Cultures of Colour: Visual, Material, Textual 9780857454652

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CULTURES

OF

COLOUR

Polygons: Cultural Diversities and Intersections General Editor: Lieve Spaas, Professor of French Cultural Studies, Kingston University, UK

Volume 1 Reynard the Fox: Social Engagement and Cultural Metamorphoses in the Beast Epic from the Middle Ages to the Present Edited by Kenneth Varty Volume 2 Echoes of Narcissus Edited by Lieve Spaas in association with Trista Selous Volume 3 Human Nature and the French Revolution: From the Enlightenment to the Napoleonic Code Xavier Martin Translated from the French by Patrick Corcoran Volume 4 Secret Spaces, Forbidden Places: Rethinking Culture Edited by Fran Lloyd and Catherine O’Brien Volume 5 Relative Points of View: Linguistic Representations of Culture Edited by Magda Stroi´nska Volume 6 Expanding Suburbia: Reviewing Suburban Narratives Edited by Roger Webster Volume 7 Cultures of Exile: Images of Displacement Edited by Wendy Everett and Peter Wagstaff

Volume 8 More than a Music Box: Radio Cultures and Communities in a Multi-Media World Edited by Andrew Crisell Volume 9 A ‘Belle Epoque’? Women in French Society and Culture 1890–1914 Edited by Diana Holmes and Carrie Tarr Volume 10 Claims to Memory: Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean Catherine Reinhardt Volume 11 The Meanings of Magic: From the Bible to Buffalo Bill Edited by Amy Wygant Volume 12 Stardom in Postwar France Edited by John Gaffney and Diana Holmes Volume 13 London Eyes: Reflections in Text and Image Edited by Gail Cunningham and Stephen Barber Volume 14 Comics in French: The European Bande Dessinée in Context Laurence Grove Volume 15 Cultures of Colour: Visual, Material, Textual Edited by Chris Horrocks

CULTURES OF COLOUR Visual, Material, Textual

Edited by Chris Horrocks

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

First published in 2012 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2012 Chris Horrocks All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cultures of colour : visual, material, textual / edited by Chris Horrocks. -1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-85745-464-5 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-85745-465-2 (ebook) 1. Human skin color. 2. Color--Psychological aspects. 3. Color-Cross-cultural studies. 4. Visual anthropology. 5. Material culture. I. Horrocks, Chris. GN197.C85 2012 306.4--dc23 2011041506

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper

ISBN: 978-1-85745-464-5 (hardback) ISBN: 978-0-85745-465-2 (ebook)



CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Introduction: Beyond the Language of Colour Chris Horrocks

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PART I: COLOUR AND VISUAL CULTURE 1. Ad Reinhardt: ‘Color Blinds’ Michael Corris 2. The Eye Is a Sphincter, or Who’s Afraid of the Postmodern Monochrome? Antony Hudek

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3. Colour Soundings: After the Tone of Francis Bacon Nicholas Chare

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4. Colour as a Bridge between Art and Science Mary Pearce

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PART II: COLOUR AND MATERIAL CULTURE 5. Colour in Gardens: A Question of Class or Gender? Beverley Lear 6. Creating a Middle Ground: Critical Remarks on the Colour/Form Relation Kiki Karatheodoris

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Contents

7. Heidegger’s Pixel: Digital Colour as ‘Standing Reserve’ Chris Horrocks 8. The Disillusion of the Image: Cinematography, Colour, Sound and Desire Liz Watkins

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PART III. COLOUR, TEXT AND RACE 9. Chromatic Ambivalence: Colouring the Albino Charlotte Baker

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10. Toussaint Louverture and Haitian Historiography: A Pigmentocratic Approach Charles Forsdick

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11. ‘Linda Morenita’: Skin Colour, Beauty and the Politics of Mestizaje in Mexico Mónica Moreno Figueroa

167

Notes on Contributors

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Index

185



ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks go to Lieve Spaas and Fran Lloyd who, under the aegis of Kingston University, London, were responsible for the genesis and development of this volume. I am also indebted to the contributing writers in Cultures of Colour for the quality of their work and their patience and understanding during the maturation and completion of the volume. Any omissions, mistakes or errors are solely my responsibility.



BEYOND

INTRODUCTION: THE LANGUAGE OF COLOUR Chris Horrocks

Something red can be destroyed, but red cannot be destroyed, and that is why the meaning of the word ‘red’ is independent of the existence of a red thing. (Wittgenstein 1963: 28e)

When I was young, I laughed a lot at Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. He opens it with these words: ‘At the outset of the study of perception, we find in language the notion of sensation …’. Isn’t this an exemplary introduction? A collection of examples in the same vein, so austere and meager, inspire the descriptions that follow. From his window the author sees some tree, always in bloom; he huddles over his desk; now and again a red blotch appears – it’s a quote. (Serres 1995: 131–2)

Wittgenstein and Serres express in their different ways the problematic relationship between colour as a visual sensation and colour as an object of language. Wittgenstein’s aporetic writing fretted over the sense of what ‘red’ meant according to the language game in which it appeared (‘Red’ as a metaphysical entity? ‘Red’ as a piece in a board game? ‘Red’ remembered but indistinguishable as a colour to someone recently suffering brain injury? ‘Red’ existing as a word?). His idea of red as part of a complex of games about words, world and mind was a significant philosophical turn in the study of colour as phenomenon, quality, concept, experience and language. Despite the attempts of such a philosophy to escape the constraints and contradictions of logical positivism, one might conclude that the

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game Wittgenstein played still erred on the side of polite language. The immediacy of sensations was not for him. No fan of the Word’s hold on the senses, Serres even finds humour in those philosophers of perception, such as Merleau-Ponty, who imagine they are more in the world than Wittgenstein: ‘intellectualized, chained to their library chairs, and tragically stripped of any tangible experience. Lots of phenomenology and no sensation – everything via language.’ But even so, and as Serres admitted, colour and language are in analytical terms intricately related: language gives us words for colours, yet for other senses such as smell there are only words for things: we say ‘red’ rather than ‘it is the colour of blood’, but we do say ‘it smells of lemons’. Language and colour have an intimacy not present in the other senses. Cultures of Colour acknowledges this ‘language of colour’, yet reaches beyond the analytical or philosophical strictures outlined above so as to recognize in colour its ‘uncanny ability to evade all attempts to codify it systematically’(Riley 1996: 1). As a study of its various expressions in visual, textual and material culture, the following chapters draw on a wide range of disciplines, though these are largely aligned under the rubric of the humanities and in part the social sciences rather than the natural sciences. Recent research in the study of colour has seen the rise of multidisciplinary approaches, where the ambiguities inherent in the study of colour are accountable or containable using a battery of methods and approaches to net colour in its different complexions. These perspectives are often drawn under the umbrella of a general subject area, such as art history, which brings its own methodological assumptions according to the job at hand (Gage 2000: 34). The present book has a broader remit. Certainly, some contributions herein have this art historical and theoretical basis, but others operate in other terrains, where the methodology and objects of study lie beyond that discourse, relating for example to the sociology of everyday life or the historiography of biography. With this in mind, it is symptomatic of the diverse approaches to the subject that any meaningful engagement should attempt to avoid writing a history of colour, or even proposing histories of colour, and try instead to provide some sense of its transdisciplinary character. For the purposes of this book, research on colour is the traversal of disciplines and histories – including histories of colour. Colour in a sense is a sedimentation and stratification of ideas and views on knowledge, consciousness, perception and world stretching back to early philosophy and finding its scientific and empirical form in Enlightenment science and philosophy. While certain chapters refer in some ways to key moments in this history (and of course there are other histories in other cultures of colour) the present volume goes beyond them. In extending our study of colour beyond its definition as an objective property, as perceiver-dependent, as dispositional

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(peculiar to specific lighting and observer situations) we encounter colour as a socio-cultural construction. Our understanding of the physical, symbolic and metaphysical properties of colour alters over time as well as across cultures. This is perhaps obvious enough, but this should not mislead us into relativistic or postmodern readings of colour’s meaning or symbolism across cultures or through time; rather, it should enable us to reflect on its historical and epistemological contingency in terms of its iterability, or ability to be repeated in different contexts (‘red’, ‘redcoat’, ‘red-skin’, for example). Colour is constructed discursively from the discipline speaking it; the question remains how to maintain this constructionist view of colour without reducing colour to simply a socio-cultural construct. Part of the answer lies in recognizing how colour functions in language not simply as symbolic constructions but as constructing acts: colour is a textual or speech act, which not only organizes language around the world, but organizes the world around itself, making the context as much as inhabiting it. More importantly, these variations are the product of real material and historical conditions and forces, in which colour is structured, mobilized and defined as an effect – sociologically, technologically, culturally – of knowledge and power. Colour is not simply constative – a true or false statement such as ‘the carpet is red’ – it is performative, an act of naming that makes an action in that naming. This has obvious relevance to issues of class, race and gender, and certain chapters in this volume discuss this aspect, in the construction of discourses on black albinism, or working-class colour preferences in back gardens. The recent study of colour may be broadly mapped onto the tendency, over the last century, to bring language and, more recently, sensation and body to the forefront of philosophy, and to understand the role of colour in science as increasingly technologically orientated and determined. Colour was once the province of philosophy and science; in recent decades it has become the terrain of language, desire and difference, in the fields of psychoanalysis, linguistics and sociology. For every discipline or combination thereof there is a range of methodological assumptions about colour, about what it is and what it does. Under the current rubric, colour ‘works’ visually, materially and textually, and its meaning shifts between the literal and the metaphorical according to context. Thus, the meaning of colour in the phenomenology of computer graphics is quite different from understanding the role of colour in postcolonial studies. ‘White’, ‘black’ and ‘yellow’ are linguistically and perceptually value-laden. This book tries to accommodate the wide spectrum of approaches to colour and mobilizations of colour’s meanings, linking these perceptual, experiential, aesthetic, technological and socio-cultural dimensions of colour to the practices and media of the arts, and to colour (as a racial and class index) in everyday life. The emphasis

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here is on the visual, the material and the textual ranges of colour, and is largely centred on the discussion of specific cases, drawing from painting, film and writing. These sit comfortably enough under the ‘visual’ and ‘textual’. The ‘material’ is more difficult to distinguish, but it serves to accommodate the sociological and ethnographical responses to colour in social life, and the technologies that pertain to colour’s manifestation as material and materialized. The contributors draw on a wide range of studies: psychoanalysis, psychology, continental philosophy, aesthetics, sociology, literary theory; but they are inflected according to the subject area of colour research: painting, film, gardening, computer technology, literature and biography. Serres’ criticisms aside, it attends to the inscription of these in writing, whether historical, ethnographical or philosophical, as much as to colour in its visual and material cultural instances.

Colour and Visual Culture The chapters in this section approach colour in postwar painting, drawing on the modernist links to philosophical and theological currents. The role of colour in the context of modern abstraction and the theme of colour’s excess – either in terms of its sublime or poetic dimensions, or its psychological and psychoanalytic register – operate here. The figures of Lyotard, Kristeva and Wittgenstein present the line between colour, abstraction and language walked by artists such as Philip Taaffe, Barnett Newman, Francis Bacon and Damien Hirst. The chapters constitute a path from modernism’s monochrome, through the fragmentation of colour in postmodernism, and on to the technological and embodied colour spaces of recent artists such as James Turrell. Michael Corris situates his study of monochrome painting within the historiography of modern art to reconsider the role of philosophy and religion in the history of postwar abstract painting. He focuses on the considerable oeuvre of Ad Reinhardt in order to assert the centrality yet negativity with which such painting signals a challenge and an ironically poetical approach to the apparent impasse of modern painting. For Corris it is poetic because it ushers forth discourses of spirituality, transcendence and healing. The monochrome represents not simply the materialization of asceticism but a provocative evocation of the limits within the signifying practices of modern art. Since 1945, arguably the period when modernism, colour and abstraction have found a philosophically and aesthetically distinct form and language in the modern monochrome, the seemingly endless possibilities of interpretation stand in dynamic relation with the limits placed on meaning by the apparent austerity or restrictiveness of the format. Corris argues that Reinhardt’s monochromes are ‘constructive, in that the possibility of painting,

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rather than its utter negation, prevails’, allowing him to concentrate more on the issue of colour. Corris accounts for the gradual development of the artist’s solution of using black hues in order to leave behind criticism of abstraction as art without meaning to combat the alternative problem of such works being choked with associative meaning. Thus Reinhardt’s progression absorbs the lessons of Zen Bhuddism and Christian mysticism in order to foreground the role of detachment in the first instance and ‘emptying out’ in the second, all the while avoiding the annexing of colour by the ‘inflated metaphysical claims’ of the Abstract Expressionists. Antony Hudek places colour in abstract painting squarely in the field of the philosophy of the sublime as the term reasserted itself problematically in contemporary postmodern art of the 1980s onwards. He begins by linking the sublime with a reemergent interest in the postmodern tropes of fragmentation, excess and displacement (rather than modern notions of lack and loss), particularly in the performance art and the ‘spectating’, feeling, sensate body: Lyotard’s ‘somatography’. Hudek’s concern is to interrogate this emergence as a double version of the sublime: positive – the possibility of a sublime art; and the negative – its impossibility. These modes are lodged within the difficult matrix of postmodern ‘campy recycling outré abstraction’. Hudek argues that closer reading of Lyotard’s sublime offers a more supple and inclusive reading of forms of 1980s abstract painting. He chooses the term ‘anal sublime’ as a contestatory, heteronomous sublime that refuses nostalgia for the unattainable and rejects the consensus of universal good taste or, in the case of Taaffe, the production of ‘readymade’ taste. Hudek interrogates the opticality and embodiedness of Duchamp’s later, impure (‘anal’) work (Étant Donnés) in relation to this discourse on the sublime, beauty and the senses. The ‘violence to the judging eye’, which is a feature of both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sublimes, is best exemplified by the role of colour in the work of Taaffe, Hafif and Mosset. The latter two’s paintings neither abandon the pictorial sublime nor celebrate it – they mime its excess in a Lyotardian matrix ‘inevitably inadequate to the task of presentation’. Here, colour possesses painting and invokes increasing cycles of transposition between eye, nose, ear and anus – a veritable chromatic economy of excess. Nicholas Chare adopts a psychoanalytic approach to colour in the paintings of Francis Bacon, or rather, to the sound or voice of that colour. Beginning with Roland Barthes’s ‘The Grain of the Voice’, he sets out to distinguish between what the paintings express and how they express it, the latter being connected to the body ‘speaking its mother tongue’. Whereas Barthes promotes this distinction in relation to song, the writer here applies it to colour, and draws on Kristeva’s analysis of colour in Giotto’s art to do so. Chare performs a close analysis of the function of line as colour and colour as expansive

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application in the Pope paintings of Francis Bacon in order to foreground the artists’s view that there is something in oil colour that is uncontrollable, and to describe the textures, mediums and tools that expressed and materialized this aspect. In his concluding observations the writer sees in Bacon’s depictions of dying and death the absence of contour and a formlessness in the formal execution of certain marks, and the articulation of this voiding in the context of sound and orality. This connection raises the possibility of an interpretation based on the phenomenon of synaesthesia, where colours for example can be heard, or sounds seen. For Chare, Bacon’s paintings induce this experience, and there is evidence to indicate the painter was exploiting this quality, one which refers us back to the gradual emergence and differentiation of the child’s senses as it separates from maternal plenitude. In Bacon’s work colours are not sound, but in the realm of the Real, are fused with noise, or semiotic excess. Mary Pearce focuses on the work of three contemporary artists to provide a discursive description of the role of colour as a ‘bridge’ between philosophical, historical and technological aspects of art, with particular emphasis on space and sound. She suggests in the examples of Damien Hirst’s and David Hill’s work that this technological dimension is accompanied by an increasing preoccupation with colour’s linguistic and conceptual character, and by extension its cultural dimension. Implicit here is the contention that colour continues to draw on philosophical and scientific foundations laid in the nineteenth century. Aesthetics once associated colour with both human emotion and later with Gestalt’s psychology and physiology of perception. Recently, however, the study of colour has become the subject of artistic interrogation within the world of new media. Hill’s ‘electronic linguistic’ reworking of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language is one example, and adumbrates the slippage that occurs when perceptual and intellectual (linguistic) regimens and approaches demonstrably fail to match each other or the phenomena they attempt to describe. Hill adds another dimension, by highlighting the role of acquiring colour through either understanding or misreading a text. This slippage becomes a feature of the work – from misinterpreting colour linguistically to ‘missing’ or ‘non-existing’ colour in the psychology of perception, and the disorientating effect colour exerts in some conditions. Pearce argues that this shift necessitates a different role for the viewer of colour: since Barnett Newman the relationship of viewer to painting for example is one of isolation and immersion.

Colour and Material Culture The definition of material culture here incorporates notions of colour in the everyday, ranging from perspectives on class and gender relations in the ethnography of gardening practices and values,

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through the mixing of colour and its application to colour theory and practice, to the materialization of colour in the technology of computer screen from a phenomenological perspective. It also includes the study of time-based materializations, in this case film. Beverley Lear focuses on the relationship between the role of colour in contemporary English domestic town gardens and in social class. Lear presents her ethnographic description and analysis of colour in gardens in the context of the literature and theory of colour, which stem from the impact of Goethe and Chevreul on horticulture, and the successive aesthetic models that developed since the Victorian period. The reversal in preferences for colour arrangements since the 1880s – gardeners now deem the pairing of reds and oranges harmonious, while the Victorians did not – are applicable to class and gender distinctions in the ‘ethnographic present’. For Lear the orchestration of garden colour comprises a ‘symbolic field’ in which action and duties are inseparable from the social context. Lear’s contribution places in historical context the living and lived material of her research with the gardeners of ‘Whitelynch’, a county town in Wiltshire. Lear then refers this history of increasing differentiation in form and colour to her ethnography of front and back gardens – the ‘everyday territory of contrasting public and private spaces’. Lear then offers a set of opposing principles which orientate gardening styles with class background and a range of factors including the longevity of displays and the relative visibility of signs of labour or proximity to nature. This taxonomy enables her to construct an ethnography of gardening in Whitelynch, one concerned to signal the contradiction between determining gardening values and styles according to class and gender and the need to establish individuality within this matrix. Kiki Karatheodoris’s practice grounds itself in the historically problematic ontology of the ‘middle ground’ of colour in order to demonstrate the contradictions inherent in creating, describing and explaining a third ‘overlapping’ colour generated from two others. Embarking from the historical given of oppositions between colour and form – the latter standing for line, shading, representation and illusion, Karatheodoris argues that since ancient Greek philosophy the formal has been privileged over the abstract value of colour itself. Colour, at best, is a supplement, repressed and relegated in favour of modelling and perspective. The relatively recent enquiry into the properties of colour, both in philosophy and art practice, culminated in the breakthrough of early twentieth-century painting, whose artists had done more than shatter the picture plane; they had also ‘punctured’ the object’s boundaries, and one might say colour ‘seeped out’. Colours can unite through ‘equality of value’ – something form (line, shading, tone) cannot do owing to its dependence on ‘the divisive boundary line’. This profound diremption between values that make boundaries and colour values that elide them means that

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painting enjoys or suffers an infinitude of combinations of values, from hierarchical form to the ‘flatland’ of pure colour. One way through this complexity is to focus on a ‘middle ground’; a space where the opposing forces of colour and value might interact in a controlled and repeatable manner. These investigations, which form the bedrock of Karatheodoris’s paintings, offer a mode of colour use that moves beyond traditional colour mixing – a mode that engages with the hierarchical conditions and oppositions to which colour has been subordinate, has lately emerged from, and now meets on its own terms in the thought-provoking arena of the ‘middle ground’. My (Chris Horrocks’s) chapter focuses on the ambiguous identity of the pixellated element, or ‘pixel’, to establish a phenomenology of digital colour as it relates to its precursor and counterpart, analogue colour. Arguing that technology is not the principal determinant, I draw on classical branches of phenomenological thought, in particular the work of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and the central concept of ‘revealing’. Taking this as the locus, I suggest that digital colour presents itself as a ‘difference-as-absence’, both a disclosure and a concealment. Digital colour, in this perspective, is not simply a technological improvement on or successor to analogue colour as a difference but as an absence. Here, Heidegger’s term ‘standing reserve’ is useful, for it serves to distinguish digital from analogue colour by accommodating the technological but not reducing it to technology. I link this mode of being to the digital world predating electronic imaging, most significantly the mosaic, in order to refute the notion that its being simply relies on its appearance as a set of discrete units; yet where once the body moved and accommodated the images and colours, now images move, zoom and reconstitute themselves. We, as bodies, implicate ourselves in the editing of our colour reality, and so it is that the being of such colour is rooted in dissimulation, in truth as representation rather than the truth of being. This has implications for the images’ function or use. Heidegger’s concept of usability and obtrusiveness, which refers to traditional tools (such as a broken hammer) run aground with digital colour, whose logic is to merge or collapse usefulness and uselessness. The only obduracy in digital colour occurs when the laptop’s battery runs out and the colours disappear. Liz Watkins’s reading of Jane Campion’s film The Piano (1993) argues for a recognition of philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s contribution to the understanding of the moving image’s use of colour. Watkins’s approach focuses on the relation between chromatic and acoustic registers and feminine desire and subjectivity, thus attending the effects of colour as part of a ‘transient complex’ including sounds and the actuality of the film print itself. This emphasis on movement points to the possibility of recognizing a form of ‘fluid subjectivity’, that destabilizes not merely the formal categories of image and narrative but extends beyond feminist theories of the gaze, of silence,

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plenitude and loss and spectatorship; in short the subjugation of the specifics of female desire to the image of women. From this position the writer posits a Deleuzian approach and attention to the actual materiality of film with emphasis on colour variations beyond the visual and dialogical. From this vantage point The Piano is a shifting texture of sound, colour and movement, all drawing to the intricacies of perception inseparable from the inscription of feminine desire through sensations and affects. This is Deleuze’s ‘movement-image’ is a theory of becomings, which Watkins extends to sexual politics and feminine desire, and locates beyond the sexual particularities of the body. Employing a close description of filmic colour and movement, she argues for a prelinguistic account that registers the affective and phenomenological dimension, from the ‘saturated’ images that compress colour, light, sound, voice and movement in shallow depth-of-field shots, to the tactile and textural specificities that are traceable as diffusions: ‘as if a solution of ink, liquid in its movements’.

Colour and Text The third section focuses on literature, history and the textual and ethnographic representation of race. It variously presents the colonialized body in light of writings by Fanon and Bhabha – midnineteenth-century Haitian historiography; and transcriptions of the lived cultural and social determinations of Mexican racial and national identity. Charlotte Baker describes and analyses the cultural constructions of the albino body, where the focus is on external appearance. Baker’s study redresses the lack of critical attention paid to this marginalized figure through the literature on the black African albino by Sassine, Destremau and Grainville. It emphasizes the perceived absence of colour of the albino and the consequent attempts to colour the albino in the face of this lack. Commencing with a description of the albino’s genetic condition, and the misunderstandings that lead to associating the albinism solely with those of African descent (on account of its visibility), the writer moves on to the question of the lack of reference points or identifying features, and the inability of characters in the literature to identify the age of the albino he has seen. The uncertainty and superstitions that arise, allied with the supernatural constituents of myth which arise in parts of Africa, conflate medical condition with poor education, racial prejudice and classifications that stigmatize and relegate the albino within society and culture. Above all, the writer argues, albinism is regarded simply as an indicator of race, as though ‘there are distinct “races” of people with clearly definable sets of social and physical characteristics’. Baker agrees that this is a fallacy, for there are no fixed demarcations; indeed, variety

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within racial groups and shared characteristics across racial divides are present. It is in terms of this transaction between the fixed and the mutable that the albino’s body is problematic, and the novels studied here suggest that looking beyond the skin of the body is unnecessary: ‘it is white skin above all else that marks the albino apart’. Charles Forsdick’s chapter on ‘pigmentocracy’ addresses Haitian historiography and the Haitian Revolution by exploring a ‘representational field’ and tracking textual and visual constructions of its general and leader Toussaint Louverture, since contemporary early-nineteenth-century and later observers remarked on Louverture’s unpredictability and mysterious omnipresence. The writer uses this model to examine the revolutionary’s ‘afterlives’, and the complexities and contradictions that persist, accrue and emerge in the passage of this figure from nineteenth-century abolitionist imagery to his reconstruction in recent debates on commemoration in France and Haiti. Forsdick is careful to frame his approach with the difficult issues of race, colour and ethnicity, particularly to avoid the binary categories that ‘Negritude’ and whiteness construe – ones which threatened national independence – and incorporate complex colour gradations in Haitian history and historiography. He identifies the textual constructions of the general as black in one text and mulatto in another in order to reveal the ‘competing pigmentocratic power structures’ that persist in debates on skin colour and race within colonial and postcolonial contexts in general, and the ‘decolonization’ and ‘neocolonialism’ of (postindependent) Haiti in particular. The case study of Louverture thus connects with a wider concern to assess representations of a figure as a process of sedimentation, in paintings as well as writing, of motifs over time, as well as contradictory versions at each time. Mid-nineteenth-century Haitian historians – especially Thomas Madiou, Aléxis Beaubrun Ardouin and Joseph Saint-Rémy – represent and repress in contradictory ways Toussaint’s colour, in ways that more recent writing on Toussaint as an example of the rapid trajectory from African slave to general, and figure of cultural creolization, seek to question and redress. Mónica Moreno Figueroa shows how perceptions of skin colour and difference operate within the specific context of Mexicanness and ‘mestizaje’, or racial and cultural intermixing. Her research employed interviews and sessions with Mexican women who discussed beauty and racist practices, linked with emotions of shame, guilt, and the desire to ‘not be insignificant’. As such the analysis proceeds from women’s self-perception to the cultural and social determinations of Mexican racial and national identity. The writer is concerned to show how inequality operates out of the ‘collision’ of ‘regimes of difference’ in the mestiza female body in terms of race, nation and femininity. This is in the context of vestigial colonial racial categories that place

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‘whiteness’ as a goal, and the relative invisibility of racism in Mexico, which expresses itself in the everyday life experiences of these women. This relation the writer calls ‘mestizaje logic’, in which racial mixing and social difference operate in a discriminatory and relational fashion. The case studies reflect the divergent ways the respondents define or identify skin colour, and the relation of dark skin to light skin, through inheritance and the expectation of ‘improvement’ in the colour of children, but in a context of the desire to belong. Moreno Figueroa concludes that in this matrix the role of beauty is bound up with notions of visibility, self-worth and racial perception – in a configuration of gaze, emotion, body and performance that constitutes the ‘mestizaje moment’. The chapters attempt to see, write and think colour as textual, material and visual instantiations by situating these themes in historical, theoretical and empirical contexts. The immediacy of these themes is not lost in this contextualization however, owing to the precision with which each disciplinary approach aligns itself with the particular problem or opportunity that colour’s cultural dimension presents.

Bibliography Gage, J. 2000. Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism. London: Thames and Hudson. Riley, C.A. 1996. Color Codes: Modern Theories of Color in Philosophy, Painting and Architecture, Literature, Music, and Psychology. Lebanon: University Press of New England. Serres M. with B. Latour. 1995. Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Wittgenstein, L. 1963. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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.

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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 squarewithin-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

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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

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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:

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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

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– 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

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art one encountered in the museum: such art was no longer an object of veneration or a ritual object, but an aesthetic object. One of Reinhardt’s most pertinent citations referred to the ‘art of the Adamantine path’. Whatever connotations of self-sacrifice and martyrdom may be associated with this phrase, Reinhardt’s selection of it as a point of private reflection seems to be emblematic of his achievement, restoring as it did the value of a painterly practice grounded in the discipline of egoless process. In these and other instances, the self-aware subject ‘is not final or absolute’, and the moment of self-awareness is characterized as an unvisualizable void – as the dissolution of self rather than the self-centred entity posited by the Cartesian cogito ergo sum. Reinhardt understood this culmination in terms of ‘destruction, negation, refusals’; an ‘unencumbered, empty space … absolutely intangible’ (Rose 1975: 192). ‘Painting that is almost possible, almost does not exist, that is not quite known, not quite seen’ (ibid.: 109). Here, the lack of finality is grasped in terms of cycles of ‘creation, destruction, creation, eternal repetition’; the ‘made-unmade-remade’ (ibid.: 193) that so clearly found expression in the various processes of making that Reinhardt had employed since at least the beginning of the 1940s. Merton’s analysis of Zen shows it to be a means for ‘explosive liberation from one-dimensional conformism, a recovery of unity which is not the suppression of opposites but a simplicity beyond opposites’. A well-known Zen koan cited by Merton had a great deal of resonance for Reinhardt, particularly when he was composing his art-as-art dogma: Before I grasped Zen, the mountains were nothing but mountains and the rivers nothing but rivers. When I got into Zen, the mountains were no longer mountains and the rivers no longer rivers. But when I understood Zen, the mountains were only mountains and the rivers only rivers. (Merton 1961: 140)

Reinhardt’s version of this koan echoes the ‘repetition of formula over [and] over again until [it] loses all meaning’: The beginning of art is not the beginning. The finishing of art is not the finishing. The furnishing of art is furnishing. The nothingness of art is not nothingness. Negation in art is not negation. The absolute in art is absolute. Art-in-art is art. The end of art is art-as-art. The end of art is not the end. (Reinhardt 1966)14

Reinhardt’s turn to Zen suggests that while the radical political ideology with which he was familiar may have been able to analyse

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the main contradictions of capitalism, it remained in his view thoroughly unprepared to address the question of how one is to live and go on in the world. It could be said that Reinhardt devoted the last phase of his career – from about 1960 to his death in the summer of 1967 – to the repudiation of some of the ideals that formed the basis for his initial embrace of abstract art and radical politics. The rigour of abstraction as he had practised it from the late 1930s through to the late 1940s no longer held promise as an image of the implicit order of society. Instead, painting had to be reinvented through an act of kenosis. In this context, Reinhardt’s art-as-art dogma functioned as a sentinel at the gates of meaning; an interpretive counterpoint to the beholder’s experience of a ‘black’ painting. In one sense, Reinhardt was proposing an aesthetic in which reflective text and virtual image stand in dialectical relation to one another. Neither is complete without the other, yet neither on its own is able to actualize fully the promise of art-as-art. Point and counterpoint; call and response: Reinhardt must have believed that his ‘black’ paintings required this dynamic in order to be seen among the colourful visual flux of the art of the 1960s. The literary metaphors that attached themselves to Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings share a common theory of reference with associations based on colour. Yet Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings are not ‘colourless’ for the sake of celebrating black; rather, they are colourless for the sake of negating colour. Nor are they emblems of a deeply held pessimism. They are the ‘end’, if you will, of a certain kind of expression in painting; an expressive force that depends upon colour. If the ‘non-colour’ black did not suggest other meanings, but only its brutish blackness, then Reinhardt would have had to invent them – if only for the purpose of stripping them away.

Notes 1. Ad Reinhardt, ‘Black’, undated notes (Rose 1975: 97). 2. Reinhardt repeats the phrase in ‘Art in Art is Art-as-Art (Art-as-Art Dogma, Part III)’ (Reinhardt 1966a: 85). 3. ‘Beauty, a harmony, rhythm, proportion, a relation between variety and unity is simplicity latent in the infinitely complex, the potential complexity of that which is simple, eluding, though not defying analysis, augmenting beauty, itself, clear, cold abstract, metaphysical, pleasurable like the mysterious delights of multiple meanings, like a box within a box, within a box, endlessly’ (Reinhardt 1933: 2). 4. Edward Corbett (1919–1971) joined the American Communist Party (CPUSA) in New York around 1944 or 1945, and the Artists League of America in 1946. In New York, Corbett became acquainted with Jack Levine and Reinhardt, both of whom were active in party cultural and political affairs. Corbett worked in Taos, New Mexico from 1951–52, and Reinhardt visited him there in 1952. They remained in contact throughout Reinhardt’s life. In 1950, through the recommendations of Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, Reinhardt was contracted to teach ‘a

Ad Reinhardt: ‘Color Blinds’

5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

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course in painting for advanced students and artists’ and to deliver ‘a series of lectures on the social, economic and philosophical problems facing the modern artist’ at the CSFA, where Corbett was working at the time. Reinhardt’s teaching commenced on 3 July 1950 and continued for six weeks. For an account of Reinhardt in San Francisco, see Landauer (1996: 101–2). In an unpublished letter (18 October 1951) to his dealer, Betty Parsons, Rauschenberg described his white monochromes as being as ‘white as one God’ and ‘dealing with the suspense, excitement and body of an organic silence’. This sentence originally appears in an unpublished text of 1959. See Breslin (1993: 459–88), Chave (1989: 194–97) and Temkin (2002: 60–65). Thomas Merton’s youthful experiences as a Communist sympathizer at Columbia University – another bond he shared with Reinhardt – are recounted in chapter 4, ‘The Children in the Market Place’, of his bestselling autobiography (Merton 1948: 131–68). Merton described his approach to radical politics in terms of a moral conversion. It was apologetically dubbed ‘a lesser evil’, not the ‘right conversion’– in deference, no doubt, to his religious conversion and ordination in 1941. From a literary point of view, the use of religious metaphor to frame secular and non-secular affinities serves only to dramatize and heighten the personal and moral triumph of his second, ‘true’ and ‘right’ conversion. Correspondence, Thomas Merton to Ad Reinhardt, 3 July 1956, p. 2, in Ad Reinhardt papers, N69/101, frame 691. See Joseph Masheck (1978: xvii) reprinted in Masheck (1984); Vine (1989; 1991: 124–33); Spaeth (2000: 245–56). See Kavanaugh (1987). Juan de Yepes (1542–1591) – a friar in the Carmelite order – lived and worked in Spain. The four major works comprising John’s doctrine of spiritual enlightenment – ‘The Ascent of Mount Carmel’ (conceived as a commentary on his inspirational poem of 1578/79, ‘The Dark Night’), ‘The Dark Night’, ‘The Spiritual Canticle’, and ‘The Living Flame of Love’ – were composed in Grenada between 1582 and 1587. In ‘The Ascent of Mount Carmel’, a spiritual handbook for divine union, John wrote of faith as ‘the dark night through which a soul journeys toward that divine light of perfect union with God’. The ‘dark night of the soul’ is John’s metaphor signifying a ‘denudation of the soul’s appetites and gratifications’ (ibid.: 64). His devotional poem, ‘The Dark Night’, ends with the realization that the ‘perfect union with God’ transpires ‘in a place where no one appeared’ (ibid.: 57). ‘The years of Merton’s most intense commitment to the issues of war, racism and the nuclear question also marked an episode in his personal life which called into question the validity of his monastic vocation’ (King 1995: 17). This period of doubt coincided with Merton’s emotional involvement, over a period of two years, with a young nurse, Margie Smith. Merton travelled to Bangkok in December 1968 to deliver a paper at an international conference of Benedictines interested in revitalizing the monastic tradition and establishing a foothold in Asia. The title of Merton’s paper, which was delivered on 10 December, was ‘Marxism and Monastic Perspectives’. On the afternoon of that day, Merton was found dead in his room, apparently the victim of an accidental electrocution. Merton’s intention had been to open up a dialogue between Marxists and the Church mediated by arguments derived from Herbert Marcuse and Eric Fromm. Merton had argued that Marxist and monk both regard the claims of the world as fraudulent. Despite the

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chasm separating Catholicism and Marxism, Merton persisted in his attempt to find common cause between these traditionally antagonistic lifeworlds, arguing that ‘the world refusal of the monk is in view of his desire for change’. At one point, Merton likened Marx and Engels’s description of communist society found in the Communist Manifesto – from each according to his ability, to each according to his need – with the social ideals of a monastic community. Merton’s reasoning depended upon generalities like levels of commitment, the will to transform the world, and the subjectively painful process of what he called ‘inner change’. These arguments, while reflecting what seems to have been an astonishing degree of political naïveté on the part of Merton, were meant to be provocative and represented a clear challenge to American aggression in South-East Asia. They were also part of Merton’s belief in the need to develop a more expansive monastic culture, where the acquisition of knowledge of Zen, Sufism, Hinduism, and, as is apparent from his last public talk, the humanist strands of Marxism, would be taken seriously. 14. For an earlier version of this text, see ‘Reinhardt Paints a Picture’, Art News (March 1965): 39–41, 66.

Bibliography Ad Reinhardt: A Selection from 1937–1952. 1974. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Marlborough Gallery, 2–23 March. Breslin, J. 1993. Mark Rothko: A Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chave, A.C. 1989. Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fuller, M. (ed.). 1970. ‘An Ad Reinhardt Monologue’, Artforum October: 37. Kavanaugh, K. (ed.). 1987. John of the Cross: Selected Writings. New York: Paulist Press. King, P.C. 1995. Dark Night Spirituality: Thomas Merton, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Etty Hillesum. London: SPCK; Nashville: Abingdon Press. Landauer, S. 1996. The San Francisco School of Abstraction Expressionism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Masheck, J. 1978. ‘Five Unpublished Letters from Ad Reinhardt to Thomas Merton and Two in Return’, Artforum 17(4) December: 24. ———. 1984. Historical Present: Essays of the 1970s. Contemporary American Art Critics series, No. 3. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Merton, T. 1948. The Seven Storey Mountain. New York: Harcourt, Brace. ———. 1961. Zen and the Birds of Appetite. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation. ———. 1962. New Seeds of Contemplation. Tunbridge Wells, Kent: Burns & Oates. ———. 1973. Contemplative Prayer. London: Darton, Longman & Todd. ———.1996. A Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk’s True Vocation; Journals, Volume Three, 1953–1960, ed. L.S. Cunningham. San Francisco: Harper. Reinhardt, A. 1933. ‘The First Aesthetician’, typescript, in Ad Reinhardt papers, N/69-102, frame 247. ———. 1966a. ‘Art in Art is Art-as-Art (Art-as-Art Dogma, Part 3)’, Lugano Review 1(5/6): 85. ———. 1966b. ‘Art in Art is Art-as-Art’ (Art-as-Art Dogma, Part 3), in G. Kepes (ed.), Sign, Image, Symbol. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University.

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———. 1991. ‘The Moral Content of Abstract Art’, The Journal of Art June/July/ August: 27. Rose, B. (ed.). 1975. Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt. New York: Viking Press. Spaeth, P.J. 2000. ‘The Road to Simplicity Followed by Merton’s Friends: Ad Reinhardt and Robert Lax’, The Merton Annual 13. Temkin, A. 2002. ‘Barnett Newman on Exhibition’, in Ann Temkin (ed.), Barnett Newman, exhibition catalogue, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 24 March–7 July: 60–65. Vine, N. 1989. ‘The Total Dark Sublime: An Interpretive Analysis of the Late Black Paintings of Ad Reinhardt – 1960–67’, Ph.D. thesis. Chicago: University of Chicago. ———. 1991. ‘Mandala and Cross’, Art in America November: 124–33.

 CHAPTER 2 

THE

THE EYE IS A SPHINCTER, OR WHO’S AFRAID OF POSTMODERN MONOCHROME? Antony Hudek

Some who allow darkness to be a cause of the sublime, would infer from the dilation of the pupil, that a relaxation may be productive of the sublime as well as a convulsion; but they do not, I believe, consider, that although the circular ring of the iris be in some sense a sphincter, which may possibly be dilated by a simple relaxation, yet in one respect it differs from most of the other sphincters of the body, that it is furnished with antagonist muscles, which are the radial fibres of the iris; no sooner does the circular muscle begin to relax, than these fibres wanting their counterpoise, are forcibly drawn back, and open the pupil to a considerable wideness. (Burke 1990: 132)

In a text from 1985, Jean-François Lyotard, the philosopher most readily associated with postmodernism, recalls how violently John Cage had reacted to one of the papers presented at the ‘Performance in Postmodern Culture’ conference in 1976, denouncing it as an outmoded exercise in securing ‘the expression of lack of meaning for a subject’ (Lyotard and Cazenave 1985: 474; translation mine). Cage’s intervention pointed to a new role for the postmodern subject, after absence and lack had characterised the modernist one: to play with fragmentary excess, with concurrent, yet incommensurable events. Lyotard’s own presentation at the conference stressed the same point, arguing for an understanding of mise en scène not as translation but as an accumulative process of transposition where nothing is lost, but everything displaced; an operation Lyotard called ‘somatography’ (Lyotard 1977b: 92, 97). I would like to argue that a somatographic operation is at work in the paintings by Marcia Hafif, who, along with a number of other painters, chose to return in the 1970s to the raw materials of painting and its most apparently straightforward form, the monochrome. In

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the late 1970s, this shift to the rudiments of painting overlapped with the commercial (if not critical) success of so-called ‘pattern painting’. Pushing against pattern painting’s decorativeness and perceived lack of historical grounding, and against earlier forms of lyrical abstraction, Hafif and the Swiss expatriate painter Olivier Mosset constituted an informal, New York-based group to which belonged, at one point or another until the group’s disbandment in the mid-1980s, Raimund Girke, Dale Henry, Anders Knutsson, Joseph Marioni, Carmengloria Morales, Stephen Rosenthal, Robert Ryman, Doug Sanderson, Phil Sims, Howard Smith, Susanna Tanger, Frederic Thursz, Merrill Wagner and Jerry Zeniuk. Retrospectively labelled ‘radical painting’, the group was hardly dogmatic, encouraging instead lively debate, even dissension, around the question of painting’s ontological status (‘What painting is’), which in turn ‘led to examination of the discipline of painting, the taking apart of it as an activity’ (Hafif 1978: 35). The painters attached to what would be called radical painting acknowledged that their allegiance to the manual application of a single colour on canvas and their reference to varied precedents (Russian Constructivism, Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman) put them in an ambiguous historical position, between high modernist abstraction and a postmodernist sampling of tradition. As Sims says in one of the group’s published discussions: ‘there’s a sense about the work that doesn’t fall within conventional modernist tradition. That’s outside of it’ (Sanderson et al. 1979: 13). As Mosset further observes, it is radical painting’s historical ambiguity that makes it radical: ‘Whether or not this kind of approach is called post-modernist or stillmodernist, the fact that these works are ambitious enough to relate to major American works of the ‘50s seems to me absolutely critical’ (Mosset et al. 1981: 7). By the mid-1980s, the ‘radical painters’ found themselves sidelined by a younger generation of painters, dubbed ‘new abstractionists’, who also referenced historical models, but whose relationship to pictorial tradition was direct and appropriative, rather than critical and deconstructive. Whereas for radical painting abstraction ‘is not abstracted from anything outside itself; it does not use the illusionistic and pictorial devices common to earlier types of painting’, abstraction for the new abstractionists is a distillation of external references, made up entirely of quotes from other instantly recognisable pictorial landmarks, such as Newman’s so-called ‘zip’ paintings (Hafif 1981: 138). New abstractionists like Philip Taaffe have usually been dismissed in discussions of painting at the turn of 1980s as representatives of a shallow postmodernism, while the divergent path followed by radical painting is rarely acknowledged. This essay seeks to distinguish the latter from the former, arguing that the work of Hafif in particular points to another, more compelling strand of postmodern painting, one capable of resonating with Cage’s and

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Lyotard’s claims for a theatrical, excessive redeployment of pictorial tradition. If both new abstraction and radical painting obey a logic of postmodern reproduction as opposed to modernist production, and both are forced to manage a ‘surplus of (worn out) signs to “get by”’, radical painting does so deconstructively, chiefly by means of colour, while new abstraction ‘gets by’ by looking outward, to well-known episodes in the history of modernist painting (Masséra 1994: 55).

