Gerhard Richter, 1985, 57.4 cm x 86.4 cm, Oil on paper
The Henri Art Magazine (written, I think, by several authors) has a fascinating continuation of a discussion of color, “Color: Simulation,” published on Wednesday Nov. 4, 2009.
The author discusses how the perception of color has changed with technology, the technology that presents any color you want: directly out of the can (reducing the need to use traditional techniques to create luminescence or brilliance by direct observation and experience); and then, further “enhancing” and changing color as we know it, technology can produce a pure physics of color through light technologies (as seen on the computer screen.) This, he insists, has produced color as desire, as consumer directed, and loses color as personal and emotive.
I can’t do justice to the writer’s observations; you’ll need to read them yourself. And I’m not sure the polemic need be as strong as it is.
But I was reminded of Steve’s black and white photography, (also here, on A&P) and along with thinking that Steve’s work clearly transcends point-and-shoot photography of the digitized masses, I suddenly understood how the black and white refuses the seduction of the digitized web versions of color.
Henri says:
For Delacroix color brilliance can be found through the complimentaries and values of shadows, in the vision of experience. In our Postmodern age we find our color in the hues of commerce, through the optics of desire. The first is sloppy, fleshy, messy, natural – color found in life and in memory. The second is clear, clean, manufactured, ‘real’ – color found through a collective and through programs. And finally, there is the surprising Platonic idea that runs beneath our electronic world of light speed and light screens – heavenly color – color unimaginable – brighter, purer, seen from above. You’ll find that sort of color on your flatscreen – pulsating and irradiating into your eyes. It is hyperactivated color, direct color, color better than that in the can, color of light and speed.
And somewhat later, his polemic:
the meaning of color, the need of color, is reduced to buying and selling – pure electronic color IS pure commerce. I recognize this as the legacy of Postmodernism and the 1960s….
I of course love the “sloppy, fleshy, messy, natural” since that’s what I think I am and do –I color from life and memory. And I have had at least one (gentle) complaint from a client who said that my (textile) art didn’t look as brilliant in person as it did on the web. Fortunately, she accepted the piece anyway (I gave her the choice of sending it back) but I was suddenly made aware that nothing I could produce would look the way the technical feat of computer light makes it look.
Henri’s further comments somewhat broke my heart:
We’ve discussed this in the examples of Richter, Heilmann, and Yuskavage. In their works we are swamped with color, but it is color that goes no further than the surface. This color is part of the critique of Modernist color, the critique of visual meaning. It does not emote or inspire – it is there to entice, to show, to consume, while it remains wholly on the surface. It doesn’t move beyond the optical, it remains a product, straight out of the can, self contained and isolated. This color is about design, customization, decoration. It is the readymade found on the color chart…. The Postmodern world is about context, about the impossibility of meaning or narrative, and so, the color remains inscrutable. It develops discontinuities rather than relationships.
The whole post, as well as past posts leading up to these observations, are well worth reading. The Henri Art Magazine is a dense historical set of posts which present a critique of post modernism, of which this post seems to me to be the center. And it is something of what I feel about a great deal of prominent painted art today. Henri differentiates between reality, by which I think he means cultural context; and the natural, which is tied to “our bodies and our physicality.” His painting dilemma, as he describes it, is to try to sort through which of what he is doing is determined by “reality” (the cultural flux) and the “natural” (physical bodily being) and to find his way “between the two.”
“Color” he says, ” is not neutral, color can be meaningful, and for me, this is the sand in the oyster.”
Underwood, oil on linen, 4′ x 5′, 2009
I find painting the desert to be hugely about color (the forms are miniscule compared to the color, but the color is so subtle, so quiet, one has to almost stop breathing to see it. And to paint it, one (this one, anyway) has to forget about all those brilliant sunsets and photos of mesas blazing in the sun. No, the northern Mojave basin.range deserts have such quiet color that even Photoshop gets confused trying to find contrast or to “correct” the color. It’s a great, fun challenge.
And here’s a bit of nonsense, interactive art , an entirely different category of art. This is one that has little to do with color, but a lot to do with contemporary art. I can’t argue with it as “art” nor as “Art” but I find it sheer delight. It’s from Robert Genn’s The Painter’s Key newsletter, by the way, so you may have already seen it.
