associative meaning such works encouraged. To this end, Reinhardt turned to Zen Buddhism. By the late 1950s, Reinhardt had become well known for his interest in Zen Buddhism – more a set of moral precepts than a theology – and was deeply immersed in the writings of Christian mystics. For Reinhardt, Zen Buddhism provided a clear argument for detachment that would render a particular mode of consumption of art problematic. Similarly, the writings of Christian mystics provided Reinhardt with vivid descriptions of spiritual revelation in terms of kenosis: an emptying out figured by the trope of darkness or the void. These were critical resources that enabled Reinhardt to extend the conceptualization of his ‘black’ paintings in opposition to what he held to be the inflated metaphysical claims of the work of the Abstract Expressionists.

During the early 1950s, Reinhardt’s work attracted the attention of theologians owing to its allegedly transcendental and meditative qualities. One admirer of Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings was the artist’s lifelong friend, Thomas Merton. Since the early 1940s, Merton had been a monk of the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance, commonly known as the Trappists.⁸ Throughout the late 1950s, Merton repeatedly asked Reinhardt for ‘some small black and blue cross painting (say about a foot and a half high) for the cell in which I perch’ in the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Lexington, Kentucky.⁹ Nearly two years passed before Reinhardt relented and produced such a painting. Summing up his consideration of the work that Reinhardt gave him in 1957, Merton wrote:

It has the following noble feature, namely its refusal to have anything else around it. It thinks that only one thing is necessary and this is time, but this one thing is by no means apparent to one who will not take the trouble to look. It is a most religious, devout, and latreutic small painting. (Masheck 1978: 24)

Merton eloquently articulates the painting’s effect on the beholder:

Almost invisible cross on a black background. As though immersed in darkness and trying to emerge from it  . . . You have to look hard to see the cross. One must turn away from everything else and concentrate on the picture as though peering through a window into the night . . .  I should say a very ‘holy’ picture – helps prayer – an ‘image’ without features to accustom the mind at once to the night of prayer – and to help one set aside trivial and useless images that wander into prayer and spoil it. (Masheck 1978: 24)

As early as 1940, Merton was convinced that Reinhardt’s painting was religious and pure owing to the artist’s rejection of naturalism in favour of ‘formal and intellectual values’ (Merton 1996: 139–40; Spaeth 2000: 250).

The ethereal quality of the experience of a ‘black’ painting – exemplified by Merton’s commentary – is frequently used to justify a connection between Reinhardt’s art and the spiritual, and has been a perennial topic of interest for contemporary critics, notably Joseph Masheck, Naomi Vine and Paul J. Spaeth.¹⁰ Rather than dwell on these associations, I prefer to explain Reinhardt’s interest in theological and moral texts in terms of their practical value as surrogates for conventional aesthetic discourse.

By the late 1950s, Merton was making a reputation for himself as a scholar of Zen Buddhism and the early Christian mystics, such as Nicholas of Cusa and, most importantly, the sixteenth-century Spanish figure, Juan de Yepes, canonized in 1726 as St John of the Cross. St John of the Cross wrote eloquently in his allegory on negative theology of ‘the dark night of the soul’ as a path to enlightenment; both Merton and Reinhardt cite him in their writings.¹¹ According to theologian Peter C. King (1995: 6), ‘Merton very clearly understood himself as standing in the tradition of [St John of the Cross]. He used John’s language and concepts – among others – to describe his journey of faith as a contemplative and a monk.’¹²

Merton was well known for promoting a meditative practice known as contemplative prayer, that drew upon his extensive knowledge of Hinduism and Buddhism, both of which refreshed his practice as a Cistercian monk. Merton (1962) discusses three modes of contemplation while referring explicitly to similar practices in Zen Buddhism. Reinhardt’s most private reflections on the ‘black’ paintings are indebted to Merton’s writing on this discipline and to his lively correspondence with the artist. For Merton, contemplative practices are classed as ‘beginnings’ where the decisive moment is ‘a sudden emptying of the soul in which images vanish, concepts and words are silent, and freedom and clarity suddenly open out within you until your whole being embraces the wonder, the depth, the obviousness and yet the emptiness and unfathomable incomprehensibility of God’ (ibid.: 172). Replace ‘soul’ with ‘painting’ and ‘God’ with ‘art’, and Merton could just as well be speaking of Reinhardt’s iconoclastic paintings. In Contemplative Prayer – published posthumously in 1969 – Merton cites the mystics of the Rhineland, such as John Tauler and Ruysbroeck (author of Spiritual Marriage), and the Philokalia, all of which stress the encounter with God ‘without intermediary’, through ‘imageless’ contemplation. The dominant figure of speech was that of a ‘simple light’ that ‘shows itself to be darkness, nakedness and nothingness’ (Merton 1973: 102). The contemplative’s knowledge of God is a knowing ‘about’: an allusive knowledge that denies the meditative subject mastery of the object of his contemplation. Merton called this a doctrine of ‘mystical unknowing’; one that did not necessarily disregard images, symbols, or other sacramental art but limited them from becoming ‘idols’ (ibid.: 104).

Merton wholeheartedly endorsed the notion of art as ‘a calculated trap for meditation’; that much was clear in his plaintive letters to Reinhardt requesting a small, dark, ‘cruciform’ painting (ibid.: 105). In Merton’s reading of St John of the Cross, ‘dark contemplation’ and ‘the night of sense’ does not necessarily signify a complete renunciation of sensation, but allows for another mode of being within a sensual life. Through his long and close friendship with Merton, Reinhardt found a valuable and compelling partner in conversation and a benchmark for profound attachment to the spiritual life against which to measure the ersatz or secular spirituality with which certain artists cloaked their painting and their persona. In a wonderful passage that encapsulates Reinhardt’s achievement as an artist, Merton writes that ‘in the world today, one would have to make heroic efforts to keep still’ (ibid.: 114).

Yet, at the point of intersection of Merton’s theological concerns and Reinhardt’s aesthetic concerns, one finds the mystification of art and the idolatry of religious imagery intertwined; surely an uneasy place for the ‘black’ paintings to reside. While Reinhardt shared Merton’s enthusiasm for these religious doctrines and precepts, the artist chose to consider them in terms of a matrix of social and ideological concerns. In Reinhardt’s mind, this may have blunted the wayward spirituality that Merton was prepared to project onto the ‘black’ paintings. During the 1960s, however, both individuals explored the conjunction of religion and politics; Reinhardt through his flirtation with the anti-war activities of the Catholic workers, and Merton through his substantial commitment to what might be called a prototype of liberation theology.¹³ The artist had always kept religion at some remove and was bemused by being dubbed the ‘black monk’ by Harold Rosenberg; a remark that was most likely made to point out the way in which Reinhardt’s restrictive working schema for the ‘black’ paintings, despite its narrowness, offered a kind of freedom (Fuller 1970: 37). For Reinhardt, the classic texts of Buddhism, Hinduism and Christian mysticism were intellectually engaging resources that provided fertile ground for the increasingly elaborate and esoteric framing of his ‘black’ paintings. These doctrines were treated in an analogous way to Reinhardt’s treatment of the religious art one encountered in the museum: such art was no longer an object of veneration or a ritual object, but an aesthetic