Postmodern Sublimes For Lyotard, to experience art in postmodernity means ‘to sound the powers of feeling and phrasing, to the limits of what is possible. Therefore one extends the sensory-sentient [le sensible-sentant] and the sayable-saying [le dicible-disant], one experiments, this is the true vocation of our postmodernity, and one opens before commentary an infinite path’ (Lyotard and Cazenave 1985: 476; translation mine). The objective no longer holds out against the subjective, as both presuppose the autonomy of an abstracting and coherent ‘I’. Instead, experimentation through language of that which art brings only partially and always disfigured to the fore is what awaits ‘us’ in postmodernity (Lyotard states advisedly: ‘our postmodernity’). The ‘us’ in question finds itself at the limits of sensibility and community, with the individual ‘I’ stunned, astonished by the overwhelming, potentially limitless field of experimentation and commentary opening before it. This feeling of astonishment is reminiscent of the condition prompted by the sublime described by Edmund Burke in his 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry: ‘The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror’ (Burke 1990: 53). Although Burke argues that poetry remains the most effective means to convey the sublime, his treatise dwells on the phenomenological impressions provoked by all sublime spectacles. In the face of natural or architectural vastness, putrid smells, or anything that overwhelms the senses, the mind ceases to entertain the position of thinking subject and is struck down to the level of ‘thing’ – a body feeling yet incapable of processing the overflow of incoming data. As Burke adds: ‘but the eye or the mind (for in this case there is no difference) in great uniform objects does not readily arrive at their bounds’ (Ibid.: 126; emphasis added). One could argue that postmodernism’s lifeline with regard to visual art – from approximately the 1976 conference on performance to the late 1980s – coincides with a renewed interest in the notion of the sublime and its effects on the spectating body. Evidence of this symmetry is made explicit in the March 1986 issue of Arts Magazine, which contains a special section devoted to the sublime in recent art,

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including an unabridged reprint of Barnett Newman’s 1948 text ‘The Sublime is Now’. In this short essay Newman asks: ‘[I]f we are living in a time without a legend or mythos that can be called sublime, if we refuse to admit any exaltation in pure relations, if we refuse to live in the abstract, how can we be creating a sublime art?’ (Newman 1948: 53). Earlier in this text, Newman admits to reading A Philosophical Enquiry ‘like a Surrealist manual’, marking his sublime as indisputably Burkean, ‘astonished’. In the same issue of Arts, Taaffe remarks: ‘From my point of view, what Newman really does in his essay is to present the case for a negative sublime. This is a sublime of disassociation, a Great Refusal of the Sublime …’. Taaffe goes on to write: ‘Now the sublime, surely we must all realize, is an experience essential to the preservation of our humanity. Especially, I would submit, since we are living in a sublimity-deprived society. Yes,’ Taaffe concludes, ‘I favor the ascendancy of a sublime art’ (Taaffe 1986: 19). Taaffe’s reading of Newman’s sublime as negative is perceptive, but this insight is immediately neutralized by his pronouncements on the sublime’s redemptive quality, capable of salvaging our humanity – note Taaffe’s wholesome ‘our’, far removed from Lyotard’s hesitant, uncertain shared postmodernity. A painting by Taaffe from 1985 clearly demonstrates this dialectical recuperation of Newman’s sublime: We Are Not Afraid refers to Newman’s 1967 Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue II by reprising the latter’s ‘zips’ – the vertical stripes running down the length of the canvas – as a decorative pattern. The passage from Newman’s title to Taaffe’s exemplifies a purging of uncertainty and negativity in favour of simple affirmation, effectively cancelling out Newman’s doubt. This doubt found its purest expression in the zip, the single most elegiac dividing line in the history of twentieth-century art, the moment when painting revealed itself capable of absolute newness and originality. Quoting Stéphane Mallarmé, the critic Thomas Hess speaks of the spiritual birth of Newman’s zip in 1948 in these elated terms: ‘Yes, I know, we are only empty forms of matter, but most sublime because we have invented God and our Soul. So sublime, my friend! that I want to present myself with this spectacle of matter, conscious of being, and yet rushing frantically into dreams’ (Hess 1972: 32). Reactions to Taaffe’s reiterative practice usually condemn both postmodernism and new abstraction for their facile recuperation of Newman’s genuine, exalted sublime. Hal Foster’s 1986 description of new abstraction speaks for many others: ‘A readymade reduction of serious abstraction, a campy recycling of outré abstraction: much of this evinces a posthistorical attitude whereby art, stripped in the “museum without walls” of its material context and discursive entanglements, appears as a synchronous array of so many styles, devices or signs to collect, pastiche or otherwise manipulate – with no one deemed more necessary, pertinent or advanced than the next’

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(Foster 1986: 86, 139). By referring to the readymade, Foster seems to be suggesting that posthistorical painters like Taaffe might legitimately claim Marcel Duchamp as their model, which, given Duchamp’s unimpeachable art historical credentials, would serve to strengthen rather than weaken these painters’ case. To avert precisely the risk of seeing Duchamp co-opted by postmodernism – all the while maintaining that ‘painting might not be dead’ – Yve-Alain Bois diagnoses the return to abstraction of the 1980s in the work of Taaffe and others as a case of protracted melancholia in need of urgent ‘working through’ (Bois 1993: 243). As another antidote to melancholia, fellow art historian Thierry de Duve prescribes mourning: ‘at a time when, in the most cynical fashion, a “return” to painting is being staged … we will have to mourn for painting, and perhaps for everything we call art’. ‘Mourning’, de Duve explains, ‘means working for survival, giving oneself the chances for the future by reworking the past.’ And ‘because everything begins and ends in aesthetic judgment’, ‘the artists of the future will have the same interlocutor that artists have always had, that is to say, tradition’ (de Duve 1983: 31–32, 35–36). By advising new abstractionists to rework the long-since completed story of painting, writers such as Foster, Bois and de Duve keep alive the hope that ‘serious’ painting might survive postmodernism and redirect the would-be postmodern sublime – and with it its overtones of Duchampian readymade – towards the sensus communis of an unfinished modernist, humanist project. Thus, in the end, both Taaffe’s positive sublime and these critics’ faith in modernism’s legacy lay the same stress on an appreciation of universal (good) taste in order to disarm the (negative, Burkean) sublime’s potential to disaggregate the past and confound historical linearity. While effective in unmasking the sublime as complicit in a 1980s art market premised on ‘facile eclecticism combined with aesthetic amnesia and delusions of grandeur’ (Huyssen 1984: 8, 46), the position adopted by both anti-new abstraction critics and the new abstractionists themselves appears to turn its back on Duchamp, and give up on the possibility of a postmodern indebted not to the beautiful but to the sublime – in Lyotard’s words, a postmodern that ‘denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable’ (Lyotard 1993: 42, 46). It is this particular postmodern that allows Hafif’s monochromatic paintings to be seen through the lens, rejected by Taaffe, of a ‘negative’, or as I will call it after Burke’s description of the eye as a sphincter, an ‘anal’ sublime, and that erects a theoretical barrier against both an uncritical embrace of the beautiful and a confusion of positive and negative sublimes which silences precisely what makes the latter so dangerous: its appeal to aesthetic heteronomy or différends, the plural communicational blockages that forbid recourse to deontic metalanguages of jurisdiction (Lyotard 1983: 9, 18–19; Silverman 2002: 226).

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In Lieu of Tradition At issue, then, is how to view Hafif’s postmodern pictorial practice as emblematic of a ‘negative’, ‘anal’ sublime without disavowing the nominalist achievements of Duchamp’s readymade; and how, moreover, to understand its relationship to twentieth-century abstraction without embracing a traditionalist view of a possible return to a gasping modernism. It must be remembered that at the same time that Bois was calling for painting’s ‘task of mourning’, the arch-modernist critic Clement Greenberg was being rediscovered, after a long period of critical neglect (Buchloh, Guibault and Solkin 1983: xi). Capitalizing on the resurgence of interest in his writings, Greenberg was able to reassert his views on modernism, which echoed the verdict of critics like Bois: ‘Modernism has to be understood as a holding operation, a continuing endeavor to maintain aesthetic standards in the face of threats – not just as a reaction against romanticism, as the response, in effect, to an ongoing emergency’ (Greenberg 2003: 30). Nevertheless, among the critics urging a return to modernism, de Duve stands out for trying to wrest Duchamp from the postmodernism of the new abstractionists, while re-engaging seriously with Greenberg’s formalism. De Duve, as we saw, condemns paintings such as those by Taaffe, but he does so specifically – and in this he differs from Bois and Foster – for their assumed indifference to the transformations brought about by the readymade on artistic production and discourse. For de Duve, new abstractionists interpret the readymade’s statement – ‘this is art’ – literally, since they quote past artworks regardless of their aesthetic merits. (Taaffe has made paintings ‘after’ Newman but also Hans Arp, Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely, to name a few.) In so doing, the new abstractionists fatally seal the infra-thin aperture between ‘good or bad painting’ and art in general – the same margin that dictated formalism’s ethical obligation to exercise free judgement in the experience of art after the invention of the readymade, particularly the one readymade Duchamp never made: the blank canvas. In other words, de Duve blames Taaffe and other postmodernists for trying to replicate the readymade’s virtual and inconclusive aesthetic gambit, thereby converting Duchamp’s and Greenberg’s hard-won hesitation – between painting’s never-ending story and the impossibility of (re-)making it – into the self-evidence of a fait accompli. Must we be grateful that, until now, no ‘future circumstances’ has occurred that would make a bare canvas a successful painting? Is it not what the likes of … Philip Taaffe would like to see established, perhaps in spite of themselves? … Whether their work is hailed or dismissed, it is for the same reason: they are insincere and rhetorical, they deny originality, they strip Newman of the sublime … They appropriate modernist painting and regurgitate it ready-made. I have

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seen too little of this painting to judge it with assurance, and I have yet to see the ‘ultimate’ blank canvas. (de Duve 1996: 261–63)

I read de Duve’s admission that he lacks the evidence to judge the work of the new abstractionists not so much as fear that the modernist experiment might have reached its conclusion, but rather as a refusal to face up to the possibility that modernism itself might in fact have authorized the postmodern attraction to the symptoms of a ‘negative’ or ‘anal’ sublime, such as being insincere and rhetorical. So long as identifying the beautiful remains the only justifiable activity of the critic, the sublime can only appear as a regrettable attempt at histrionic self-aggrandizement on the part of the contemporary artist eager to expand her or his influence in the contest of judgement that gives rise to sensus communis (Soutif 1990: 126; de Duve et al. 2003: 269). That is to say that, for de Duve, Taaffe and other new abstractionists are unworthy of the ‘great masters’ they quote since they deny the sublime’s fundamental affinity, and ultimate subservience to, the logic of the beautiful: this ‘good’, mildly perverse sublime, in vainly attempting to transgress the limits of the beautiful only serves to better reinforce them. De Duve might well be correct in accusing Taaffe and his peers of providing a cynical, hollow remake of Newman’s sublime. But he fails to accuse Taaffe’s new abstraction of clinging to the beautiful and of not seizing, as Hafif’s monochromes do, upon the anality of Newman’s sublime – a frequently kitsch sublime that renders inoperative the jurisdiction between good and bad taste, between what constitutes tradition and what fails to make the historical cut (Keller 1994: 98–99). The reasons for de Duve’s self-imposed ignorance vis-à-vis new abstraction are clear: in appearing oblivious to the irreversible impact of the original readymade, Taaffe signals the irrelevance of the judging amateur, forcing, rather than freely inviting, comparisons with historical tradition. But this tradition, from de Duve’s perspective, can only emerge gradually, as the cumulative effect of amateurs exercising their right to judge a work of art, sight seen. Postmodernism, on the other hand, no longer seems to care if the modernist critic establishes retrospectively the canons by which to measure the quality of future art, since the work itself masquerades as this very judging function by recycling stock examples of ‘greatness’ from Newman to Riley. And whereas the modernist conditions of viewing art created the division between the avant-garde artist and the judging crowd, postmodernism encourages the fracture of the crowd into a sea of potential artists, all of whom can legitimately proclaim ‘I can do the same’. With Taaffe’s paintings, history’s momentum risks grinding to a halt, leaving nothing else to be seen or judged: everything has ‘been done’, and can only be redone. But what if ‘Taaffe vs. the readymade’ were itself a rhetorical contention masking a deeper-seated resistance to the challenge posed

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by the anal sublime, in particular in the ‘late’ work of Newman and Duchamp, to aesthetics in general? What if de Duve’s readymade was the tree occluding the forest – here the larger conflict between positive and negative sublimes? Duchamp’s readymade no doubt questioned optical purity, but did not go so far as to repel it: as long as the lid on the tube of paint remained in place, de Duve could imagine Duchamp guaranteeing the perpetuation and promise of painting. This is why de Duve’s dismissal of Taaffe needs the readymade and must ignore Duchamp’s last, posthumously revealed Etant Donnés (1946–1966), for the blank canvas, like all readymades, exists only virtually, and cannot sit (let alone pass) the optical test of aesthetic judgement. But contrary to the blank canvas, Taaffe’s paintings and Duchamp’s Etant Donnés exist – their rude actuality invalidating de Duve’s claim that he cannot judge them ‘with assurance’. In not wanting to see Taaffe’s possibly terminal posthistorical remakes and Duchamp’s mock-sublime cabinet of curiosity on permanent display in the Philadelphia Museum, de Duve reneges on the amateur’s responsibility to judge, and thereby to take responsibility for a prescriptive norm that would have set a precedent for future art history. The stakes of such caution are high: by overlooking Duchamp’s final, paradoxical reversal of sublimes in Etant Donnés, de Duve repeats Greenberg’s mistake of bending the rules of his own theoretical game when faced with an object (minimalism for Greenberg, new abstraction for de Duve, and for both, Duchamp’s posthumous installation) that refuses to play by them. Just as de Duve proved that the readymade constituted a theoretical limit-case for Greenberg – forcing him to compromise his modernism in order to save formalism – overlooking Etant Donnés led de Duve to break formalism’s promise, that only the eye can decide, in order to protect the modernist tradition against new abstraction. In the end, paralysed by what he views as Taaffe’s flaunted indifference to the sensus communis regulating the republic of taste, de Duve’s aesthetic différend can only remain defensive – precisely towards the idea of postmodernism’s elaboration of Newman’s and Duchamp’s anal sublime. Both Taaffe and de Duve are eager to forget that Duchamp’s Etant Donnés turned the tables on both modernism and formalism by colluding with the nightmares of the 1960s avant-gardes: the sublime, the rejection of ‘pure’ abstraction, figurative painting, and, most troublingly of all, colour. For clearly the means by which Taaffe, as well as Hafif, seek to apprehend modernism’s sublime – whether positive or negative – is through the application of pure colour. Based on Duchamp’s hypothetical proposition – ‘Let’s say you use a tube of paint; you didn’t make it. You bought it and used it as a readymade. Even if you mix two vermilions together, it’s still a mixing of two readymades’ – de Duve considers colour as secondary to the fact that store-bought paint is always already a readymade, implying that every foreseeable canvas would by necessity treat colour as a

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supplement, an ironic coat over the essential, necessarily invisible blank canvas (de Duve 1996: 162). Refraining from actually choosing to make a monochrome painting-as-readymade, Duchamp’s pictorial nominalism imposed a preemptive clamp on abstract art, and with it on the modernist sublime and its most potent signifier – pure colour. De Duve’s fixation on the readymade’s symbolic significance rather than on the negative, material act of blocking the tube of paint finds justification in Greenberg’s own depreciation of colour as an inessential characteristic of the medium condition, and of the sublime as merely an emotive conceit. For Greenberg, colour blurs the essential boundary between mediums, since it belongs indiscriminately to sculpture and painting, while the sublime similarly fails to distinguish between categories, this time between good and bad art: ‘Viewed strictly as art, the “sublime” usually does reverse itself and turn into the banal. The eighteenth century saw the “sublime” as transcending the difference between the aesthetically good and the aesthetically bad. But this is precisely why the “sublime” becomes aesthetically, artistically banal’ (Greenberg 1975: 14).

Painting Stripped Bare In the early 1970s – at a time when colour found itself under consensual erasure by avant-garde art and criticism – Hafif reacquainted herself with painting by following Max Doerner’s 1921 The Materials of the Artist, a manual that provides detailed instructions on how to prepare and apply pigments following traditional recipes handed down from the ‘great masters’ of the past. As Germano Celant has noted, Hafif’s goal seems to be ‘the formation of a kind of “tractatus” of color information and paint methods’ (Celant 1975: unpaginated). Her ‘tractatus’, or Inventory as she calls it, began in 1972 and now comprises numerous series, some complete, others open-ended, including the Gray Series, Mass Tone Paintings, Drawings, Watercolors, Pencil on Paper, Acrylic Paintings, Ink Drawings, Roman Paintings, French Paintings and Enamel on Wood. In the singlecolour series of paintings, Hafif isolates the pigments and mediums ‘in order to make visible the qualities and attributes of a specific pigment color in a specific medium and format’ (Hafif 1978: 38–39). For this specificity to survive the act of painting, and for the result to contribute to the Inventory, Hafif often titles her paintings after the pigment used in their preparation, and processes the pigment herself. ‘For instance’, she writes, ‘that painting is terre verte and by calling it Terre Verte I indicate to the viewer that that is of interest, that it is terre verte and not a mixture of other pigments…’ (Hafif et al. 1980–81: 5). As for the preparation of the painter’s raw materials, it is ‘as important as the use of them. Grinding paint or preparing canvases is an equal activity with the application of the paint’ (Hafif 1978: 40). For Hafif,

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the aim is not produce beautiful works, but rather an impression redolent of Burke’s sublime: ‘I use the word “beauty” cautiously. One wonders if the term is valid, if it any longer has meaning, but we do need some way of indicating the psychotropic action of visual stimuli. It is undeniable that an effect is felt in the presence of certain phenomena – an awe, an excitement. That can be as simple as a reaction to a landscape undergoing the change of autumn colors, or the sense of grandeur felt in the face of dramatic mountain scenery’ (Hafif 1978: 40). Even before it enabled Hafif to counter the reigning disenchantment with colour and painting, Doerner’s The Materials of the Artist encouraged Duchamp to give up painting and ‘invent’ the readymade upon his return from Munich in 1912, where he had encountered the colour theories of Wassily Kandinsky and Doerner first hand. ‘If Duchamp and his readymade prove Kandinsky wrong, and empty the tube of paint of its promises,’ writes de Duve, ‘they do not prove Doerner right; they explain him. They reopen the file on pure painting; they investigate the archaeology of pure color.’ Duchamp pursued this archaeology well beyond the readymade, in particular in his monumental work The Large Glass, completed in 1923, featuring the famous Batchelor Machine, about which de Duve argues: With all its onanistic connotations referring to painting as ‘olfactory masturbation’, the Bachelor Machine is a self-portrait in disguise, whose very personal meaning also resonates with the historical conditions that led Duchamp to officially record his abandonment of painting in the readymade, on the one hand, but also to ‘secretly maintain’ the cherished activity of a painter-bricoleur, on the other. (de Duve 1996: 185)

De Duve does not dwell on Duchamp’s unavowed, reprehensible desire to paint and his fascination with pure abstraction’s colourist sublime, yet clues to the artist’s continued involvement with exactly this ‘dirty’ secret abound, starting with the depiction of the chocolate grinder which marked a decisive break in Duchamp’s contested identity as a painter. ‘Don’t you understand that the greatest danger is to arrive at a form of taste,’ asks Duchamp, ‘be it that of La broyeuse de chocolat [The Chocolate Grinder]?’ (Duchamp 1975: 181). In contrast to de Duve’s progressive formation of pictorial tradition, the treatment to which Duchamp’s grinder submits painting is considerably more traumatic. Indeed the semi-liquid, bitter-sweet glistening brown mass gurgling from under the grinder’s barrels can only represent an affront to optical purity, a repellent mixture of pleasure and pain trying the senses of sight as much as of hearing, touch, taste and smell. Duchamp’s representation of painting’s manual destruction plays havoc with the fine line separating good and bad taste, sensual loci, and gendered ways of seeing, graphically displaying what the

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readymade prudishly allegorizes, namely the vicious castration of the tube of paint and the repugnant mess left in the wake of the pigment’s preparation for aesthetic consumption (Nesbit 1991: 366). Contrary to de Duve, Lyotard has written extensively on Etant Donnés, a preference related directly to the philosopher’s interest in the sublime. For is not Duchamp’s pornographic spectacle, visible through the notorious peephole in Philadelphia, a pseudo-portrait of a sublime landscape? In his third Critique, Immanuel Kant paints the following scene: Bold, overhanging, and as it were threatening rocks; clouds piled up in the sky, moving with lightning flashes and thunder peals; volcanoes in all their violence of destruction; hurricanes with their track of devastation; the boundless ocean in a state of tumult; the lofty waterfall of a mighty river, and such like … [W]e willingly call these objects sublime, because they raise the energies of the soul above their accustomed height and discover in us a faculty of resistance of a quite different kind, which gives us courage to measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness of nature.

In addition Kant stresses that: A pure judgment upon the sublime must, however, have no purpose of the object as its determining ground if it is to be aesthetical and not mixed up with any judgment of understanding or reason. (Kant 1951: 100, 91)

Inverting Kant’s pure judgement on the sublime, Etant Donnés invites the curious, interested viewer to gaze into the splayed woman’s genitalia. Duchamp had previously abstained from representing the waterfall in the Large Glass, to ‘avoid the trap of being a landscape painter again’; yet here he paints the tacky waterfall on glass, giving it the illusion of movement by inserting a sheet of aluminium foil between the pane and the light bulb (Lyotard 1977a: 145–46). He uses chocolate for the diorama’s background, cotton puffs for the clouds, and plastic filters to conduct the beholder’s voyeuristic look to the painting’s punctum, the nude’s orifice. Finally and with a vengeance, Duchamp’s stage set recapitulates fifty years of a closet passion for the cheap scenic tricks afforded by the unclogged tube of paint. If the modernist critic had thought vision purged of such ramshackle vestiges of a pictorial sublime – a renouncement Duchamp ‘officially’ proclaimed in 1918 – she or he might as well enjoy another eye-full of Etant Donnés (Horrocks 2000: 206; Banz 2010: 32). Hafif’s monochromes are to Newman’s paintings as Etant Donnés is to abstract painting in general: a reprise of the modernist sublime, not as visual pun but as do-it-yourself material craft. Duchamp’s last work spells out not the end of painting – since it is one after all, however flimsy – but the medium’s derisive mortification, its aborted

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reincarnation. The peeping Tom stares into Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World in the form of a lukewarm corpse: Duchamp specified in his notes that he intended the aluminium reflectors in Etant Donnés to ‘protect the nude from the heat’ of the bulb. Thus not only light, but also temperature, and from there all possible bodily sensations intervene in the aesthetic perception of Etant Donnés. Ensconced in the shoddy theatrical framing device – a questionable parergon – Duchamp’s partial female corpse brilliantly exposes high modernism’s pathetic fate: to be reduced to a livid physical fragment, the cast-off fetish of haggard pictorial mimesis (Bernstein 2006: 208). In Etant Donnés, Duchamp coerces the viewer-voyeur to face up to the fear of painting’s colour, of its finish (its end as well as its patina), and of the abjected body in and of painting (Didi-Huberman 1985: 86–87). Similarly, the nominalist specificity of Hafif’s colours and support – canvas, frame – continually undercut the ideal purity of the modernist monochrome tradition, by revelling in the idiosyncrasies of the creative hand as it systematically covers painting after painting in the Inventory. In this regard it is symptomatic how de Duve tries to cope with monochromatic colour: Today [in 1982] as on the first day of abstraction, the risk is that pictorial practice lapses into the decorative. Witness the vogue of Pattern Painting. What does it reveal in its mediocrity? That colours do not suffice; that without the ideal horizon of colour, one never leaves the realm of good or bad taste. (de Duve 1987: 255)

On the contrary, Hafif’s colours and paint texture, rather than referring to a generic ideal, maintain their material individualism, leaving themselves open to aesthetic evaluation based on good and/ or bad taste. If the viewer chooses to project meaning onto Hafif’s coloured surfaces, her Inventory of single-colour pigments on various supports accepts it: ‘Paint can be paint again and does not have to apologize for its illusion-provoking qualities’ (Hafif 1971–72: 58). Thus, on the one hand, Hafif’s monochromes refer to the readymade through their generic titles corresponding to the names of the pigments employed in the paintings’ fabrication; on the other, the visible strokes of Hafif’s monochromes and the traditional grinding and glazing technique she employs return the beholder to the attempted transcendentalism of Doerner’s The Materials of the Artist, as well as to Duchamp’s handiwork in Etant Donnés. Hafif’s entire Inventory, in its ungraspable totality, registers the same hesitation between the universal and the particular, the objective-ideal and the subjective-individual. To save monochromatic painting from mere decoration, de Duve must relate it to the tradition of landscape painting. For Hafif and Duchamp, however, nature has long since ceased to provide effective or affective inspiration (Gilbert-Rolfe 1999: 44–45). Etant Donnés specifically posits that for a natural sublime to survive, it will have to

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depend on artificial light and theatrical props. Correlatively, whoever falls into the trap laid out by the (post)modern landscape painter will endure the uncertainties of aesthetic judgement as she/he struggles to legislate between good and bad taste with the prosthetic aid of spotlights, filters and perspectival cues. In 1967, a group exhibition held in Italy – entitled Illumination, after the prose poems by Arthur Rimbaud – included Hafif on the grounds that she, along with the other artists in the exhibition, succeeded in extricating colour from literary or symbolic allusions, returning it to abstract purity. Her participation in Illumination bespeaks of her work’s ambivalent aesthetic standing: while the exhibition underscored the hygiene of Hafif’s colourful abstraction (even though her early ‘Italian’ paintings were not yet of one colour), Rimbaud’s nominal presence suggests that the (anal) sublime was already there, lurking, in her work before it took over as a dominant force. In 1964 good taste equates illumination with the inspiration of the genius; in Hafif’s monochromatic work after 1972, painting takes place in a garishly illuminated, para-optical space that exacerbates the dubious moral connection between sight and aesthetic judgement.

Somatographic Vision At the turn of the 1970s, Etant Donnés and Hafif’s monochromes signalled a shift from the readymade’s strict adherence to Chevreul’s chromatic charts to its theoretical opposites, namely, the scientificpoetic worlds of Goethe and Wittgenstein (Gage 1993: 174, 201; Melville 1996: 142). Catherine Perret has made a strong case for the affinity of Duchamp’s Large Glass to Wittgenstein’s study of the difficulties encountered by language when assigning names to colours, as these tend to confuse the object’s name and its referent (Perret 2001: 158). Perret’s case only gains in strength with Etant Donnés, whose austere ‘public’ view of the wooden door restricts access to the bawdy ‘private’ body inside. As Rosalind Krauss has commented, Goethe’s physiological colours transform the eye into an unreliable recorder of stimuli which ‘may come from outside the body, as in the case for normal perception, but they may also erupt internally’ (Krauss 1993: 124). Etant Donnés addresses the viewer ‘normally’ as well as ‘internally’, not as positive or metaphysical sublime, but as reviled painting; what is more, as a parody of abstract painting synthesizing three of the most ‘realist’ genres – landscape, the nude and the still life. The Duchamp of Etant Donnés systematically undoes the claims of science and precision that characterized the Duchamp of the Large Glass. The viewer-voyeur, her or his eyes stuck to the wooden door, has in the act of looking become a libidinal vector, a retinal sphincter struggling to maintain distinct what constitutes

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‘outside’ and ‘inside’ the body (the viewer’s as much as the figure’s) (Krauss 1991b: 447). Hafif’s monochromes position themselves in this dark, grandguignolesque context of ‘high’ monochromatic abstraction, where the optical is under assault by the other senses. Denys Riout’s anthology of satirical drawings and commentaries mocking the avant-garde monochrome features the following account of a uniformly green painting exhibited at the 0.10 exhibition in Petrograd in 1915: ‘Under number 107 one finds exhibited, without any commentary, a single board of around 10 centimetres thick and 35 wide, painted green. Visitors are perplexed … What is it about? Some touch it, others even sniff it, on the sly, so as not to be seen’ (Riout 1989: 92). This review can be read in two ways: either as a denunciation of an absence of text capable of compensating for the painting’s lack of meaning, or, by taking the reviewer at his/her word, as an observation that the beholder, left with nothing to see or read beyond a single expanse of colour, has no choice but to resort illicitly to smell and touch. I would argue that it is this second interpretation that characterizes the Duchampian genealogy inaugurated by The Chocolate Grinder and perpetuated by Hafif’s monochromes: Duchamp’s ‘pure’ pigments continually undergo distillations, transmutations and purifications, each time rendering more porous the borders between sensory faculties (Lyotard 2004: 30). Colour – as an invisible, viral medium – is that ‘free’ agent that scrambles the history of modernism by mimicking the transcendental sublime in the avant-garde monochrome tradition (Cheetham 2006: 44). Yet colour, precisely, can only ever stand in, comically act out (Didi-Huberman 1985: 30–31). As the 1938 Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism puts it, ‘When colours will have lost all brightness, the eye will visit the ear’ (Dictionnaire 1938: 8; translation mine). But until that time when colours lose their sheen, they will appeal to the painter’s nose, that is, the avant-garde painter, instead of the touch (la patte), must have du nez, du flair: ‘What I am?’ asks Duchamp. ‘Simply a “breather”’ (Clair 1977: 97; translation mine). Etant Donnés enacts this somatographic transfer from hand and eye to nose and back again – a passage that itself rehearses the ambivalent history of colour production, conflicted between its usevalue in Doerner’s labour-intensive grinding and its exchange-value as readymade tubes (Escoubas 1986: 153; Brusatin 1986: 129). Colour flickers between the necessary and the frivolous, the onto-philosophical and the seeming, since one can never ascertain if it means to please indirectly, ‘naturally’, or if its feigned disinterest conceals a purpose, an artificial promise of ever-deferred satisfaction. As Kant’s writes, ‘We cannot say with certainty whether colours are merely pleasant sensations or whether they form in themselves a beautiful play of sensations, and as such bring with them in aesthetical judgment a satisfaction in the form [of the object]’ (Kant 1951: 169). Colours, like

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smells, threaten subjective disinterested pleasure, and their jouissance confounds the abstract, a priori laws of interest and profit. As Jacques Derrida has argued, the obscene chemistry of colours and smells is most likely to cause a sublime disgust, a ‘catastrophe’ in the ordered economy of the senses (Derrida 1975: 92–93). Because the metaphysical tradition from Plato onwards has assimilated colour with the ‘feminine’, there is a danger of interpreting Hafif’s monochromes as suggesting the possibility of ‘a discourse in which bodies that maintain and display their difference can communicate’ (Lichtenstein 1989: 118–19; Gibson 1992: 148). By contrast, I see Hafif’s paintings as calling upon the anal sublime to question precisely this communicative potential of painting. Their colours simply interpolate too many senses and meanings to make discursive sense, in the same way that Etant Donnés deconstructs wholesome, teleological sublimity through an excess of sensation. Deconstruction, for Hafif and Duchamp, does not so much subvert or transgress gendered positions as compound them. When Amelia Jones returned to Etant Donnés four years after her first glimpse through Duchamp’s door at the Philadelphia Museum, she noted that ‘the figure is still there, but now that I “know” so much about it, it (or “she”) seems pathetically constructed’ (Jones 1994: 203). Rather than ascribing this recognition to ‘knowledge’, Jones might have suspected that this gendered degradation from solid and coherent to pathetic is exactly the transformation that Duchamp’s piece traces, and that Hafif’s paintings re-enact. By visibly failing in their lofty representational task, his and her ‘paintings’ oppose to the ascetic in the aesthetic an aestheticism based on perceptual surplus, through colour. Hafif’s monochromes do not aim so much to desublimate modernism’s positive sublime as resublimate it, putting it into circulation again, representing it for what it is: at once the victim of painting in the eye of modernism, and the postmodern prosthetics of reconstructed chromatic ‘painting’. Hafif’s monochromes refuse to take sides in the aesthetic-moral dispute of Foster, Bois and de Duve vs. new abstraction; this specific form of indifference, as Etant Donnés insists, remains ambiguously ‘interested’ (Lyotard 1988a: 173, 176). In Hafif’s dramatic revisions of Newman’s sublime, another inassimilable sublime comes to the fore, which disbands the sensus communis in the name of an uncommon postmodern aesthetic experience and forces the eye to face up to its own mobile, elastic topology in a corporeal an-economy. What makes Newman’s paintings necessary to postmodernism, then, is the same volatile tube of paint that was left for dead with the readymade but that reappeared in Etant Donnés, and that Lyotard claims makes apparent ‘a sort of stupefaction or stupidity that suspends the activity of the mind’ (Lyotard 1988b: 76). But instead of abandoning the pictorial sublime altogether, or celebrating it as déjà-vu as Taaffe does, Hafif patiently

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mimes its excess and records its every move in a frame inevitably inadequate to the task of presentation. In Hafif’s postmodern paintings, colour takes possession of painting by defaulting on modernism’s lawful contract with opticality, stimulating (not simulating) ever-accelerating substitutional cycles of somatographic dispositions among various perceptual ‘sphincters’: eye, nose, ear, mouth / nose, ear, eye, mouth / mouth, eye, nose, ear / …

Bibliography Banz, S. 2010 (ed.). Marcel Duchamp and the Forestay Waterfall. Zurich: JRPRingier. Bernstein, J.M. 2006. Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bois, Y-A. 1993. Painting as Model. Cambridge, London: MIT Press. Brusatin, M. 1986. Histoires des Couleurs, trans. C. Lauriol. Paris: Flammarion. Buchloh, B., S. Guibault and David Solkin (eds). 1983. Modernism and Modernity. Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Burke, E. 1990. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of the Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Celant, G. 1975. ‘Marcia Hafif’, Marcia Hafif. La Jolla: La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. Cheetham, M. 2006. Abstract Art against Autonomy: Infection, Resistance, and Cure since the ’60s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clair, J. 1977. Marcel Duchamp: Catalogue Raisonné. Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne. De Duve, T. 1983. ‘Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?’, Artforum (September): 30–37. ———. 1987. Essais Datés: v.1 (1974–1986). Paris: Editions de la Différence. ———. 1996. Kant after Duchamp. Cambridge, London: MIT Press. De Duve, T., et al. 2003. ‘The Mourning After’, Artforum (March): 206–11, 267–70. Derrida, J. 1975. ‘Economimesis’, in S. Agacinski et al. (eds), Mimesis des Articulations. Paris: Aubier-Flammarion. Dictionnaire Abrégé du Surréalisme. 1938. Paris: Galerie Beaux-Arts. Didi-Huberman, G. 1985. La Peinture Incarnée. Paris: Minuit. Duchamp, M. 1975. ‘Entretien Marcel Duchamp – James Johnson Sweeney’, in M. Sanouillet (ed.), Duchamp du Signe. Paris: Flammarion. Escoubas, E. 1986. Imago Mundi: Topologie de l’Art. Paris: Galilée. Foster, H. 1986. ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’, Art in America (June): 80–91, 139. Gage, J. 1993. Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction. London: Thames & Hudson. Gibson, A. 1992. ‘Color and Difference in Abstract Painting: The Ultimate Case of Monochrome’, Genders 13 (Spring): 123–52. Gilbert-Rolfe, J. 1999. Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime. New York: Allworth Press. Greenberg, C. 1975. ‘Avant-Garde Attitudes: New Art in the Sixties’, in B. Smith (ed.), Concerning Contemporary Art: The Power Lectures, 1968–1973. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2003. Late Writings. R. Morgan (ed.). Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. Hafif, M. 1971–72. ‘Frank Bowling’, Arts Magazine (December–January): 58.

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———. 1978. ‘Beginning Again’, Artforum (September): 35–40. ———. 1981. ‘Getting On with Painting’, Art in America (April): 132–39. Hafif, M., et al. 1980–81. ‘Conversation’, Cover 4 (Winter): 4–7. Hess, T. 1972. Barnett Newman. London: Tate Gallery. Horrocks, C. 2000. ‘You Want to See? Well, Take a Look at This!: Ethical Vision, Disembodiment, and Light in Marcel Duchamp’s Etant Donnés’, in F. Lloyd and C. O’Brien (eds), Secret Spaces, Forbidden Places: Rethinking Culture. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Huyssen, A. 1984. ‘Mapping the Postmodern’, New German Critique 33: 5–52. Jones, A. 1994. Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. 1951. Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard. New York: Hafter Press. Keller, J-P. 1994. ‘Bon Goût, Mauvais Goût: La Frontière des Couleurs’, Cahiers du Léopard d’Or 4: 95–101. Krauss, R. 1991a. ‘Overcoming the Limits of Matter: On Revising Minimalism’, in American Art of the 1960s. New York: Museum of Modern Art/H.N. Abrams. ———. 1991b. ‘Where’s Poppa?’, in T. de Duve (ed.), The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp. Halifax, Cambridge, London: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design/MIT Press. ———.1993. The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge, London: MIT Press. Krens, T (ed.). 1984. Radical Painting. Williamstown: Williams College Museum of Art. Lichtenstein, J. 1989. La Couleur Éloquente: Rhétorique et Peinture à l’âge Classique. Paris: Flammarion. Lyotard, J-F. 1977a. Les Transformateurs Duchamp. Paris: Galilée. ———. 1977b. ‘The Unconscious as Mise-en-scène’, in M. Benamou and C. Caramello (eds), Performance in Postmodern Culture. Milwaukee, Madison: Coda Press. ———. 1983. Le Différend. Paris: Minuit. ———. 1988a. ‘L’Intérêt du Sublime’, in J-L. Nancy (ed.), Du Sublime. Paris: Belin. ———. 1988b. ‘Réécrire la Modernité’, Les Cahiers de Philosophie 5 (Spring): 193–203. ———. 1993. ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’, in T. Docherty (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader. Harlow: Pearson. ———. 2004. ‘Jean-François Lyotard: de la Fonction Critique à la Transformation’, in C. Pontbriand (ed.), Parachute: Essais Choisis 1975– 2000. Brussels, Montreal: La Lettre Volée/Parachute. Lyotard, J-F. and A. Cazenave (eds). 1985. L’Art des Confins: Mélanges Offerts à Maurice de Gandillac. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Masséra, J-C. 1994. ‘Your Attention Please’, in Marcia Hafif: From the Inventory. Wuppertal: Kunst– und Museumsverein (30 January–27 March 1994). Melville, S. 1996. Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context, ed. J. Gilbert-Rolfe. Amsterdam: G&B Arts. Mosset, O., et al. 1981. ‘Monochrome: Definitions, Amplifications, Repercussions & More…’, Art in America (December): 7–9. Nesbit, M. 1991. ‘The Language of Industry’, in T. de Duve (ed.), The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp. Halifax, Cambridge, London: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, MIT Press. Newman, B. 1948. ‘What is Sublime Art?’, Tiger’s Eye 6:51–53. Perret, C. 2001. Les Porteurs d’Ombre: Mimésis et Modernité. Paris: Belin. Riout, D. 1989. ‘La Peinture Monochrome: Une Tradition Niée’, Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne 30 (Winter): 81–98. Sanderson, D., et al. 1979. ‘Monochrome in New York’, Flash Art (October– December): 13–15.

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Silverman, H. 2002. Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics, and the Sublime. New York, London: Routledge. Soutif, D. 1990. ‘Critique Subjective ou Théorie Critique?’, in La place du goût dans la production philosophique des concepts et leur destin critique. Châteaugiron: Les Archives de la Critique d’Art. Taaffe, P. 1986. ‘Sublimity, Now and Forever, Amen’, Arts Magazine (March), 18–19.