A really interesting post, thanks. I’ve been asked to write something for the same series, since my work focuses on contemporary culture in the aftermath of postmodernism. I agree totally that interactive art has “a lot to do with contemporary art” (it’s the basis of my book Digimodernism, see the link below) and would be very grateful if you could expand on this statement at all?
http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=134279&SubjectId=1366&Subject2Id=1377
Hi Alan Kirby,
You are probably looking in the wrong place for Digimodernism, although maybe some of our readers are working in this mode. Hockney et al (including the New Yorker) are using their digits on the iPhone (or iPod Touch), which fascinates me. I’m saving my money to buy an iPod Touch which could substitute for a sketch book on my travels (just as my Kindle substitutes for hauling a six-week supply of books for my residencies).
But my primary passion involves brush, canvas/board, paint and subtle color effects. Most of these are only fodder for the digital maw that is eating at us all. Perhaps some of my fellow participants would wish to join in. Mr. Kirby has published a book called something like “Digimodernism.” His URL takes one to the sales site.
June,
I really like the downward slope in your painting. That geometry has to be done from plein air, one couldn’t possibly capture it from a photograph. At home, on my laptop, it was difficult to make out your picture. The higher resolution of my Apple monitor at work now gives me a better impression. Could you add some higher magnification detail?
I took your picture, gave it raw umber frame (currently my favorite color for paintintg the sides of my panels) and enlarged it to 200% so that I could let a larger size work on me. The horizontally streaming clouds enhance the downward slope of the land. Looking at your picture now for a while, I feel a serenity about it.
So far, I have not been able to get used to the colors in the Richter painting that you show. The bloody red overwhelms me. I do like deKooning’s color interactions. I recently studied his paintings in an art book and then was able to view Woman, I at the MOMA. I sat in front of it for, perhaps, half an hour and studied the colors. Though, on the whole, I thought that the picture was hilarious, huge breasts but knees modestly turned to the side – nursing but not sex?
Thanks for the link to the Henry magazine. I enjoyed the Delacroix story!
Birgit,
Your enthusiasm for that linen panel exceeds my own — setting it up enlarged with a frame never occurred to me. I don’t consider it finished, so I’m reluctant to add detail — you’d discover too many flaws. But your doing so does make something of the point that the Henri Magazine article was making.
On the juneunderwoodpaintingss site, you can see what I did with this on the masonite board panel. One of my readers (a colleague in a critique group) was taken with the “pink” that the masonite board contains, showing this same scene. I’m thinking about altering it in that way.
I am terribly naive (ignorant, I mean) about working on the linen and keep modifying my approach. So I have no idea how the final product will look, only that it will probably be different from what it is in this photo.
Like you, I can’t deal with the colors in the Richter, which was why I chose it to illustrate the Henri Magazine point. I have never seen a deKooning in person, so I’m glad to hear that the colors kept you for half an hour. The imagery always annoys me, but that might be because it’s too close to home.
The geometry of the slope is an ongoing issue in Range and Basin materials, because one side of the slope is invariably gentle-appearing, while the other is steep and abrupt. But the slopes don’t all go in the same direction, so I’ll be painting along, thinking I know what direction and how steep and then then I’ll look out the open doors and realize that somehow it all changed while I was painting (give or take a few million years).
Hi June,
Thanks for continuing the discussion! Color is a fascinating subject and I think it will lead painting to somewhere new, beyond the Postmodern trap we’ve created for ourselves. Part of the reason for my sharp critique, both on Henri and in my work, is how overwhelmed I feel by the prevalence of these institutional POMO ideas. I want something more personal, something that is my own, something that opens up new visual possibilities for painting. There are great new ideas coming into focus that need to be considered, but here in NYC, well, it’s a small insular art world and those ideas get overlooked. Change is never welcome and always looks suspicious.
Thanks again for being a part of the discussion and I hope you enjoy the coming posts that will expand these ideas across other cultural disciplines!
