The Assignment - Art Text
July seminar 2023 – due 21st August
Examine a published, critical piece of writing on an artwork or artist's practice, or artworks as grouped together within an exhibition. This could be a current or a previous critical review and essays.
A Color that is a Form of Thinking
By Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev – Director of GAM Modern Art Gallery Turin
“Although or perhaps because, colors are used to seduce, manipulate, design, and control behavior, can we muddle them up, play and produce a different logic, a different color from that of our screens ? “A color that is a form of thinking? “They needed coloured fire and had only ground earths” Annie Besant said of visual artists in 1905 as they tried to reproduce with bright pigments the images produced in our brains. Now that we have only “coloured fire” and liquid crystals (Gustav Metzger) on our screens, we need new tools.”
I have written the first draft and certain key words and ideas for my practise have started to come out from this so I thought I would make a note of these for myself for future reference
prismatic memory
Klimtian Crimson, Baroque yellow, Algae Green (this follows on from the landscape course where we were encouraged to name our colours)
mischievous outsider (Harlequin) Cezanne, Picasso, Doig - can there be an equivalent in female form?
synaesthetic ability to conjure music with paint
hypnogogic state between reality and memory
Essentially there are 3 different types of cones denoted as red, green and blue, and 3 attributes of colour, namely tonality, luminosity, and saturation.
I will add to this as I go.
Assumption
Christov-Bakagiev describes and breaks down the scientific ways of trying to understand how and why we see colour. In doing so she puts forward the idea that we can change or rather extend the way we see the world to produce a more vibrant harmonious future.
Carolyn Christov-Bakagiev opens the Exhibition Book that accompanies the Exhibition Colori – Emotions of Color in Art with an introduction into the scientific and historical processes behind colour. She calls colour an “obvious...yet elusive aspect of the world” and explains that certain materials absorb electromagnetic waves except those that bounce back at them. Try as we might we still do not understand the way that, after these waves hit our trichromatic retinas, they are processed though the V4 part of our brains where we translate and “see” them as hues of differing saturation or brightness. Different species see different colours, some have more cones, or photoreceptor cells in the retina than we do.
Christov-Bakagiev describes the brain’s involuntary ability to create ‘colour constancy’. This is the process by which we modify ever changing, vibrating hues to become constant, allowing us to distinguish one object from another and to experience the world ‘clearly’ and not as a blur.
She explains that we see colours before shapes, e.g., a red ball first as red then as a ball.
The cones in our retinas are receptors that together with the process of transduction, have our nerve cells transform the electromagnetic energy that strikes them (the light reflected by the objects on which the gaze falls) into electrical potential, receptor potential. The perception of colour is translated into the electrical code used by the neurons to communicate with one another, i.e., action potential. Essentially there are 3 different types of cones denoted as red, green and blue, and 3 attributes of colour, namely tonality, luminosity, and saturation.
Goethe named the ‘afterimage’, the complementary colour (such as green), we see when we have looked for long enough at its complement (red in this case), proving that colour is produced in the brain.
In the early 19thC a follower of Goethe, Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge created the first chemical colour, Cyan Blue, it was aniline, oily, created from the dark brown of the carbon fossil fuel, and published his book of chemical color experiments, De Buldunstreib der Stoffe, in 1855. Esther Leslie writes in 2005 (?) how the chemical turn in the 19th C helps to create belief in the “relentless positivity of science to harness the universe”.
We can make any colour in the natural world artificially and the creation of standard palettes for colour RAL and Panton 1920’s and 30’s later those of IG Farben (later creating Zyklon B) reflect this drive to name and catalogue the optics of the brave new world.
If colour perception is concerning vision, then it could be argued that vision has been under scrutiny as a hierarchical sense, “that allows for detachment and power over what is being looked at: the gaze of the guard in the Panoptican”.
I could also see vision as the most sensual of all the senses, possibly no less about touching than touch itself. Maybe I can reclaim colour for myself?
Cristov-Barakgiev finds a correlation between the rise of the new world order of the later 19th C and early 20th with the creation of electrical light and the ushering in of Fascist governments who created an atmosphere of anti colour tendencies. White becomes favored by the modern heroes of such times, the architects, modern philosophers and intellectuals. Colour becomes associated with the primitive and naïve, with radical expressionists and avant-garde artists seeped in Theosophy and Anthroposophy as “deluded in their ideas about synesthesia – the relations between colour and music, colour and the vibrations of light.” She describes them as becoming marked down as early modernists, not part of the new understanding of life as it should be or will become.
Proposition
When thinking about the way our brains process colour and the signs and signals we attach to it, perhaps we can understand how this can lead to future ways of seeing, using and creating. A way that enhances rather than depletes the world.
How can this be used in my work?
In exploring these ideas, I can further my own practice. The more consciously I use colour to create the emotions I seek to evoke in my paintings the more powerful I feel they will be.
Further explorations into Victorian and Edwardian colour use within the Western European Art tradition would be helpful. I have already seen how the palette and subject matter of the Courtauld collection have helped to shape Doig's recent paintings. The collection at the Courtauld of Manet, Monet, Pissarro to Cezanne and Gauguin are a touchstone for him. He is seen recasting and reinventing traditions of painting. (Barnaby Wright – Introduction to the Paintings in The Morgan Stanley Exhibition: Peter Doig 2023)
This historically referencing way of working also resonates with the notion of before-images and using this to create a future way of expression.
Christov-Barakgiev (2015) insists much of our visual experience involves active reconstruction by the observer to “bring light to “invisible” components induced by the visible. “ . We lose many seconds of continuous vision through our blink reflex and saccadic movements alone, yet we still have a continuous and coherent vision forming a subjective experience. What happens to the images that fall between these moments?
Bibliography
Christov-Barakgriev , Carolyn. “A Color that is a Form of Thinking” Colori Emotions of Color in Art GAM Torino March 14-July 23, 2017, 19-22
Gallese, Vittorio and Ardizzi, Martina. “The Sense of Color, Midway Between World, Body, and Brain” Colori Emotions of Color in Art GAM Torino March 14-July 23, 2017, 23-35
Wright, Barnaby. First published to accompany the exhibition Peter Doig The Morgan Stanley Exhibition 2023 at The Courtauld, Paul Holberton Publishing
Kupferschmidt, Kai. “Blue - The Science and secrets of Nature’s rarest Color”
copyright 2019 by Hoffmann Lund Camp Verlag, Hamburg
Other sources (to be expanded)
Patoureau, Micheal.
Ettinger, Bracha
Barad, Karen
Merleau-Ponty
#KNMATalks: In Conversation: Carolyn Christov Bakargiev with William Kentridge and Nalini Malani
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev presenta "L'emozione dei COLORI nell'arte"
Colour design in the age of Artificial Intelligence