 CHAPTER 3 

AFTER

COLOUR SOUNDINGS: THE TONE OF FRANCIS BACON Nicholas Chare

White has the sound as of a silence that suddenly becomes comprehensible. It is a nothingness having the colour of youth or, more exactly, the nothingness that exists before the beginning, before birth. (Kandinsky 1982: 185)

Body Paint This chapter attends to the sound of colours in Francis Bacon’s paintings. Bacon’s use of colour in his compositions is frequently complex, and contributes to the production of a particular figuration, fractured and fraught, which causes his works to oscillate between being abstract and representational. There is a persistent challenge to outline in operation in the paintings, a determined withdrawal from drawing distinct boundaries. The syntax, the orderly arrangement of forms, the meaningful separation of pictorial elements, is regularly disrupted. This calculated unsettling acts to prevent the intrusion of narrative. Bacon sought to subdue narrative because, in his words, which pointedly position the artworks in an acoustic register, once it occurs ‘the story talks louder than the paint’ (Sylvester 1993: 22). The painter wanted instead to let pigment be heard, to give it its voice. He wanted to foreground the material reality, the fact, of the paint, often preferring ‘malerisch, loose brushwork, laissez faire facture’ (Chare 2005: 136). This impacted upon the appearance of colour in his works. In painting, colour is usually contrasted with drawing which ‘has since Aristotle been the favoured means for giving narrative form to representation, that is, for defining a picture as a story’ (Lichtenstein 1993: 149–50). Drawing, as a dividing line that creates distinct units within a painting, can be thought to constitute a kind of language

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that gives mute paint ‘intelligible meaning by lending it the voice it lacks’ (ibid.: 150). For Bacon, however, rather than giving voice to paint, drawing (as a technique which operates in the service of communication, narration) was perceived to stifle it. In spite of this belief, as will become evident, the painter’s works do not abandon drawing although neither do they act to embrace it. To make sense of the way Bacon simultaneously employs and rejects drawing within a single canvas it is useful to turn to Roland Barthes’ work on the voice. In his essay ‘The Grain of the Voice’, about the interpretation of music, and more specifically song, Roland Barthes seeks to disengage the grain of the voice – which he defines as the diction of a singer – from ‘the tissue of cultural values’ which that voice communicates in a song (Barthes 1991: 270). Barthes wants to differentiate between what a singer expresses and the manner in which it is expressed. In the style of singing he detects ‘something which is directly the singer’s body, brought by one and the same movement to [the] ear from the depths of the body’s cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilage’; the grain of the voice is ‘the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue’ (ibid.: 270). It is the body as it persists within language. Barthes is able to differentiate between this corporeal aspect to language and its cultural component by developing ideas advanced by Julia Kristeva. Kristeva, working partly within a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework, conceives of language as possessing what she describes as semiotic and symbolic elements. The symbolic is the place within the Symbolic Order from which the subject can express meaning. It services communication and is predicated on making sense rather than on the style of delivery by way of which such sensible communication is achieved. The semiotic, by contrast, could be said to form the means by which meaning is conveyed rather than being that meaning. It is marked by the drives, grounded in the reverberations, rhythms and tones of the early involvements of mother and child. The semiotic can be said to constitute the material component of the signifier. To give an example of these two aspects of language in operation, the voice as the material support of speech – the tone, the tempo – would be on the side of the semiotic, whereas the syntax of the spoken words – not the way that they are articulated – would be on the side of the symbolic. These two elements of language are, in reality, inseparable. They require each other to constitute the productive aggravation that animates language, although the symbolic is usually privileged over the semiotic in this process. These two facets to language are not solely to be found in speech but also manifest themselves in literary texts. Such texts, for Kristeva, comprise both a phenotext and genotext. The phenotext is allied to the symbolic whereas the genotext is associated with the semiotic. The phenotext describes that part of the

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text concerned with communication whereas the genotext refers to the style by which that communication is actually carried out. The latter contributes to meaning but is in excess of meaning or an excess to meaning. The two aspects of the text can be discussed separately but in reality they are inseparable, fused together, functioning symbiotically. Barthes transposes Kristeva’s conception of the literary text to song, writing of the pheno-song and geno-song. The conception can also be applied to a discussion of colour and drawing. Drawing is primarily symbolic whilst colour often privileges the semiotic although, as will be argued later, it also seems possible to recognize pheno- and geno-colour. Kristeva, in fact, discusses colour at length in her essay ‘Giotto’s Joy’ and appears to conceive of it in these terms. ‘Giotto’s Joy’ provides an extended analysis of Giotto di Bondone’s fresco cycles at the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi (c.1297–1305) and the Arena Chapel in Padua (1305–1308). Kristeva is interested in tracking the way in which the drives are translated into coloured surfaces. The drives are described by Freud as on the borderline between the psyche and the soma (Freud 1991: 83). Kristeva shares this view, calling them ‘energy charges as well as psychical marks’ (Kristeva 1984: 25). They are formed from pressures within the body that seek satisfaction without. These marked energies – composed of ideas and affects – act as representatives of bodily pressures within the psychic apparatus. They speak for the body in thought. They speak for the body through the genotext in literature. For Barthes, they speak for the body within song. For Kristeva, in ‘Giotto’s Joy’, the drives speak for the body through colour in painting. Colour carries the energetic pressure of the drives within it. This vital dimension to colour leads Kristeva to suggest that any linguistic analysis of the meaning of colouration in art which is premised on a transposition of descriptions of words and their component parts to the visual field will rapidly encounter its limits. It is not possible to explain colour in terms of units of language, as phonemes, morphemes and lexemes (Kristeva 1981: 216). It forms one of those elements of the pictorial experience which cannot be reduced to phonetic units (Bal and Bryson 1991: 194). An investigation of colour should, for Kristeva, therefore be economic rather than structural. It should proceed by way of an analysis of increases and decreases of energy within pictures rather than reducing pictures to unitary grids of meaning. Paintings are fields of pressures meshed with systems of signs. Colour as pressure, as drive, is inserted into paintings ‘under the impact of censorship as a sign in a system of representation’ (Kristeva 1981: 219). This censorship is performed by drawing which inscribes form into formless material, making the stuff of paint sensible. Colour is worked into something other than itself. It becomes the colour ‘of’ something. It becomes form, a sign, a representation in the communicative system that is picture-making. The drives form the

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semiotic underbelly to a symbolic carapace. The symbolic, painting’s grammar and syntax, resides in contour, in delineation, in what shapes subject matter and contains colour. This governing geometry, a parliament of forms, acts to hold colour in check. It is assisted in this by pictorial narrative. There is a need to repress the semiotic, the drive-invested underside to language of which colour forms a part, because it poses a potential threat to the subject. The semiotic is too resonant of the Real. As a bodying within language it carries traces of a time before language, of a time in which lack was absent, in which experience was unmediated, of a time before time. It carries the mnemonic traces of maternal plenitude. In the absence of a symbolic counterbalance to the semiotic, the subject would be too much of the Real, indifferent to difference, and fall into psychosis. It is for this reason that colour (in its semiotic excess) has to be policed. Kristeva writes that colour is linked to primary narcissism, to the earliest stages of infancy, and to subject–object indeterminacy. It has the capacity to carry the subject back to its beginnings. Colour acts as a reminder of the fragility that ultimately underlies the self. It troubles the self-certainty achieved through the mirror-phase and the resolution of the Oedipus complex. In fact, colour perception probably precedes the eye’s capacity for centred vision, the eye’s ability to perceive objects like the speculative ‘I’ in the mirror (Kristeva 1981: 225). The first colours that the infant registers are those with short wavelengths such as blue, a colour used extensively by Giotto in the Arena Chapel. In scientific terms different colours are produced by different groups of wavelength. Violet light, a short wave colour, for example, ranges from 450 to 380 nanometres, whereas red has a longer wavelength ranging from 760 to 630 nanometres (Varley 1980: 15). For Kristeva, colours of all wavelengths (but blue in particular) potentially ‘have a noncentered or decentering effect, lessening both object identification and phenomenal fixation’ (Kristeva 1981: 225). This means that they return the subject to a moment ‘before the fixed, specular “I”, but while in the process of becoming this “I” by breaking away from instinctual, biological (and also maternal) dependence’ (ibid.: 225). The experience of colour therefore prompts a moment of unbecoming or, perhaps, a reexperiencing of becoming. It unsettles the self, acting as a reminder of its fragile foundations, creating a sense of anxiety. This is, perhaps, the chromophobia David Batchelor identifies as symptomatic of contemporary Western culture’s responses to colour (Batchelor 2000: 22).

Out of Line In the 1950s, the backgrounds to Bacon’s paintings were frequently composed of ‘very diluted dark blue or black paint’ (Sylvester 1993:

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195). The eight papal portraits from 1953 which Bacon rapidly produced after completing Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953, Nathan Emory Coffin Collection, Des Moines Art Center) provide examples of this choice of ground. These canvases, which each depict enthroned popes, were given an initial thin wash of navy blue or black paint. The painter then worked out the portraits against this dark background. The popes wear blue, or in the case of Study for Portrait I (1953, Collection Denise and Andrew Saul, New York), bluish purple robes, with white collars. The paintings each have similar settings, ‘spare, deep, dark interior spaces defined by sketchy white recessional lines that culminate in rear walls parallel to the picture plane’ (Davies 2001: 14). The white lines frequently meet up, forming rectangles. The backgrounds of the portraits exhibit blocks of delineated, seemingly uniform colour. Line in painting is a visual equivalent of syntax. It can constitute a system for ordering forms, functioning to produce and regulate shapes and spaces. It contributes to what Batchelor calls the ‘rhetorical subordination of colour’ (Batchelor 2000: 49). In realist painting it is allied with communication, with the symbolic aspect of language. As outline, it frequently operates to describe colour. It distributes colour throughout a picture managing the work’s semiotic economy. The expanses of colour in the papal portraits pose a potential threat to the subject but the danger is minimized by the action of line, which orders the chromatic content of the paintings. Line is, however, itself composed of colour. The painter ‘uses drawings and lines, but he coats them, suffuses them with colored matter so that they break away from strictly chromatic differentiation’ (Kristeva 1981: 231). Line separates colour, seeks to present colours as distinct units, yet it accomplishes this separation by way of colour. Line cannot detach itself from colouration. It is colour. The difference between colours is articulated through colours. There is no ‘between’ of colour. There is no outside to colour which can outline it. Colour cannot be bordered except by itself, which means ultimately it has no borders. It is this absence of boundaries which line strives to repress. The success of line as a form of repression must, however, always be provisional, given that it is constituted out of the very material it seeks to inhibit. Colour always waits within line. It is its disavowed underside. On close inspection the dark blocks of colour produced by line in the papal portraits, the background colour given contour and ostensibly contained by the thin white recessional lines and the thick gold lines of the papal thrones, literally overrun those lines. The white and gold paint does not entirely cover the colour of the ground beneath. The ground shows through the lines. It is merely muffled by the later applications of paint. Under scrutiny the blocks of colour also lack uniformity. The symbolic functions through discretion, it achieves communication through the reasoned placement of discrete

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signifiers. Colour is indiscrete, it refuses singularity. The absence of uniformity within ‘a’ colour prevents it from forming ‘a’ signifier. Bacon was attuned to the indiscreetness that characterizes colour and indeed painting in general. He knew of the nuances inherent in the application of paint. In several interviews he drew attention to the malleability of the medium of oil paint. He explained to Michel Archimbaud that ‘when you’re using oil paint, it can result in an effect that you cannot control’, adding that ‘you can apply a blob of paint, turn the brush in one way or another, and that will produce a different effect each time which will change the whole meaning of the image’ (Archimbaud 1993: 82). These accidental effects were appreciated and often preserved by Bacon. His encouragement of these contingent smears and blobs against the backdrop of a frequently orderly and draughtsman-like composition lends his work quite distinct qualities. The paintings liberate the usually suppressed semiotic energy of colour yet do not abandon the symbolic entirely. They do not collapse into the chromatic delirium of, for example, some of Jackson Pollock’s works such as Untitled (Green Silver) (1949, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York). The ways in which accident registers in the colours of Bacon’s paintings will now be discussed in more detail. The chance effect of a given brushstroke, the tenor of a certain mark, the impression made by a particular dab, was increased because of Bacon’s frequent use of impasto. The technique of laying on the paint thickly impacted upon the colour. In the Interaction of Color, Josef Albers remarks on the way that traces of the tools of painting within paintings act to vary the density and intensity of colours (Albers 1975: 7). The random aspect to the encounter between brush and canvas, the contingency which nestles in the bristles, carries into the colour. A thick stroke of paint with a large brush will leave an uneven trail of pigment. This is especially true of Bacon’s works given that he used a coarse-grained brown canvas and, from 1948 onwards, employed the rougher, unprimed side for his works (Hammer 2005: 51; Harrison 2005: 41; Russell 2009: 234). This meant that the more abrasively toothed surface of the canvas would bite the paint, additionally holding it better. The rough surface, however, also meant the medium had to travel across deeper interstices in the mesh of the canvas. This is apparent in an early work like Head VI (1949, Arts Council Collection, Hayward Gallery, London). The thick sweeps of black and grey paint that form the notional backdrop or ground for the figure often begin at the top of the canvas. They initially sometimes entirely cover over the weave of the canvas in a block of black or grey paint, but the pigment held by the brush soon becomes too thin to sustain this and more and more of the canvas remains uncovered. The paint begins to adhere to only the roughest sections of the warp and weft. The gradual decrease in the volume of pigment as the eye travels the length of these down-strokes makes it appear that colour is lighter

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towards the end of each stroke. The paint is less dense in places, hence the colour appears less opaque. The colour is interrupted by the canvas. In those areas where it is most visible, such as the bottom left of the painting, the canvas also does not appear to have an even colour. This is probably the result both of real changes in the surface colour of the hemp and of the effect of texture upon the perception of the tan surface with the unevenness producing thin shadows which make some areas appear darker than others. This effect can also be seen, for example, in the papal portrait Study for Portrait I (1953, Collection Denise and Andrew Saul, New York) in which the bottom third of the work is almost entirely unpainted canvas. The meeting of a brushstroke of one colour with one of another will also produce contingent effects. If the initial dab of paint is not dry then a commingling will occur and the canvas will become a proxy mixing palette. If the dab is dry then it may well not be covered entirely by the second dab and will show through. A thick stroke of paint is ridged like the weave of the canvas. A second stroke will seep into the furrows of the first leaving its ridges exposed to view. The brush can also accumulate wet paint from the canvas which, for Bacon, means that ‘one end of the brush may be filled with another colour and the pressing of the brush, by accident, makes a mark which gives a resonance to the other marks’ (Sylvester 1993: 121). The marks of colour resonate with each other; they reflect the sounds of their counterparts. The brush itself can become not merely a carrier of colour but also a producer, a place through which colours meet and mingle. Or, if there is a thin underlay of dry paint, the tooth of the canvas may still influence the way a second overlay of paint behaves. In the papal portrait Study for Portrait V (1953, Collection Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution), the face of the pope is built up of strokes of mauve, pink, purple, yellow and white paint. On close inspection the blue ground shows through these colours which only rest on the uppermost part of the threads of the linen. The teeth of the pope are sometimes represented by dots of white paint floating above the blue ground – the teeth are therefore not white but blue-white – although at a distance, in the eye of the spectator, they cohere into solid blocks of white paint. Up close the teeth, and the face as a whole, lack solidity because the secondary applications of colour have only adhered to the ground in patches. The grain of the canvas has still exerted an influence through the thin initial wash of colour.

Real Time In various ways, through the contingency that inheres in painting, colour is rendered pluri-form. The blocks of paint in Bacon’s paintings are not composed of a single colour but of many colours differing

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from each other by the barest degree perceptible. These various colours are usually described as ‘shades’ of a single colour in an effort to disavow difference and preserve an illusion of uniformity. They underline the excess to meaning that exists as the underside to language. The visible differences within ‘a’ colour articulate ‘an area beyond meaning that holds meaning’s surplus’ (Kristeva 1981: 221). The signifier is found wanting when it refers to colour. Its meaning is insufficient. The language of colour we employ is one which functions on the premise of a purity of colour that does not exist in the real world. As Wittgenstein remarked, in ‘everyday life we are virtually surrounded by impure colours’ (Wittgenstein 1978: §59, 25e). This impurity is what exceeds language’s descriptive capacity and infuriates drawing’s best efforts to contain colour. Bacon’s works, in their foregrounding of the chromatic impurity that characterizes all paintings, indeed all fields of colour, reveal a truth about colour which has broad implications. The notion that discrete units, forms and names have a satisfactory hold on the perceptual experience that is colour is revealed to be false. This erroneous assumption is what undergirds works such as, for example, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay’s Basic Color Terms with its preposterous theories about human evolution. Berlin and Kay suggest that ‘the sequence of elaboration of color lexicon is an evolutionary one accompanying, and perhaps a reflex of, increasing technological and cultural advancement’ (Berlin and Kay 1969: 16). They perceive an increase in basic colour terms to reflect evolutionary progress. Those cultures which possess fewer basic colour terms are seen to be backward. In fact, however, the sedimenting of colour into basic terms is an action that disavows the fluid reality of colour, its ever-present impurity. It is an affront to the lived experience of colour. Cultures which refuse the limiting effects of basic colour lexicon potentially possess a more sophisticated understanding of the shimmer that is any given colour. They are attuned to its rippling plurality. Colour is what the mechanisms of the symbolic, such as basic colour terms or the famed Munsell colour chart with its distinctive chromatic blocks, cannot communicate. This is why Kristeva emphasizes the need for an economic reading of the coloured surfaces of paintings, one which understands them as fields of intensities rather than as discrete signifiers. Colour can be quantified – similar colours, shades, are present in either large or small quantities on a canvas; and there are instances of colour – a colour may appear in a single place in a painting or in a number of different places. The size and placement of colours affect their intensity. All colours are invested with drive but the semiotic dimension to colour is suppressed, to a greater or lesser extent, by the way the colour is used within the painting. Colour can be allied closely to the symbolic, for example, when it is used to describe depth. A large block of a single colour on a canvas will visually reduce the sense of distance between a spectator

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and a painting (Albers 1975: 44). In a painting composed of thick blocks of one colour separated by thin bands of another colour, the thick blocks of colour will appear more proximate to the spectator. This is, however, not always the case. Darker colours appear to be further away than lighter colours so the thin zip of pale blue in Barnett Newman’s Midnight Blue (1979, Ludwig Museum, Cologne) appears closer to a viewer of the painting than the expanse of dark blue it bisects. Mark Rothko’s Black and Grey (1969, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) demonstrates this quality as well. The thick block of grey appears closer than the band of black above it. In these paintings colour is made to signal depth. Colour is distracted. Its energy is deflected. The pressure the semiotic brings to bear upon the symbolic in these paintings is minimized. Colour decorates the canvases as procession or recession. In Bacon’s paintings the colours that form the backgrounds are frequently subservient to depth, they are rendered descriptive. Bacon’s favourite colour orange, for example, as it is used in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944, Tate, London), works to make the spectator’s experience of the painting more intimate (Archimbaud 1993: 170; Cappock 2005: 208). The bright orange background in each study lifts the image of the grey bio-morph up towards the spectator. It denies depth and appears to push the mouthing figures outwards from the picture plane. The dark backgrounds of the papal portraits, on the other hand, engineer the illusion of deep space. The colouring of the foreground in Bacon’s paintings, of the figures and forms that constitute the subject matter, is, however, frequently more complex. The colour sometimes resists coercion by the symbolic in the guise of drawing. It emerges as ‘the “device” by which painting gets away from identification of objects and therefore realism’ (Kristeva 1981: 231). Colour refuses to describe either depth or form, rejects narrating. It resists being bounded by the symbolic. Bacon’s avowed desire not to illustrate or story-tell in his paintings is a desire not to privilege the phenotext. The contrast between the smoother, ostensibly uniform background colours of Bacon’s works and the rougher, polychrome images that they surround has often been remarked on. Gilles Deleuze, for example, reads these contrasts as constituting variations in time within the painting. Time results from colour in two ways, ‘as time that passes, in the chromatic variation of the broken tones that compose the flesh; and as the eternity of time – that is, as the eternity of the passage in itself, in the monochromy of the field’ (Deleuze 2003: 143). In the difference between the foreground imagery and the ground of background colour, ‘the chronochromatism of the body is opposed to the monochromatism of the flat fields’ (ibid.: 48). The foreground is ‘in’ time whereas the background ‘is’ time, it is the eternal. It is, however, possible to read these contrasts in the application of colour in another way. They could be said to lead the

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spectator towards a ‘time’ before the time of the subject, towards a time usually beyond recall, towards the timeless time of the Real. The use of colour in Bacon’s paintings does tell a story, it tells a story in reverse. It takes the spectator back in time. The blocks of colour that border Bacon’s figures, supplemented by regular shapes, doorframes, bedsteads, grids, act as yardsticks against which to measure an unblocking of colour and a loss of contour. This undoing of the chromatic and the morphological can be witnessed in Triptych (May–June 1973) (1973, Collection Saul Sternberg, New York). The triptych is a reconstruction of the final minutes of Bacon’s former lover George Dyer’s life. In October 1971 Bacon and Dyer had travelled to Paris to attend a retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work at the Grand Palais. As Bacon was attending to the exhibition, Dyer was in their shared hotel room committing suicide. Dyer, overdosing, had attempted ‘to vomit a surfeit of alcohol and pills into the sink’ before slumping ‘back on to the lavatory seat in the hotel bathroom’ and dying (Peppiatt 1997: 235). The triptych represents these events. The right panel depicts a figure vomiting in a basin, the left panel a hunched figure seated on a toilet. The central panel of the triptych shows a seated figure casting an amorphous, bat-like shadow (Van Alphen 1992: 27). The figure in each panel is painted against a black background and framed by a doorframe. The left and right panels contain white arrows that point towards the figure. These were probably imprinted on the canvas using arrows cut out from card and then coated with paint (Cappock 2005: 212). The arrows direct the eye, the frames focus it. The face of the figure in the right-hand panel, in particular, is not painted in uniform flesh-tones but as a whorl of various colours: mauve, yellow, white. The brushstrokes smear and smudge the pigments, creating a purl of hues: a curve of red shading into maroon and then pink. The gradations of colour are too nuanced to be caught in words. There is difference, there are distinct hues, but they are beyond the capacity of language to communicate them. They are not yet coloured by words. These hues register the moment within original non-differentiation ‘when something begins to be sketched, tone on tone, the first differences: early morning’ (Barthes 2005: 50). These colours defy delineation by words; they also refuse to describe depth or form. The hues in this face open the spectator to the foreclosed history of the self. They carry the subject back in time to their own early morning. This is abject colour. It is ambiguous, composite, in-between colour (Kristeva 1982: 4). It is colour which reminds the self of those primitive and provisional severances that occurred prior to the mirror-phase, the moment before being like (ibid.: 13). It is colour in the midst of becoming. Many of Bacon’s other portraits, with their brush-drunk faces, their muddied and smirched countenances, share this coloured excess. The triptych Three Studies for Portrait of Lucien Freud (1965, Private Collection) is a sophisticated mix of pinks and reds. The texture of the

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paint, especially in the central panel, has been variegated through applying a ridged material to the wet paint, which prevents uniformity. To produce tactile effects in his paintings Bacon is known to have used ‘cashmere sweaters, ribbed socks, cotton flannels’ and ‘even towelling dressing gowns’ (Cappock 2005: 208). He either applied the paint with these materials or applied the materials to paint which was already on the canvas. In an interview with David Sylvester, Bacon described how he impregnated ‘rags with colour’ as they allowed him to ‘leave this kind of network of colour across the image’ (Sylvester 1993: 90). Colour applied in this way is broken apart, undone. It fissures into multiple parts which fall below the threshold of language. This kind of colour is what Barthes called colour that has not been ‘installed’ (Barthes 1991: 166). Installed colour operates in the service of ‘rhetorical modes of existence’ (ibid.: 166). Colour that is not installed – that does not function in the service of sense but enjoys the freedom of non-sense – causes the spectator to experience a ‘tiny fainting spell’ (ibid.: 166). Colour of this kind acts upon the subject but as energy rather than sign, as pressure rather than meaning. It provides a point of access to the flesh beneath words. It cuts to the body beneath language. Through this encouragement of contingency in his paintings, Bacon produces a rupturing of symbolic language of a kind equivalent to the revolution in poetic language described by Kristeva in her book of that name. Chance, as it plays out through the paint, provides a means of access to the usually suppressed semiotic aspect of pictorial language, to colour as a kind of non-sense. The ‘chance blobs and slicks of paint in Bacon’s works are formless noise’ (Chare 2006: 94). The texturing Bacon engineered, the variegation he provides, liberates the drives but, as discussed earlier, enough of the symbolic is maintained that the canvas is not perceived simply as chaos. Steven Connor traces the origin of the word colour to the Latin word color which is in turn derived from ‘a Sanskrit word meaning the skin on the surface of milk’ (Connor 2004: 151). In Powers of Horror, Kristeva describes ‘when the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk’ as an experience liable to bring on food loathing, the most archaic form of abjection (Kristeva 1982: 2). Colour is a similar kind of skin. It is a fragile, permeable boundary, separating the self from its pre-history. It is a boundary which, as in-between, threatens the subject’s own boundaries. The sight of abject colour of the kind that occurs in Bacon’s paintings menaces the ‘I’. The curdled skin of the surface milk causes the self to ‘experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly’ (ibid.: 2–3). The vomiting figure in the right panel of Triptych (May–June 1973), who is in his death throes, causes a similar nausea through Bacon’s use of colour. The subject in this painting is close to death. This moment is, in a sense, the closest it is possible to be to the beginning of self, it brings the ‘I’ back to the Real. Death, through its negation

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of self, represents a return to the time before self. Ernst van Alphen reads the body in the central panel of the triptych as dissolving into its shadow, losing ‘its bodily features to its shadow’ (Van Alphen 1992: 27). The shadow rises up to meet the self which in death collapses back into an absence of contour. It is like the formless whip of white paint across the back of the figure in the right-hand panel, a blob of pigment that opens the ‘I’ to its beginnings.

Hue and Cry The dissolution of self that occurs in death agony, in moments of extreme anguish, could be said to be the theme of several of the papal portraits. The figures in Study after Velázquez (1950, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York), Study after Velázquez II (1950, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York), Study after Velázquez (1953, Des Moines Arts Center, Des Moines) and Study for Portrait VII (1953, Museum of Modern Art, New York) appear to be screaming. They appear to be in great pain. Pain blurs mind and material. It brings the body back to itself, fragmenting the signifying carapace that usually mediates our experience of the flesh. In these portraits the voiding of self is explicitly linked to acoustics, to vocalizations. These are carefully coloured images centring on the mouth as the source of sound. There is a long tradition of relating colour to sound. This occurs most obviously in synaesthesia. The condition of synaesthesia involves the conflation in perception of senses which are usually thought of as distinct. It is a union of the senses. A sense impression of one kind, for example sight, will produce an image in the mind of another sense impression, such as sound. The most common form of synaesthesia is, in fact, the opposite, ‘a visual sensation caused by auditory stimulation’ (Harrison 2001: 3), a coloured hearing. In Bacon’s works, however, it might be argued that the spectator experiences the phenomenon of an auditory seeing – the eye hears colours. The artist Wassily Kandinsky, a noted synaesthete, claimed that whilst mixing his colours on the palette he ‘conjured up in the process a musical sound’. He could ‘hear the hiss of the colours as they mingled’ (Kandinsky 1982: 372). Bacon was not a synaesthete but he was much taken by synaesthetic images. He frequently quoted a line from W.B. Stanford’s translation of Aeschylus’s Eumenides, ‘The reek of human blood smiles out at me’ (Hammer 2005: 103). He had also read Stanford’s Aeschylus in his Style which quotes the line as part of a more extended discussion of the playwright’s use of synaesthetic imagery (Stanford 1942: 109). Stanford describes several images from Aeschylus which transfer sound to sight (ibid.: 107–9). In the reference to the reeking smile, the visual has become olfactory. The smile, the appearance of up-curved lips, carries the stink of cruor. The sense of smelling through seeing

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was one praised by an artist Bacon greatly admired. In his letters, which Bacon read several times, Vincent van Gogh, with The Potato Eaters (1885, Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam) in mind, suggested that ‘if a peasant painting smells of bacon, smoke, potato, steam, fine – that’s not unhealthy’ (van Gogh 1997: 292). Bacon’s own paintings, through their use of colour, also possess synaesthetic qualities. In his Theory of Colours, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe argued that analogies between colour and melody, between seen and heard, should not be made. He stated that: colour and sound do not admit of being directly compared together in any way, but both are referable to a higher formula, both are derivable, although each for itself, from this higher law. They are like two rivers which have their source in one and the same mountain, but subsequently pursue their way under totally different conditions in two totally different regions, so that throughout the whole course of both no two points can be compared. (von Goethe 1970: §748, 298–99)

Goethe is correct to locate the two senses in a single point of origin but wrong to deny the possibility of comparison between them. The senses become differentiated as the infant extricates itself from the realm of maternal plenitude, the Real, and enters into language and the Symbolic. For Lacan, the Real persists as a kind of traumatic kernel, a perpetual missed encounter within the Symbolic. Using a Kristevan psychoanalytic framework, however, it is possible to read the experience of abjection as one that engenders an encounter with the Real. This encounter is one in which the senses collapse in upon each other and fuse together again; colour runs into sound. The myriad hues in Bacon’s paintings do not simply suggest varieties of colour but also cry out. The hues do not signal. They introduce noise into signification; they are manifestations of the semiotic excess that is usually suppressed by the symbolic. Bacon’s colours liberate the drives. The colours in Bacon’s works collapse back to the before of signification. In his figures he produces colours beyond tones. After the tone there is only noise. A tone is a shift from a constant, an ideal colour, which still relates to that colour. A noise is a mess of colours which lack the volume to resolve into tones. It is beyond colouration. This is why Wittgenstein aligns the colour black with noise. He writes that ‘the difference between black and, say, a dark violet is similar to the difference between the sound of a bass drum and the sound of a kettle-drum. We say of the former that it is a noise not a tone. It is matt and absolutely black’ (Wittgenstein 1978: §156, 37e). A kettledrum is an instrument of definite pitch which can be tuned to produce particular tones repeatedly. A bass drum, as an instrument that thunders and rolls, might be said to be matt because it flattens out or swallows sound as a particular. In its extended nature it is general whereas the kettledrum is specific. It is dull whereas the

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kettledrum is vivid. It is noise as Aden Evans describes it, the usually unnoticed support of sense, ‘a baseline, a plane of relief against which signal stands out’ (Evans 2005: 15). Bacon’s colours smooth over differences, parti-colours, providing rough planes that offer no relief. I am grateful to Carol Blower, Laura Burkhalter, Mark Hallett, Griselda Pollock, Alistair Rider and Marcel Swiboda for their insightful comments on colour, on Bacon’s work, and on earlier drafts of this essay.

Bibliography Albers, J. 1975. Interaction of Color. New Haven: Yale University Press. Alphen, E. van. 1992. Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self. London: Reaktion. Archimbaud, M. 1993. Francis Bacon: In Conversation with Michel Archimbaud. London: Phaidon. Bal, M. and N. Bryson. 1991. ‘Semiotics and Art History’, The Art Bulletin 73(2): 174–208. Barthes, R. 1991. The Responsibility of Forms, trans. R. Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2005. The Neutral, trans. R.E. Krauss and D. Hollier. New York: Columbia University Press. Batchelor, D. 2000. Chromophobia. London: Reaktion Books. Berlin, B. and P. Kay. 1969. Basic Color Terms. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cappock, M. 2005. Francis Bacon’s Studio. London: Merrell. Chare, N. 2005. ‘Regarding the Pain: Noise in the Art of Francis Bacon’, Angelaki 10(3): 133–43. ———. 2006. ‘Passages to Paint: Francis Bacon’s Studio Practice’, parallax 12(4): 83–98. Conner, S. 2004. The Book of Skin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Davies, H.M. 2001. Francis Bacon: The Papal Portraits of 1953. New York: Distributed Art Publishers. Deleuze, G. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. D.W. Smith. London: Continuum. Evans. A. 2005. Sound Ideas: Music, Machines and Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Freud, S. 1991. The Penguin Freud Library Volume 7: On Sexuality. London: Penguin. Goethe, J.W. von. 1970. Theory of Colours, trans. C.L. Eastlake. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gogh, V. van. 1997. The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, trans. A. Pomerans. London: Penguin. Hammer, M. 2005. Bacon and Sutherland. New Haven: Yale University Press. Harrison, J. 2001. Synaesthesia: The Strangest Thing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrison, M. 2005. In Camera: Francis Bacon, Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting. London: Thames and Hudson. Kandinsky, W. 1982. Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art Volume 1 (1901– 1921), eds K.C. Lindsay and P. Vergo. London: Faber & Faber. Kristeva, J. 1981. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. T. Gora, A. Jardine and L.S. Roudiez. Oxford: Blackwell.

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———. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L.S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. M. Waller. New York: Columbia University Press. Lichtenstein, J. 1993. The Eloquence of Color, trans. E. McVarish. Berkeley: University of California Press. Peppiatt, M. 1997. Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma. London: Phoenix. Russell, J. 2009. ‘“The Mystery of the Paint”: Francis Bacon’s Materials’, in M. Harrison (ed.), Francis Bacon: New Studies. Göttingen: Steidl: 233 -45. Stanford, W.B. 1942. Aeschylus in his Style. Dublin: Dublin University Press. Sylvester, D. 1993 Interviews with Francis Bacon. London: Thames & Hudson. Varley, H. (ed.). 1980. Colour. London: Mitchell Beazley. Wittgenstein, L. 1978. Remarks on Colour, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. L. McAlister and M. Schättle. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

 CHAPTER 4 

COLOUR AS A BRIDGE BETWEEN ART AND SCIENCE Mary Pearce When a British team of scientists sent the spaceship Beagle 2 to study Mars at the beginning of 2003, they decided to send an artwork to the planet: Damien Hirst’s colour spot painting (no title, 2003), which consists of sixteen coloured discs on an 8 cm by 8 cm aluminium plate.1 Hirst, who from the 1980s had been creating colour spot paintings related to pharmaceutical compounds, whilst also having previously displayed a sheep in a glass tank of formaldehyde, Away from the Flock (1994), and a sliced-in-half calf, Mother and Child Divided (1993),2 had contributed a work of art that would also provide them with an indexical means for visually calibrating the imaging instruments being carried on the spaceship. While a novel development linking art, colour and science, it is now also a part of the historical relationship between colour and science, one that in the field of astronomy and spectroscopy is capable of deducing the physical constitution of stars and planets through their emission of colour and sound frequencies.3 This chapter employs the work of Hirst and two other artists, David Hill and James Turrell, in order to draw out certain themes and tendencies that I suggest predominate in recent art involving colour as a central theme. These examples are intended to form ‘bridges’ between fields of colour use and function: namely, between the domains of aesthetics and science; between philosophy of language and the perceptual aspects of colour; and between previously dominant philosophies of colour and their current orientation within the technological and phenomenological context of colour in some areas of contemporary art. In terms of the latter, I will discuss the increasing importance of the connection of sound to colour, and how the historical context of this link applies to some current aspects of art practice. These introductory remarks must be seen in the context of new, technologically oriented and derived media. The philosophy and

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theory of colour in the history of art, and specifically painting, was traditionally mobilized to describe, explain and provide models to understand the relationship between sensation, perception and visual pleasure. The rise of new technologies and media networks in the digital or cybernetic age has ensured a change of emphasis or adaptation when considering the role of colour in technological and scientific contexts. Hirst’s Mars-bound spot painting is a contemporary and perhaps the most media-aware example of the confluence of aesthetics, science and technology.4 It is one that incorporates the critical role of colour as a method of communicating scientific knowledge data, and of expanding the traditional place of colour in aesthetics. First, it is necessary to introduce to the context of colour in science the role of imaginative colour, in order to assess historically the shift in emphasis that colour has undergone in the domain of science.

Differences in the Focus on Colour – Past and Present The perception or visualization of colour requires, indeed is founded on, human cognition. Colour perhaps represents the purity or singularity of the human visual process. Generally, we cannot hear colour, smell colour or understand colour intellectually – we can only see it.5 Humans, however, have the capacity to imagine colour. We can perceive it, visualize it and remember it. This aspect of human perception and cognition is currently impossible to simulate artificially.6 Relatively recently, artistic practice has redrawn the relationship between colour-as-sensation, colour-as-perception (the organization of sensations) and colour-as-cognition, including the linguistic, connotative function (e.g. recalling a colour in memory and naming it ‘red’). Many traditional visual artists orchestrated colours according to more or less abstract or figurative conventions. The arrival of conceptual art shifted the emphasis away from colour as visual pleasure to colour as linguistic and connotative function. In addition, in order to function as a scientific tool, Hirst’s artwork on Beagle 2 plays with aesthetics through such conceptual interpretations and their cultural or imaginative context. A significant dimension of the relationship of the Beagle 2 spot painting to the visual arts was that it was displayed at the White Cube Gallery in London before being included in the space probe. As an artwork of relatively minimal aesthetic impact but with high symbolic and linguistic content, its colours inhabit a matrix of scientific usefulness and nomenclature. There exists a suite of colours called the ‘Mars Colours’, which are significant to the scientists because they contain a certain amount and ratio of ferrous material. The spot painting used these pigments.

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Conceptually, the colours are symbolically double-coded: as an ironic ‘language game’ the painting is also reminiscent of an artist’s palette.

Imagined or Non-visual Colour and Its Relationship to Language Verbal language often falls short of describing visual phenomena adequately, and for this reason colour has been used historically in attempts to depict the sublime (in the sense of ‘things beyond meaning’). Attempts to evoke ‘heightened sensation’ of such things beyond meaning were therefore either developed through music or visually through pictorial compositions relying on colour. This could be either figurative, as in the Romantic era, or abstract, as in twentieth-century painting. Equally, to turn this idea on its head, artists working with colour often conclude that the capacity to perceive colour is closely linked to the way we describe it. In other words, the way we name colour affects what we are able to visualize or imagine. The late-twentieth-century ‘linguistic turn’ in colour raises the question of the relationship between colour in discourse or language, and colour as a visual or imagined phenomenon. A video by contemporary artist Gary Hill draws on an additional aspect of colour, one that affects the modern cognition and conception of colour: its capacity to defy fixed definitions. Hill’s video (Remarks on Color, 1994) consists simply of a child, called Anastasia, struggling to read and understand a text from beginning to end. Hill, however, is apparently aware that the viewer, being conscious of the child’s difficulties, is also simultaneously assimilating the words she is reading: see Wittgenstein’s philosophical text on colour ‘Remarks on Colour’ (1978). Hill’s visual work consists of what he calls an ‘electronic linguistic’ element that expresses the relationship of language and image to text. His multi-layered art contains perceptive ‘twists’ (or layers) to the concept: ‘In Hill’s view, meaning cannot be constructed without words, and vision itself could not exist without them’ (Kerr 2004). In order to depict this idea he draws on the philosophical work of Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colour. This philosophical investigation, however, is not about ‘colour’ as such, but about our linguistic capacity to describe colour. But this raises the question: ‘How do I know, for example, that the colour I call red is the same as what you see as red?’7 Scientifically, perhaps, it is easy to name colours, but individual interpretations obstruct our certainty about whether what we actually see is the same as what another person observes. In this way, colour will always escape fixed interpretations, as Wittgenstein stated. In Hill’s film we witness not only the difficulties of the child’s attempt to understand the text – which is obvious from her hesitant

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reading – but the difficulties, contained in the text itself, of naming and describing colour. Melissa Kerr of the Philadelphia Museum of Art summed up the plurality of the work: ‘Wittgenstein investigates the difference between the visual identification of colour and the words created to describe it. Hill, however, uses the philosopher’s text to effectively demonstrate the conflict between vocalization and writing, as demonstrated through Anastasia’s interpretation of the text. Here, the transposed letters and mispronounced words add a new dimension to the prose’ (Kerr 2004). Similarly, the dual perspectives of the visual and linguistic aspects of the piece are emphasized by the fact that it is constructed in the audiovisual medium of a video.

Colour and Aesthetic Sensation The examples above suggest that colour in contemporary art draws upon relatively recent enquiry into the linguistic aspects of colour, and into colour’s function as both a symbol and an aesthetic value. Hirst’s spot painting distils the latter, and Hill’s piece problematizes the bridge between colour as phenomenon and as language. Both works perhaps display a degree of irony, or at least a form of detachment between colour and aesthetic sensation, in favour of more instrumental and conceptual concerns. The bridge between colour and contemporary art, however, is not reducible to the dominance of colour-as-discourse. The link between colour and sensation is also critical to understanding the role of colour in current art, as this bridge still informs many works of art. In order to introduce the role of sensation in colour we should briefly recapitulate the dominant philosophical moves made since the nineteenth century. For example, Goethe’s theory of colour in the Farbenlehre (originally published in 1810), is, for many reasons, also relevant to later arts, including, incidentally, the piece by Gary Hill: Wittgenstein wrote the Remarks on Colour as footnotes to Goethe’s Farbenlehre. However, as artists themselves are not always aware of the theoretical origins of their work,8 it is necessary to outline some the relevancies of colour to art, past and present. These are divided into four significant groupings. The first is human participation, Gestalt and interactivity: the significance of colour in human perception and human interaction. Second is symbol and emotion, with reference to sensation and links between music and art. Third is transience and temporality, in which colour connects to the symbolic notion of the sublime, which includes expansive, temporal issues related to the transience of light. The last section refers to spectator interaction: the relevance of colour as an expression of (emotive) sensation and visual pleasure. As these concepts are abstract, complex, and thoroughly interrelated, it makes

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sense to describe their history first, and then demonstrate their role in more recent technological artwork.

Human Participation, Gestalt and Interactivity Since the visual theory of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, not only are the physics of colour applied to the recognition of different colours, but also to the way the human eye and the mind received colour. Theories of perception were constantly refined and in the twentieth century, principally through the Gestalt psychology of the 1930s onwards, certain methodologies became central to the development of abstract art in general, and to the teaching in the Bauhaus art schools in particular. Gestalt psychology made possible the transformation of certain artistic issues into a language of abstract form. The first issue is the projection of the imagination, or ‘inner space’ onto the canvas. This meant viewing the rectangle of the picture frame as a kind of ‘screen of the imagination’,9 where a sense of inner space and corporeal balance was projected onto the canvas by the painter and, through a kind of psychological consensus, was understood and received as such by the spectator. The second is the ‘after-image’, as described in detail in Goethe’s Theory of Colour, which, on sustained observation of one colour, appears in proximity as its complementary colour (e.g. red causing green).10 This phenomenon suggests that the eye requires harmony of all the colours, the mind constantly updating information to the eye by creating the colours that are missing from the visual field. The third is simultaneous, or ‘non-existent colour’, where juxtaposed complementary colours confuse the eye and create a flickering sensation. Theorists, such as the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul (1786–1889), developed the understanding of the mechanics of this phenomenon of simultaneous colour. In the nineteenth century, the painted flecks of vibrant contrasts employed by Eugène Delacroix in frescoes of the Palais de Luxembourg (1841– 46), for example, transposed into paint the contemporary scientific theories of simultaneous colour.11 Generally, this has been explored as a kind of vibration or resonance, and demonstrates that the human eye has the capacity to create extra colours that do not exist in the object. Some artists call this ‘non-existent colour’, and the use of this technique exists today.12 These three phenomena have relevance for the function of contemporary artwork using colour, particularly in virtual spaces and colour installations that use light rather than paint on the canvas. In the work of Dan Flavin or, more recently, James Turrell or Carlos Cruz-Diez,13 coloured light in their installations interact with and disorientate the spectators’ colour sense and spatial awareness.