Regards,
Mark
Hi Mark,
I really enjoy the Henri Magazine posts and am astonished to imagine that you’ve been doing them all yourself. The struggle you describe is perhaps inevitable as what was once fresh and new is now both tired and overly-commercialized. Overworked, banal, not comprehended as not-the-whole-truth.
Working in the desert in November has me flummoxed six ways for Sunday, not only because as sun and days change, everything changes in its forms and shape and color, but because I’m blogging on a laptop, with inadequate lighting for taking photos (not to mention seeing what I’m painting) and there are days when I feel like I’m hallucinating. Between the studio “lighting,” the laptop’s variabiity depending on the slope of the screen, Photoshop Elements’ quirks, and my own exhausted sight, I never know if what I’ve posted comes anywhere near the truth. Nor do I know if what I’m seeing when I check out any individual geological form comes anywhere near the truth.
And then I look at clean and bright photos and graphics on the web and I feel, well, flummoxed. It’s then that I go back and read in Henri to see that it isn’t only myself who finds this PoMo world outside her ken.
Thank you for checking in and for posting as you do. Steve Durbin was one of your readers who originally got me to your site.
Hi June,
Please don’t prejudge digimodernism too hastily – it’s more complex than just digital art; for instance I read Antony Gormley’s One & Other installation in Trafalgar Square London this summer as digimodernist. And interactivity is very important to me. But I like your piece reproduced above very much too. We live (perhaps not always happily) in interesting times…
Best wishes,
Alan
Hi June,
Part of our postmodern condition is the shifting truths that we deal with everyday. When these ideas began to take hold (in the 1960s) it was a way to come to terms with this shifting viewpoint caused by electric media. Every idea, every thought, every vision became relative, and so, the context became the focus. This has been the interesting thing about our electronic extensions – they embody this postmodern context – it is built into their programs and projected on their screens. For instance photoshop does exactly what Rosenquist and Warhol did. You can make perfect Peter Halley paintings on a simple Windows drawing program. The lens replicates, contextualizes and our understanding of “reality” is formed by it. I understand your exhausted vision!
Henri comes from thoughts and ideas that I “try out” on a few very trusted (and patient) friends who offer insight and support. They keep me grounded and on target! I am not a natural writer, I write from necessity (it helps me to understand what I am doing in the studio) and a boot to my backside is often needed.
Steve Durbin is a thoughtful photographer. I am fascinated by his connection to great early 20th century photography and how that can be reborn in this new digital age of lens based programming. For instance in some of his posts here he shows both the black and white and color photo of the same shot. I’m always stunned at how differently I see and perceive these same images. Structure and Form vs Color, Light and Space.
Thanks again and good luck with your current series. It looks very ambitious and it’s apparent that you’ll be sliding between your extensions, your vision and your memory all at once. I don’t see you getting much relief from your exhaustion in all of that!
Best,
Mark
Hi Alan,
If my response was a bit terse, I apologize. Have you been reading the Henri Art Magazine (link in the original post)? It seems to me that Mark Stone is talking, perhaps only obliquely but interestingly, about what you seem to be concerned with.
When I return to civilization, I will have a look at your book, which sounds very interesting. The Plinth Project is fascinating and I admit to having been unaware of it until about ten minutes ago, when I googled it.
Such projects bring me joy and delight, but they, like most installation art, seem to sit in a space by themselves. Their very transient nature makes them part of the City Beautiful (post modern, of course), producing a space that temporarily, like dance, forces us out of our ordinary selves.
I suppose one might argue that wall art in museums also does that, but with wall art, you can return and perhaps revisit the emotion. With installations, you only get one chance (or one month’s or one year’s) chance. The Central Park “Gates” project or “Running Fence” here in the States has the same effect on me. I love them, but I’m only seeing them on the web, experiencing them virtually. Perhaps that’s what you are saying when you speak of Digimodernism — that most of us can’t be part of the experience but get to participate virtually. But of course that’s true of the Mona Lisa, also.
I’m not sure what I’m trying to say, but I think that seeing or participating in these events through (for me) the computer is a bit of what Mark Stone is getting at in the Henri — that our virtual views are mediated by light through rather than light bouncing off, by platonic physics of light rather than by the messy, uncertain reality of what we could really see or feel if we all sat on the Plinth for an hour or had been able to walk under the Central Park Gates in February in NYC.