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The Relationship between Symbol, Emotion and Sensation Both the sensations of after-image and simultaneous or ‘non-existent’ colour are nowadays linked to the psychology of perception, as they demonstrate that the human eye is active in its response to colour. Nineteenth-century theory attempted to link this response to the emotive power of colour; for example, the logic of Goethe’s idea was as follows: if colour was affecting the mind directly it also touched the emotions. It was therefore thought to be an ‘a priori’ symbol. In turn, this bridge linked colour with music: harmony of colour has a direct emotional affect on people, as have harmonies of music. The former therefore connected with aesthetic taste and pleasure, and heightened experience or ‘elation’.14 Colour represented an extension of the devices used to create harmony in paintings and emotional responses in the viewer. Furthermore, the idea of resonance, and its links with timbre in music, developed through these possibilities of simultaneous colour. For example, in the early twentieth century, the branch of cubist painting known as Orphism employed the technique called ‘Simultaneity’. Robert and Sonia Delaunay created a combination of rhythms of colour with optical mixes of colours which would vibrate and therefore appear to contain light. The use of colour sequences or rhythms therefore brought a temporal element into the work as the spectator’s focus of attention moved from one rhythm of colours to another, as though following a musical melody. Equally possible was an experience of pure, resonating colour through ‘drinking-in’ the effect of the whole shimmering canvas. The paintings initially kept their figurative references but therefore gradually became more abstract. This technique was described, by the art critic and poet, Apollinaire, and by contemporary painter Paul Klee, as being similar to that of a Fugue, where two interrelated rhythms are repeated within a musical composition, and other painters composed pictures with similar intentions such as in Frank Kupka’s Disks of Newton (Study for ‘Fugue in Two Colors’) (1912).15 Through the early decades of the twentieth century, many artists created mathematical and harmonic rhythms or patterns which were converted into colour compositions intended to move the emotions, and these were often linked to musical notation systems. One example is Paul Klee’s paintings, some of which employed underlying numerical structures called ‘magic squares’ connected with harmonics, as explained within his theoretical writing from the 1920s, later published in ‘The Thinking Eye’ (Pearce 2002/5). Paul Klee developed a combination of both simultaneous vibrancy and mathematical harmony, and invented what he called ‘polyphonic’ painting, which is evident in paintings such as Alter Klang (1925), Fire in the Evening (1929) and Ad Parnassum (1932).16 He drew on the musical theories of

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counterpoint in order to create a purely abstract expression, where layers of different qualities and textures of paint were equivalent to different timbres or textures in music. He also employed Gestalt ideas in his work. Like Delaunay, he set up rhythms of colour to involve the spectator in a kind of spatio-temporal game, guiding their gaze from one focus point to another. Here, the art of painting could contain a kind of virtual temporality, as the linear rhythms resembled the linear quality of text or music. We will return to the role of the spectator presently, but I wish to explore a further traditional ingredient inherent in colour, which enriches its temporal significance in the fine arts.

Transience and Temporality In Romantic symbolism the rainbow and the sunset came to represent the transience of light, and the colours that appeared at sunset were quite literally considered to represent the ‘Birth of Colour’ from white light.17 It thus also came to represent Genesis, or the beginnings of form, created from the split in the energy of white light. Similarly, the changes of colour in nature came to represent the energy of constant motion and the passing of time. Various techniques could result from attempts to depict these concepts. Artists who were considered colourists and interested in abstract human issues, such as Joseph M.W. Turner (1775–1850) and Otto Runge (1777–1810), also depicted the evening or morning sky to represent transience, or the sublime. In fact, the emotive and fleeting appeal of colour was exploited to evoke more powerfully issues of ‘ecstasy’, or things beyond meaning, until the paintings themselves became vast coloured expanses. The canvas visually lost its surface and became a kind of void, or a field of infinite depth. One of the issues of later twentieth-century abstract colour painting was that, through images of pure colour, it could represent totality or ‘the absolute’ (the sublime), or, in other words, that which is beyond comprehension. This is particularly evident in the work of the American abstract expressionists, such as Barnett Newman and Marc Rothko (Golding 2000).18 Barnett Newman, for example, personally explained the desired effect of his work on the spectator: ‘I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality’ (Sylvester 1990: 258). The scale of his colour field paintings was therefore important to immerse the spectator in a one-to-one relationship with the vibration of seemingly infinite pure colour. Newman was interested in the spectator’s perception of the colours reflected from the canvas as a kind of ‘colour/chromatic’ sensation or light, as in the human response to frequencies of vision. Thus, to return to the idea mentioned

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at the beginning of the chapter, his stated aim was not to create coloured patterns, but to attempt to ‘create colour’.19

Spectator Interaction With relation to the themes outlined above, an element that has radically changed in the digital era is the role of the ‘spectator’. We notice the word ‘human agent’ instead of ‘spectator’ being used to describe the interaction of many contemporary (especially robotic) art works with the public. Installations and three-dimensional human computer interfaces provide the spectator with ‘interactive’ experiences of art. Now we can literally ‘put ourselves into the picture’. We do not need to capture the ephemeral on a two-dimensional plane; we can simply set up situations to experience it. Several contemporary artists working with colour, such as Carlos Cruz-Diez, have been attempting to do this. Ever more sophisticated neuro-scientific awareness of the human brain enables the artist to stimulate further our sense of perception. James Turrell, a contemporary artist working directly with coloured light, states: ‘If you only have five names for color, you see only five colors’ (Virilio 2001: 226). This stresses our ability to develop visual perception verbally. Turrell creates not only light installations in gallery situations but, using digital technology, has also excavated a set of chambers in an extinct volcano at Roden Crater, Arizona, in order to view the natural light of the sky: ‘Roden Crater will order basic human interactions with light and space and also with time. It will affect not only the intensity, but also the protensity, the extension through time of perceptual experience’ (Adcock 1989).20 As Turrell puts it, the light has its own ineffable quality: ‘What takes place while looking at the light in a Skyspace is akin to wordless thought. But this thought is not at all unthinking or without intelligence. It’s just that it has a different return than words.’ Again we see a common interest in depicting the ‘screen of the imagination’: ‘I work it [light] in the way that I can, and that is mainly to bring to the conscious awakestate, the light that inhabits these spaces that we know in the dream’ (Laaksonen 1996).21 The digital tools and technology now available to Turrell and other artists are responsible for the sophistication of artists’ ‘threedimensional’ thinking. Without the three-dimensional models of representation that the computer offers, it would be impossible to imagine, visualize or make installations that affect the public in such a complex way. Our capacity to visualize such space through software has shifted the projection of the human sense of colour from the imaginary plane of the painted canvas to the physical threedimensional space of the installation.

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Artists working with colour and light in virtual space also concern themselves with similar characteristics to those of installations, for they also involve space, movement, real time and sensation. A group of artists called ‘Squid Soup’ created a project in 1999–2003 called ‘Altzero’ which experimented with a combination of ‘spatial compositions and navigable soundscapes’, and became known as ‘navigable spatial music’, mounted both physically in galleries and on the Internet. The main aim was to question the way we listen to electronic music, to think ‘beyond the stationary listening point of current digital audio technology’, and they provided freely downloadable software for experimentation (Altzero 2008). With Altzero, the space created consisted of coloured abstract threedimensional shapes: a ‘visual roadmap to what the listener is hearing’, as they explained on their website at the time. In fact, visually, some of the environments created resembled paintings by the early abstract artist and Bauhaus master Wassily Kandinsky. However, in this digital medium, the objects appeared to move in space, and, with limitations, it became possible to control positioning, playback and visual representation, including colour, of the objects displayed. Essentially this project concentrated more on sound than vision, but it represented a contemporary version of audio-visual machines where colour adds to the creation of a kind of immersive virtual environment. Essentially continuing to work with visualization of sound, they have more recently developed this into more immersive environments where land and soundscapes are created from the user’s physical movement, for example Freq2 (2007) and Driftnet I (2007) continue the idea of responsive virtual spaces that can be explored both visually and aurally, originally developed earlier in Altzero.

Audio-Visual Machines and Colour At present, and available for download from the Internet, we have a suite of software that can reproduce images in unison with the emission of sound, or music. This has implications for contemporary uses of colour in relation to sound, and for the possibilities of user participation in the work. Some of these, for example, are used for projecting bitmaps, either true to life, or with filters to abstract or distort them. Other software promises to produce abstract sequences of visual waves that are directly related to sound waves.22 A third group creates both sound and vision as a result of programmed or random algorithms (or mathematical sequences). Artists such as Tom Betts have been developing such software for a number of years. As a ‘video jockey’ (VJ), programmer and artist, Betts has created audio-visual tools and, more recently, written software for gaming environments.23 With PixelMap (2002), for example, the intention was for the system to allow composers to accompany their

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performances with real-time generated graphics, and some of his early software also drew on forms of abstraction and harmony in painting. In a work called Painting by Numbers (2004), for example, Betts hung an obsolete laptop within a gold picture frame in a gallery, and passed programmed sequences of patterns on the computer screen. This type of work pinpoints similarities between pattern and programming, recalling harmonic sequences in painting such as those formerly seen in Paul Klee’s magic square paintings (see above). These audio-visual tools, which encompass spectator involvement and use harmonic systems to link colour, music and spectator, are also reminiscent of colour organs. One of the earliest pioneers of cybernetics, Gordon Pask, programmed a colour organ ‘Musicolour’ (1953–55) to demonstrate his theory of conversation between the sensory systems of man and machine. His organ could register the touch of the musician and respond directly to the improvised musical performance. When the musician tired or the improvised tunes became repetitive, the computer would divert from the original sequence, forcing the musician to change direction and adapt to a new pattern of colour and sound. It has been reported that this produced a hypnotic effect on the musicians so that they lost all sense of time. Since antiquity there has been a continuing fascination for producing machines that emit sound and colour. In an essay on the history of colour organs, Peacock (1988: 397–406) traces instances back to Aristotle, and notes the use of analogies of music to develop non-objective painting of the early twentieth century. Like early audio-visual computers, these organs are nevertheless a significant transition from coloured pigment on the canvas to projected coloured light and computerized harmonic systems based on programmed algorithms. Peacock concludes that technology has helped us to break down the boundaries between music, painting and sculpture. Such technology has also problematized the role and identity of colour and the position or movement of the spectator. For example, a work called OP_ERA (2003–2008) by Daniela Kutschat and Rejane Cantoni – a work of developing transformations from Brazil and the United States – presents a field of sound and vision that can be adapted by the movement of an ‘interator’, or ‘human participant’. Based on the technology of the virtual reality ‘cave’, an environment described by the artist as imersivo-interativo (immersive and interactive) has been created in which ‘o comportamento “natural” do agente humano está associado ao comportamento “artificial” do computador de maneira inseparável’ (‘the “natural” behaviour of the human participant is associated with the “artificial” behaviour of the computer’). A green triangle, red square and blue circle move, break apart and reform around the ‘human participant’ (or user) in accordance with their body motion. This movement also dictates the type of sound the work emits. Its focus is presently on sound and line as well as colour, and it provides the opportunity for physical human

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participation and interference in real time. Alienated from external space and from normal visual references, the ‘participant’ user is involved in physical sensations which bombard and swamp the senses. Here, as in the confrontation with Barnett Newman’s canvases or James Turrell’s installation, the spectator is invited to enter the space of the imagination, conceived here as technologically embodied colour. This theme, now more synthetically orchestrated by the convergence of technologies and the increasing absorption of the viewer’s senses in the colour environment, is the latest expression of the concerns of twentieth-century artists mentioned above. The artists of ‘OP_ERA’ recall the visual language of the mathematical ballets of Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer.24

Conclusion Colour, therefore, can be seen as a bridge between art and science, which spans historical and contemporary artistic expression, drawing on issues related to sensation, spectator, the sublime, musical analogy and mathematical harmonic proportions in both eras. It seems that the element of colour has survived and regains significance as a tool of artistic expression in a changing technological context. This, in part, is owing to the intricate symbiotic relationship of emerging colour environments with the psychology of human visual perception and shifting conceptual and linguistic approaches to colour. Contemporary installation works combine these themes with differing emphases – along an axis between the conceptual and the perceptual – on the viewer’s participation or detachment. Hirst’s Beagle 2 spot painting and Hill’s video of Remarks on Colour operate in this field. It would appear, then, that colour, in terms of the sublime or extralinguistic, might still be one step beyond our comprehension, but its function in art is directly related to our sense of participation, perception and imagination. With experimentation into neuroscience, and computer-aided devices touched on briefly here, artists now have the tools to immerse the spectator or ‘interator’ in ever broader and more profound aesthetic sensations of colour. The possibilities afforded by robotics and human presence in virtual spaces (tele-presence) return us to the remote environment of the Mars probe, where colour operates in a quasi-virtual, technologically reliant setting.

Notes 1. Named after Charles Darwin’s voyager ship HMS Beagle. 2. Hirst also uses the traditional artistic medium of the canvas to create paintings with ironic subject matter, such as the series of commodity paintings, Pharmacy 1992, of which the colour spot paintings were originally a part, as representations of medical pills.

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3. See D. Derbyshire (2003), and Beagle 2 ‘Briefing Notes’, White Cube Gallery, London, Exhibition: Damien Hirst goes to Mars (2002–3). See also Royal Observatory, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, 6 December 2002, and http://www.beagle2.com, for rationale and images. 4. Discussing artistic roles of colour within contemporary digital culture, we must first of all remember that it has to compete as a medium of expression in a world of tele-presence and global chat networks. However, with our greatly developed capacity for web-based communication, including increasing possibilities of surveillance and even voyeurism, our artistic expression is continually changing and expanding. As with many more millennial projects, therefore, and with reference to the Beagle 2 spot painting mentioned above, a critical part of the creative concept of this project was to have live online coverage of all the events on Mars. In addition, the contemporary band Blur was set to compose music to suit the first investigations on the planet. One big problem for this artistic event was that Beagle 2 never achieved its planned landing on Mars; communications and ultimately the craft itself were lost. The scientific head of the Beagle 2 project, Prof. Colin Pillinger, of the Open University, mentioned that the namesake HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin’s ship, had succeeded in its mission on its second voyage. Thus, he was afterwards looking for funding to return to Mars. 5. This does not include physiological and psychological conditions ranging from blindness to synaesthesia (where subjects are able to ‘smell’, ‘taste’ or ‘hear’ colours). 6. Robots, for example, are so far incapable of reacting to visual stimuli through memory or conscious recognition. See Virilio (2001). 7. Nevertheless Wittgenstein thought our concept of colour relied on a consensus: ‘If humans were not in general agreed about the colour of things, if undetermined cases were not exceptional, then our concept of colour would not exist’ (Wittgenstein 1970: s. 351). 8. See Birnbaum (2001) and Virilio (2001). 9. See Gyorgy Kepes’s concept of psychological space, which is similar to the idea of ‘screen of the imagination’ (Kepes 1944). Gestalt psychology was developed in the 1920s by Wolfgang Kohler and taught at the Bauhaus and, later, in the United States. 10. See Goethe 1971. For after-images: original notation from paragraph numbers in all copies of Zur Farbenlehre (F) – (F)58, (F)136, (F)152, (F)688. 11. See the French contemporary of Goethe (Chevreul [1839] 1967). Charles Blanc (1889) studied Eugène Delacroix and further developed theories of optical mixing for painters. The employment of simultaneous contrast as a form of optical mixing used to create resonating colours culminated in the work of the American Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s and 1960s, and the massive colour field canvases of artists such as Morris Louis, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, whose works resonate through subtle differences of tone and hue. 12. For example, compare with installations of Carlos Cruz-Diez as seen in note 13. For detail on concept of ‘non-existent colour’ see also Pedrosa (1982). 13. Carlos Cruz-Diez has written on colour in ‘Reflection on Color’, where he states that he creates an event as a dialogue between real space and time: ‘Due to my chromatic experience, I try to present color as an ephemeral and autonomous situation.’ See also:‘Son oeuvre cherche á demontrer et á mettre en scène l´existence de cette nouvelle couleur que l´oeil perçoit lorsqu’il est soumis á la vibration de deux couleurs juxtaposées. Mais sans la reproduire, au contraire de Delaunay, qui la peint sur sa toile.’ (‘His work searches to demonstrate and put

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into play the existence of this new colour, which the eye perceives through the vibration of the two juxtaposed colours. But without reproducing them, in contrast to Delaunay, who paints them on his canvas.’) Retrieved 6 April 2009 from http://www.cnac-gp.fr/expositions/toureiffel/lexique.htm

14. See Goethe 1971: Note [(F)916]. ‘It has been circumstantially shown above, that every colour produces a distinct impression on the mind, and thus addresses at once the eye and the feelings. Hence it follows that colour may be employed for certain moral and aesthetic ends. Such an application, coinciding entirely with nature, might be called symbolical, since the colour would at once express its meaning.’ For pleasure and heightened emotion or ‘elation’, see ibid.: Note (F)752-8. Because the eye was able to produce colour of its own accord, it would delight in recognizing those colours in the natural world. 15. Delaunay sought to represent two themes simultaneously in the Fugue. He subsequently created ‘laws based on the transparency of colours, which is comparable to musical tones’ (Delaunay1978: 81). ‘I played with colors as in music one can express oneself through a fugue of colored phrases’ (ibid.: 23). Other painters used the form of the fugue such as Franz Kupka’s (1871–1957) Disks of Newton (Study for ‘Fugue in Two Colors’) [1912], and Paul Klee’s Fugue in Red [1921]. 16. See Fux [1725] 1965. Austrian composer Johann Joseph Fux (1660–1741) developed counterpoint theories in Gradus Ad Parnassum [German translation with commentary by L.C. Mizler, Leipzig, 1742]. 17. See Goethe 1971: Note (F)712. For sunset [(F)150–55] or archetype or ‘primordial phenomenon’. The source of light was viewed through the densest medium of the earth’s atmosphere. Because it was viewed horizontally it would therefore manifest all the colours of the light half of the spectrum: ‘For the birth of colours, light and darkness, clear and obscure, or if one wants to use a more general formula, light and nonlight were required’ (Goethe, 24 May 1828). 18. The American abstract expressionists ‘reaffirmed the fact that … abstract art is heavily imbued with meaning, with content … [In] order to make this content palpable, new formal pictorial innovations must be found to express it’ (Golding 2000: 8). 19. To reflect again on Gary Hill’s video of Wittgenstein’s Remarks, it is relevant to notice his use of the text to represent human lack of comprehension. This is close to the historical role of colour as representing notions of the ephemeral or ‘things beyond definition’. Hill’s means are different, however, because he works in the medium of video. 20. Extracts from videos of Roden Crater demonstrate how time-based media express the temporal dimension of colour in perceptual experience (retrieved 1 January 2008 from http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/turrell/). In an interview with Esa Laaksonen in Blacksburg, Virginia, 1996, Turrell states, ‘I like to bring light to the place that is much like that in the dream – where you feel it to be some thing itself, not something with which you illuminate other things, but a celebration of the thingness of light, the material presence, the revelation of light itself. This is something that allows light live more than the forming of it’ (retrieved 1 January 2012 from http://www.ark.fi/ark5-6_96/turrelle.html). 21. James Turrell interviewed by Esa Laaksonen in Blacksburg, Virginia, 1996. First printed in ARK, The Finnish Architectural Review (retrieved 1 January 2012 from http://www.ark.fi/ark5-6_96/turrelle.html). See also Skyspace Project at Henry Art Gallery (retrieved 1 January 2008 http:// www.henryart.org/skyspace.htm). 22. These are often based on FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) algorithms.

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23. Tom Betts’s website at ‘Nullpointer’ includes information on all this software and his continued study on the relationship between programming, pattern and Gestalt psychology. Retrieved 6 April 2009 from http://www.nullpointer.co.uk/ Earlier work archived within the website. Retrieved 6 December 2012 from http://www.nullpointer.co.uk/-/ home.htm 24. See Daniela Kutschat and Rejane Cantoni OP_ERA (2003): Uma Jornada Através de Dimensões Paralelas e Experimentos Multisensoriais, from ‘International Festival of Electronic Language’, Brazil, 2003 (Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica), retrieved on 1 January 2008 from http://www.file.org.br/file2003/paper_rejanecantoni.htm. See also http:// www.op-era.com: ‘Dentro dessa caixa imaginária três formas geométricas … executam um balé matemático do tipo Oskar Schlemmer’ (‘Inside this imaginary box three geometric forms … perform a mathematical ballet like that of Oskar Schlemmer’). Note that Oskar Schlemmer also worked with Gestalt concepts in his mathematical ballets such as the ‘Triadic Ballet’.

Bibliography Adcock, C. 1989. ‘The Roden Crater Project, 1989’. http://www.trincoll.edu/ depts/ecopsyc/courses/turrell/turrellsegura.html Altzero. Retrieved February 2008 from www.squidsoup.org/altzero/ Art21. ‘James Turrell biography’. Retrieved 1 January 2008 from http://www. pbs.org/art21/artists/turrell/ Beagle 2. Royal Observatory, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Retrieved 6 December 2002 from http://www.beagle2.com/ Betts, T. Nullpointer. Retrieved 1 January 2008 from http://www.nullpointer. co.uk/ Birnbaum, D. 2001. ‘Eyes and Notes on the Sun’, in P. Noever (ed.), James Turrell: The Other Horizon. Vienna, Austria: MAK; and Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag. Blanc, C. 1889. The Grammar of Painting, and Engraving, trans. K.N. Doggett. Chicago: S.C. Griggs and Company. ‘Briefing notes on Damien Hirst Beagle 2 spot painting’. 2002–3. Damien Hirst Goes to Mars Exhibition, White Cube, London. Chevreul, M.E. [1839] 1967. De La Roi Du Contraste Simultané des Couleurs. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Cruz-Diez, C. 2009. Reflection on Color, Madrid: Cruz-Diez Foundation. Delaunay, R. 1978. ‘On Light’, in The New Art of Colour. The Writings of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, trans. D. Shapiro. New York: A.A. Cohen. Derbyshire, D. ‘Hirst’s Art is Out of this World’, Telegraph, 18 January 2003. Retrieved 30 January 2008 from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/ main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2003/07/16/ecnmars16.xml Fux, J.J. [1725] 1965. Gradus Ad Parnassum. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, Inc. Goethe, J.W. von, [1810] 1971. in Zur Farbenlehre, ed. R. Matthaei, trans. H. Aach. London: Studio Vista. Golding, J. 2000. Paths to the Absolute. London: Thames and Hudson. Henry Art Gallery, Skyspace. Retrieved 30 January 2008 from http://www. henryart.org/skyspace.htm Kepes, G. 1944. Language of Vision. Chicago: Paul Theobald. Kerr, M. Curator of Modern Art, Video Gallery, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Retrieved 5 July 2004 from http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/ video/garyhill.shtml

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Klee, Paul. 1961. The Thinking Eye, ed. Jurg Spiller, London: Lund Humphries. Kutschat, D. and R. Cantoni. 2003. OP_ERA: Uma Jornada Através de Dimensões Paralelas e Experimentos Multisensoriais. Retrieved 30 January 2008 from http://www.op-era.com http://beallcenter.uci.edu/exhibitions/opera_x. php Laaksonen, E. 1996. ‘Interview with J. Turrell’, Blacksburg, VA, 1996. Reprinted from ARK, The Finnish Architectural Review. Retrieved 30 January 2008 from http://home.sprynet.com/~mindweb/page44.htm OP_ERA ‘International Festival of Electronic Language’, Brazil, 2003 (Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica). Retrieved 30 January 2008 from www.file.org.br/file2003/symp_participantes.htm and http://www. op-era.com PBS TV Station – Art21. Retrieved 1 January 2008 from http://www.pbs.org/ art21/series/seasonone/spirituality.html Peacock, K. 1988. ‘Instruments to Perform Color-Music: Two Centuries of Technological Experimentation’, Leonardo 21(4): 397–406. Pearce, M. 2002. Colour and Communication in Twentieth-Century Abstract Art, CD-ROM. Ph.D., Kingston University, U.K. ———. 2005 ‘Animating Art History; Digital Ways of Studying Colour in Abstract Art’, in Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Trish Cashen and Hazel Gardiner (eds), Digital Art History: A Subject in Transition. Chicago: Intellect Books. Pedrosa, I. 1982. Da Cor à Cor Inexistente. Rio de Janeiro: Brasília University. Sylvester, D. 1990. Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Originally published as ‘Concerning Barnett Newman: Interview’, The Listener, 10 August 1972, pp. 169–72. Recorded in April 1965. Tour Eiffel Exhibition ‘Une Tour Eiffel Haute En Couleurs’, R. Delaunay and C. Cruz-Diez, Centre Pompidou, Paris, September 2003. Retrieved 2003 from http://www.cnac-gp.fr/expositions/toureiffel Virilio, P. 2001. ‘Sight without Eyesight’, in P. Noever (ed.), James Turrell: The Other Horizon. Vienna, Austria: MAK; and Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag. Wittgenstein, L. 1970. Zettel, eds G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ———. 1977. Remarks on Colour, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. L.L. McAlister and M. Schättle. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

PART II

COLOUR AND MATERIAL CULTURE

 CHAPTER 5 

COLOUR A QUESTION

OF

GARDENS: CLASS OR GENDER?

IN

Beverley Lear A desire for year-round ‘colour’ and the orchestration of colour in ways which reflex the sensibilities of ‘good taste’ are major preoccupations in the popular culture of gardening. This prioritization of colour, which is reinforced by images in style magazines and gardening programmes on television, makes the production and enjoyment of colour appear to be a natural and inevitable effect of gardening itself. It is perhaps surprising then to learn that very little attention was paid to colour in gardening before the Victorian period (Elliott 1986: 48). This concern for colour and its usage in gardens was stimulated by a vast surge in the availability and diversity of newly introduced plants bearing brightly coloured flowers. These horticultural developments led to new ways of thinking about how colour might be arranged within gardens and ran alongside a vigorous intellectual interest in colour itself. The colour theories of Goethe (1810) and Chevreul (1839) permeated the world of horticulture, and the legacy of new styles of gardening which emerged in their wake continue to be influential today through the popular appeal of gardening as a visual art form. As with the elite gardens of the Victorian period which framed the early horticultural debates about colour, the home gardens of today place greater emphasis on the role of ornament and artistry than on the needs of household subsistence. ‘Gardening is often the closest thing that we do to being artistic … gardening as outdoor housework is not fun, and that’s how a lot of magazines portray it.’ So claimed Rosie Atkins (1996: 16), editor of Gardens Illustrated, a glossy magazine aimed at a middle-class audience, the vast majority of whose fifty-two thousand readership are women. There is an important truth in Atkins’s rhetoric, nonetheless: middle-class and working-class gardeners aspire to different aesthetic values, and what results are some radically different ideas about colour. This chapter explores

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why and how these differences arise. It argues that underlying these visible distinctions are differences in the way that the processes of nature and the nature of physical labour are valued, suggesting that the values which are observable in the gardening practices of today are the result of enculturated practices and differing perspectives of aesthetic excellence that can be traced back to the late nineteenth century. The chapter divides into two parts. The first outlines the historical development of our contemporary ideas about colour in gardens, arguing that by the end of the nineteenth century two competing garden styles had developed which reflected quite different ideals as to what constituted a ‘good’ garden. Through much of the nineteenth century garden schemes utilizing complementary-contrastive arrangements of colour, such as the positioning of red, yellow and blue together, were considered to be harmonious, whilst those employing red and orange together were not. This is a quite different perspective to that generally held today, where red, blue and yellow are normally said to be contrastive, and closely related colours such as red and orange are considered harmonious. This turnaround in opinion and preference for spectrum-adjacent harmonies in gardening did not arise until the 1880s and grew as a normative understanding during the twentieth century (Elliott 1986: 159, 172). Yet these opposing concepts remain central to the class/gender distinctions evident in everyday garden-making practices today, and in the second part of the chapter I turn to the ethnographic present, to draw from my field study investigation of domestic gardening carried out in the small town of Whitelynch1 in Wiltshire. As such, I shall argue that the appreciation and orchestration of garden colour constitutes a symbolic field, underpinned by social use and class associations, which are manifestly the result of gendered differences in the responsibility for decision making and action in the home garden.

A Brief History of Colour in Gardens Between 1820 and 1850, the ‘bedding out’ of short-term plantings arranged as bright blocks of colour was regarded as a fashionable innovation to be exploited by new owners and designers of large mansions. This style arose as a result of new plant introductions, improved technologies of cultivation, and developments in techniques of plant selection and breeding. Plants such as fuchsias, geraniums (pelargoniums) and verbena, which had been ‘improved’ to maximize the production of flowers and minimize the appearance of leafy growth, were arranged in tightly planted blocks of a single variety, and positioned adjacent to blocks of other varieties and colours, so that a mosaic effect similar to that seen in a stained-glass window might be produced. The arrangement and juxtaposition of these

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various colours became the focus for much discussion amongst leading professional gardeners writing within the horticultural press. Bedding schemes were designed to be seen from above, looking downward from the principal windows of the mansion itself. As such, the structure of these gardens served to emphasize the power of the garden owner and his command over men and resources. Highly labour intensive, these gardens required the mass production of plants and embedded further hierarchies. As the celebrated authority on gardens, J.C. Loudon noted (1827: 1040–41), gardening during this period was sustained by an elaborate hierarchy of ranks ranging from garden boy, journeyman gardener, craftsman gardener to head gardener. Accordingly, these bedding schemes were not only indicative of a particular way of using colour but are the structural representation of the hegemonies involved in their production, epitomizing the value of work well done at the same time as exemplifying the taste and refinement of the garden owner. Both Goethe’s Theory of Colours and Chevreul’s Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colour were known to the gardening community (Elliott 1986: 125). Chevreul argued that there were three primary colours (red, yellow and blue) and three secondary or intermediary colours (orange, green and violet) which when arranged together in a circle illustrated the principle of complementarity. Moreover, the juxtaposition of complementary colours heightened the visual intensity of both colours and this idea rapidly became seen as the ‘natural principle’ to follow in the arrangement of colour in gardens: Now the complementary colour of red is green; of orange, sky-blue; of yellow, violet; of indigo, orange-yellow; and consequently blue and orange-coloured flowers, yellows and violets, may be placed together, while red and rose-coloured flowers harmonise with their own green leaves … In all cases, however, where colours do not agree, the placing of white between them restores the effect. (Gardeners Chronicle 1841: 291)

Following a period of horticultural experimentation however, gardeners began to argue that the Chevreul scheme was too abstract, and in 1857 the Gardeners Chronicle published a leader article sceptical of the theory of complementarity. But whilst professional gardeners were tiring of the ideals of complementarity, the public appetite for bright colours and strident colour contrasts was not. Bedding schemes in public parks had become exceptionally popular. In 1859, Hyde Park was planted with thirty thousand to forty thousand bedding plants, the editor of the Gardeners Chronicle claiming in the same year that, ‘Flowers are wanted in the people’s parks just because the people’s houses have no gardens, and nine-tenths of those who frequent the parks have no opportunity of seeing growing flowers anywhere else’ (Gardeners Chronicle 1866: 879–80).

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By the mid-1860s, bedding schemes had become prevalent in municipal parks in London, and, it might be claimed, had become the aesthetic of ‘horticultural excellence’ in the minds of the working classes. But if the brilliantly coloured schemes of public parks appealed to the working classes, then the distinctions of taste which during the 1840s and 1850s had defined an exclusively elitist experiment in gardening, were now forced to shift in order to maintain the visuality of class distinction. Bright colours were increasingly being aligned with the barbarism of primitive tribes and uncultured ‘taste’,2 and as such, it was said that they should be confined to public parks (Murray 1863: 171). At the same time, the condition of ‘colour-blindness’ was also being investigated (Gage 1999: 11), making it possible to claim that the uncivilized found pleasure in bright colours because they were rendered blind to educated sensibility. Indeed, the social importance of staging such a visual display for the poor came to be seen as a means of taming and educating the masses: ‘Get the multitude first into a frame of eye, so to speak, to see flowers, by presenting them in brilliant masses of the strongest colours – a blaze in fact. Then will be the time to present them scientifically’ (Cottage Gardener XXI 1858: 18).

Herbaceous Borders Reinvented In reaction against the commonality of urban bedding schemes utilizing highly contrastive colour schemes, the middle-class eye came to favour ‘neutrality’ and ‘relief to the eye’. Scarlet and red began to be regarded as an index of impure taste, and there was increasingly a return to planting beds of mixed colours and an emphasis on displays of foliage. Moreover, under the influence of John Ruskin, the idea that a genuine love of plants must be directed toward them as individuals rather than masses became influential (Elliot 1986: 150– 51). The notion that aesthetic sensibility was inseparable from the social conditions in which it was produced was core to Ruskin’s philosophy (Lanman 2000: 218), and whereas the plant production systems which sustained the bedding-out system were increasingly industrialized, in contrast cottage gardens were seen to echo earlier modes of production which were perceived to be rapidly eroding in the late nineteenth century. Significantly, the herbaceous perennials typical of cottage gardens were easily reproduced in small quantities by subdivision, a process which involved a more intimate relationship between gardener and plant than did the huge volumes of bedding plants which were planted out for a few weeks and then discarded. Up to this point, all the protagonists in the arguments about colour and gardening had been male; but the new style of gardening using herbaceous plants was most famously championed by a woman, Gertrude Jekyll. However, the claim by some that Jekyll was

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expressing something exclusively feminine about colour is difficult to sustain. Certainly, when she wrote a chapter for William Robinson’s The English Flower Garden in 1883, the fashion had already begun to move away from the conspicuous control of nature, and favoured an aesthetic of profusion which was redolent of, and created through, an appreciation of nature and a regard for the natural propensities of each species.3 Described by her biographer, Sally Festing (1993: 18) as tomboyish, Jekyll was one of the first female students to enrol at the Central School of Art in South Kensington, London. It was this training which underpinned many of her subsequent ideas about colour. Whilst her tutors and the texts that she studied reflected a theoretical framework created by men, Jekyll’s real innovation came in the types of plants that she chose and the audience that she addressed in her writing. As a woman of private means, her work, both as a designer and writer, was always considered ‘amateur’, nonetheless unlike the other gardeners writing about colour during the nineteenth century, it was a non-professional, middle-class audience that she sought to influence through her regular column in The Guardian, a high Anglican paper with special appeal to women (Festing 1993: 153). Although Jekyll did not seek to recreate the ad hoc informality of cottage gardens in her design work, she was strongly influenced by her observation of vernacular architecture and appreciation of traditional manual crafts, and her garden designs made use of familiar cottage plants, along with a more exclusive array of shrubs and flowering plants, including roses and rhododendrons. These she incorporated into ‘colour-coordinated’ schemes which she arranged in garden areas typically created as smaller subsections of the overall garden. Jekyll did not fully reject Chevreul’s theories of complementarity, nor the types of plants that were used for bedding schemes, but rather she remarked on the unintelligent ways in which they had been used (Jekyll 1908: 178). Her ideas were much influenced by the paintings of J.M.W. Turner and the writings of John Ruskin (Bennett 2000: 122), but it was her great knowledge of plants, their individual growth habit, form and season of flowering which allowed her to amass borders in which shifts in volume and colour were subtly controlled without the need to dig up and replant for each season. Moreover rather than planting these as artfully shaped beds as had previously been the case, Jekyll advocated long wide borders in which plants were to be arranged in lozenge shaped clumps. These ‘drifts’, as they are termed, were designed to give a greater sense of form and visual rhythm to the border; a consideration that signalled a shift in the perspective of the viewer, away from the downward gaze from the mansion, to the more touristic experience of a genteel walk through the gardens which required that the garden should look good from multiple and sequential perspectives. Her recommendations for the avoidance of strong contrast and the grouping of related tints were

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taken up by the major garden designers of the postwar years, and by the 1980s a concept of harmony based on spectral proximity had become the accepted wisdom in both interior design and gardening (Elliott 1986: 177). Moreover, the Jekyllian ideals of sustainable longterm plantings, the aestheticization of growth and natural transition, and the painterly use of flowers, colour and form, permeated widely as a middle-class sensibility. By the 1990s the great exponents of ‘country house garden design’ were women; Penelope Hobhouse (1985) and Rosemary Verey (1990) both published popular books which guided taste and advised on the creation of borders predominated by soft pastel hues and a carefully graded colour palette. Since middle-class women today tend to play a more active role in gardening than do working-class women, it is easy to see this Jekyllian model as the expression of an essentially feminized view of colour and its use in gardening. Yet at the turn of the twenty-first century, the influential gardener and writer, Christopher Lloyd, reacted against the genteel aesthetic of soft pinks, mauves and pastel blues, publishing details of his newly designed ‘subtropical’ borders in which he had mingled brilliant reds, oranges and acid yellows set off by a profusion of ‘green’ foliage – a ‘look’ which is currently popular amongst designers working in small urban back gardens and roof terraces belonging to the new and younger urban elite. As such, the styles of gardening and arguments about colour ricochet back and forth, creating new waves of popularity amongst different sectors of society, a process led and influenced by those who have money to indulge and experiment. At the same time, heritage gardens and private ‘open garden’ schemes have extended the range, type and accessibility of gardens influential amongst ordinary gardeners. Despite the wide repertoire of potential garden styles available, most domestic gardens look remarkably similar; the greatest distinction being evident in the treatment of front gardens. For some gardeners, these areas of garden are the focus for a public display of horticultural ‘excellence’; whilst for others, the front garden is a quiet transitional zone, kept tidy but not embellished or gardened in a time-consuming way. In the former, summer bedding utilizing bright contrastive schemes of annuals and half-hardy plants make conspicuously evident the fact that work has been done, and these oppose simple schemes of perennials and evergreen shrubs which minimize labour and are favoured by middle-class homeowners who focus their energies on making secluded gardens hidden behind their houses. It is in this everyday territory of contrasting public and private spaces that the aesthetics of colour are played out in ways which are cut through not only by the influences of history but also gender and class. It might be proposed that one view is essentially masculine, the other feminine; indeed a collection of oppositions arises which can be summarized thus:

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Table 5.1 Gardening Oppositions Bedding Schemes

Herbaceous Borders

Short-term displays

Long-term displays

Instant but ‘static’ effect

Transitory dynamic effect

Blocks of colour equal in height and intensity through season

Intermingling of plants at different heights and with fluctuating visual intensities

Bright complementary colour schemes

Pastel colours and harmonious colour schemes

Demonstrate labour and control over nature

Conceal labour and endorse growth and harmony with nature

Male

Female

Initially upper class becoming working class

Middle class

Let me now turn to my ethnographic material to see what validity can be given to this model.

Domestic Gardening in Whitelynch, Wiltshire The data source presented here is drawn from my study of gardening in Whitelynch carried out between 1997 and 1999, and based on fifty semi-structured interviews carried out between June and September in the gardens belonging to my informants. Whitelynch is a small country town with a population of around two thousand people. Here, newly built ‘social housing’, older areas of council housing (now largely in private ownership), picturesque stone cottages and higher-status housing dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries demarcate the present-day infrastructure of social class, property relations and the spatial topography of gardening. The majority of accounts come from middle-aged or older people. There are no upwardly mobile young homeowners included in the dataset and this reflects the social composition of Whitelynch. This is a quiet town, where people come to retire, and only local people from working-class backgrounds ‘stay at home’. In consequence, Whitelynch is more representative of ‘middle England’ than it is of avant-garde or urban elite, and the account testifies to what might be generally thought of as culturally unproblematic about gardens. But as much as these accounts are intended to be exemplary of what is ordinary and normative about the way that people make gardens and think about colour, they are ultimately ‘views’ which reflect the specificity

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by which, and through which, real people live real lives, and it is therefore important to ‘read’ the accounts that are given as transitory, changing and constitutive of lives, values, and actions in process.

Colour as Quantity and Quality Just looking at a garden in the company of its owner/maker provides evidence of a sort. The material presence of the garden allows people to display what they think about colour, but it also opens up an opportunity to talk about things that are not materially evident, since the space itself reminds people what they think and allows them to express their aims and ambitions: We try to have something colourful in the garden all the year round; that’s not necessarily flowers, I like variegated and coloured foliage. Brian Trotter I like yellow in the garden in spring, but I dislike the sort of yellow that you get later on. Isobel Howard I thought that this was going to be pink which would look nice with that plant there, but it’s turned out different to what I thought. What do you think – should I move it or do you think it’s all right? Yvonne Bertram

But if this comment from Yvonne, a mother in her thirties, points to the priority with which women typically address the concept of colour, then Rodney Bell, a keen gardener in his mid-seventies, makes no reference to colour in his garden at all until I ask directly what he thinks: We like a good mixture of colour but we don’t worry too much about it. The edges are the only bit that I do a bit regular, otherwise it’s just a question of what we’ve got really.

Yet as Rodney and I stand talking we are surrounded by an arrangement of orange marigolds, puce petunias and scarlet salvias planted tightly together in beds cut into an immaculate green lawn. Rodney is a summer bedder par excellence but, unlike Yvonne who ponders the arrangement of plants and their colours, working-class men like Rodney do not so much contemplate colour as possess it: colour is either present or absent; it is as an entity in its own right, and the more conspicuous its presence, the greater his regard of his own achievement. In this sense, much in the same way as a good crop of soft fruit or potatoes is often remarked on in terms of weight, ‘colour’ is quantitive and totalized as a sum of the whole. In contrast, for Brian, Yvonne and Isobel, whose plantings of herbaceous perennials and shrubs form permanent plantings, ‘colour’ is seen as

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a facet of the growth and multiple seasonality of individual plants. As such, each colour and the relationships between colours are constantly reassessed in terms of scale, hue and relative proportions throughout the year. Colour is qualitative and relative. These gardeners not only see colour as something which is inherently transitional, but also intend its distribution in time and space. Here then, we have the first major distinction in the way that different groups of gardeners appreciate and think about the process of colour-making – colour as an entity which is produced by the gardener; and colour as a quality of nature which is orchestrated and coordinated by the gardener.

The Colour of ‘Colour’ and Its Representational Capacities When gardeners talk about colour they are usually referring to any colour other than green; but this does not entirely exclude green from the discussions about colour. For example, my informant Mary Bullock emphasized the greenness of her garden because she wanted to distinguish her garden and her aesthetic sensibility from what she regarded was the cultural expectation that gardens should be colourful rather than green. But a consideration of greenness also opens up important cultural and sensory associations, including the symbolic association of green with nature and the metaphorical associations of an embodied sensibility. In the ethnographic data that I have gathered, the attribute of ‘green fingers’ is always portrayed as being feminine – tending, caring and knowing the internality of plants constitutes a special type of relationship to colour, not so much as a scopic quality but as a tactile, emotion-bearing perception. Synaesthetic crossover between the optic and haptic senses are indeed commonplace in the discourses of women gardeners, and for example Mary uses terms such as ‘texture’ and ‘feel’ to describe the pleasure that she finds in the greenness of her garden.4 The use of red in the garden is similarly loaded with associations of gender. Jean Yarnley is the main gardener in her household; indeed her husband insists upon his uninterest. Yet when they are choosing plants at the garden centre, Andy’s opinion seems to hold considerable sway. There is a bed of bright red roses situated as the centrepiece of the garden, which Jean tells me she does not like very much: ‘they have no scent and are a bit too bright, I try to steer Andy towards things when we go shopping, but like that pieris there, Andy chose that as well because he liked the red leaves’. Whereas for Jean the red roses lack other sensory potentials which she clearly thinks to be important, other middle-class women are more vociferous in their disregard of red-flowered plants on account of the associations of class. ‘I dislike Salvia, in fact I generally dislike those strong red colours’, remarked Jill Pointon; ‘I dislike busy gardens which

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have lots of bright colours; I particularly dislike the gardens in Dukes Avenue’, said Peggy Cooper. Dukes Avenue is the neighbourhood of former council houses where Rodney Bell and his neighbours Nick Grey and Sid Sykes have their gardens, and here, amongst the bedding scheme of brightly coloured orange and lemon marigolds, are large swathes of red-flowered begonias and salvias. For Jill and Peggy, red plants and bright colours signify the ‘Other’, which is working class in counter-distinction to their own aesthetic sensibilities. This representational capacity of colour draws on generalizable perspectives of what is seen to be normative about gardens and the way that different neighbourhoods are conceived in terms of property, wealth and class status. Yet if we were to look more closely at the gardens belonging to Jill and Peggy we would find plenty of brightly coloured plants arranged in tubs and planters in the back garden. Indeed within the borders of Jill’s garden, plants with dark red leaves and flowers are a notable feature. This again points to the way that middle-class gardeners are concerned with the relationships between colours and the distribution of colour throughout the garden. As such, front gardens on ‘public display’ and patio areas close to the house are specific garden locales where there is an increased concern about colour. What is also at issue is the way that the use of colour is seen to represent a sense of self and be capable of producing personally specific associations. Indeed, Gladys Park, who lives on a small council estate elsewhere in Whitelynch, described her late husband as ‘the gardener’, but she now finds herself having to garden, not through choice or pleasure but through a sense of obligation to keep faith with his memory. As we toured around her garden she reflected, ‘My husband always liked blue, it was his favourite colour, so this year I bought these delphiniums from a car boot sale’. Here the use of ‘colour’ is regarded as expressive and individualizing – certain colours are favoured over others and colour has symbolic meanings which are active both in terms of individual specificities and the representation of broader social categories. In other words, as Strathern (1992: 28) has suggested, ‘the English distinguish between phenomena whose own character includes the fact of their generality and those that seem characteristically atypical and individual’. Colour is clearly one such phenomenon.

Harmonies and Contrasts This sense of an individualizing use of colour presents a problem since, superficially at least, in most households the garden is a shared domain in which both husband and wife, to a greater or lesser degree, collectively participate. But if we are to identify colour as a gendered principle, the question remains: how are we to isolate what is male about colour from what is female?

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I conducted a small experiment in which twenty informants were given a selection of different coloured triangles and asked to arrange them in a colour wheel according to the considerations they might take in the garden. Both men and women were asked to complete this task, but whilst women clearly enjoyed doing it and often spent a considerable amount of time deliberating and discussing their choices, men were often reluctant or dismissive and the sample size from them is much smaller. Despite this, some preliminary findings can be discussed. Notably, the majority of women favoured graduated sequences and looked for harmony between adjacent colours, placing red next to orange or purple for example. The contrary was true of men, who tended towards primary colours arranged in complementary sequences which maximized contrast, often placing red next to green, or blue next to yellow. We might then form a hypothesis in which men favour complementary or strongly contrasting colour schemes and women favour more subtle arrangements which can be termed harmonious. But what are the implications of class within the data? The attribution of class status is subjective and not based on any single definable criterion, but nonetheless a notion of class consciousness pervades English culture (Fox 2004: 15–16). For the purposes of this study, I not only made my own assessment of an informant’s class status, but I asked two local residents (who were not included in the study) to list their assessment of my informants’ class status. Our lists concurred without exception and underpin the assessments and representations that are made here. Of the study group, six of the woman can be termed working class (or lowermiddle class), six middle class and two upper-middle class. Of the men, two are best described as working class, one lower-middle class and two upper-middle class. What I found was that there was little difference in the use of colour between genders in the middle-class sample, but the gender difference was much more marked in the working-class data. Of the colours chosen by women in this group, 45 per cent were arranged according to spectrum-adjacent harmonies, but only 27 per cent of selections made by men fell within this category. Likewise, whereas only 18 per cent of the women’s colour arrangements were based on complementary colour relationships, this figure was as high as 72 per cent in the men assessed. Whilst it is important to reiterate the smallness of the data sample, these results suggest that there is disparity in the socio-cultural use of colour; and it is now necessary to consider how such findings relate to the real gardens that I looked at.

Real Gardens The first set of gardens that I want to consider in more detail is the front gardens in Dukes Avenue; a row of semi-detached former

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council houses now in private ownership. In these gardens, the annual plants and strong colours relate stylistically to Victorian bedding schemes and the aesthetic of civic horticulture familiar in city parks and municipal plantings. The second set is mainly ‘back gardens’ secluded behind houses in higher-status parts of the town. These gardens, like those belonging to Jill and Michael Pointon and Brian and Ruth Trotter, consist of carefully orchestrated herbaceous plants which make use of subtle combinations of pastel tints and tonal colours. These are the modern equivalent of the Jekyll borders in which the colour of flowers and the formal relation of plants to one another are primary organizational factors.

Propriety and Control My purpose in introducing these ‘real gardens’ is to develop my argument about the way that gendered use of colour in gardens is also a matter of the aesthetics of class. As such, it is the specifics of control and authority over the garden and the distribution of practical gardening tasks, as much as if not more than differences in the aesthetic sensibilities of men and women, which produce gardens that manifest such different ideas about colour. The gardens in Dukes Avenue are made by men; neither Mary Bell nor Sheila Sykes seem to have much say in their gardens, and Nick Grey lives with his elderly mother who is blind. In these households, the domestic ‘taskscape’ is strictly divided: stereotypically, female responsibility and control over the house interior (cooking, laundry, cleaning and choice of interior furnishings) is mirrored by male control over the exterior (garden, car and DIY tasks). Indeed, when I went to visit, it was notable that the women in these households did not participate in our conversations, yet the converse was often true in middle-class households, when husbands and wives often chose to meet me together to talk about their gardening interests. In middleclass households, the concept of inside and outside is more blurred and indeed the garden is often described as a ‘room outside’. The concerns of decoration and the aesthetics of the interior are extended into the domain of the garden, and the planting up of tubs for the patio and the coordination of colour in the flower borders comes within the realm of home-making. Women in these households do not necessarily carry out all the tasks that are involved in gardening, but they act as ‘director of operations’, choosing the plants and orchestrating the labour. In our conversations, the men typically deferred responsibility to their partners on grounds of their superior plant knowledge and their perceived innate ability in the aesthetics of colour, whilst the woman themselves made a more pragmatic justification, claiming that they had more time to do the garden since they spent more time in and around the home owing to the

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obligations of childcare. Such pragmatism does not appear so much in evidence in the distribution of propriety and control of the garden within working-class households. Responsibility for the garden is a matter of some negotiation within the specificity of individual marriage partnerships, but is also heavily influenced by expectations which arise as a result of childhood experiences of gardening and the enculturation of normative roles of mothers and fathers in home-making. Not only do informants like Andy Yarnley, who had no exposure to gardening during childhood, appear to develop little more than a cursory interest in gardening in adulthood, but more generally, informants whose mothers did the garden at home have a normative expectation that women have a practical role to play in garden-making. The converse is also true; Rodney, Nick and Sid in Dukes Avenue all described in detail the way that their fathers had gardened, and indeed attributed their own practical know-how from having ‘had to help’ their fathers do the garden as children. This gendered distribution of the garden as a zone of responsibility and authority does not act in a rule-like way, but it has a tendency to do so and there is a normative expectation in working-class households that men are in charge of the garden, whereas in middle-class households the garden is largely regarded as an integral aspect of the female responsibility for home-making.

The Working-class Garden On first impression, Rodney Bell’s garden follows the model well: a back garden planted with vegetables, no sitting-out area and a small greenhouse for raising seedling vegetables and bedding plants. ‘Production’ is a term which well describes the activity of the back garden, which in contrast to the front garden is thought of as a ‘behind the scenes’ area where acts of transformation are performed in order that the front garden bedding display can appear almost miraculously, fully formed and in technicolour. Yet there are other interesting details here. Firstly, since the garage is at the far end of the back garden, Rodney and his wife often walk along the straight garden path through the vegetable plot to reach their car, and here, along the path edge, Rodney has planted out his surplus bedding plants so that ‘Mary has a little bit of something to look at’. He is in other words, making a display of ‘colour’ for his wife, but it is the front garden which is Rodney’s cause célèbre. The front of house garden is where men like Rodney seek to display their expertise as gardeners. Rodney’s neighbour, Nick Grey, articulates well the priority of making these displays public: I mean it’s nice for people to have something to look at. People do say if you want to see decent gardens then go to Dukes Avenue. It’s the

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second year I’ve planted that out [‘Dukes Avenue’ spelt out in red fibrous begonia and bright blue lobelias]; people stop and look at it and ask me about it, and this year I’ve got that [a life-size plastic swan] planted up and those [Bill and Ben figures made of flower pots] are new, I take them in at night, but it’s a bit of fun for people.

Yet the front gardens in Dukes Avenue were not always like this and a shift in social focus from the back garden to the front has occurred in response to changes in property status. Rodney Bell explained When the kids were young it was all vegetables out the back, we didn’t really bother much with flowers, just a few bits and bobs the missus was given … Before, when it all belonged to the council, there was all cherry trees down the Avenue; they were horrible and nobody bothered much out the front then. Mostly there was just a hedge and a bit of scruffy lawn, the kids used to go out there. I couldn’t wait to sort it all out when we bought our place. Now the front garden’s the main thing really, but before we used to do most in the back garden. It was all growing vegetables then; although I still do a lot [of vegetables] it’s not the same as it used to be. I mean you hardly ever see much in the way of brassicas these days – most young people don’t seem to want the bother … Yes I suppose you could say I’m the main gardener in our household, but Mary likes her garden. She can’t do digging or anything like that but she goes out and picks anything she needs for cooking and she comes out the front when I’m doing the deadheading. She likes doing that sort of thing – yes we do that side of things together.

Through their brazen displays of colour and the conspicuity of their labour, these front gardens outwardly represent a sense of authority and control over nature, but they are also demonstrative of a sense of status which has shifted with ownership. It is only since these gardeners purchased their former council houses, that the old hedges which enclosed and secluded the front gardens have been removed and replaced by decorative chains and dwarf walls. At the same time, new panel fencing and moves towards greater seclusion in the back garden have redefined the spaces in which neighbourliness and sociability can occur. In their turn, these changes in the structure of garden space have also led to the instigation of garden styles which utilize and redefine practical skills honed in growing vegetables,5 and draw upon role models of horticultural excellence which define notions of civic pride through their association with urban parks and corporate planting schemes.

The Middle-class Garden Brian Trotter is unusual amongst my middle-class informants in playing such an active role in garden-making; nonetheless, closer

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attention to the household power relationships soon reveals what is normative and typical about the distribution of labour in middleclass households. Although Mary Trotter does not like doing the practical aspects of gardening as it spoils her hands for embroidery, Brian and Mary regularly walk around their garden together, discussing what should be done – Brian ‘the labourer’ is guided in the selection and arrangement of ‘colours’ by Mary, who advises when certain colours look out of place and should be moved. The house was built to the Trotters’ own commission. It is detached and situated centrally within a large garden plot which is surrounded by a high hedge ensuring that no portion of the garden is visible from the street. It is interesting to note this emphasis on creating a garden which is entirely without frontage onto the street, since it reflects the fact that much of the higher status housing in Whitelynch (mainly dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) is without the provision of a front garden – only in one case is there a small paved garden area which is ornamented by planting, and here the choice of planting is subdued with dark evergreens and shrubs with white flowers. Yet where this historic street line is punctured by newer in-fill housing of lower value and status, brightly coloured hanging baskets and tubs with seasonal bedding are prevalent. The Trotters’ garden is subdivided into discrete areas. Two of these areas are devoted to trees and lawns, another to vegetables, and two others are dominated by flowers. The section of garden, described by Mary as ‘the rose garden’ comprises a small area laid out with ‘oldfashioned types of roses’ and under-planted with lavender, catnip and other low-growing perennial plants and herbs bearing pastelcoloured flowers. The second flower garden is a patio and pond garden, overlooked by the principal entrance and main rooms of the house. Here, a mixture of herbaceous and half-hardy perennials such as penestemon and michaelmas daisies is set off with a backing of shrubs such as Cotinus coggygria with deep-maroon-coloured leaves. Again, the principal colour theme is pastel; the border comprising a mingled array of flowers in white, mauve, soft pink and blue, with the deeper-coloured foliage adding depth and density to the overall effect. Nothing is strident and no bloom is too large; there is no shocking pink, bright orange, yellow or scarlet, and the garden epitomizes the ‘country house style’ advocated by Hobhouse and Verey.

Anomalies? So far, I have described two contrasting styles of gardening, one ostensibly working class, the other middle class. What is not yet clear is whether these distinctions also make reference to gender, and it will be helpful now if I briefly describe two other gardens in Whitelynch which have been made wholly by women. Both Lyn Barrett and

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Yvonne Bertram are working class; one is employed as a shop assistant, the other works at a local factory assembling light fittings. Both live in rented accommodation, both are married, and both claim that their husbands have no interest in gardening and consider that the garden is part of their domestic domain over which they have authority and control. Lyn’s garden is situated behind the small stone cottage that she rents from the Methodist church which is next door. A condition of this tenancy is the requirement that the garden in front of the chapel is maintained, and to this end, Lyn plants up the perimeter of the chapel garden with scarlet and pink geraniums so that the garden ‘looks nice for weddings and things’. Lyn clearly likes bright colours, yet when I visited, there were only small splashes of colour in the back garden: a few flowers here and there without sense of organization. She says that she likes a ‘jungle look with lots of foliage’ but also that she ‘needs more colour in August by the garden seat’. Yvonne on the other hand, lives in a new terrace house with a small back garden and a paved front garden. There are no plantings at the front, which she says ‘would be just showing off’ – yet the back garden comprises a small rectangular lawn which she (and her husband) ‘made for the children to play on’, and this is surrounded by narrow flower borders around the edge. At the time of my visit, several plants were in flower: a pink lupin, two pink-flowered clematis and a white rose. These were dotted around the garden, the borders being too narrow to achieve a cohesive scheme like the Trotters’. Both Lyn and Yvonne have made their gardens mainly with plants that they have received as gifts from friends and relatives; nonetheless both also find plant shopping an irresistible temptation. Yvonne told me: I’m terrible, I can’t resist going to garden centres. I love roses and things like that, I always come back with something … the first year we lived here I bought bedding plants and thought about how to arrange them, but I’m not doing that again, it’s so much watering and next year you’ve got to buy it all again. At least this way, things look nice and they should come back again themselves next year.

This ad hoc accumulation of plants militates against the sense of any arranged or ordered colour scheme; nonetheless both women clearly consider and pay due attention to colour and its position within the garden. It is also interesting to note Yvonne’s preference for pastel pinks and her rejection of the bedding schemes in Dukes Avenue; in contrast, Lyn’s choice of scarlet and puce geraniums planted around the edge of a neatly clipped green lawn appears to pay homage to complementary rather than spectrum-adjacent colour harmonies. But when Lyn’s gardening practice is analysed more closely, it can be seen as complying with a male-centred concern to display excellence,

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and it is in her back garden that Lyn ‘does what she likes’. Significantly, this is not treated as a ‘behind the scene’; it does not contain rows of vegetables, and the geraniums for bedding-out are purchased each year from the local nursery. Indeed, like Yvonne, Lyn has constructed the back garden as an intimate domestic space, the form of which she has adapted to serve the needs of her children: It used to be mainly lawn when the kids were small, but they’re off out with their friends now … Ray doesn’t take any interest … I’ve finished doing the cottage up so now I’m onto the garden. My mum comes round and helps me. We dug all that out there to make a sitting-out place, I’d like to do it with decking really but I can’t afford that … I got given these runner beans so I thought some more lawn will have to go, and I’ve planted them along the edge to make a sort of archway between the two borders.

Lyn relishes a sense of her own inventive and resourceful capacity in making her garden, but the garden also provides an important focus for her social life. I was myself shopping for plants at the local garden centre when Lyn arrived with a couple of friends. What ensued was interesting to watch from a distance, as the women passed from plant to plant, discussing their various qualities. The plants that had flowers (and were therefore colourful) attracted their attention, yet the decision to buy was complex and negotiated. On several occasions, a plant was picked out only to be dismissed by another of the women on the basis that they had one and therefore could provide a piece of root. Once it had been agreed that a particular plant might be desirable, a colour-matching exercise then followed in which the favoured plant was offered up to other potential plants, the merits of these various combinations being further discussed. Lyn left the garden centre pushing a trolley containing a mauve verbena, purple petunias, a magenta loosestrife and white foxgloves; plants which were apparently destined to be split up and shared between the friends. Like Rodney Bell, and the men on Dukes Avenue, an interest in gardening provides a sense of mutual interest and involvement, but here the concern is not to gain public approval. Lyn’s garden is essentially a private space, but it is also both the venue and backdrop for a range of social occasions. These include shopping but also a sense of sharing the garden, both materially through the exchange of plants and spatially through invitations to friends to sit out in the garden with her. Colour plays a key role in this discourse, but it has transitory effect, not simply as a function of the biological morphology of plants, but through the sense of occasion and opportunity that these events in sociable garden-time evoke. Whilst the way in which Lyn sets about gardening is not ‘productive’ in the sense that Rodney’s

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is, it is nonetheless productive (and reproductive) in creating cultural and social ‘normalities’ in which colour and presentation of the garden is marked out by social occasions which consolidate and have meaning in the representation of a sense of Self.

Systematizing Value Regardless of their class situation, most women appear to aspire to more or less the same aesthetic values in gardening. Namely, they pay close attention to individual plants and are concerned with the decorative potential of ‘colour’. In this, the arrangement of spectrumadjacent colour harmonies is most often the ideal, but they also value diversity, since this not only widens the timeframe in which flower colour can be contemplated, but also reflects the way that women exchange plants and reinforce their own social connectivity as gardeners. The degree to which women achieve these objectives is determined by the social constitution of their households and the specific way in which power and rights over the garden are distributed within households. Changes in the traditional power structures of the home and a greater sense of self empowerment allow gardeners like Lyn and Yvonne to act assertively in expressing a style of gardening which overturns their own class stereotypes of male-dominated gardening. This necessarily leads to hybrid forms of garden, and the gardens belonging to Doreen and Ted Harrow and Vic and Brenda Grayling typify what happens in working-class homes when control over the garden is more contested (or perhaps more equally shared). Here we find a division of both tasks and spaces within gardens: vegetable growing and lawn-care are carried out by men, and the flower garden and plant production (including the greenhouse) are female responsibilities. The flower gardens are most pertinent to the present argument however, since these reflect a strange ‘higgledy-piggledy’ effect in which the ‘traditional’ brightly coloured bedding plants are intermingled and set between an array of herbaceous perennials and shrubs, without any conspicuous attempt to create patterns or colour schemes of any sort. Made of a complex tapestry of plants obtained cheaply and as gifts, they incorporate what is ready-to-hand and are perhaps, in the true sense of the term, cottage gardens. These gardeners do not make self-conscious statements about style and taste; more mundanely, both Ted and Vic place importance on providing food for the table; whilst Doreen and Brenda invest considerable store in the sentiments of growing and caring for plants which stand both as symbols of their own creativity and their connectivity to family and friends.

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Conclusion My analysis has identified differences in the way that men and women utilize colour, but these should be thought of as fuzzy rather than hard rules. The categories of class, gender and indeed ‘style’ that I have been dealing with are all stereotypes, which in the situated specificity of lived practice can be expected to produce exceptions. Moreover, the discourses which situate colour are themselves also in the process of change. It is already easy to look at the work of influential garden designers at the Chelsea Flower Show to see new orders arising in reaction to established patterns of normality. Male designers like Dan Pearson, who claims to favour green over ‘colour’, or women like Arabella Lennox-Boyd who create highly structured gardens defined by box hedges, contradict and complexify the gender/plant/colour model that I have put forward here. Framed within practices of mimesis and rupture, the symbolic nature of gardens is constituted by a social elite who define ‘taste’ and who direct the passage of aesthetic sensibility and its migrations through the stratigraphy of culture. In this process, the aspirations of gardeners to define their individuality give rise to a proliferation of forms which both appeal to the ideals of tradition and rework them in different ways. As such, time and variation become inextricably linked in the processes of differentiation (Strathern 1992: 21). But this does not take away from the fact that in ordinary everyday England, it is possible to look at the gardens made by men and those made by women and to argue that there are observable patterns of difference and that these differences are manifest in the ways that men and women orchestrate and think about colour. More importantly however, colour cannot be isolated from other values that plants encode, and to understand the practices and products of gardeners entails recognizing that they are the result of the meeting of two histories: the history of the positions they occupy within the extant social environment and the history of their dispositions within culture (cf. Bourdieu 1993: 61). As such, there are real differences, not only in the colour affordances of different types of plants, but significant differences in what annuals, herbaceous perennials, and trees and shrubs say about time, the ownership of time and the processes of self-definition that constitute the cultural field of gardens within lived practice. An analysis of colour as a social phenomenon is therefore also one in which history and historicity are intimately connected and productive of constantly changing and situated discourses of value.

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Notes 1. Whitelynch is a pseudonym, as are the names of my informants. 2. See Jones (1856) for example. 3. This aestheticization of growth caught the mood of ‘survival of the fittest’ as Darwin’s Origin of Species permeated the national consciousness (Elliott 1986: 205). 4. Feminist scholars who have studied the senses have suggested that haptic sensitivity is more significant and more meaningful for women. See Irigaray (1980: 101). 5. Raising bedding plants from seed involves much the same skills as raising young vegetables for planting out.

Bibliography Atkins, R. 1996. ‘A Blooming Success’, The Independent, 10 December 1996: 16. Bennett, S. 2000. Five Centuries of Women & Gardens. London: National Portrait Gallery. Bourdieu, P. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production. Oxford: Polity Press. Chevreul, M.-E. 1839. Les Lois du Contraste Simultané des Couleurs. English trans. [1854] 1981. The Principles of Harmony & Contrast of Colours, ed. Faber Birren. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Elliott, B. 1986. Victorian Gardens. London: B.T. Batsford. Festing, S. 1993. Gertrude Jekyll. London: Penguin. Fox, K. 2004. Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour. London: Hodder. Gage, J. 1999. Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism. London: Thames & Hudson. Goethe, J.W. von, 1810. Farbenlehre. trans. C.L. Eastlake [1840] The Theory of Colours. Tübingen, Germany: JG Cotta’schen Buchhandlung. Hobhouse, P. 1985. Colour in your Garden. London: Collins. Jekyll, G. [1908] 1986. Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors Club. Jones, O. 1856. The Grammar of Ornament. London: Day & Son. Irigaray, L. 1980. ‘This Sex Which Is Not The One’, in E. Marks and I. de Courtivron (eds), New French Feminisms. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Lanman, S.W. 2000. ‘Colour in the Garden: “Malignant Agenta”’, in Journal of the Garden History Society 28(2): 209–21. Loudon, J.C. 1827. An Encyclopaedia of Gardening. 5th Edn. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green. Murray, A. 1863. Book of the Royal Horticultural Society. London: Bradbury & Evans. Robinson, W. 1883. The English Flower Garden. London: John Murray. Strathern, M. 1992. After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Verey, R. 1990. Good Planting. London: Frances Lincoln.

 CHAPTER 6 

CREATING A MIDDLE GROUND: CRITICAL REMARKS ON THE COLOUR/FORM RELATION Kiki Karatheodoris Remarkably little has been written about colour as a means of pictorial organization. There are descriptions of the palette used by particular painters; there are critical judgements praising or condemning an artist’s use of colour. But on the whole, one can only agree that, in the words of the art historian Allen Pattillo, ‘a large part of what has been written about paintings, it’s fair to say, has been written almost as if paintings were works in black and white’. (Arnheim 1974: 344)

It is surprising to read this statement because when we think of paintings in general, we think of colour. Rarely do we think of paintings in black and white unless recalling specific ones we have seen in books, galleries or museums. Yet we do think of works in achromatic black and white when we recall drawings. Why did Allen Pattillo make such a statement? Throughout painting’s history a colour/form opposition with philosophical, political, scientific and symbolic significance has existed. Such differences in attitude towards colour versus representational form have, more often than not, set artists and artistic styles in opposition. Traditionally, representational form has been seen as more important, more essential, and more illustrative of ‘true’ artistic capability and creativity, and since antiquity it has had priority over colour, especially in the West. This prejudice began with the ancient Greeks, continued with the Romans, was reinforced during the Renaissance, caused problems for the fauvists and impressionists, and continues to the present day despite the critical acceptance of the many non-objective and colour field paintings produced in the United States and Europe beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Gage 1999; Kinsgley 1992; Ruhrberg 2000; Sandler 1978).

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Art historian John Gage describes this opposition as the polemic of disegno (drawing, design) against colore, explaining it as the ‘ancient notion that an adequate representation might be made with line alone, colouring being an inessential adjunct to form’ (Gage 1999: 117). Gage traces this polemic between colourists and formalists, highlighting the see-saw history of colour’s gain in popularity and importance, for example during the Quattrocento (it is interesting to note here the flatness that also accompanied the strong use of colour during this period) and its subsequent ‘repression’ during the Renaissance, when artists favoured strong modelling and perspective in the third dimension. These controversies regarding colour and its place in art, culture, philosophy and even religion raged alongside a slowly evolving systematic investigation of its properties by artists and scientists. Slowly, colour became worthy of systematic study through the work of Goethe, Chevreul, Birren and Ostwald, who endeavoured to put it in a logical and comprehensible order. In addition, through the work of the cubists, fauvists, impressionists, pointillists and other modernists, the strongly modelled object was fractured, flattened, blurred and/or dissolved. By the early twentieth century, artists had done more than shatter the picture plane; they had also ‘punctured’ the object’s boundaries. And one might say colour ‘seeped’ out. A genuine splitting had finally occurred that gave painters an alternative from the purely literary or representational. Colour was thought of as ‘freed’ from its subservience to form and stood on its own, as exemplified by the non-representational works of artists such as Josef Albers, Jules Olitski, Barnett Newman. When viewers were first confronted with non-objective paintings consisting, for example, solely of one colour, or of a black or white painted surface, many, including some art critics, balked (Sandler 1978; Kingsley 1992). The charge was not so much that colour was not a subject worthy of artistic expression and investigation – such investigations had already been done. Rather, abstract or nonobjective works were more problematic, their language less comprehensible, their abstractness and flatness less available to the viewer because the third dimension had suddenly become marginalized. With the advent of abstraction, colour – more at home within the flatness of the picture plane – was no longer thought of as subordinate to form or ‘inessential’. In the words of art critic Clement Greenberg: three dimensionality is the province of sculpture. To achieve autonomy, painting has had above all to divest itself of everything it might share with sculpture, and it is in its effort to do this, and not so much – I repeat – to exclude the representational or literary, that painting has made itself abstract. (Greenberg 1982: 6–7)

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Here Greenberg juxtaposes the opposition of the flatness and abstractness of painting to the three dimensionality of sculpture. In a parallel comparison colour can also be thought of as a true opposing force to the illusion of the third dimension in a painted image. It has its own laws of behaviour, which are in opposition to those of the building blocks of form, the achromatic scale of black, white and grey. Therefore to think of colour as ‘inessential’ was to deny its power to be adversarial to form, thereby weakening their mutual inherent tension; a tension that is necessary and vital to the production of art. Freed from the sculptural, colour could offer a stronger and truer antithesis to form ‘within’ the created image. Rudolf Arnheim discusses at length the varying effects of colours, lines and shapes on our consciousness and calls them ‘opposing perceptual forces’ because they actually act on our perception through our vision and, comprising not only visual art, are also present in everything we see. He writes: ‘Whether or not we choose to call these perceptual forces “illusions” matters little so long as we acknowledge them as genuine components of everything seen. The forces … are “illusory” only to the man who decides to use their energy to run an engine. Perceptually, and artistically, they are quite real’ (Arnheim 1974: 17). What are the most salient differences between these opposing perceptual forces of colour and form? Black, white and grey comprise the achromatic scale of form; they are the components which give a painting the illusion of depth – the third dimension. Achromatic values ‘move’ from depth to surface and vice versa. Black recedes the farthest while white advances towards the viewer, the resulting greys fit between these two extremes. An achromatic drawing is created by using gradients from black to white, but in order for any drawn object to be perceived, a boundary indicating a difference in value must be present. This boundary is indicated by a line or an edge which absolutely must have a different value than the area contiguous to it. It is necessary in order to make the object stand out from its surroundings, and it is the only way to prevent two contiguous areas of the same value from merging. The defining edge of an apple, for example, drawn on a two-dimensional surface, must be darker or lighter than its background. Form, created through the use of the dividing boundary line, requires relations of ‘inequality of value’ in order for it to be perceived. Boundaries define, enclose and separate. Form becomes manifest to our eyes only through polarities, oppositions, or relations such as darker or lighter – that is, only through relations of difference. Gradations or gradients, oppositions and inequalities of value require and are linked to our analytical abilities of measurement (how dark, how light?), to comparison, to separation and division, to evaluation and, therefore, to our judgement. Form’s order is hierarchical; equality of value has no place here. Put another way, there is no ‘middle ground’, only steps and gradients. Form, drawing and the

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illusion of the third dimension are the domain of the ‘object’ (for clarity, the terms ‘achromatic values’ and ‘form’ will be used interchangeably here). Colour works differently; colour is fractured light and by nature is non-objective. Difference is already present in the infinite number of colours produced when light is fractured, and normal vision is sensitive enough to perceive even the slightest colour change. The situation is opposite to that of form, where difference of value is necessary for visual perception. Colour is also interactive and relative; every colour in a composition affects the hue and value of every other colour. This interaction changes a colour’s appearance, sometimes to an extreme degree. The effect is immediate, unpredictable and ephemeral. Its simultaneous interactive nature makes colour chaotic and unpredictable, but it has the capacity to do what the achromatic values of form cannot. It can unite through ‘equality of value’, something form cannot accomplish on its own, as it operates only within the law of contrast. To visualize these different mechanisms, one can imagine transposing a colourful painting into an achromatic value study and arriving at one large, flat, grey area lacking any definable edges or modulation because the value of each original colour was one and the same. This illustrates that, whereas creation of form is dependent on the divisive boundary line and on ‘inequality of value’, colour connects through ‘equality of value’. Colour’s order is non-hierarchical. It provides horizontal breadth to the vertical, spatial depth of the achromatic values. Offering an opposition to form’s movement, colour’s movement is characterized by its location along a horizontal axis where it begins from the achromatic grey and moves outwards from that particular value at a ninety-degree angle. To see this relationship clearly, a value scale going from dark to light is drawn in a vertical direction (the actual direction here is simply a convention; what is important is the ninetydegree angle of intersection between the achromatic values and colour’s placement in relation to them). A particular colour is mixed with any achromatic grey and placed in small, square but even increments until one has more colour in the mixture than grey. Value of the colour must be kept constant throughout; change is made only in the amount of colour. Finally the colour reaches its point of complete saturation ‘at this specific value’ as it moves away from the vertical axis. This point of saturation is difficult to achieve because if too much colour is added then value is changed. This is important to avoid for the desired structure is one of colour crossing value at a ninety-degree angle. The vertical axis contains gradients of grey of different value; the horizontal, gradients of colour at a constant value. Precisely at the crossing of these two axes, the fundamental difference between the behaviour of colour and that of the achromatic values is illustrated. The achromatic scale requires a clear division at

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the boundary of each value, separating it, and moving from dark to light. On the other hand, gradations in colour are united at the boundary of each colour increment moving horizontally through equality of value. It is therefore at the boundary that differences between colour and form are salient but also where they appear to be at ‘cross purposes’. What we have here is an example of two ‘opposing perceptual forces’ to which Rudolf Arnheim referred. The work of painting is to bring them together, using their power to unite and divide, to arrive at some form of resolution (the ‘work’ of painting). When one tries to combine these two forces, value and colour, everything changes. When used out of order, suddenly values and colours begin to affect each other in innumerable ways, and chaos ensues when they are no longer in a neat, orderly and ideal structure of a colour chart. This is not an easy place from which to begin a painting. Therefore, if an artist desires to make an aesthetic statement requiring forms, colour is usually subdued, sacrificed to the necessities of the sculptural. But if one desires to understand colour in and of itself, then s/he must enter ‘flatland’ in order to study its interactions. Keep in mind a strong boundary line encloses and separates colour, minimizing its interactive nature; but when value is equalized among varying colours, their mutual interaction is at its strongest. Colour comes to the fore and becomes the ‘subject’ of the work. The desire to understand the behaviour of colour requires an artist not only to put aside requirements of disegno, the sculptural, but also to be willing to set aside ‘hierarchical thinking’ to enter the more emotive side of painting. Colour is the factor in painting that most closely connects to our emotions. ‘Emotion strikes us as color does’ (Arnheim 1974: 336). ‘Here’, writes Josef Albers, ‘we may point to a discovery made by a few contemporary painters, that the increase in amount of a colour – not merely in size of canvas – visually reduces distance. As a consequence, it often produces nearness – meaning intimacy – and respect’ (Albers 1975: 44). With colour we are closer to the realm of emotion and the irrational, and that can be disconcerting for our reasoning and analytical minds. The unease is aptly described in a quotation used by Arnheim from the writing of Charles Blanc: ‘the union of design and color is necessary to beget painting just as is the union of man and woman to beget mankind, but design must maintain its preponderance over color. Otherwise painting speeds to its ruin: it will fall through color just as mankind fell through Eve’ (Arnheim, 1974: 337). If an artist no longer ascribes to Blanc’s idea, then how can one integrate colour and value in such a way that neither is sacrificed to the other? This is the question that I have been exploring in a series of paintings dealing with creation of a middle ground and transparency in colour (see ‘Paintings’ in: http://www.transparencyincolor.com).

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Transparency effects are simply an illusion of a second plane or area of a particular colour that appears to be superposed over an underlying plane. It is an example of what Josef Albers called the ‘discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect’ (Albers 1975: 2). One physical fact in the illusion of transparency is that no actual colour is physically superposed over another, and yet the psychic effect is to perceive just that. A second physical fact is that two forms cannot occupy the same space at the same time, but the psychic effect of the transparent figure visually convinces us of two forms occupying the same space simultaneously. Through the illusion of transparency a ‘middle ground’ is created because: (1) a colour must be or appear to be a ‘true’ middle mixture between two parent colours, and (2) it must also satisfy specific form-conditions of placement where it lies ‘between’ two parent colours.

The Middle Ground and Transparency Why is transparent white impossible? … Paint a transparent red body, and then substitute white for red! Black and white themselves have a hand in the business, where we have transparency of a colour. Substitute white for red and you no longer have the impression of transparency; just as you no longer have the impression of solidity if you turn this drawing

into this one

.

(Wittgenstein 1978: 19e)

To bring colour and value together in a harmonious relationship, the middle ground becomes a key element. In visual terms the middle ground is a ‘mix’ between opposing perceptual forces (i.e. different colours, values, shapes, and so on), bringing them together or joining them in a relationship on a two-dimensional surface. From the work of Josef Albers (1975), Augusto Garau (1993), and Harald Kueppers (1982), one learns that when a true middle mixture between two colours is achieved, the result is an illusion of transparency in the area of overlap. Albers refers to this middle mixture as ‘the most significant and the most difficult’ (Albers 1975: 29). For my purposes it is also the unifying ‘middle ground’ and, in my paintings, is the unifying transparent layer between complementary, or opposing, colours. Finding a true middle mixture between two colours is easy enough, if they are related in some way like green and yellow; the colour of the transparent overlap is seen as a combination of the parent colours used. Problems arise with opposing colours such as yellow and violet, or yellowish red and greenish blue, because they extinguish each other’s coloured light (chroma) when mixed, and achromatic grey results. When this grey occupies the place between the parent colours, one perceives three very distinct and unrelated colours. This middle grey

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does not behave as a unifying middle ground. It is perceived as a third element separating the two chromatic colours. Magically the illusion of transparency disappears in the area of overlap. And yet, this grey is the ‘true’ middle mixture between the complementary colours of yellow and violet. It should show illusion of transparency but it does not. Here one can conclude there is no middle ground between the extremes of colour because the grey produced by their admixture takes us back to the achromatic value scale where the laws of colour interaction no longer apply. Going back to the beginning quotation by Wittgenstein, the words ‘achromatic grey’ can be just as easily substituted in place of his word ‘white’, and his statement would still be true. It appears that here the limits of physical mixing are reached. The middle ground between such extremes, then, must be created and cannot be brought about through conventional means. The challenge becomes how to unify two complementary colours and prevent their mutual chromatic annihilation. Is there another way to arrive at a middle ground yet preserve the illusion of transparency without physical intermixtures? Arnheim explains that in order for transparency to be perceived, ‘the color of the overlap must be seen as a combination of the other two colors or at least as a fairly close approximation of such a combination’ (Arnheim 1974: 255). That is, one must be able to perceive the colour in the area of overlap as a middle mixture, and it has already been stated that this is impossible with mixtures of opposing colours. Augusto Garau, teacher/artist at the University of Milan who has worked extensively with transparency offers a new and unique insight to this problem. He writes: An achromatic hue cannot be split perceptually into two chromatic hues. To split the color of the shared area into its two component colors, it is necessary that this color be made by what I call a visual chromatic mixture. By this I simply mean a hue that appears as a mixture, whether or not it is actually a mixture … the phenomenon of transparency is independent of physical reality. Transparency is founded on visual reality, which, as we have seen, does not overlap with physics. (Garau 1993: 54–55)

Garau agrees with Arnheim that the area of overlap must be perceived as the combination of the two parent colours used but also claims it does not have to be an actual physical paint mixture. In fact, only one colour, not a mixture, can be used to achieve the illusion of transparency so long as that particular colour ‘appears’ as a mixture of the other two colours. Going back to the question – is there another way to arrive at a middle ground and preserve the illusion of transparency without physical intermixtures – the answer would appear to be ‘yes’ if a third

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colour occupying a middle position relative to the parent colours is used as a transparent overlay (Figure 6.1). What occurs in the area of superposition, or overlap, is no longer a physical mixing but simply a colour change. It is for the artist to discover the correct colour change in order to produce the illusion of transparency in the areas of overlap.

Simple Physical Mixture

Overlay of Third Colour

Parent colours overlap in grey area.

Parent colours are kept separate. Colour change in area of superposition.

Figure 6.1: Examples of the structural differences between simple transparency through physical mixture and one brought about through inclusion of a third colour with colour changes in the areas of overlap.

Colour change in the area of overlap is key to the perception of transparency between complementary colours, is calibrated using the proportions of the undertone every colour possesses and is dependent upon the particular parent colours involved. The technical aspects of arriving at the specific colour in the superposed area requires considerable preliminary research and cannot be addressed here. Suffice to say although I have relied heavily on Garau’s idea of colour change my work differs in that I do not use his mathematical formulae to arrive at the colour change in the overlay. I should also add that Garau does not think using laws of additive colour mixture makes any difference to finding the new colour in the overlay, but I disagree with him here. In my work the choice of the new superposed colours is dictated not by the subtractive mixture of pigments, nor is it affected by subjective taste but is dictated according to the laws of ‘additive light mixture’ (Kueppers 1982). In addition, a serendipitous effect occurs when colour is used according to such laws: because all three primaries are always used in varying amounts, colour balance is automatic and the painting stays in balance under differing light conditions. In order to view a few colour examples, please note the square paintings on the website already mentioned. All areas contain

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different and specific colours; each is painted separately, no ‘greying’ colours are ever mixed. What is applied in the ‘transparent’ area is the changed hue which the parent colours should hypothetically and logically acquire ‘if’ only the chromas (coloured lights) of the parent colours and the chroma of the overlay were mixed. Using colour change in the areas of superposition allows colours in the painting to keep their chromatic vibrancy. This method suggests an alternative to the problem of physical mixtures that kill chromas of complementary colours when mixed – thus the term ‘subtractive colour mixture’. The principles of additive light mixture, which illustrate how we see colour, demonstrate that when coloured lights are combined a new and different colour altogether is created. For example, red light and green light produce yellow light. Using these principles one can create a different kind of middle ground between opposing colours, and because of this colour change in the area of superposition, transparency and a middle ground with complementary colours becomes possible without creation of grey. The website paintings were executed with no thinning of paint, no use of special mediums, no glazing techniques. Paint is laid in a thick and opaque manner; the illusion of transparency occurs naturally. Value is adjusted only through the use of black and white. The ‘transparent layer’ is actually a piece of wood overlaying the square within a square composition appropriated from the ‘Homage to the Square’ series of Josef Albers. Illusion of transparency occurs when colour interaction is allowed to work at its best and that happens only upon the painting’s completion. To summarize, the subject of my paintings is the creation of a middle ground between opposing perceptual forces of colour through the use of the transparent layer. It adopts an opposite strategy to defining form through opposition of dark and light. Rather, value is used for colour’s placement in space and also for allowing its simultaneous interaction to work freely on the picture plane. It illustrates the power of colour when it is allowed to function interactively, not only as a material used for the plastic articulation of objects in space, but as an equal partner with value whose effects are also allowed to play an important part. I stated earlier that it was at the boundary that colour and form seem to be at cross-purposes. It is also at the boundary that transparency can unite these two antagonists because it relies, among other things, on ‘connections’. The uniting and balancing impact of a transparent area is a personal exploration for a visual metaphor that expresses the desire for both connectedness and respect for difference. It is not, by any means, the only resolution to oppositions. The work simply offers an alternative use for colour that can be an addition to conventional mixing within any composition.