Of course, most of our “reality” is mediated, but my perception of the art I do is that it’s the result of experience, and however inadequately I am able to paint that experience, whatever I do is intent on projecting that experience in way that could be actually, not virtually, experienced. Or at least that pigment and oil comes closer to approximating the experience that I’ve had and thus are more likely to give a viewer that experience.
This is not to say that the platonism of the web isn’t wonderful — only that it heightens the color (and sound) so that reality might seem more drab than ever. Whereas I’m very fond of reality, and the subtlety of the subdued, crazy whacko desert that surrounds me is likely to remain, at least in my lifetime, available to me.
Maybe along with High Design, High Craft, High Art, there could be a category called High Installation. After all, Wallace Stevens noted that “Death is the mother of beauty” which undercuts my argufying…
Thank you for your response and your reference to Gormley’s Project. “Art and Perception” is just the place to put such ideas to the test. I’m looking forward to reading your book; I should check it out on Kindle, come to think of it, since package delivery is iffy in this part of Nevada. But if I stand in the right place in the kitchen, the Kindle delivers my reading matter quite nicely. Reading, now, there’s potential for messy experience well mediated by our own minds………
So Mark, what do you think of Alan’s notion of digimodernism, which he posits as “Post Modern?” Here’s the publisher’s description of his book:
“Almost without anybody noticing, a new cultural paradigm has come center stage, displacing an exhausted and increasingly marginalised postmodernism. Dr. Alan Kirby calls this cultural paradigm digimodernism, a name comprising both its central technical mode and its privileging of the fingers and thumbs in its use. The increasing irrelevancy of postmodernism requires a new theory to underpin our current digital culture.”
http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=134279&SubjectId=1366&Subject2Id=1377
From the description, I can’t see that he’s dealing with wall art at all, but then, I haven’t read the book. But it looks like a dialogue between the two of you might be interesting.
As for “exhausted,” I pulled the linen canvases up to (my) eye level yesterday and worked on the bottoms of them (the mid/foreground, insofar as the desert has a foreground) and it was miraculous. Or at least it seemed so to me as I finished up the day’s work. Just that two foot difference in positioning changed the vision I was encountering (a vision that I myself had painted.) So I’m taking today off, before I go back to encounter reality, in all its sloppiness, tomorrow. None of that would be apparent through the computer, but it’s what makes my reality a dance.
June, you’re right. Alan’s book doesn’t deal directly with painting, but it has much to say about culture, postmodernism, and quite interestingly, the end of postmodernism. Alan’s main contention is that our interactive technologies have changed how we approach an artwork, any kind of artwork really. I think that this may be a similar approach that Hockney alluded to at the end of his discussion in Secret Knowledge. The Hand is back in the computer – I’m paraphrasing. Alan is interested in how this “manipulation” is changing postmodern practices and bringing about a different kind of cultural experience. (that’s a very small nutshell of his book.) I thought that he might find our discussion of color, light and space interesting in light of some of the points that he brings up. The subject he has chosen to write about is exciting and unexpected – we’re looking forward to it!
As to your practical solution in the studio – I think a new perspective on one’s work sometimes does become miraculous! I had a friend who would stand on his head to see how to resolve a painting problem. When I asked what the hell he was doing he said he needed not just to see the work upside down, but he needed the blood rush to his head. Of course he also drove a huge motorbike and drank copious amounts of tequila. That’s a sloppy reality that our electronic extensions don’t have a clue about!
Regards,
Mark
Hi Mark,
I think I’ll avoid the tequila — I have no stomach for liquor, which is A Good Thing. And a guy who visits me regularly at the Red Barn on the desert talks incessantly about going 140 mph in various cars, but I think I’ll avoid that too. The truth is, my very ordinary life has almost more challenges than I can handle — I don’t need tequila to make me vibrate excessively (add the snort right here). I’m looking forward to reading Alan’s book and seeing what further he has to say. My grandson tells me that google is proclaiming a new internet protocol that will lose the http and be 55% faster. My digits and digitizing can’t keep up.
Good to hear from you. And keep up the thinking and ruminating — and writing on the net so I can read it!