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Bibliography Albers, J. 1975. The Interaction of Color, 2nd edn. New Haven: Yale University Press. Arnheim, R. 1974. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, 2nd edn. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gage, J. 1999. Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction. Berkeley: University of California Press. Garau, A. 1993. Color Harmonies, trans. N. Bruno. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Greenberg, C. 1982. ‘Modernist Painting’, in F. Frascina and C. Harrison (eds), Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. London: Harper and Row, pp. 5–10. Kinsgley, A. 1992. The Turning Point: The Abstract Expressionists and the Transformation of American Art. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kueppers, H. 1982. The Basic Law of Color Theory, trans. R. Marcinik. Woodbury, NY: Barron’s Press. Ruhrberg, K. 2000. Art of the 20th Century. New York: Taschen. Sandler, I. 1978. The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties. New York: Harper and Row. Wittgenstein, L. 1978. Remarks on Color, trans. L.L. McAlister and M. Schättle. Berkeley: University of California Press.

 CHAPTER 7 

DIGITAL

HEIDEGGER’S PIXEL: COLOUR AS ‘STANDING RESERVE’ Chris Horrocks

When approached as a specific conjunction of technology and optics, electronic digital colour tends to demarcate itself from the ‘natural’ world of colour: the embodied, ‘thick’ environment of colour related to and bound up with a context and a ‘setting’. Kittler’s observation that the technological restrictions on digitally recreating colours of a range and quality able to match the visible spectrum (Kittler 2001: 32) perhaps suggests that digitality is emerging or revealing itself as a deficient yet potential successor to both the natural world of colour and its analogical partner in representation: pictures of the world that attempt to provide reflective equivalents for that world. Whether a supplement, replacement or the hyperreal completion of the natural and analogical realms of colour, digital colour puts itself forward as difference: a departure or separation from the analogical through a union of new technology and information processing and storage. Yet such colour cannot be reduced simply to a technological determinant. It takes as its grounding not only a sensory and perceptual connection with technology, but also a relationship to a type of world, one expressible as a cleaving (in its opposed senses of ‘joining’ and ‘splitting’) of number and image, potential and actuality. The work of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty applies in this regard, particularly the concept of ‘revealing’, which is discussed below. This relates specifically to the context of the withheld potential of digital colour when contrasted with a general account of analogical or ‘connective’ colour. Yet recent work in the phenomenology of technology, in its so-called ‘empirical turn’ (Achterhuis 2001), can also provide a more concrete and specific account of actual technologies as they are lived. This amounts to a shift from sensory to cultural perception within phenomenological thought, a movement from early phenomenology which takes the ‘being’ or essence of technology as its ground of experience of concrete technologies lived through and

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within, in the human life-world. As the ‘postphenomenologist’ Don Ihde claims, it is necessary to contretize the artifactual and relational world of our lived relation to actual technologies in order to conjoin sensory and cultural perceptions: ‘What is usually taken as sensory perception (what is immediate and focused bodily in actual seeing, hearing, etc.), I shall call microperception. But there is also what might be called a cultural, or hermeneutic perception, which I shall call macroperception. Both belong equally to the lifeworld’ (Ihde 1990: 29). Ihde’s cultural framing of technology is important here, for the pixel’s essence (if such a word can be said to describe this most ambiguous entity) is precisely not a sensory but a cultural perception, and it is this aspect which is omitted in technical readings of digital colour (Smith 1995). As we shall see, the entrance of the pixel from the technological to the cultural world is one of a particular interpretive activity, with often contradictory and incomplete readings rich in variation, and unaccountable according to a simple mathematical notion of the pixel’s existence. Therefore, to highlight the paradox of the pixel, this chapter attempts to link its mathematical, technological and cultural modalities, from Heidegger through to postphenomenology, from consciousness and being, through to actual technology and cultural construction. First it is necessary to account for the pixel within Heidegger’s philosophy of technology, to link its strange existence to the world of digital technology in contrast to the analogue world of Heidegger’s conception of technology, power and potential.

Heideggerian Themes We can assess the role of potential when focusing on what at first glance appears the simplest unit of digital colour: the pixel. This reveals the internal ‘difference-as-absence’ that digital colour presents between the poles of disclosure and concealment, clarity and obscurity, proximity and distance, obstinacy and withdrawal. Heidegger’s writings on being, art and truth enable us to approach digital colour beyond the problem of its capacity to provide an equivalent representation for reality, as a phenomenon that is not simply a ‘technological’ successor to ‘analogue’ representations, but a different and richer mode of revealing or disclosure, whose form is given through new technology but also ‘withdrawn’ when considered against Heidegger’s reading of being. Rather than inhabiting a postanalogue space, as though its ontology were characteristic of a world that replaces, improves on or renders obsolete analogue forms, it may be more useful to consider such colour, its components and its representations as an unfolding of a particular relation between subject and object, and between body, technology and world. Heidegger’s philosophy is relevant because it provides some means to

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understand digital colour, or to match or supersede the world of analogue or natural colour. In Heidegger’s thought, digital colour would have an existence that exceeds its existence as the ‘other’ of analogue or natural colour. Such a binary reading too readily frames such colour in opposition to another modality. Heidegger invites us to consider it as present as a ‘difference’, not merely in contrast to analogue or natural colour, but also as a mark of ‘absence’ on its own terms, which I will discuss from the perspective of Heidegger’s concept of ‘standing reserve’ or what we can call ‘energy potential’. Unlike analogue colour, which has the good manners to adhere to a setting and embed itself in the pigment, dirt, canvas, fibre and earth that for Heidegger provided the bridge between the natural world and our world of tools, artworks and language, digital colour is marked as being paradoxically present and absent. To borrow from Gertrude Stein’s description of her childhood experience of Oakland, with digital colour ‘there is no there there’ (1971: 289), digital colour exists doubly and spectrally as a numerical reservoir of coordinates, most usually deep inside the memory of the computer, and as a constantly fleeting host of colours refracted through crystals and arrayed on the meshes of display screens in orthogonal form. Digital colour announces itself as a number value and visually isolatable unit, which for the sake of conceptual and perceptual convenience we call a ‘pixel’. Heidegger’s insight on technology as an ontological problem has application for colour in a technological environment, and specifically digital colour, if we can assume that its being can be thus contextualized. We often understand digital colour chiefly through the prism of new technology. The encounter is one marked as electrically and electronically oriented, and appears to us through advances in imaging techniques such as the liquid crystal display screen. Illuminated from behind the screen, and sent through those crystals and metallic meshes to meet our optic nerves, digital light is more a product of mechanical refraction rather than reflection, the latter being more the province of analogical media such as painting, where light rays rebound from a plane. Digital colour seems technologically driven. Digital colour suggests that its work is done, as it were, ‘backstage’, and drafted in as a calculation which only then finds itself visible as perceived colour on the screen.1 In the electronic era, and in Heidegger’s terms, this colour can be considered as ‘standing reserve’, waiting for its fleeting appearance as a photon-charged phosphor, as a transient pixel. I will discuss the importance of standing reserve below. For now, it is sufficient to say that the concept may describe colour as attached to neither material nor memory, to neither place nor time. It does not arise from or remain in a setting to which it still belongs. Such detachment and dislocation arguably gives rise to some difficulties in defining the being of digital colour. It is evident from the generally held notion of what a pixel – as a representative unit of digital colour – ‘is’, or

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appears to be, that Heidegger’s formulation may allow us to sidestep the problems of definition that I will now describe.

Defining Digital Colour: The Problem of the Pixel The pixel, short for ‘pixelated element’, is the basic unit of the digital image. It is the visual equivalent of DNA, being the foundational building block of colour in new media environments. It exists as a unique conjunction of mathematical calculation and visual aesthetic, appearing in a cultural context that evinces a particular dynamic between the numerical and the sensory in a historical dimension. Premised, therefore, on a cluster of quite contradictory assumptions, which are seemingly easily exposed by an appeal to mathematical laws, the pixel, as emblem and symbol of the digital universe, initially appears to us as a perceptually discrete unit. It is a technologically organized entity that briskly martials itself with other pixels to manufacture a gestalt image, while operating according to laws operating ‘elsewhere’, offstage and within the architecture of the abstract processing and encoding powers of the computer. Existing in two fields or ‘enframings’, the relation between the two cements itself within consciousness as a unique mode of meaning and imagination, opening out onto a complex cultural habitat; one that traces for itself a history that draws together aspects of the analogical and digital life-worlds, and which incorporates a connection of technology with modernist aesthetic forms. The pixel appears at this locus of the mathematical, the technical, the perceptual and the cultural, often leading to a problematic definition: A pixel is a point sample. It exists only at a point. For a color picture, a pixel might actually contain three samples, one for each primary color contributing to the picture at the sampling point. We can still think of this as a point sample of a color. But we cannot think of a pixel as a square – or anything other than a point. There are cases where the contributions to a pixel can be modeled, in a low-order way, by a little square, but not ever the pixel itself. An image is a rectilinear array of point samples (pixels). The marvelous Sampling Theorem tells us that we can reconstruct a continuous entity from such a discrete entity using an appropriate reconstruction filter. (Smith 1995)

Alvy Ray Smith’s claim for the pixel as numerical purity assumes some discrepancy in the ontology of the pixel as it moves from a mathematical and positional quantity to a perceptual and linguistic misassumption: everyday language excludes digital colours value as number to present the pixel as a small square. The latter is a product of hardware rather than mathematics.2 For Alvy, the pixel is a cultural misrecognition of a mathematical truth. Yet the pixel-as-

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square has become sort of grammar of computer perception, entering the culture as the dominant icon – indeed the metaphysical building block – of the electronic digital image. These contradictions between the conceptual and the mathematical, which have their effect on visual understanding of digital colour, are best illuminated by Heidegger’s two key texts on technology and aesthetics (Heidegger 1977; 2001).

Colour, Coding and Standing Reserve If we follow Heidegger, at least in his initial phrasing of the question, we can determine how colour may relate to a questioning of technology, in terms of what he describes as a ‘bringing-forth’ [poiesis, or Hervor-bringen]. For him, the mode of revealing, or ‘un-concealing’, differs between modern and premodern technology: ‘It is said that modern technology is incomparably different from all earlier technologies because it is based on modern physics as an exact science’ (Heidegger 2003a: 286). This difference may have some bearing on what we might call the ‘revealing’ of colour and the respective modes of bringing-forth of analogue and digital colour, if we at least initially phrase the digital as having become a phenomenon associated with recent technological advances. What is this bringing-forth of colour, technologically given? For colour, we can perhaps phrase the distinction between digital colour and analogue colour along the lines that Heidegger determines when questioning the mutual relationship between science and technology, where the digital succeeds the analogue in certain ways. Heidegger describes technology as a mode of revealing the world that constitutes a challenge, ‘which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such’ (Heidegger 2003a: 286). Nature is set upon and everywhere turned into ‘standing reserve’. His examples are typically drawn from proximity to the world of work and the land. The windmill draws the energy from the wind, and its sails ‘are left entirely to the wind’s blowing. But the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it’ (ibid.: 286). What changes under technology is the transformation of nature into its captured potential. Where once the Rhine’s force imposed itself through its direct physical being, it now exists as ‘held in storage’: In the context of the interlocking processes pertaining to the orderly disposition, even the Rhine itself appears as something at our command. The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank over hundreds of years. Rather, the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a power supplier, derives from out of the essence of the power station. (ibid.: 287)

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The natural force of a river (we may call this its analogical, connective, continuous force) is quite different to the being of that river as a potential force stored by a hydroelectric dam (or the digital content: storing energy as potential). Digital colour, unlike analogue colour, can be stored and transported in this way. Indeed, the phenomenon of digital colour exhibits a high degree of versatility in both these regards. It can be transported quickly and efficiently as information; or it can be stored fairly conveniently, and be reproduced or copied on demand. In short, digital colour can exist as standing reserve. But its existence as standing reserve sets it in opposition to its grounding in the connective sense, for electronic digital colour is not attached to or grounded in a medium as such. The colour red on a computer screen does not have fidelity with its ground, because the prismatic quality of the liquid crystal display is capable of becoming any colour according to the electrical charge passing through the material. Digital electronic colour has no lasting connection to its immediate setting, and does not arise out of it in a durational arrangement. In Heidegger’s terms, digital colour therefore has no ‘relevance’. If we refer to Heidegger’s famous essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, we can identify the work of art as subscribing to the idea of relevance. Heidegger refers to a building or the presence of a building, such as an ancient Greek temple, in terms of its ‘embedded-ness’ or bound-up relationship with its environment. The stones pick up the sun’s rays and refer us back to the sky; they draw on the ground and produce an awareness of the land: ‘The luster and gleam of the stone, though itself apparently glowing only by the grace of the sun, yet first brings to light the light of the day, the breadth of the day, the darkness of the night’ (Heidegger 2001: 41). The stone is never exhausted in its use in the temple, likewise ‘the painter also uses pigment, but in such a way that color is not used up but rather only now comes to shine forth’ (ibid.: 46). In these terms such colour’s being, as art, is ‘the setting up of a world and the setting forth of an earth’. Digital colour’s being is not defined in this manner, however, and must be more closely related to two other factors, the first being its gathering together in electronic technology and the second its embodied element. Digital colour has not always been destined to disconnection from its setting. It once existed in contrast to its later incarnation as standing reserve, as bound up in the (analogue) world. We must therefore introduce, as Heidegger does, a historical dimension to the appearance of digital colour, to suggest that the being of digital colour is not limited only to its status as standing reserve, or to its determination by or through electronic and electrical technologies. In fact, early types of digital imagery predated both the use of digitality as standing reserve and the involvement of digital information in electronic technology. A significant example, the world of the mosaic, enables us to see the digital emerging out of

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‘earth’ and into a cultural world. Digital colour preceded electronic technology, because any form of image that presents colours as discrete or as divided into separate units is digital, as in the case of needlepoint or mosaics. In this context, before industrialization and mass production, digital colour was generally expressed as a matter of judgement rather than calculation. The adjoining of discrete units of colour in a Byzantine mosaic was not organized with reference to an abstract code, but composed according to visual trial and error – as craft rather than technology. The mosaic emphasizes the embodied relation of such imagery and colour. Digital colour is expressed in a different relation of eye, hand, body, space and material in a matrix that links nature to world. The orderly grid of calculation and machine technology was yet to come. Colours, while discrete, were composed according to a sense of the maker who placed colour rather than the machine which computed it. According to Heidegger this elementary arrangement bespoke a use of colour, material and form that emerged from the ‘earth’ into the (socio-cultural) world. The hues and tones connected the image/figure to a ground. Colours emerge from nature, from materials, and connect to the world in ‘a’ place, rather than emergent from or as ‘any place’. Unlike modern electronic digital colour, standing reserve was absent. This ‘worlding’ sets colour in nature, but lets it reveal itself from it. This mode of colour relationship is also present in Merleau-Ponty’s (2000) thought. In his book, he speaks of two modes of colour: one is attached to material (pots, canvas, fabrics); the other connects with a cultural memory of, say, all reds in the world, and all they do and can symbolize or signify. The color is yet a variant in another dimension of variation, that of its relations with the surroundings: this red is what it is only by connecting up from its place with other reds about it, with which it forms a constellation, or with other colors it dominates or that dominate it, that it attracts or that attract it, that it repels or that repel it. In short, it is a certain node in the woof of the simultaneous and the successive. It is a concretion of visibility, it is not an atom. The red dress a fortiori holds with all its fibers onto the fabric of the visible, and thereby onto a fabric of invisible being. A punctuation in the field of red things, which includes the tiles of roof tops, the flags of gatekeepers and of the Revolution, certain terrains near Aix or in Madagascar, it is also a punctuation in the field of red garments, which includes, along with dresses of women, robes of professors, bishops. (Merleau-Ponty 2000: 132)

Mosaic colour sprang from the ‘earth’ in Heidegger’s terms and is connected to a ‘field’ in Merleau-Ponty’s. This world of connection is what Heidegger in another context called relevance, or the ‘what-for of serviceability’. In his version of the being of beings, including

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colour presumably, ‘To be relevant means to let something be together with something else. The relations of ‘together … with … is to be indicated by the term reference’ (Heidegger 2003b: 114). The problem of digital colour persists, however. In its electrical and electronic manifestation, standing reserve and the technological frame set it apart from nature, world and meaning. How does this ‘irrelevance’ work in relation to the body (as well as the eye)?

Flesh-tones: Colour, the Body and Media Technologies Whereas such analogue colour, prepixelated colour or natural colour is ‘saturated’ – replete with the body of its maker and disposed towards the body/eye of the viewer – computer colour appears in a different frame of relevance. Colours in the former genus of images were composed digitally by hand (‘digit’ meaning ‘finger’). They were made and set under glaze according to the maker, and in these early appearances of digital imagery, they were not only reckoned on being seen, but taking into account the position of the seer. This setting up of colour existed as it were with the viewer in mind: not just the viewer’s eye, but also the viewer’s position, above, in front of, or below the image. Mosaic – the first digital manifestations of colour – was composed in order to be seen at a range of distances, decomposing its cohesive identity as the viewer approached. The setting-up of colour in this relation of body, eye and medium imposes a figure-ground arrangement in which digital colour adopts the mantle of the analogical the further away from the body it appears, and each digital unit appears out of the analogical field the closer the viewer approaches it. The body and eye’s connection to preelectronic digital colour tells a story of a kind of perceptual inversion, one which is set in motion by electronic imaging technology. By ‘inversion’ we mean the switch historically between the constituting perception of the body and eye in relation to preelectronic imaging and the constituting abilities of the electronic digital image itself. Before the electronic era, images were contained or crystallized in a bodily relationship to the subject, composed of textural materials such as pigment, glass, paper and ink, and held in a particular arrangement. Simply put, the images remained stationary, and the changing position of the viewer enlarged the scale of the image in their visual field and the ratio of the image to its surroundings. This arrangement applies to pointillist paintings as well as mosaics. Latenineteenth-century theories of perception and colour, such as Chevreul’s, concerned themselves with this embodied and sensory attitude, focusing in some cases on optical mixing from the point of view of the eye and its proximity to the canvas (Chevreul 1987). Here, the eye is a vehicle and has its own kind of zoom lens, or mixing desk. It prefigures the annexation of this procedure by the technology of

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twentieth-century mature cinematography, which introduced the zoom lens, leaving enlargement and scale to the discretion of the camera rather than to the object or person filmed approaching the camera, or the viewer moving in front of a painting. With the advent of new technologies such as virtual reality, the chiasmus, or crossing, of human vision and computer technology comes into being. As Rheingold says, ‘our eyes are stereo input devices; our eyeballs and necks are sophisticated, multiple degree-of-freedom gimbals for moving our stereo sensors. We are elements in an information ecology that creates the useful illusion we call “reality”’ (Rheingold 1991: 63). Mid-twentieth-century zooming is the bridging point between the image that requires the moving body to compose it or indeed enter it, and the later digital computational imaging technology which is able to zoom in and out of an image, leaving the eye and body with nothing to do but react. Colour will become the object and instrument of this change from body to technology. In precomputational digital colour, such as pointillism, the eye and the body act constitutively, their proximity from the image rendering the colours as more or less discrete, depending on the distance. The body in a sense ‘is’ the image, ‘is’ the place of and theatre for digital colour. It is the field in which the image coheres and falls apart. Preelectronic ‘digital’ colour sets itself up in the world in a ‘thick’ relationship to its ground and to the body. Electronically manipulatable digital colour is ontologically a ‘thin’ relationship, in which the manipulation lies on the side of technology, the body becoming as it were a projection screen on which the standing reserve makes its mark, or where colours and images ‘play themselves out’. Here, the body is a node. There is a further consequence of this shift in emphasis from the body as constituting subject to the machine as constitutive object. Now colour has become ‘mechanical’, leaving the body simply reactive rather than proactive and detached equally from a field or world in the senses outlined above, we are faced with a question concerning digital colour and imagery in general. It is one of the truth-status of the image, and it is one that permeates discourses on digital imaging. What type of truth (or being of truth) subtends such images and colours? We have already suggested that digital colour has lost its ‘relevance’ in Heidegger’s terms, by dint of the absence of the truth, in his view, in its mode of being (i.e. its lack of being connected to and with an earth and world, or ‘field’ in Merleau-Ponty’s view). Yet another form of being – an inferior or secondary mode in Heidegger’s view – continues to haunt the ontology of digital electronic colour. This form is one cast as dissimulative or simulated. Digital electronic images are predicated, in other words, on their capacity to deceive, either by pretending to be other than they are, or feigning existence as something they are not.

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We can identify this in the marked shift towards a postanalogue discourse in which the emphasis, perhaps mistakenly from a Heideggerean perspective, is on the epistemology of a digital image (‘how can we know that it represents the truth?’) rather than its ontology (‘how can we establish what it is?’). In Heidegger’s thought the latter ontology is more clearly expressible when connecting digital colour to a more primordial idea of being (e.g. standing reserve) than to the representational model of such colour, because the latter bogs us down in issues of representation, misrepresentation, simulation and dissimulation. Manipulation of digital colour occurs at the level of basic colour elements and of the image or images themselves. The problem that Kittler and others highlight is one not only of being ‘taken in’ by a manipulated image but of being unable to recognize manipulation when looking for it – even on the closest examination in close-up.

Colours That Lie: Digitality and Truth As Kittler states (2001: 32), digital colour succeeds what he calls the ‘semi-analog medium of television’, resolving not only the horizontal lines but also the vertical columns of the screen into basic units. Colour is no longer the product of a cathode ray fired rapidly and sequentially at a phosphor-coated screen; each colour value is assigned a precise geometric coordinate on the horizontal and vertical, in addition to its chromatic value as a ratio of red, green and blue. For the first time, this conjunction of technology and digitality enables colours to be altered at a basic level: ‘Now, for the first time in the history of optical media, it is possible to address a single pixel in the 849th row and 720th column directly without having to run through everything before and after it.’ This has a consequence for the ontological status of the computer image that pixels collectively compose. Kittler concludes that such an image of bits ‘is thus prone to falsification to a degree that already gives television producers and ethics watchdogs the shivers; indeed, it is forgery incarnate. It deceives the eye, which is meant to be unable to differentiate between individual pixels, with the illusion or image of an image’ (ibid.: 32). This mode of falsification is of an order different to analogue forgery because it composes the deception at a pixel-by-pixel level, altering the value of different pixels, or magnifying the image in order to alter blocks of colour – to remove a blemish on an image, for example. The developing historiography of the digital image rightly emphasizes this shift in the capacity of images – and their colours – to generate representations artificially, to present images as if they are true to the world, to effortlessly build pictures from constituent units. Such a history sets up the ‘truth’ of digital colour on the basis of an

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inherent uncertainty: how can we ever know if this or that image is more than merely the ‘image of an image’? We can also observe that such images contain within themselves another form of uncertainty, one that lies on another axis, and one that we glimpsed on occasions when our awareness of digital imagery as constructed and constructing comes to the fore. Certainly, we are ‘taken in’ by digital images, but beyond the immediate difficulty of judging whether such and such a colour is in any way relatable ‘truthfully’ to an origin or setting discussed above, there remains the technological question that permeates our experience of these colours as ‘tools’ rather than (deceptive) signs. Digital colour’s ontology must adumbrate its tool-like nature in order to shift focus from its sign-like character. Heidegger’s phenomenology of handiness and ‘un-handiness’ is useful here. In many ways digital colours are like the famous Heideggerian hammer, which is never objectively present as a ‘thing’ until it breaks (thus becoming ‘unhandy’, conspicuous, obtrusive and obstinate): The structure of being of what is at hand as useful things is determined by references. The peculiar and self-evident ‘in itself’ of the nearest ‘things’ is encountered when we take care of things, using them but not paying specific attention to them, while bumping into things that are unusable. Something is unusable. This means that the constitutive reference of the in-order-to to a what-for has been disturbed. (Heidegger 2003b: 105)

Digital colour is a tool in the fullest sense of Heidegger’s phenomenology. When not paid specific attention, its usefulness lies in its capacity to be ‘determined by references’. It works towards representing something, being something else, composing an image. As such it is transparent, for its usability lies in its connection to the ‘what-for’ of colour. When such colour breaks down – either intentionally, when the graphic designer magnifies an area of an image to work on the constituent blocks of colour, or unintentionally when ‘drop out’3 occurs – it becomes obtrusive. The ‘in-order-to’ becomes disrupted as attention is focused on the colour itself rather than on what it represents. When digital images decompose into their discrete blocks we have a ‘breach’ in our terms of reference. We experience colour as an entity whose being both discloses itself as technology and forecloses itself as reference. We bump into colours when they become obtrusively magnified or abstracted into static tessellations (when the processor cannot adequately do its job of remaking the moving image from ‘frame’ to ‘frame’ or find its way transparently through them to the image they constitute). The abiding difference between ‘digital colour as tool’ and ‘hammer as tool’ is that the former is designed from the outset to be broken down and paid attention to. Unlike the hammer, which fails when broken, digital colour thrives on its capacity to flip between

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transparency and reference (i.e. used to represent or provide form) and obtrusiveness. Indeed, its obtrusiveness – where for example an image of a person’s face is magnified until blocks of colour replace it, the latter then being altered in order to remove a blemish – operates as both obdurate and handy. Indeed, the colours themselves become the tools. Only glitches such as ‘drop out’ would recast them as obdurate in Heidegger’s original sense of being ‘uselessly’ ‘in the way’. Heidegger’s binary of usefulness and uselessness appears in a unique combination within the ontological framework of electronic digital colour. While Heidegger’s concept of handiness has to be upgraded to accommodate this mutable arrangement at the core of digital electronic colour, it simultaneously grants the possibility of assessing such colours and images beyond their status as representations, symbols or signs. An approach to digital colour that remains attentive to its ambiguous and expedient location within the sensory, cultural and technological matrix described above, and the consequences such a complex arrangement has for its perception and conception within the technological life-world it inhabits, may well provide a less certain but more revealing account not only of its ‘truth’ but also of the unique conditions that must be present for it to come into being.

Notes 1. Such colour is a phenomenon that in McLuhan’s formulation is partly conditioned as ‘light through’ (as in the example of stained glass) rather than ‘light on’ (McLuhan 1987: 313). It is a form of emanation of light. It signals the gradual removal of the digital image from the analogue world of pigment and light reflection, and the culmination of computer colour as light through a screen. The latter is composed in an additive rather than subtractive way. Unlike pigment, or such matter printed on a paper surface to absorb or ‘subtract’ certain frequencies of light and reflect back certain others, electronic colour comprises the mixing of frequencies, adding one to another, with the absence of them making black and the aggregation of those lying in the range of human visual perception making white. 2. Here, video hardware is using a process of replication to make the image detail easier to work with; each image pixel is replicated to create a 3x3 or 4x4 grid of identical values. These grids appear on the screen as solid colour squares, made up of many screen pixels. 3. ‘Drop out’ happens when the processing speed of the computer fails to keep pace with the coding it receives. Blocks of colour appear on screen in place of the still or moving image.

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Bibliography Achterhuis, H. (ed.). 2001. American Philosophy of Technology: The Empirical Turn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Chevreul, M.E. 1987. The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors and their Applications to the Art. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing. Coyne, R. 1994. ‘Heidegger and Virtual Reality: The Implications of Heidegger’s Thinking for Computer Representations’, Leonardo 27(1): 65–73. Heidegger, M. [1971] 2001. ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Perennial Classics. ———. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row. ———. 2003a. ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in Martin Heidegger: Philosophical and Political Writings. New York, London: Continuum. ———. [1927] 2003b. ‘An Analysis of Environmentality and Worldliness in General’, in Martin Heidegger: Philosophical and Political Writings. New York, London: Continuum. Ihde, D. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kittler, F.A. 2001. ‘Computer Graphics: A Semi-Technical Introduction’, trans. S. Ogger, Grey Room 2 Winter: 30–45. McLuhan, M. 1987. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. Merleau-Ponty, M. 2000. The Visible and the Invisible. Paris: Editions Gallimard; Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Rheingold, H. 1991. Virtual Reality. New York; Toronto: Summit Books. Smith. A.R. 1995. ‘A Pixel is Not a Little Square, A Pixel is Not a Little Square, A Pixel is Not a Little Square!! (And a Voxel is Not a Little Cube)’, Technical Memo 6, Microsoft, 17 July. Retrieved 11 October 2007 from http//:www. cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall00/cs426/papers/smith95b.pdf

 CHAPTER 8 

THE DISILLUSION OF THE IMAGE: CINEMATOGRAPHY, COLOUR, SOUND AND DESIRE Liz Watkins A Deleuzian reading of colour and sound in The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) examines the mutability of cinematic meaning as a supplementary register and ‘material’ for the formation of a female imaginary (Whitford 1986: 3-8) that elides the prescriptions of feminine desire that feminist analyses identified in classic narrative form. The interactions of colour, sound, and the residual effects of the film as a photographic material, elicit a sense of movement beyond that of a figure traversing the image or of celluloid winding through the spools of a projector. Deleuze’s theory of the endlessly shifting configurations of cinematographic elements that form the movementimage, suggests that colour, sound and a sense of the photographic (light, shadow, diffusion), constitute a transient framework through which to theorize a form of subjectivity. The question of the sexual indifference of Deleuzian theory is revisited through the work of Luce Irigaray, to suggest that movement distracts and takes up new meaning as it disturbs the formal delineations of image and narrative familiar to classic Hollywood cinema. The intersections of Irigarayan and Deleuzian theory offer a way to address moments in the film that perform a critique of the cinematic codes that feminist enquiry into cinema initially found to be determinants feminine desire. Annie Goldson has noted that The Piano traverses the criteria of art house and mainstream cinema, paradoxically being funded independently but sustaining the ‘look’ of a Hollywood film to ‘deliver the emotional impact of a popular melodrama’ (Goldson 1997: 276). The involvement of a female protagonist in a story of desire and entrapment is detailed through a sense of the domestic, of interior spaces and familial structures, within which her daughter’s fantasies suggest Ada’s ‘silence’ in spoken language as a mark of mourning.

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Feminist readings of The Piano have tended to focus on Ada, discerning progression and desire in her ability to control the gaze (Bruzzi 1995; Gillet 1995; Goldson 1997) and her decision not to speak as a form resistance to the phallocentric orientation of the subject in language. While theories of the gaze tend to operate at the level of shots, framing and the close-up to discern a structure of ‘looks’ (spectator, camera, characters) that is gendered, this structure also manipulates the tensions between absence and presence, plenitude and loss, as a source of fascination for the spectator and so persists in enacting an imbalance of power. Critical engagements with this form of analysis have emphasized the specificities of film as an audio-visual medium beyond signification at the level of image and dialogue, or individual shots and edits, whilst the juxtaposition of sound and image has been addressed as a supplementary and interrogative form of signification. Mary Ann Doane, Kaja Silverman and Michel Chion have explored the presence and absence of sound, voice and music as components of a signifying complex that is susceptible to social and cultural positioning of the subject. Such theories indicate the vitality of non-visual registers in what has been primarily analysed as a visual medium. Chion’s attention to the voice reaches as far as silence and the affectivity of the body as a locus of the gestures and sounds that sketch its potential as a ground of signification (Chion 1999: 168). Chion writes of The Piano’s heroine that ‘the irresistible desire to make the beloved woman speak (“to say my name”) is shown as a sort of impulse to rape’ (ibid.: 169), indicating violence in the determination to make her speak in accordance with phallocentric language. This discourse of the voice is directed toward the writing of the desire of language on to her body. It is in this sense that Ada’s ‘silence’ as resistance is through a form of communication that is a more fluid and sensuous register of a ‘voice’ that incorporates the signifying capacity of the body beyond verbal articulation of meaning or confinement to single facet or image of the film. Michel Chion’s brief analysis of The Piano does not, however, engage with the social, cultural and psychic constructions of subjectivity or the sexual specificities of feminine desire. Silverman and Doane have tracked the significance of psyche and soma within sexually differentiated formations of subjectivity by identifying the proscriptive and gendered cinematic codes and narrative play of classic Hollywood cinema (Doane 1980, 1996; Silverman 1988). A Deleuzian attention to the materiality of the film as a site of mutable meanings traces the interrelations of variations in colour, shifts from diegetic to extra-diegetic sound, and the movements of the body. This sense of movement is elicited by visual and sonorous aspects of the film and so operates across numerous registers to counter the dominance of image and dialogue and reframe the familiar.

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A Deleuzian sense of cinema discerns shifting constellations of sound and colour as a movement that offers a potential mode of thinking about subjectivity and desire. In The Piano, cinematic registers refigure established patterns of representation, operating through various saturations of colour, cyclical patterns of music and the detailing of minute sounds as they interact with sweeping camera movements and numerous close-ups, to enfold the intricacies of perception and action in the cinematic medium. Minutiae, the faint, and the residual aspects of the filmic are sifted from its depths and drawn into the midst of the image, enacting and eliciting perception as desire. This movement is elicited by a photographic effect and incites a shift in the viewer’s attention to the cinematic codes familiar to narrative cinema. An engagement with the mutable configurations of cinema is with the flux and flow of affect that can be discussed through Deleuze’s concept of the movement-image. For Deleuze, listening, music and writing are desires. The movement-image, which enfolds the aesthetics of cinema and medium, seems predisposed to refiguring theories of desire and the ideological complicity of cinema. However, Deleuze’s attention to a film history which establishes networks of similarity, persistence and change through various formulations that depend on embodied conceptuality, does not acknowledge the sexual politics and questions of sexual difference that are integral to the theorisation of desire at the level of the image, shots and edits, colour and sound as facets of narrative cinema. The sense of subjectivity that persists in the surge and flow of affect through cinematographic configurations is drawn from Deleuze’s theory of becomings. Becoming-woman as a condition of all becomings, disinherits subjectivity from the sexual specificities of the body. Luce Irigaray’s negotiations with Deleuzian theory through the interrogative form of analysis focuses on the physicality of body and fluids (pressure, erosion) as a dimension of signification that tends be overlooked by the social and cultural construction of an idealised image of woman. Irigaray’s theory of subjectivity and the feminine and desire offers a way to engage with the transience and convergence of Deleuzian cinema. The Piano orientates expression around the female protagonist through the interplay of gesture, colour, sound and music within a narrative that emphasizes significance of a mother-daughter relationship within cultural and social constructions of femininity. In her article ‘Playing Jane Campion’s Piano Politically’, Carol Jacobs details the materiality of the photographic itself as evocative of the body in its divergence for the production of an immediately legible image, presenting one that is instead ‘unfocussed like a failed and developed colour negative of translucent vessels of blood’ (Jacobs 1994: 769). This opening sequence reveals the flicker of light filtered through the as yet undetermined form of fingers. Blushed with a colour we will rarely encounter in this film the protagonist’s hands

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are arched over her eyes. This sequence prioritizes the body as expressive and establishes movement that is constituted of light, colour and sound as a supplementary form of signification within the visual field.1 The movement constituted by the interrelations and resonance of colour and sound permeate and disturb the spectator’s perception of the formal structures of cinematic representation. Desire is evoked by this movement, rather than bound to a character at the level of dialogue and image. The orientation of movement through the subjective position (from point of view shot, or perception, to affect and action-image) offers a way to explore the intonations of the body. Character and dialogue operate as coordinates within an inscription of subjectivity. Deleuzian theory, however, reframes the methodology of film analysis that operates at the level of narrative and image. The dissolution of the distinction between subjects and objects shifts the focus of analysis away from texts that have suggested the piano itself as the object of Ada’s desire (Hoeveler 1998; Hendershot 1998); the piano, rather, offers another mediating space through which desire emerges as expression to form a new relationship to language. At any moment the photographic resolution of the film as it can be understood in terms of variations in light, shadow and colour is interpreted by the spectator as a legible image. The visual organisation of the image is, however, the residual effect of differing levels of reaction and inaction in the photographic emulsion as both light sensitive material and ground of the film. In this sense, filmic colour is not bound to the visibility of individual objects but subsists as variation integral to the perception of the image. The residual effects of the film as a photographic material are emphasized in certain sequences by a colour practice in which ‘some tints drain scenes, imparting otherworldliness’ (Carr 1999: 169). Towards the end of the film ‘when we finally see an underwater scene … we realise its quality of underwaterness has been replicated earlier, on land’ (ibid.: 169). Here, colour bears a trace of its prior occurrence where flux and flow elicit a rhythm; the movement that this constitutes participates in the disillusion of the resolution of film narrative and image.

Colour, Movement and Spatiality In his cinema books, Gilles Deleuze writes critically of Metz’s analogy of language and film, which, tied to its development as a narrative form, tends to close down other possible directions. Deleuze suggests that cinematic codes, like components of language systems, deny the most ‘visibly authentic characteristic’ of the cinematographic ‘movement’ (Deleuze 1994: 27).2 Although the superimposition, repetition and juxtaposition of images can be manipulated to the predominantly narrative form of mainstream cinema, Deleuze’s

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attention to the materiality of the film identifies the potential of characteristics specific to the cinematographic, such as movement, to constitute and elide images and signs. In this sense, Deleuze discusses cinema in terms of matter and form, whereby matter can be understood as unformed elements that exist prior to assemblages of images and sounds. Colour and rhythm can be drawn together in formations which accumulate and disperse through an endless flux of assemblages. In a cinematic sense, the movement-image is prelinguistic; it is formed of matter that is not entirely reducible, or attributable to the fixity of codes. Similarly, movement is not simply added to the image as a series of immobile film stills passing through a projector, but is directly experienced as an integral part of the film as the viewer perceives it (Deleuze 1997: 2). For Deleuze, affect does not blend into the indifference of the place or time it appears (1997: 96). Rather, it can be understood as diffuse, but not diluted within the predominant form of cinematic representation. Affect can be traced as the continuous exchange and recurrence of characteristics that are abstracted or dislocated from the legibility of image composition, such as the movement evoked by the complex relationship between patterns of music and imbricate colour forms in the opening sequence of The Piano. To recall, a pool of red light suffuses the screen and is threaded with cool grey shadows that undulate beneath the repetitive play of music. These vague forms dissolve and emerge into the new configurations, evoking a textural surface. The sounds that will form spoken words are uttered before the surface cuts through to the pallid image of a woman’s hands arched over her face. These sounds, organized into words and sentences, claim the image as their own in a delicate voice that seems to ache in its speaking, the imprint of a making whose purpose is lost. As the film cuts again her hands are transformed and the screen is filled with embryonic translucence; birdsong pressing through the music and her voice, light seeping through her skin. The edit that severs the first two shots is bound together by the sound of a voice which, without echo or visible bodily location, Michel Chion (1999) refers to as an I-voice or voice in close-up. In this sense affect is not contained by one element but can be traced simultaneously across several layers of the film. The motion of the abstract pattern of her hands in close-up elicits a texture within the colour image. This movement is picked up in a series of cuts between the interior and exterior shots of her hands to interweave their abstract elements rather than to comply to the formal categorization of shot reverse-shot, as both the source of each image and the relevance of their juxtaposition are not immediately apparent, but established through the repetition and reflected movement of a reverse perspective. In this sense, the abstract image which marks a sense of the body through vision is positioned as subjective in this configuration.

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The low depth of field in these images can also be tracked through the echoless sound of Ada’s voice. The movement that is perceived operates across variations in the intensities of colour and light that trace the undulating form of the legible image, and at the level of the audible through the spilling of breath drawn into the resonance of words. Deleuze (1997: 12) refers to such images as ‘saturated’. In this example the internal composition of the close-up can be traced in the external context of the sequence. The colouration and texture of the initial shot, which occurs prior to the counter-shot of Ada’s hands, reflects meaning back across it, tracing an interval where affect surges from the troubling of the spectator’s perception by a hesitation in the discernment of meaning before reflection declares the abstract image to be that of her hands. In this sense, the edits and framing of the film operate in close relation to the assembled colour image. This effect is emphasised as it is layered with the noise of cinematic ‘silence’ initiated into speech. This formation engages the viewer in a process that emphasizes characteristics susceptible to a reading in terms of touch, where resonance and texture can be traced through the sense of movement elicited in the interrelations of sound and image. This sequence offers a sensate inscription beyond analyses that read film as a predominantly ‘scopic regime’ (Metz 1977: 61–63), instead, marking subjectivity through the close proximity of framing, sound and colour in saturated form. The movement-image describes the visual effects of the complex interrelations of mise-en-scène with the variations of colour, tone, light that constitute them. These elements relate to the framing of the image and the effects of editing processes, such as superimposition, cuts and montage. These factors affect the viewer’s perception of the film. The twenty-four frames a second that facilitate but belie the cinematic illusion of movement are not experienced by the viewer as a unit or measure of time. Rather, in a Deleuzian sense, time is perceived of the movement which flows from a synthesis of images specific to each sequence of film. Movement can be traced across the juxtapositions and variations of sound and image and ‘always relates to change’ (Deleuze 1997: 8). Definitions such as these allow us to study cinema at a level that seems microscopic and is not bound to any ‘single’ facet or composition, but can be traced as the diffusion of one element in another like a solution of ink, liquid in its movements, unfurling and hesitating in response to the turn and pressure of the solution in which the two elements combine and disperse. In The Piano the physical characteristics of water (pressure, erosion) persist beyond its direct representation at the level of image and narrative to interact with the repetitive undulation of musical patterns and an environment imbued with the desaturated colour of the film. The framing, the camera’s movements and the use of filters affect the quality and colouration of the image as light is registered by the film, just as alterations in the pitch and clarity of music is interwoven with

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visual variations to elicit a rhythm that is specific to each cinematic sequence. The transitions and transformations of the material elements of the movement-image can consequently be described as signifying potentialities that are specific to film as a discourse that participates in, but can also disturb, cinematic codes. As a network of connections in perpetual dissolve these elements can potentially play a part in the formation of meaning for the viewer. The weaving of these elements, traced through movement and the interstices of each configuration is transient, continually changing to find new constellations and possibilities.3 Deleuze subdivides the movement-image into three types: the perception-image, the affection-image and the action-image. Each of these images is described as an ‘avatar’ or visible manifestation of the movement-image (Deleuze 1997: 65). The perception-image and action-image as subdivisions of the movement-image play through cinematographic transformations to engage the viewer’s subjective and empirical relation to the film from anticipation to the next ‘(new, worse or stable) situation’ (Frampton 1991). The imbricate and permeable layers of cinematographic elements allow Deleuze to describe the affection-image as that which occupies but is not defined or contained by the interval between perception and the action. The intensity of the affection-image emerges through layers of cinematographic elements or acts to mediate the exchange or path of intensity that is characteristic of the movement-image. Deleuze evokes the interval in a way that allows the affection-image to exceed the simple movement from one to the other, or from perceptionimage to the action-image. The interval does not simply interrupt the ‘direct propagation of movement that can be traced from received to executed movement which could be understood as translation, but rather reestablishes their relation to become a “movement of expression”’ (Deleuze 1997: 66). A movement such as this occurs towards the beginning of The Piano when we find Ada and Flora alone on the beach, with all that is familiar packed in the crates that surround them. Flora lies in her mother’s lap, the pale form of her face ensconced in the dark folds of their clothes. The sound of air rushing in from the sea crawls about her daughter’s face, sweeping through her hair as it unfurls about her. The ocean rolls back and towards unknown and blackened sands to swell and disperse through the air that surrounds them. In the expanse of an unfamiliar shoreline the camera turns left through the bleached colours of the beach, tracing the movement of Ada’s hand as she reaches towards the wooden casket of her piano. Fibres creak as the fractured wood stretches and tears in a movement contiguous with the subdual of the sea. Her arm sinks into the darkness of its interior and is absorbed from our sight. Although the film cuts to a familiar pattern of darkness and light, it demarcates a seemingly impossible place: inside the crate, close to the piano a pool

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of light falls with her hand. This image resonates with the paleness of her daughter’s skin, as her fingers press into the row of keys. The movement inside the crate marks an unusual camera angle and attention to detail through framing and chiaroscuro to draw the prosaic into the midst of film. It is in its intimacy that the trace of movement from the paleness of Flora’s skin to her mother’s hand held in the lull of sound and unrelenting bleached light of the desolate shore becomes an expression of their closeness and desire for each other. The paleness of the light is drawn to the viewer’s attention towards the end of the introductory sequence as the film titles have finally faded from the image; it is an immobile element, evocative of the stillness of a single frame, thrown into motion. Deleuze offers the analogy of a face for the close-up as a surface of receptive organs that ‘bring(s) to light these movements of expression while they remain most frequently buried in the rest of the body’ (Deleuze 1997: 66). For Deleuze this relationship describes the closeup in general, registering the affects of what happens elsewhere in the film (Deleuze 1997: 102). The close-up traces the reconnection of the affection-image with the reaction or action-image and so can be described as an expression which is neither entirely associated nor disassociated from affection. In this sense signification in film is not restricted to the movements and actions of characters within the narrative. The current of intensities from perception through affect to reaction is not sequential because of the instability of each ensemble as it permeates the boundaries and divisions of the text dissolving to offer a multiplicity of imbricate expressions.4 In some movement-images, colours and patterns of lighting may retain a trace of signification from linguistic and semiotic fields outside cinema, but like certain intensities of brightness or levels of saturation, individual colours do not offer a direct corollary of a particular sensation. While a colour and its associated meanings (the culturally specific semiotics of colour, such as red or blue, are layered with each viewer’s subjective response and the pattern and system of its recurrence with a particular film) can participate in a cinematic configuration, the configuration itself may be escharotic of meanings previously established in the system of a particular film. In Deleuzian cinema, a colour-image does not simply refer to a particular hue, but seems ‘to be defined by another characteristic, one which it shares with painting, but gives a different range and function. This is the absorbent characteristic’ (Deleuze 1997: 118). The particular colours of a cinematic image function in relation to the phenomenal characteristics of colour, which Deleuze describes as ‘an affect itself, that is the virtual conjunctions of all the objects which it picks up’ (ibid.). In this sense, the absorbent characteristics of colour influence the formation of onscreen space. The general colouration of an image, for example, tends to absorb what is identifiable of a particular hue so that differences in tone and (de)saturation reveal something

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about the perception of colour. Light casts a photographic image through the levels of reaction and inaction of photosensitive emulsion and influences the delineation of the onscreen space. The residual effects of the materiality of film itself can function as a coordinate within these virtual conjunctions. The perception of colour is relational; it depends on the context of colours that are layered with and surround it. Perception is subjective through the peculiarities of sight and memory, and informed by the visual resolution of its technological base whereby each film stock embodies its own colour ideology (Gunning 1996 57). In The Piano the use of colour alters the visual formation of sequences where the image appears to be enveloped by a blue-grey light that tends to ‘drain scenes’ of variation and so, in part, the contrasts upon which spatial delineation is dependent (Carr 1999: 169; Feldvoss 1999: 99). The compression of this form of colouration in the movementimage elicits what Deleuze (1997: 111, 120) refers to as an ‘any-spacewhatever’. An ‘any-space-whatever’ can be understood as extracted from determinate space into the potential of indeterminacy, or interval, of an affection-image; a cinematic moment that is dislocated from the visual organisation of the architectural composition and temporality of the film. Cinematic temporality allows sheets of past and present to coexist. For example, the recurrence of a characteristic, first encountered elsewhere in the film, can evoke an association that establishes a new meaning. The layering of visual information through superimposition or the replaying of a sequence can confound the sense of determined space established in surrounding sequences, instead forming an interval through which it is possible to trace the affection-image: Affection is what occupies the interval, what occupies it without filling it in or filling it up. It surges in the centre of indetermination, that is to say in the subject, between perception which is troubling in certain respects and a hesitant action. It is a coincidence of subject and object, or the way in which the subject perceives itself, or rather experiences itself or feels itself ‘from the inside’. (Deleuze 1997: 65)

In The Piano, the desaturation of certain sequences invokes other images in a way that implies the forest as an underwater environment. The threading of such sequences with abstract images suggests that the entrapment of laborious mud and entangled branches is prescient of the penultimate section of the film in which the restrictive volume of Ada’s clothes, liquid in their movements, are determined by the sea currents that drift around her tethered to her piano. The sense of movement that operates through series of associations can be theorised as a form of expression that distracts from the shots and edits that structure Ada’s point of view and engage the spectator. The absorbent characteristics of colour offer another register, of troubled

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perception, that foreshadows the fluctuations and flow of affect through the dislocation of images.

Voice: Sound, Colour and Transformation In a sequence where Ada, Flora and Baines first return to the beach, the general colouration of the film imbues the movement-image with a watery appearance, flooding the complexions of mother and daughter.5 The camera turns slowly in circles, continually inscribing a new perspectives through which to trace the three figures as they follow circuitous paths through the expanse of the beach, weaving a complex web of movements. This image is interwoven with three subsections of music; the first is the sound of the piano recorded in close-up and with little variation in volume, a familiar theme but in this instance it is layered over the shots and edits that form the sequence; the second is diegetic and seems to be situated amidst the players. This subsection is faint in relation to its predecessor as it merges with the sound of the ocean, and diminishes as the camera draws back from a close-shot of Ada and Flora playing the piano. As the third subsection emerges, we find that it is formed of instruments other than the piano. The exchange between these two is contemporaneous with the transposition to an overhead shot of the beach. The second section of music registers the movement of the camera as the image fades as both light and the variety of the piano player’s touch begin to languish. This dissolve elicits another movement from image to sound as the movement-image itself adopts an ‘almost musical value’ (Deleuze 1997: 121). This sense of movement is echoed as stanzas are replayed. A review of the composer Michael Nyman’s work on this film recognizes this process as the assembling of ‘complete pieces from fragments which are repeated and allowed to develop in a morphing fashion’.6 Amy Herzog (2001a: 225) writes that in cinema ‘“music performs” as a fibrous core throughout the text … the force of the song transects the film’s multiple layers, swelling within and through characters’. In The Piano, music shifts within the diegesis from orchestral recordings to those made of Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin on set. These layers are interspersed with ambient sounds, the resonance of the piano directing our attention towards particular details within the imagetrack through its tonalities and speeds. For a moment within the complexity of this sequence, the film rests on a close-up which is shadowed in colour. This configuration of visual-images and soundimages foregrounds the shifting relationship between them. The close-up frames Ada’s and Flora’s hands playing the piano through a haze of colour and the skeletal crate, the timbre of their touch permeating the occurrence of sounds. The visual-image, condensed through colour and nearness of framing, rests on the choreography of

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their hands, whilst the difference of Flora’s playing can be discerned through the harshness of her touch, the fall of each finger slightly but perceptibly displaced from the anticipated resonance of the instrument. The pattern she has learnt from her mother also traces their difference, a dislocation within the complex form of a movement-image which elicits a hesitation, an interval through which affect spills. The repetition and variation in the music are manipulated to trace patterns and pressures of touch, a practice which extends to the communicative form enacted by Ada. Initiated through a voice-over that declares itself her ‘mind’s voice’, the film traces the rhythms and mediations that mark her interactions with the environment and its inhabitants: the written word is reiterated through sound of a pencil tapping, the balletic gestures of her arms weaving a tale about her daughter in a skirt-frame shelter on the beach, Flora’s translations of her signing, the texture of her clothes as the movement of her body brushes against them, of the music played, and the guttural sounds that spill from her throat in the scene where Stewart drags her from ‘his’ house. The communicative form sought elides the privileging of visual delineation, transgressing shot structures in a mode that is suggestive of the subjective processes of psyche and soma. This sense of movement traces expression at the level of the cinematographic that differs from the use of cinematic codes of classic narrative cinema and that feminist theorists have specified as phallocentric. Michel Chion’s analysis of the signification of the voice in cinema describes both the I-voice and object-voice. The I-voice is a ‘voice in exile’ (Chion 1999: 52) disembodied from the visual track and the resonance or echo that would locate it in a certain space. The dislocation of an I-voice, such as a voice-over, is subjective as it narrates a corresponding image. For a voice to operate as a point of identification, Chion tells us that it cannot be inscribed into a concrete or, as Deleuze might call it, a determined space. Although the spoken voice to which Chion primarily refers can be bound into shot structures such as those that have been analysed through theories of the gaze, the I-voice can also move outside of these structures. In The Piano, the transition between I-voice and object-voice operates through patterns of interaction and resistance that occur between the complex layers of cinematographic elements. Ada and Flora communicate through an intricate system of gestures, signing, written words, dancing, listening and music, so that the expression and reception of information flows through a framework of understanding that is sensitive to the circumstances and environments in which they find themselves. Sight, touch and sound are integral to the piano and to the note pad which Ada wears around her neck, each as a space through which communication is initiated. Their communications overlap and resist, eliciting a force that seems critical of the exclusivity of the visual and aural registers of the film,

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the complexity and fluidity of their interactions suspending Chion’s privileging of spoken words as the realm of the voice. Kaja Silverman notes Chion’s analysis as exceptional, but more specifically examines the signifying potentialities of voice and sound for inscriptions of female subjectivity in cinema. Silverman identifies a moment in Chion’s theory where he admits that the mother’s voice traces a ‘subversion of closure’ (Chion 1999: 61) and continuum across intrauterine, infantile and primary moments the formation of subjectivity. For the child, this maternal voice has the all-seeing, allknowing traits of the acousmêtre and in this sense would seem ‘to be the original prototype for the disembodied voice-over in cinema’ (Silverman 1988: 76).7 In classic Hollywood cinema a determinant of the threat of the maternal voice is through its dislocation from the image of woman as spectacle. Silverman states that this is enacted in psychoanalysis and cinema through the ‘substitution of the child for the mother in the fantasmatic tableau’ (ibid.: 99) so that while the voice-over ‘transcends the body’, that which is bound to its visual presence onscreen is fragile and vulnerable (ibid.: 72–100). The ability to move from disembodied to embodied voice denotes the agency of subjectivity, a dynamic that is vital to the protagonist. However, the body that Silverman describes is that of a figure on the cinema screen, whilst in The Piano both the body and voice are evoked in intricate detail through the interrelations of the visible and invisible. This process is established in the opening sequence of the film as the protagonist is introduced both through sound and words that speak of her past across the luminosity of an image that is then revealed as that of her hands. The intensity and saturation of colour and the timbre and tone of her voice persist through the translucence of the image as her childlike voice-over initiates the complexity of the relationship between mother and daughter. This form of communication disrupts the substitution recognized by Silverman of classic Hollywood cinema, to trace a form of interaction that is endlessly refigured. The mother’s voice is not sequestered by the child, but coexists, marked by difference, each with their own tales, each questioning boundaries.8 The voice operates in The Piano as a texture of visual and aural elements that through the use of ‘close-miking’ also registers touch; this can be found in the intonation of Ada’s piano playing, the brush of clothes as she signs, her harsh expulsions of breath and the furious reiterations remarked on the notepad. In such moments their allegiance and indifference continually shifts, but carries reverberations that refigure the exclusivity of the realm of spoken words to embody rather than create the cinematic illusion. In this sense, the transition from object-voice to subject-voice does not enact a division or disembodiment, but seems to affect a change within the cinematography itself, eliciting the interval of the affection-image so

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that it is these transformations, rather than the spoken words of Chion’s voices, trace the inscription of subjectivity. In The Piano this voice is carried by the pressures, reflections and permeations of breath in language and the interrelations of imagery, sound and cinematographic. In certain sequences the volume of Ada’s piano playing overlaps and absorbs the sound of the sea, just as the light of the forest and the shoreline that affect the watery tint of her skin seem to draw her into the sea mist. These effects operate across image and sound to embody a sense of Ada being drawn into the mud of the New Zealand forest and eventually the sea. This struggle persists throughout the film: we hear the mud churn and clasp her as she clambers through it, its touch registering as it marks her clothes; a spectre of smoke gently blown from a forest burnt into dereliction trails about her. Stewart watches through a crumpled thickness of glass, as an embodiment of his perception, a refraction and distortion of her form.9 The child Flora, in the jealousy of an Oedipal rage, repeatedly acts against and endangers her mother. Spurned, if only for a while, for the attentions of Baines, Flora runs to Stewart calling him to enforce retribution upon the passion of her mother. The skies darken and the camera cuts through a series of awkward and exaggerated angles prescient of the chaos to ensue. Ada’s body utters and grunts in shock against the physical force of Stewart’s rage. The sound of rain and thunder crackles through endless rounds of piano music, obfuscating the words that Stewart shouts and the demands that he makes. In his most direct assault on her body, this time with the blade of an axe, she sinks into the mud, her sodden skirt flat with the ground and her torso obscene in its silence, tilting above the surface of the liquid earth. The detailed sound of fabric tearing from the house registers touch as Ada clings to it in desperation, but as the axe falls and the music stops it is Flora’s voice that we hear scream in place of her mother’s silent mouth. In this instance, violence lies both in the direct assault of her body and in the cessation of the mode of expression that has established her as protagonist. The disorder of her forced utterance, the spectacle of the attack, paradoxically seems to be marked as that of the threatening acousmêtre. The Piano plays on the discourse of classic narrative cinema whilst establishing and returning, in a rhythm specific to the interrelations of image, sound and the cinematographic to trace the ‘voice’ as expressive rather than bound to a single character, dialogue or dimension of the film. Flora does not sequester the image of mother, but temporarily takes up the movement of expression and yet still offers a subjective response. Despite the allusions of The Piano to liquids that threaten to envelop and overwhelm the subject, its heroine does not dissolve into confusion or succumb to Stewart’s demand that she adopt his idea of communication and expression as spoken language. The sequences of shots that establish her point of view are notable for their particular close proximity to the physicality of her body, but even in circumstances

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where the disintegration of subjectivity could be anticipated, the configuration and perpetration of colour, sound and movement refigure narrative structure.10 The inscription of Ada’s voice resists the displaced dissolution of her subjectivity that the visible liquids of the film intimate. The knowledge and desire of her voice is dissipated through a body of sounds, signs, colour and light. These elements are woven through the movement-images of the film and its cinematography as the questioning of her relationship to language, and seek new forms of expression. In a scene subsequent to Stewart’s assault, the film turns to find Ada lying unconscious on a bed; her hair is soaked and bedraggled across the pillows as he watches over the stillness and vulnerability of her body.11 Stewart climbs onto the bed and moves across her body in a way that suggests an intention to rape. His actions are halted as Ada awakes to look directly at him, her gaze stopping his violation. This reframing of conventional cinematic codes and narrative structures persists through the interim shots between these two sequences; from the moment detailing the severance of her finger, the forest remains both dark and blue, filled with vines that reach across every path. The movement of both mother and child is again taken up in turn by the movement of the camera, its uneven circles echoing the series of disorientating events; her confusion at the violence and restrictions of the world Stewart tries to create is, again, transformed this time in the moment that the repetitious cycle of piano music stops. As Ada emerges from the house following her approbation of Stewart’s intention, the camera follows her gaze up through the canopy of trees to the sky beyond. The camera takes up this motion and turns full circle, in a gesture that initiates a different sense of onscreen space mediating a theme of transformation.

Irigaray, Deleuze and Desire Feminist theorists such as Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz and Alice Jardine have argued that Deleuze’s theorization of ‘becoming’ in a molecular world closes down the space for inscriptions of sexual difference. Elizabeth Grosz (1994) writes that Deleuze’s interest in difference is that of the variations and fluctuations between subgroups and multiplicities within a formulation of the world as a whole: ‘difference capable of being understood outside the dominance or regime of the one, the self-same, the imaginary play of mirrors and doubles, the structure and duplication presumed by … notions of signification and subjectification’ (ibid.: 164). Deleuze’s proposition of difference as multiple and diffuse does not, however, recognize or engage with issues of sexual difference. Grosz writes that the concept of becoming-woman is made a universal point of all becomings which Deleuze and Guattari situate, not in the figure of woman but

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in that of the little girl ‘as site of culture’s most intensified disinvestments and re-castings of the body’ (ibid.: 174–75). ‘Woman’ again signifies a problematic of this cathartic moment in the subject’s connection to and apprehension of the world; becoming-woman for women is ‘a striking reversal (but exact replication) of phallocentricism’ which sees the ‘dissolution of the subject, and the body with it’ (ibid.: 178– 79). In this sense, Deleuze’s theory of difference tends to elicit sexual neutrality as a metaphor of ‘becoming-woman’ and so marks an indifference to the sexual specificities of subjectivity.12 Janice Richardson (1998) refers to Grosz as she writes that ‘in using the term “woman” to signify a process of becoming deterritorialized they fit too easily into a tradition which views women as subject to dissolution and disintegration; unable to defend the boundaries of their bodies or the state’ (ibid.: 109). For Rosi Braidotti, Deleuze’s attempt to ‘image’ thought differently dislocates it from the biological body as a surface or screen of cultural, social and psychic inscriptions, a repositioning of subjectivity and desire that disavows sexual difference. Deleuze’s conceptualizations of intensities and affects are instead the matter that is imaged or embodied in thought; his rejection of the gender dichotomy of male and female is in turn part of a reduction of difference which refuses to recognize sexuality and desire as processes that are operative within and exceed their positioning in a social and cultural context. In this sense, although sexuality is another flux it does not form an infrastructure of assemblages and is neither transforming nor transformed. It is here that Braidotti makes a vital intervention in returning to the complexity and influence of individual desires and histories coded by and resisting discourse on the formations of subjectivity that operate across psyche and soma: ‘women … can be revolutionary subjects only to the extent that they develop a consciousness which is not specifically feminine, dissolving “woman” into the forces that structure her’ (Braidotti 1993: 47). The transformations that occur in the interstices of affects, forces and flows in cinema do not in themselves register the specificity of the feminine, which at least in this sense is not aligned with the body of the film or text. In cinema, however, even if the affection-image is elicited by a configuration of images and elements that have been associated with femininity in the film, it could not, for Deleuze, trace feminine desire because the specificities of sexual difference are lost in becoming-woman. His discourse of becomings is ultimately based on a universal subject that attempts to move beyond issues of sexual difference without first acknowledging them. It is in this sense that Jardine notes that the spaces Deleuze and Guattari unfold are separate from women but also utterly dependent on the notion of becoming-woman (Jardine 1984: 46–60). Deleuze and Parnet (2002: 95) tell us that ‘sleeping is a desire, walking is a desire. Listening to music, or making music, or writing

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are desires’, because they engage with the patterns that organize perception and the possibility of new meanings. Molecules of matter flow and fluctuate through interstices of shifting constellations of (cinematographic) elements. Here, change is affected through a rhythm evoked amidst assemblages in an echo of the relationship between the legibility of a figure and the photographic ground of the image. Bogue describes this movement as ‘the essence of sensation’ (Bogue 1993: 64). In this sense the dissolution of figure and ground makes invisible forces visible, but does not mark the disintegration of subjectivity, rather, this movement embodies it as a register of intensities and affects. Luce Irigaray remarks upon the Deleuzian contradiction of maintaining a discourse on multiplicities without acknowledging or engaging with issues of sexual difference. Although Irigaray notes the concept of femininity as a social and cultural construct that affects the formation of subjectivity she objects to the displacement of women from their maternal genealogies and from the influence of their political histories. In a similar move to Deleuze, Irigaray drives back through the dualist logic of Freud and the philosophical divide of a transcendental mind over a sublimated body. Irigaray is not opposed to Deleuze’s theory of multiple and complex relations between matter and form, but to the conditions of sexual indifference that he imposes in its formulation. Multiplicities, intensities and flows must, for Irigaray, sustain difference to create a space in which to listen to the other. It is is in this sense that she is: certainly not seeking to wipe out multiplicity, since women’s pleasure does not occur without that. But isn’t a multiplicity that does not entail re-articulation of the difference between the sexes bound to block or take away something of women’s pleasure? … doesn’t the ‘desiring machine’ still partly take the place of woman or of the feminine? Isn’t it a sort of metaphor for her/it that men can use? (Irigaray 1996: 141)

Luce Irigaray’s project primarily differs from that of Deleuze in that she discerns an archaic maternal existence of prediscursivity as the forgotten ground of discourse. From the beginning of her project (Irigaray 1974) the fluidity of feminine desire and the complexity of a relationship to the maternal that is suppressed and yet persists in the phallocentric determinations of language disturb the logic of discourse that demands a specific form of expression be adopted as a condition of being heard or represented. Irigaray tracks the agency of feminine desire in the formation of subjectivity by evoking pressure and erosion as qualities of fluids and as material for the formation of a female imaginary (Whitford 1986: 3-8).To further facilitate inscriptions of feminine desire and expression in cinema, the specificity of sexual difference must be considered as integral to the conditions of emergence and to the coordinates of the analysis of film.

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A Deleuzian attention to the materiality of film and to the flux and flow of affect through constellations of elements that are continually refigured discerns a signifying complex that can be theorized through Irigaray’s sense of fluid feminine desire. Deleuze’s dissolution of the distinctions and oppositions between subjects and objects and his theorization of the complexities of cinema offer a mode of signification that differs from the familiar readings and representations of classic narrative form. Irigaray’s work is vital in identifying the tendency of a Deleuzian rubric to remain relatively uninfluenced by the specificity of the body for inscriptions of sexual difference. Deleuzian cinema operates at the level of colour, sound, rhythm and flow, disturbing cinematic codes in a movement draws attention to themes of transformation, desire, and expression. In The Piano individual histories and maternal genealogies inform the female protagonist’s progression. The challenge to and retention of selected cinematic codes operates at a level of legibility that is continually being rewritten through the interrelations of cinematographic elements. In The Piano this focus traces the sexual specificities of subjectivity yet touches upon a sense of the body as a signifying ground that is also, but not only inscribed by social and cultural formations of gender. The liquids that threaten to engulf Ada throughout the film are prescient of the penultimate sequence where she is drawn into the sea. Encompassed by oceanic waters and the folds of her clothes, her skin appears pale in a light drawn from the forest as she sinks away from the surface. The film emphasizes the sounds of spilt breath and her movements underwater against the beat of a depth gauge as it cuts between the image of her body floating passively and the sadistic detailing of close-ups of her face. As Ada struggles, slipping from the rope that binds her to the piano the potential of the narrative to resolve itself in her death is eluded. As the surface of the water is broken her mind’s voice disrupts the anticipated disintegration of subjectivity that is visualised in response to narratives determined by the cinematic trope that associates woman with water and death. This sequence acknowledges her agency by heightening the viewer’s perception of the physicality of her body underwater and her decision to action. In the midst of this gradual shift from perception to action, the affection image persists within the intersecting of threads of association that can be traced through rhythm and repetition of cinematographic elements elsewhere in the film. The final sequence drifts beyond that of her life in Nelson and returns to the image which could have detailed the silence and death in the sea. This image is claimed as that of a dream, of a Deleuzian movement into a different light, a constellation or dust thrown in to the motion of desire, embodied and articulated through the rhythm, colour and noise of the cinematic silence that infiltrates the words cited from Thomas Hood’s sonnet. This sequence traces difference through a cinematographic movement that is echoed by the poetic configuration of words to

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emphasize the resonance of intonation and foreground the saturations of colour and the residual sounds of the film to evoke variations in intensity, flux and flow of subjectivity. The words spoken by Ada as a subjective voice-over, operate as potential coordinates within a complex and fluid cinematographic movement that continue to be reconfigured for their possibilities.13

Notes 1. This sequence is analysed in greater detail at a later point in this chapter. In ‘What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh’, Vivian Sobchack’s seminal theorization of the body in cinema moves beyond spectacle and the fetishization of form towards the spectator as cinesthetic subject. In particular, Sobchack engages with Jacobs’s reading of the opening sequence of The Piano to discern the potential resonance of one sensory perception or register with another; an image may serve a mnemonic and projective function, evoking the recollection of an instance or experience that becomes present again in response to a particular configuration of cinematographic elements (Sobchack 2004: 62–63). The analysis offered here differs most significantly in its focus on sexual difference as an aspect of subjectivity that is too readily overlooked in film theories of embodiment. 2. In Cinema 1, the Movement-Image, Deleuze primarily draws from C.S. Peirce’s concepts of images and signs, and the film analyses of Sergei Eisenstein, to identify the ways in which cinema can be theorized as an ‘information system’ (Deleuze 1997: 12). Deleuze tells us that the cinematographic can be understood through a series of classifications which he introduces through the movement-image. 3. This sequence is 70 seconds in length and occurs approximately 24 minutes into the film. 4. In this sense a Deleuzian attention to the materiality of the film is receptive to the vibrations and fluctuations of the elements shifting within and as part of the movement-image. Deleuze uses the word ‘immanence’ to describe the potential of ‘what is neither seen nor understood, but is nevertheless perfectly present’ (Deleuze 1997: 12) to affect the viewer’s perception of the film. These movements constitute the transitions and transformations of the cinematic image so that, for example, even though individual particles of sand cannot be clearly seen their potential to erode and scrape into motion is intimated in the sequence outlined. 5. Deleuze (1997: 66). The movement from ‘received’ to ‘executed’ can be understood as a form of translation; it embodies movement or process and so suggests a shift to another form as a mode of expression. 6. See ‘mfiles’ Reviews (2002); Artsworld (2002). Certain sections of music that are encountered as part of the film’s orchestral score also recur where a recording was made of the actress, Holly Hunter playing the piano to articulate sequences of Ada playing. In the ‘mfiles’ review, Nyman notes that this decision was made to give these sections of music a different quality, retaining the imprint of a different touch and of the location of the sound’s making. 7. Although Silverman notes this moment in Chion’s work, she also states that his apparent interest in the maternal voice as a ‘bath of sounds’, ‘a sonorous envelope’ or ‘music’, is primarily to seek poetic props for his theories as opposed to an interest in the issues of sexual difference this discourse entails.

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8. The Piano includes a number of sequences in which the maternal voice seems to be displaced to construct a figure of a child that is not always aligned with the then child-actress Anna Paquin. Such sequences include the opening shots of the film where embryonic imagery is interwoven with a childlike voice-over, and more directly in a sequence where the instant Stewart severs Ada’s finger with an axe and the image-track shifts to the image and sound of Flora screaming in the place of her mother; in this moment her mother’s blood falls onto Flora’s clothes. Both sequences associate this particular shift in sound with visual elements associated with femininity to emphasize the very physical matter of the body (intrauterine imagery, the pattern and spill of blood that seeps beyond the idealised image but invokes the abject and traces the pulse of arterial pressure). This invocation of the ‘fantasmatic tableau’ referenced by Silverman operates in The Piano to foreground issues of sexual difference and the feminine in a way that retains a sense of the problematic relation to language. Both mother and daughter participate in a communicative form attuned to their desire for expression that is not prescribed by the phallocentricism of language. 9. This sequence occurs approximately 1 hour and 7 minutes into the film. 10. For example, in Laurence Olivier’s 1948 and Franco Zeffirelli’s 1991 film representations of Hamlet, the disintegration of Ophelia’s subjectivity is accompanied by the refusal of a subjective relation to the camera. The camera does not follow her look, nor trace the image of her eyes; her articulations do not take the form of a voice-over but are displaced onto the words of Gertrude’s Willow Speech. In Olivier’s Hamlet, the words Ophelia sings as she drowns are imperceptible, and in Zeffirelli’s film her gestures are wildly formless – an effect exaggerated by the disassembly of shots edited against the delineation of a coherent onscreen space. 11. Her skin pallid and damp with sickness, her body immobile and silent, forms an image reminiscent of Ophelia’s descent into the waters of the brook. 12. Dorothea Olkowski (1999) suggests, in opposition to the view proposed by Elizabeth Grosz, that as a general process becoming-woman is not metaphorical, but a deterritorialization through which Deleuze attempts to dissolve the hierarchies and privileges of the psychoanalytic concept of subjectivity. Deterritorialization suggests a dissolution or disintegration of the subject that threatens to perpetrate traditional representations of women and the problems inherent in this potentially substitutive discourse; Deleuze, however, attempts to theorize a desiring machine rather than a desiring form of subjectivity, which seems complicit with this mechanism. 13. Thomas Hood (1799–1845) ‘Sonnet: Silence’.

Bibliography Artsworld, ‘Interview with Michael Nyman’. Retrieved 11 November 2002 from http://www.artsworld.com/music-dance/works/s-u/the-pianomichael-nyman.html Bogue, R. 1993. ‘Gilles Deleuze and the Aesthetics of Force’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 24(1): 56–65. Braidotti, R. 1993. ‘Discontinuous Becomings: Deleuze on the BecomingWoman of Philosophy’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 24(1): 44–55. Bruzzi, S. 1995. ‘Tempestuous Petticoats: Costume and Desire in The Piano’, Screen 36(3): 257–66.

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Carr, J. 1999. ‘Jane Campion, the Classical Romantic, 1993’, in Virginia Wright Wexman (ed.), Jane Campion Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 168–72. Chion, M. 1999. The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. 1994. ‘Recapitulation of Images and Signs’, in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London: Athlone. ———. 1997 [1986] . Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone. Deleuze, G. and C. Parnet. 2002. ‘Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse’, in Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Continuum, pp. 77–123. Doane, M.A. 1980. ‘The Voice in Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space’, Yale French Studies 60: 33–50. ———. 1996. ‘Woman’s Stake: Filming the Female Body’, in Sue Vice (ed.), Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reader. Cambridge: Polity, pp. 194–204. Feldvoss, M. 1999. ‘Jane Campion: Making Friends by Directing Films, 1993’, in Virginia Wright Wexman (ed.), Jane Campion Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 96–100. Frampton, D. 1991. ‘On Deleuze’s Cinema’. London: Polytechnic of North London. Retrieved 13 October 2002 from http://www.filmosophy.org/ deleuze.html Gillet, S. 1995. ‘Lips and Fingers: Jane Campion’s The Piano’, Screen 36(3): 277–87. Goldson, A. 1997. ‘Piano Recital’, Screen 38(3): 275–81. Grosz, E. 1994. ‘Intensities and Flows’, in Volatile Bodies, Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 160–83. Gunning, T. 1996. ‘Disorderly Order’: Colours in Silent Film, The Amsterdam Workshop 1995, eds Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk. Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum. Herzog, A. 2001a. ‘Reassessing the Aesthetic: Cinema, Deleuze and the Art of Thinking’, Film-Philosophy 5(4): 224–26. Hendershot, C. 1998. ‘(Re)visioning the Gothic: Jane Campion’s The Piano’, Literature/Film Quarterly 26(2): 97–108. Hoeveler, D.L. 1998. ‘Silence, Sex and Feminism: An Examination of The Piano’s Unacknowledged Sources’, Literature/Film Quarterly 26(2): 109–16. Irigaray, L. 1985 [1974]. Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1996. This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. C. Porter and C. Burke. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jacobs, C. 1994. ‘Playing Jane Campion’s Piano Politically’, Modern Language Notes 109(5): 757-785. Jardine, A. 1984. ‘Woman in Limbo: Deleuze and his Br(others)’. Sub-Stance 44/45: 46–60. Metz, C. 1977. ‘The Imaginary Signifier (1975)’, in The Imaginary Signifier, Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ‘mfiles’, Reviews. Retrieved 11 October 2002 from http://www.mfiles.co.uk/ Reviews/nyman-the-piano.htm Mulvey, L. 1989. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)’, in Visual and Other Pleasures. London: Macmillan. Olkowski, D. 1999. ‘Can a Feminist Read Deleuze and Guattari?’, in Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation. London: University of California Press, pp. 32–58. Richardson, J. 1998. ‘Jamming the Machines: “Woman” in the Work of Irigaray and Deleuze’, Law and Critique 11(1): 89–115. Silverman, K. 1988. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.

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Sobchack, V. 2004. ‘What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh’, in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California, pp. 53–84. Whitford, M. 1986.‘Luce Irigaray and the Female Imaginary: Speaking as Woman’, Radical Philosophy, 43: 3–8.

PART III

COLOUR, TEXT AND RACE

 CHAPTER 9 

CHROMATIC AMBIVALENCE: COLOURING THE ALBINO Charlotte Baker The apparently ‘colourless’ body of the albino is a contested space that has been claimed alternately as ‘black’ and as ‘white’, but which is consistently positioned in representation as ‘other’. Perceived either to be ‘blank’ and ‘lacking’, or contaminated and racially impure, the albino body emerges as vulnerable to misinterpretation, misrecognition and misrepresentation. Artistic, filmic and literary representations of albinism rarely avoid recourse to the myths and stereotypes surrounding the condition. The focus of these forms of representation is always on the external appearance of the albino body, which is portrayed in terms of the markers of albinism such as pale hair, skin and eyes – markers which are often exaggerated for dramatic effect. Despite the significant number of albino figures in literature, film and art, there has been little critical attention to the albino body, and this is echoed in the failure of current discussion of the body to account for the multiply marginalized albino, a figure that challenges the ‘norm’ and refuses categorization.1 This chapter responds to this lack of critical attention by examining the way in which the figure of the black African albino is portrayed in fictional works by Guinean writer Williams Sassine, and French writers Didier Destremau and Patrick Grainville. The four selected novels are imbued with a temporal awareness that firmly locates the personal experiences of their protagonists in the specific historical contexts of colonial and postcolonial Africa. Sassine’s Wirriyamu (1976) is set against the background of the final days of colonial Africa, Grainville’s Le Tyran Eternel (1998) and Destremau’s Nègre Blanc (2002) focus on the aftermath of colonial rule, while a second novel by Sassine, Mémoire d’une Peau (1998), presents an uncompromising picture of postcolonial Africa. With particular reference to the portrayal of the figure of the black African albino in these novels, this study explores the perceived lack of colour of the albino body, attempts to ‘colour’ the albino as

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black, white or ‘whitened’, and the implications of this for the individual, and in the broader postcolonial context. Before going on to discuss the fictional representation of the figure of the albino, I should first explain albinism further. The term ‘albinism’ refers to a group of related conditions which are the result of altered genes that cause a defect in melanin production. In this chapter, the term will be used to refer to oculocutaneous albinism, which results in the absence of pigment in the skin, hair and eyes so that albinos have a pale or pink complexion, and blonde or even red hair. Albinism is often wrongly assumed to occur only among those of African descent, for it is clearly more visible within black communities.2 This specious assumption is typical of the misunderstandings surrounding the albino that manifest themselves in myth and stereotype. The African albino suffers overt discrimination that results from a fundamental and recurrent misinterpretation of the condition. The very visible difference of the albino body from the accepted bodily state distinguishes it from others, for the need to see recognizable traits is constantly inhibited by the deviance of a body that fails to reflect the characteristics of those bodies around it. The loss of conventional points of reference means that the albino cannot be recognized or classified in terms of the usual ‘identifying features’, as Grainville’s Tetiali finds when asked the age of the albino he has just seen. He replies, ‘C’est difficile à dire étant donné la blancheur des cheveux, des sourcils, les yeux pales, la peau desquamée’ [It is difficult to say, given the whiteness of the hair and eyebrows, the pale eyes, the marked skin]3 (Grainville 1998: 42). The whiteness of hair that would normally be black, the paleness of eyes that should be dark and a skin that is damaged all signify the replacement of ‘normal’ identifying features with the distinctive traits of albinism. The lives of people with albinism are rendered more difficult because of the web of myths, beliefs and stereotypes that have long surrounded the condition. Robert Murphy argues that ‘the greatest impediment to a person’s taking full part in his society is not his flaws, but rather the tissue of myths, fears and misunderstandings that society attaches to them’ (Murphy 1995: 140). Certainly, the traditional beliefs surrounding the albino, that have been sustained and elaborated upon in the form of modern myths and stereotypes, serve as devices of ‘marking apart’ that stigmatize the albino individual and compromise the founding of a positive albino identity. The lack of pigmentation that sets the albino apart in black Africa is frequently portrayed as symbolic of his or her links to the spirit world. In different parts of Africa, albinos have been alternately venerated and alienated, lauded as emissaries from the spirit world or feared as harbingers of disgrace or punishment for the misdemeanours of the family or tribe. In certain areas, albinos were traditionally killed at birth or sacrificed. Even today they are discriminated against, treated as social outcasts because of their condition, and conspicuous by their

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whiteness in black Africa. Therefore, they face not only the practical problems of their disability, but also the misunderstanding and prejudices of society, and in certain parts of Africa albinos are still ostracized and barred access to education, employment and marriage. Poverty and ignorance serve only to exacerbate their situation, often meaning a life of confinement or social exclusion.4 Although albinism is a medical condition, it is often regarded merely as a racial indicator. As such, the manifestation of the condition in the colour (or lack of colour) of non-pigmented albino skin makes it a condition that is loaded with symbolism and meaning in terms of racial difference too. The term ‘racial difference’ implies that there are distinct ‘races’ of people with clearly definable sets of social and physical characteristics. Yet this assumption has come to be recognized as a fallacy, for there are no clear or fixed demarcations of people fitting coherent sets of physical traits. It is now acknowledged that within any racial group there are varying shades of pigmentation, and different body shapes, hair textures and facial structures, as well as shared characteristics across racial divides. However, this has not always been recognized. In 1735, Linnaeus established a classification system, his Systema Naturae, which listed categories that he labelled as ‘varieties’ of the human species.5 To each were attributed inherited biological, as well as learned, cultural characteristics. At one end of the scale was the European, white-skinned and governed by laws; at the other was the African, black-skinned and governed by impulse. In the nineteenth century further ‘research’ was carried out in the West to give such racial theories legitimacy. Foreheads were analysed for shape, noses were measured and brains were weighed; all aiming to prove the superiority of the ‘white race’. Although it became clear that there was no necessary link between physical difference and social characteristics, racial categorization presupposed social significance in physical differences, binding the two inextricably. The demarcation of distinct, socially significant ‘races’ that lies at the centre of racial categorization, fetishizes the features it considers ‘distinctive’, artificially injecting them with social value. This does not in itself imply the division of people into inferior and superior racial groups, though that is its historical origin. It is the very practice of according significance to physical features such as skin colour, eye colour, hair or nose shape that has been racialized, revealing racial categories to be socially founded and based not on biological realities, but on arbitrary physical traits that are neither historically nor socially fixed.6 The problematic nature of the albino body immediately becomes evident in the novels of Sassine, Grainville and Destremau, all of which have male black African albino protagonists. Destremau’s Mbuya describes her newborn son as having ‘[a]lbâtre malain tâché de points rouges, maladif avant même de réspirer’ [pestilent white skin, tainted with red spots, sickly before even taking his first breath] (Destremau

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2002: 29). Grainville’s Tetiali undertakes the same negative survey of the albino body as Destremau’s Mbuya in his description of the albino in Le Tyran Eternel, ‘Dans nos jumelles, la chevelure blanche a surgi. La peau du visage grisâtre et rose. On a su que c’était un albinos’ [Suddenly, we saw white hair through our binoculars. The grey and pink skin of a face. We knew it was an albino] (Grainville 1998: 41). As with the albino figures in the work of Sassine and Destremau, Grainville’s protagonist is defined by his colour alone: ‘L’Albinos … Sans prénom. Sans autre identité que sa couleur innommable’ [The Albino … Without a name. Without any identity except for his indescribable colour] (ibid.: 302). The novels suggest that it is unnecessary to look beyond the skin of the albino to identify him, for it is white skin above all else that sets the albino apart. At the two extremes of colour, or ‘race’, the struggle has been to define the very nature of ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’, and the implications of belonging to or identifying with either group. Although the history and categorization of non-whites has frequently been a topic of debate, it is only in recent years that the subject of whiteness has become a focus of discussion. Within white-dominated societies and among white people, whiteness remains a relatively under-discussed ‘racial’ identity. The manner in which black people have been marked as ‘black’ (and not just as people) has made it relatively easy to analyse their representation, whereas white people are more difficult to analyse in terms of their whiteness. Whiteness has emerged from this critical debate as multi-faceted and complex. Problematic, for it cannot simply be reduced to a dichotomous relationship with blackness, it emerges as polysemic – a loaded term that is tainted by notions of racial superiority. It is found to be not solely dependent upon skin colour, but to incorporate different ways of being as well as varying access to positions of privilege and power. Typically disruptive of established categories, the albino body challenges the assumption that all Africans are black, in turn undermining notions of black essentialism, for the enigmatic location of white skin on ‘black’ features problematizes racial categorization and identification according to the connotations of skin colour. The possibility of misinterpreting the colour of the albino is underlined in Destremau’s description of the nègre blanc, Alpha: ‘Ne serait-ce sa chevelure rousse qu’il conserve courte et épousant fidèlement les formes de son crâne, et ses traits négroïde, à distance on pourrait se méprendre sur sa race’ [If it weren’t for his red hair which he keeps short, growing closely to his head, and his negroid features, from a distance one could be mistaken over his race] (Destremau 2002: 241). It would be all too easy to ascribe whiteness to the albino body, with all its associations. However, it is important to heed the warning of albino writer Ngaire Blankenberg (2000: 9) that to interpret albino skin purely by the standards ascribed to it by European society would mean contextualizing the albino within a racialized society, where

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the connotations of blackness include ‘savage’, evil and bad; and those of whiteness include good, purity and ‘civilized’. Although lighter skin is valued in much of Africa – particularly among women who, in some cases, go so far as to use natural or even chemical means by which to bleach their skin – the portrayal of the albino in the works of Sassine, Destremau and Grainville confirms that the whiteness of the albino delivers none of its perceived advantages. It is considered to be neither ‘good’ nor ‘pure’. Instead, albino skin is consistently depicted as being an affliction or a burden, and ascribed a sense of incongruity. While Sassine’s protagonist Milo is described as ‘ombre de Blanc, négatif de Nègre’ [the shadow of the White, the negative of the Black] (Sassine 1998: 124), the whiteness of Destremau’s nègre blanc is represented as ‘une tare’ [a defect] (Destremau 2002: 43), giving a sense of the weight of this indelible stigma. Constant references to the startling and consistent whiteness of albino skin can be found in, and are indeed integral to, the novels. While the skin of Destremau’s Samate is described as ‘la peau blanc laiteux’ [milky white] (Destremau 2002: 30), Alpha’s skin is ‘blanc comme un asticot’ [as white as a maggot] (Grainville 1998: 233), and Milo refers to his own ‘sale tête blanche’ [nasty white face] (Sassine 1998: 8). Yet, the reference to Condélo’s skin as being so white that it marks him as ‘cent pour cent albinos’ [100 per cent albino] (Sassine 1976: 44) is the sole allusion in all four novels to the varying levels of pigmentation of albino skin that determine the type and degree of albinism. Elsewhere, in the work of Sassine, Grainville and Destremau, as well as in other writing about albinos, the assumption is that the whiteness of albinos is uniform and unchanging. In their discussion of whiteness, Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood (1997: 39) note that in twentieth-century Europe the category ‘white’ has become increasingly synonymous with the ‘European’. Clearly, this trend makes the notion of the ‘non-white European’ a problematic one. If the category ‘black’ is in the same way synonymous with Africans, then the notion of the ‘non-black African’ is equally problematic. Whiteness makes itself invisible in the West in a ‘white’ world by asserting its normalcy; so in examining whiteness one must recognize that the constructs of ‘race’ and ‘culture’ continually ‘unmark’ white people whilst marking, or racializing, others. However, when this process of ‘marking’ is considered in terms of whiteness as a stigma in black society, then colour-bound racial stereotypes and associations are challenged. When the whitened individual becomes the focus of prejudice within a black community, then it is whiteness that designates difference and the albino is revealed as a ‘marked white’, defying the grouping of individuals into races based on their physical appearance. The whiteness that marks the skin of the albino is portrayed as being profoundly troubling to the albino individual. In Sassine’s novel, Mémoire d’une Peau, the protagonist Milo expresses the difficulty

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for the albino in identifying with whiteness as he articulates the colour of his skin as an encumbrance. His body is ‘signé de l’étrange, de l’inconnu’ [marked with the strange, with the unknown] (Sassine 1998: 81). The peculiarity of his whiteness becomes disconcerting and problematic as he struggles to establish an identity. Blankenberg (2000: 7) expresses the same problem of self-recognition: ‘You can only imagine what happened when I looked at myself; when I glanced at me walking in shop windows, in the rear view mirrors; when I looked down, even for a moment, and saw glimpses of white and it didn’t fit with who I was’. The same sense of chromatic ambivalence7 is expressed in Sassine’s novel Wirriyamu, as the young Condélo, holding his arm next to that of a Portuguese soldier, states ‘Je suis plus blanc que vous et pourtant je ne suis pas blanc’ [I am whiter than you, yet I am not white] (Sassine 1998: 90). That Condélo’s skin is so repulsive to the soldier reveals its colour to be troubling to the white, who sees a purer version of his own whiteness in the albino. The albino body becomes a mockery of the white body, forcing the white man to direct scrutiny at his own inadequate whiteness, a questioning of its validity as a signifier of superiority. Albino skin is not always described as being ‘white’ though, for it is frequently referred to as being transparent or lacking in colour, not only laying the albino open to attack from the sun, but also rendering him unprotected from the gaze of others. The skin of Grainville’s albino protagonist is described as being particularly inadequate: ‘Sa peau est transparente. Elle ne le protège de rien … L’Albinos est nu. Il est offert. Le moindre soleil l’écorche, l’étripe. Il est cru. Il crie’ [His skin is transparent. It fails to protect him … The albino is naked. He is vulnerable. The slightest exposure to the sun scorches him, guts him. He is raw. He cries out] (Grainville 1998: 91). In this way, Grainville challenges notions of the skin as ‘final boundary’ and the sense of the ‘closed person’ in his portrayal of the albino body, and with this breaking down of boundaries comes a characteristic disruption of categories.8 Skin is generally supposed, at the very least, to protect. However, the non-pigmented skin of the albino is open to assault from the sun and easily becomes damaged or diseased.9 Rather than protecting, the skin that would generally be considered a boundary is broken down and becomes inefficient as a membrane of separation, as a divide between the individual and the world. The failure of albino skin to ‘contain’ or to delimit is emphasized in descriptions of its transparency, with the skin failing to provide a division between the internal and the external. Thus, the transparency of skin renders the albino individual subject defenceless under the gaze of the onlooker; a vulnerability to interpretation that translates into a loss of identity. Throughout Grainville’s Le Tyran Eternel, the association of pale skin with the sensitivity or transparency of emotions is also evident. Whereas dark skin is often represented as being impenetrable and

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concealing, light skin is perceived to be revealing, leaving the body open to interpretation. This notion of transparency is carried still further in representation, to the point of absence. Since albino skin fails to protect, to ‘contain’, or to carry out the functions of ‘normal’ skin, it is often portrayed as being inexistent. In Grainville’s words, albinos are ‘Incomplets, inachevés, sans derme définitif’ [Incomplete, unfinished, without a definitive skin] (Grainville 1998: 26), ‘plus nu qu’un ver’ [more naked than a worm] (ibid.: 124). The ‘skinless’ albino is stripped naked and the albino body exposed as defective, a process for which a metaphor can be found in Mémoire d’une Peau, as Milo is stripped of his clothing and rendered physically and emotionally vulnerable. However, from a different perspective, colourless albino skin emerges as revealing, since the lack of melanin means that it displays the marks imposed upon it. Hence, the albino body becomes communicative in its transparency, a chronicle of the violence it has suffered. Charles Martin (2002: 119) argues that ‘White skin displays the abuse it suffers. Black skin experiences pain, but is silenced, still saddled in part with the insensitivity racial scientists attributed to black skin as a rationalisation for slavery.’ Black skin is supposed to conceal its pain, whereas the skin of the albino lays it bare. In the expression of the previously unspoken, the chromatically ambivalent albino body (the body being one of the main targets for control under colonialism) emerges as one of the prime locations of resistance. Thus, the albino body is perceived to be lacking in colour, implicit in which is the notion that it should be ‘coloured’, that is to say, located as either black or white. However, the very need to locate colour in the albino body is, in itself, questionable. The possibility of being simply ‘albino’ is dismissed in the rush to particularize the colourless body, revealing the vulnerability of the albino body to the imposition of identity. Ascribing colour to the albino body emerges as troublesome for both writer and critic, for the implications of colouring the albino body are profound. In an endeavour to define the albino, Grainville, Sassine and Destremau posit the albino as ‘ce nègre blanc’ [this whitened black] (Destremau 2002: 239), ‘ce malheureux nègre-pie’ [this miserable piebald] (Grainville 1998: 65), and ‘le blanc, le rose, le gris, le Sans-Peau’ [the white, the pink, the grey, the skinless] (Grainville 1998: 56). Both exaggeration and the overuse of adjectives reveal the inadequacy of language for the expression or definition of the albino, a struggle that recalls the complexity of constituting any postcolonial identity through a language inflected with the associations of the colonial past.10 The descriptions used by these writers tend towards definition of the albino in terms of a blackness that has been sullied, corrupted or even lost, bringing to mind the insistent literary portrayal of mixed-race individuals as impure; inhabiting the boundary between black and white, and threatening the purity of both. Indeed, Grainville suggests that the skin colour of the person of mixed race is equally as

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ambiguous and problematic as that of the albino. The most striking example is found in Le Tyran Eternel, with the description of the métisse or mixed-race Akissi’s skin as being shadowy and elusive (Grainville 1998: 121). While the skin of the métisse individual is troubling in its appearance – neither black nor white, yet both – it is the absolute absence of pigmentation in the skin of the albino that problematizes his identification as African. The skin of the albino is consistently represented not merely as a ‘casing’, but as inescapable, all-defining and subject to the imposition of values attached to its whiteness. Rather than standing apart from the experience of the individual and his or her quest for identity, the body becomes integral to it. For the protagonist of Sassine’s Mémoire d’une Peau the body becomes something that entraps and defines: ‘Pour moi, le corps a toujours été la seule réalité, la seule évasion ou l’unique prison’ [My body has always been my sole reality, my only escape or my unique prison] (Sassine 1998: 57). This sense of being confined by the albino body and constrained by its implications recalls Frantz Fanon’s description of the individual being circumscribed by the connotations of skin colour: ‘le Blanc est enfermé dans sa blancheur, le Noir dans sa noirceur’ [the White is trapped in his whiteness, the Black in his blackness] (Fanon 1952: 6). Fanon refers here to the colonized body, subject to the notions of superiority of white over black deployed by France in the nineteenth century in an agenda of empire building. The aim of the mission civilisatrice was to spread French culture, raising ‘Others’ in French colonies to the French standard and way of life through a policy of assimilation. However, this process presupposed the superiority of French culture over all others, so that in practice the assimilation policy in the colonies meant an extension of the French language, institutions, laws and customs – and implicit in this was a complete disregard for the culture and history of the indigenous peoples. Hence, for both colonizer and colonized, notions of the ‘dirty’, ‘unruly’, sexually deviant black, and the superiority of the white, were confirmed by a policy of assimilation that aimed to ‘purify’, to control, to culturally ‘whiten’. With the aim of assimilation being to ‘whiten’ the black, the boundaries between black and white needed to be firmly imposed and degrees of ‘whiteness’ or ‘civilization’ established. Under this system, the attempt to direct the ways in which individuals perceived themselves and their relation to the world involved the control and regulation of the body and its expression. Thus, the black African body was subject to the imposition of values and prejudices, firmly subordinated to the white body of the colonizer. The desire to maintain the imposed boundaries is clearly illustrated in the declaration of a soldier, a member of the colonizing armed forces, in Sassine’s Wirriyamu: ‘Mes compatriotes et moi voulons un monde clair et net. Des Noirs ou des Blancs. Mais pas de Noirs blancs ou de Blancs noirs. Nous aimons l’ordre’ [My compatriots and I want

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a clean and tidy world. Blacks or Whites. But not white Blacks or black Whites. We like order] (Sassine 1978: 158). The colonial system of defining the ‘Other’ involved the grouping together of the colonized, and construing them as ‘a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction’ (Bhabha 1994: 70). In terms of the albino individual though, the denial of identity is not only that of the colonized denied individuality by the colonizer, but also that of the black denied blackness and the whitened black denied access to the white world. Excluded from positions of blackness and whiteness, the albino is, in Destremau’s words, ‘un paria parmi les Noirs, et un simulacre, une pâle copie pour les Blancs’ [‘a pariah among Blacks, and a sham, a pale copy among Whites’] (Destremau 2002: 256). The only way in which the albino can be known is when defined in terms of those categories that are already known – in this case, blackness and whiteness. To challenge the boundaries would be to undermine the founding principles of the mission civilisatrice. So the body of the colonized became a critical site, both for maintaining colonial alterity and enacting colonial governance, and as such had to be closely controlled. Not only does the albino body disrupt the boundary between blackness and whiteness, but it also impedes the marking by colour of the degree of civilization of an individual. If the albino body is to be considered ‘white’, then the location of white skin on a body deemed to be black threatens the all-important divide between black and white, revealing the whiteness of the albino to be disruptive and subversive. Giving the visual illusion of fulfilling the aims of the mission civilisatrice, the whitened body of the albino implies civilization, as its ‘whiteness’ is perceived as the same as that of the colonizer. For Martin (2002: 6), the albino ‘embodies the desire of the coloniser to strip away the traditions and culture of the colonised people and to replace them with a duplicate “whitened” citizen’. The external whiteness of the albino body is identified as a sign of civilization or assimilation, almost perversely fulfilling Fanon’s ironic declaration in Peau Noire, Masques Blancs that ‘pour le Noir, il n’y a qu’un destin. Et il est blanc’ [for the Black, there is only one destiny, and it is white] (Fanon 1952: 8). However, recognition of the albino body as white is firmly established in the novels of Sassine, Grainville and Destremau as being a misidentification on the part of the colonizer, and as such the troubling whiteness of the albino unbalances the very foundations of racial identification. If, on the other hand, the albino body is posited as a space of possibilities where, at the boundaries of blackness and whiteness, new identities can be formed, then the possibilities offered by the chromatic ambivalence of the albino body begin to emerge. On the level of individual identity, this allows for the reconciliation of, or even an escape from, binary oppositions, and presents a viable possibility for identifying those individuals with albinism simply as

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‘albino’. However, the implications of the chromatic ambivalence of the albino body are more far-reaching, for in simultaneously embodying and challenging the boundary between blackness and whiteness the albino body resists categorization, challenges notions of difference, and thereby undermines the constructed differences upon which the colonial system so firmly relied.

Notes 1. With the exception of Little (1995), Martin (2002) and Blankenberg (2000). 2. Other types of albinism exist, but the effects are not so noticeable. This study focuses on the black male albino of African descent, although many of the issues discussed are experienced by albinos of other races too. I use the term ‘albino’ throughout, although the term ‘person with albinism’ is now considered more acceptable, because it puts the person before the condition. 3. The translations into English are mine throughout. 4. There is an abundance of references to the continuing exclusion of albinos in the African media, as well as in the literature of support groups such as ZIMAS (Zimbabwe Albino Association) and TAS (Tanzania Albino Society). 5. For further reading see Lively (1999). 6. Blankenberg (2000) highlights the fact that ‘race’ is a European invention, not an African one, and therefore its application to African identities is already an imposition. However, she notes that race and racism have been one of the most powerful forces of the century (in the guises of slavery, colonialism, apartheid and ‘black consciousness’) and their impact on African identities has been important. 7. I use Martin’s term ‘chromatic ambivalence’ here. See Martin (2002). 8. For further discussion of these terms, see Benthien (1994). 9. Skin cancer is common among African albinos who have not been educated about the damaging effect of the sun on their skin, or who do not have access to healthcare and skin products. 10. Indeed, the framing of many terms here with quotation marks confirms the problematic language of race and colour.

Bibliography Benthien, C. 1994. Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and World. New York: Columbia University Press. Bhabha, H.K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Blankenberg, N. 2000. ‘That Rare and Random Tribe’, Critical Arts 14(2): 6–48. Destremau, D. 2002. Nègre Blanc. Paris: Hatier International. Fanon, F. [1952] 1972. Peau Noire, Masques Blancs. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Grainville, P. 1998. Le Tyran Éternel. Paris: Editions de Seuil. Little, R. 1995. Nègres Blancs – Représentations de l’Autre Autre. Paris: L’Harmattan. Lively, A. 1999. Masks – Blackness, Race and the Imagination. London: Vintage. Martin, C. 2002. The White African American Body. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

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Murphy, R. 1995. ‘Encounters: The Body Silent in America’, in Disability and Culture, B. Ingstad and S.R. Whyte (eds). New York: Henry Holt, pp. 140–58. Sassine, W. 1976. Wirriyamu. Paris: Présence Africaine. ———. 1998. Mémoire d’une Peau. Paris: Présence Africaine. Werbner, P. and T. Modood. 1997. Debating Cultural Hybridity. London: Zed Books.

 CHAPTER 10 

TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE AND HAITIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY: A PIGMENTOCRATIC APPROACH Charles Forsdick Nobody ever knew what he was doing: if he was leaving, if he was staying, whither he was going, whence he was coming … None knew when and where the Governor would appear. (James [1938] 1980: vii)

In what remains one of the key texts on Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, James (1938) echoes what contemporary, earlynineteenth-century observers claim to have been the historical reality of the Haitian general and revolutionary leader, namely a ubiquity and a ‘mysteriousness’ central to his strategic advantage over the French, British and Spanish (all of whom, for their different reasons, were trying to prevent the success of the Haitian Revolution). Toussaint kept horses scattered around the country to permit rapid displacements; he used decoys to disguise his movements; and he undertook exhausting and unexpected tours of inspection. James’s observation regarding Toussaint’s dynamic unpredictability provides a model for what may be dubbed the revolutionary’s afterlives, by which are signified the various posthumous representations – textual and visual, literary and historiographic – to which the historical figure has been subject, and according to which he has variously been interpreted, demonized, eulogized, mythologized and instrumentalized. From Toussaint’s role in nineteenth-century abolitionist imagery on both sides of the Atlantic to his resurrection in more recent debates regarding commemoration in both France and Haiti, the Haitian revolutionary has been adopted by a range of often contradictory causes in radically different contexts.1 Toussaint’s renewed prominence in the late twentieth century coincided with, and was fuelled by, the bicentenary of the declaration

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of Haitian independence, commemorating the culmination of the revolution during which, to borrow Aimé Césaire’s terms, ‘la Négritude se mit debout pour la première fois’ [Negritude stood up for the first time] (Césaire 1983: 24). The principal risk in privileging Negritude (as well as noirisme, the political doctrine with which it has been associated) in discussions of the decade-long revolution that led to this independence is that history may be seen to rely on binary relationships, eliding in this case the more complex gradations of skin colour with which Haitian history is associated. For there is a need to acknowledge that the white racialism on which the Haitian colonial plantation system depended was complicated by the further categorization of genetic composition, according to a sliding scale of 128 divisions reflecting such gradations (see Garraway 2005). The history of Haiti – colonial and postcolonial – is thus closely linked to issues of race, colour and ethnicity, on all three of which many of the laws of the newly independent nation were based. Colour was central to early Haitian identity, underpinning the revolutionary impulse, fuelling the desire for unity once independence was achieved, and contributing to definitions of postindependence citizenship. However, as Dessalines declared that all Haitians were noir, exclusive divisions based on colour prejudice present in the colonial period, especially those distinguishing black and ‘coloured’, persisted as a permanent threat to national independence, both perpetuating internal division and justifying external intervention. The Haitian Revolution was accordingly driven by ideals that the independent nation has failed to reach, and the bicentenary of independence provided an opportunity to consider the role and legacy of pigmentocracy in the country’s troubled postcolonial history.2 Despite shifts in the historiography of the Caribbean and an associated will to revise versions of Haiti’s past dependent on what Maryse Condé dismisses as ‘conventional revolutionary bric à brac’ (Condé 1993: 133), the presence of Toussaint has persisted, not least in postcolonial criticism (from where the revolutionary leader has emerged in recent years as a key point of historical reference). In assessing these recent postcolonial readings, which are interested in the myth of the revolutionary as well as in the unrecoverable historical phenomenon he represents, one is struck by the continued richness (or, in some cases, instability) of Toussaint as signifier or referent. Consider, for instance, the contrast between recent readings by Hazel Carby (1998) and José Buscaglia-Salgado (2004), both of whom react in their interpretations to The Black Jacobins. Carby, drawing on James’s 1930s engagement with Toussaint, presents him as a popular, essentialist model of ‘autonomous, self-determining, revolutionary black manhood’ (1998: 113; my emphasis), whereas Buscaglia-Salgado interprets him as ‘a mulatto “by vocation”’ (2004: 205), adding: ‘He was a conciliator and translator, liberator and enforcer, father, brother, and son. Could anyone but the mulatto, in

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all his subjective disposition to metaphoricity, wear so many disguises?’ (ibid.: 207). What these competing interpretations illustrate is the continued need to ‘argumenter autour de Toussaint’ [argue around Toussaint] (Glissant 1981: 233), to struggle to make sense of his contested, often contradictory legacies of the Haitian revolutionary seen in him, and to understand the historical layering to which these are subject. The contemporary, postcolonial application of Toussaint to persistent debates regarding the role of skin colour and racialization in Haitian culture, society and politics accordingly provides a way into the subject of this chapter: that is to say the role of Toussaint in the emergence, within nineteenth-century Haitian historiography, of ‘legends’ (the term is offered by David Nicholls) whose aim is to justify, encourage or otherwise shore up competing pigmentocratic power structures, mulatto and noiriste.3 Although Haiti offers one of the clearest examples of a society regulated by a pigmentocratic system, reflected both in the ethnic hierarchies of the colonial plantation economy and in the shifting patterns of postcolonial power, government by those of one skin colour was a generalized colonial reality that continues to persist in various postcolonial forms. The historical evolution of pigmentocracy is accordingly a subject with contemporary resonance. Nick Nesbitt has described the ways in which early-nineteenth-century Haiti witnessed the emergence of phenomena that would dominate the twentieth century: Two of the processes that came to distinguish the twentieth century were invented in Haiti: decolonization and neocolonialism. Haiti was the first to demonstrate that the colonized can take hold of their own historical destiny and enter the stage of world history as autonomous actors, and not merely passive, enslaved subjects. Less happily, newly independent Haiti also demonstrated to the world the first instance of what would later be called neocolonialism, as ruling elites (both mulatto and black) united with the military and merchant class to create an instable balance of power. (Nesbitt 2005: 6)

To decolonization and neocolonialism might here be added pigmentocracy, whose role in shaping postindependence Haiti still remains central. The current historical and historiographic case study fits into a wider project, already alluded to above, of exploring a representational field: in tracking representations of Toussaint, there is a clear chronological progression, with interpreters engaging with, developing, approving or contradicting their predecessors in a process of representational sedimentation.4 In such processes, certain key refigurings of Toussaint are granted a privileged status, with visual portraits of the revolutionary by John Kay and Maurin (produced in 1802 and 1832 respectively) resurfacing periodically, most notably in Jacob Lawrence’s Toussaint series painted in 1930s Harlem (on the

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iconography of Toussaint, see Daguillard 2003), or with C.L.R. James’s Black Jacobins stimulating a series of subsequent interlocutors – including Césaire, Glissant, Wilson Harris and George Lamming – who engage with the first Marxist reading of the revolution. In parallel with this linear, diachronic (and ultimately teleological) grasp of the processes of representation, a synchronic understanding is required to illuminate the dynamics of the Toussaint myth at any one time. James’s Black Jacobins is again a good illustration of this point, since it is all too often understood outside a complex network of refigurings of Toussaint Louverture – in the work of Caribbeans in Parisian exile such as Césaire, but also in that of Soviet artists such as the novelist Vinogradov and the director Eisenstein. Such a synchronic reading attenuates – and regularly disrupts – any neat chronological progression in Toussaint’s posthumous travels. There are repetitions, feedback loops and other connections, with tensions such as these existing from the outset, with the London and Paris press and pamphleteers presenting, even before Toussaint’s death, competing and even mutually contradictory versions: laudatory and condemnatory, anti-Napoleonic and pro-Napoleonic (on this early context, see Forsdick 2007). The chapter proceeds with these cases in mind, and aims to illustrate two central tenets of a more general reflection on the afterlives of the Haitian revolutionary: firstly, the transformation of Toussaint’s mythologization into a more explicit instrumentalization; and secondly, the recognition of the complexity, at any given moment, of the representational field by which the revolutionary’s memory is posthumously perpetuated, and ever more widely disseminated. The aim is to sketch out a series of historical engagements with Toussaint produced by Haitian historians – especially Thomas Madiou, Aléxis Beaubrun Ardouin and Joseph Saint-Rémy – around the mid-nineteenth century;5 and to suggest the ways in which selective interpretations of their subject’s biography – and a particularly negative reading of decisions that were essentially strategic as character flaws – permit a clear instrumentalization. Such a historiographic intervention in the processes of myth making simultaneously maintains Toussaint’s position in the Haitian national pantheon, whilst relativizing that position in order to foreground mulatto leaders (both contemporary and subsequent to Toussaint) such as André Rigaud, Alexandre Pétion and Jean-Pierre Boyer. The chapter will thus allow an exploration of the ways in which the rigid pigmentocratic structures underpinning Saint-Domingue as a French colony persisted in a reconfigured form in postcolonial, independent Haiti. It aims also to illuminate the complex interrelationships of skin colour, racial categorization and ethnicity, suggesting the ways in which the privileging of these interlinked phenomena may have served to eclipse other important factors contributing to Haitian society, such as class.

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The monolithic presentation of the Haitian Revolution as a single event, albeit one lasting over a decade, has been contested by numerous commentators, perhaps most notably by Césaire (1960) in his essay on Toussaint, which offers instead a tri-partite structure: white planters’ revolt; mulatto rebellion; black revolution. The aim of the early mulatto historians, active from the 1840s onwards, was to elide the final two stages, skirting problematic issues such as Rigaud’s refusal to serve under Toussaint (as well as major historical events such as the civil war that ensued) in order to suggest that the unity that led to independence following Toussaint’s death had in fact existed before Napoleon’s efforts to reimpose slavery and reannex Saint-Domingue in 1802. Pigmentocratic divisions in Haitian society have arguably subsided only at the moments of crisis generated by foreign intervention, namely during the French invasion of 1802–4 and the American occupation of 1915–34, when hierarchies based on skin colour were counterbalanced by the possibility of a unity based on ethnic ties. Residual prejudice relating to skin colour has otherwise persisted, accompanying (and often hindering, to the same extent as external interference) the efforts of nation-building. Following the death in 1820 of Henri Christophe, the last surviving of the three black leaders of the revolution, power in Haiti shifted into the hands of a small mulatto elite under Jean-Pierre Boyer’s presidency. The concentration of power in the hands of one group to the detriment of others may be seen to encapsulate a reconfiguration of the relationship between the white and coloured populations in the colonial era. The subsequent overthrow of Boyer in 1843 led to political upheaval and a return to black power, culminating in the empire of Soulouque and the regime of Geffrard. During Boyer’s presidency, Haiti had remained a predominantly agricultural country, characterized by a clear split between its urban and rural societies. Although colour lines largely corresponded with class lines, a growing number of powerful black landowners nevertheless managed to eclipse emerging class divisions within ethnic groups. This black property-owning class maintained the support of black workers by setting up the mulatto population as their common enemy, a move facilitated by Boyer’s code rural of 1826, which, by attaching workers to single estates and outlawing vagrancy, was seen to reimpose a form of slavery. It was in this context – accentuated by growing black control of the army – that the mulatto elite began to consolidate and even enhance their hegemony through the creation of a ‘mulatto “legend” of the Haitian past’ (Nicholls 1988: 67). In its extreme forms, this legend transformed into heroes relatively minor or controversial coloured figures (Vincent Ogé, JeanBaptiste Chavannes, André Rigaud) whilst representing the revolution’s black protagonists as wickedly corrupt or dangerously ignorant – or both. Central to these processes was the emergence of a previously absent tradition of national historiography that began to permit the

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imagination and construction of different forms of nationhood through the writing of history. The lack of unity in such a tradition reflects not only the actual fragmentation of the mulatto elite but also the obvious dangers of allowing crude pigmentocratic divisions to eclipse the subtleties and strategic compromises of the historical process: SaintRémy, for instance, was a critic of Boyer; in a politique de doublure, Beaubrun Ardouin directed a black puppet president, Guerrier, in the 1840s; and Madiou, although never entirely committed to any mulatto ‘ideology’ or historical ‘legend’, played a key role in Soulouque’s empire. Despite divergences in their work – the subsequent histories, for instance, take issue with Madiou’s Histoire – the mulatto historians converge in their shared project of countering any threat of noiriste claims to dominance in Haitian historiography. During the period in question, these claims were manifested in particular in a controversy surrounding the memorialization of Dessalines, who was deemed a martyr or a tyrant according to the agenda of the government in power. A plan to erect a monument in 1861 was, for instance, supported by the black-dominated national party and opposed by the French consul and mulatto politicians, although some of the latter managed to offer support by distinguishing between Dessalines the liberator and Dessalines the dictator (Nicholls 1988: 85–87). In the published histories, however, it was debates around the historical character and role of Toussaint that predominated. This was not least perhaps because the revolutionary leader, who had prepared the way for independence without ever witnessing its final achievement, had by this time gained such an international status – for example in the poetry of Wordsworth, the theatre of Lamartine, and the essays of some of the early U.S. abolitionists – that he had eclipsed other members of the Haitian revolutionary and postrevolutionary pantheon. Moreover, Toussaint’s martyrdom at the Château de Joux in the Jura lent him a romantic dimension that tended to divert attention away from the detail of his rise to and exercise of power.6 Madiou’s Histoire d’Haiti inaugurated a Haitian historiographic tradition begun in reaction to the frustrating absence of the written national history that he had sought while in France: as Beaubrun Ardouin later made clear, such a task was urgent as the first generation of Haitians died and memories of the revolution itself were further distanced. A lawyer educated in France, Madiou is said to have been inspired to return to Haiti by a meeting with Toussaint’s son in Bordeaux in 1835. A lack of access to documents and archives led to criticism from subsequent historians – Michelet dismissed his work as being ‘d’intérêt dramatique’ (Lescouflair 1950: 26) – but some critics were also distrustful of Madiou’s refusal to espouse an unswerving mulatto version of history. Although his advocacy of ethnic ‘fusion’ matches aspects of mulatto ideology, it was not yet accompanied by any aggressive reassertion of mulatto agency to the detriment of its black equivalent. The early revolutionary Toussaint is

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presented positively, as a moderate influence on the leaders of the 1792 outbreak of revolution, Jean-François and Biassou. Madiou acknowledges his emerging ambition, but sets this in the context of Rigaud’s arrogance. He attenuates any claims of his extremism by characterizing Toussaint’s despotism as fierce but civilizing, injecting order and discipline into the chaos of the revolution. There is in fact little criticism, although he sees a strategic flaw in Toussaint’s failure to declare independence on the arrival of Leclerc’s expeditionary force in 1802. It was, however, the matter of independence – and Toussaint’s willingness or otherwise to declare it – that would rapidly become central to the ‘mulatto legend’. Indeed, Toussaint’s supposed hostility to the coloured population was linked to his refusal until relatively late in his career to break with France, with whom he hoped to develop the relationship of ‘république-soeur’ (Harouel 1997), at a time when the mulatto population were largely (to further their own particular interests) openly seeking independence.7 It is this approach that Ardouin and Saint-Rémy adopt in their contradictions of Madiou’s history. The tendency in Haiti of the punctual to become durative leads to such use of interpretations of the revolution to justify and consolidate the predominance of a mulatto elite. To this end, in Ardouin and Saint-Rémy, the actual colour divisions – and the inevitable tensions between former slaves and slave owners, seen by Madiou as the perpetuation of ‘castes’ – are minimized so that the French are presented as a common enemy. But in this understanding of the economic and social situation in colonial and revolutionary Saint-Domingue, a Manichean characterization of revolutionary and postrevolutionary leaders seems to emerge. Toussaint is presented as a ruthless collaborator with the French, who preferred continued white sovereignty to any power-sharing with the coloured population in an independent state. Rigaud, on the other hand, is seen to be the radically determined enemy of the French, whose split with Toussaint was triggered by the latter not on the grounds of colour, but as a result of his advocacy of full independence from an early stage; and it is Pétion who is granted the virtuous qualities of honesty, diplomacy and humanity. In the desire to prove that the free coloured population had more in common with the slaves than with the white population, there is also an emphasis on shared suffering and oppression; and claims that the 1791 slave revolution was mulatto-inspired are implicitly supported by the perceived anarchy of black-led uprisings. In enhancing the standing of the coloured population in the revolution, the role of Toussaint – traditionally seen as the greatest national leader – had to be diminished. Ardouin [1853–60] (1958), writing while in Paris exiled from Soulouque’s regime, was the more critical, presenting Louverture as a French stooge, and accusing him of attempting in a counter-revolutionary, anti-republican manoeuvre to reimpose slavery (Nicholls 1988: 97). Although he grudgingly

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acknowledges Toussaint’s qualities, these are immediately counterbalanced by matching flaws – ‘la ruse et l’audace, – l’hypocrisie et l’énergie, – le machavélisme [sic] et la résolution, – l’orgeuil et la prudence, – la méfiance et la fermeté’ [cunning and daring, – hypocrisy and energy, – Machiavalianism and resolve, – pride and caution, – suspicion and firmness] (Ardouin 1958: II, 92). The death at Joux is accordingly presented, in the same passage, as the exemplary Divine or providential punishment of one of ‘ceux qui, comme lui, adoptent un système de gouvernement basé sur la haine des hommes et sur la terreur qu’ils leur inspirent’ [those who, like him, adopt a system of government based on hatred of people and on the terror that they inspire in them]. Ardouin only articulates any real respect for Toussaint once he has been arrested, and most of his key strategic decisions – such as the shift of allegiance from Spain to France in 1794 – are explained as means of self-preservation. Despite the critique of the French colonial system and the sense of a need for shared African origins, it is nevertheless European values that underpin the mulatto legend. In Ardouin’s refiguring of Toussaint, this contradiction emerges: vaudou is demonized, and Toussaint is even presented, as a result of his supposed skills as an apothecary, as a new Mackandal;8 yet while Toussaint is praised for the (Frenchderived) military organization and civil administration he bequeathed, he is at the same time condemned for the emulation of the French revolutionary ‘Terror’ that he endeavours to import to Haiti. It is as if for Ardouin there is an ‘African’ Toussaint, a ‘French’ Toussaint, but the existence of a ‘Haitian’ Toussaint is denied. In both traditions, Toussaint may be seen as a monarchist, as he would be identified by a later historian, Pierre Pluchon (1989), with such a connection explaining, to a certain extent, his links to Spain (Geggus 2002: 119–36). Emphasis is thus shifted from the republican, ultimately independentist Toussaint, whom C.L.R. James and others would later describe, whose aim was to force the French Revolution to recognize its shortcomings, in terms of ethnicity, by abolishing slavery and recognizing the equal importance of black agency in history. Although Saint-Rémy subsequently moderated his views on Toussaint, providing what James ([1938] 1980: 388) calls an ‘almost friendly’ introduction to the edition he produced of the latter’s memoirs, his Vie de Toussaint Louverture is a similarly negative account of its subject, in the tradition of earlier biographical attacks such as Dubroca’s (1802) widely disseminated pamphlet. Saint-Rémy follows Ardouin in his mix of admiration and condemnation, presenting Rigaud – despite his schismatic activity – as the true Haitian revolutionary, and claiming, against the predominant historiographic tradition, that it was Toussaint who had turned the war against him into a conflict based on colour. He questions Madiou’s foregrounding of Toussaint’s role in the early stages of the revolution, and describes his progressive shift towards barbarism and away from ‘ce Toussaint

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si bon, si pieux, si humain de l’année 1791’ [Toussaint in 1791, so good, so pious, so human] (Saint-Rémy 1850: 250). Like Ardouin, Saint-Rémy’s initial admiration for his subject reemerges after the account of the arrest, by which time Toussaint was no longer a threat and could be subject to sentimental presentation as a faithful father and husband.9 (Saint-Rémy does not, however, hesitate in stressing the mulatto origins of Placide, the stepson who rallies to Toussaint, whilst his own son Isaac had rallied to the French.) In presenting a mulatto version of the revolution and accordingly questioning Toussaint’s role, both Ardouin and Saint-Rémy conceal the oligarchical, pigmentocratic system present behind unifying claims of democracy and meritocracy. Yet in paying lip service to a clear division between biology and culture, they nevertheless perpetuate racialized assumptions that, despite their reconfigurations, have similarities with those that structured colonial Saint-Domingue. References to colour, for instance, are replaced by notions of ‘ability’, a quality owned exclusively by the mulatto elite (and denied, for instance, to Toussaint in Ardouin’s version, on account of his slave upbringing and Jesuit education, the sources of his dissimulation and hypocrisy). A ‘noiriste legend’ exists as a counterpoint to these interpretations, emerging in the nineteenth century and consolidated in twentiethcentury accounts of Haiti, such as Lorimer and Duvalier (1946), in which Toussaint continues to play a key if celebratory role. At the same time, however, the mulatto legend persisted, counterbalancing this noiriste legend. A striking example is the work of Alfred Viau (1958), whose son was assassinated under President Estimé in the late 1940s. According to this study, Toussaint was a puppet of the French, responsible for ensuring the colonial foundations of postindependence Haitian society and creating the colour prejudice that future black leaders would perpetuate. Describing the models that shaped Haiti, Viau criticizes louverturisme (the union of black and white against the mulatto) and praises pétio-dessalinisme, the solidarity of black and mulatto Haitians against a common white enemy that would ensure the country’s independence. The suggestion that Haiti is locked into this bipolar cycle of pigmentocratic alliances predominates in histories of Haiti, an approach epitomized perhaps by Nicholls (1988: xliii), who acknowledges the risk of wearing ‘lunettes bicouleures’. It would be inaccurate, however, to conclude without alluding to the different historiographic traditions that challenge these predominantly ‘coloured’ readings of the past. On the one hand, Etienne Charlier began in the 1950s to sketch out a Marxist reading of Haitian history, developing James’s theses but at the same time challenging the privileging of revolutionary heroes to the detriment of the people (Charlier 1954).10 As such, he prefigured the more recent work of historians such as Carolyn Fick (1990) who have explored the revolution from below. On the other hand, and perhaps more interestingly for the purposes of this chapter since Toussaint

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continues here to play a key role, the earlier writings of the politician and essayist Anténor Firmin, produced shortly after those of Ardouin and Saint-Rémy, develop a different narrative of Haitian society and history (Dash 2004; Fluehr-Lobban 2006). Toussaint is praised, in ways unthinkable in the mulatto histories considered above, as an example of the rapidity of evolution of an African slave transported to the Caribbean (Firmin 1885: 545–60). The assumptions underpinning this view remain problematic, taking European standards as a benchmark and underplaying the importance of traces of West African culture in Toussaint’s formation. Firmin’s Toussaint is nevertheless a response to earlier interpreters whose casting of the revolutionary as tyrant or despot failed to see the strategic flexibility and pragmatism by which his biography was characterized. At the same time, the author responds to Gobineau by projecting an essentially monogenist concept of racial equality. Those who present Firmin as a proto-Negritudinist thinker are therefore mistaken, for his essay is a reevaluation of the factor of race, exploring a hybridizing modernity that contrasts starkly with the schematic and reductive racial continuum that ranges from white to mulatto to black. Firmin thus anticipates by a century some of the reflections of Edouard Glissant on Caribbean ethnicity, and, as Firmin challenges the instrumentalization of Toussaint in the mulatto histories of his contemporaries, so Glissant’s exploration of the culturally creolized revolutionary – presented in particular in his play (Glissant [1978] 1986) – may be seen to respond to the seemingly polarized postcolonial interpretations of the figure with which this chapter opened.11

Notes 1. For recent considerations of the commemoration of Toussaint (and his role in memorialization), see Forsdick 2005, Prown et al. 2002, and Kachun 2006. 2. Pigmentocracy describes a state where rights and resources are apportioned in accordance with the pigmentation of the skin. The old colonial pigmentocracies may have gone, but contemporary forms have emerged to replace them. In the new South Africa, for instance, these can be seen in the search of some of the members of the coloured community for an identity separate and apart from white or black. At the same time, however, in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean, a new focus on creolization has challenged such a reemergence of a pigmentocratic impulse and gestured towards what many see as the possibility of postpigmentocratic cultural matrices. 3. For a full study of these competing historiographic traditions, see Nicholls 1988: 71–102. This chapter is indebted to Nicholls’s outstanding study for much of its wider historical detail. 4. See e.g. Forsdick 2006, Mudimbe-Boyi 2005, and Nesbitt 2004. A useful anthological approach is provided in Tyson 1973. 5. Aléxis Beaubrun Ardouin (b. 1796, Petit Trou de Nippes; d. 1865) was a printer, and then lawyer in Haiti. In 1843, he fled Haiti on the fall of

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9. 10.

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Boyer, but served as ambassador to France under Soulouque (resigning this position in 1849 when his brother was assassinated). On Beaubrun Ardouin, see Trouillot 1950. Ardouin’s principal publication was Etudes sur l’histoire d’Haïti suivies de la vie du général J.-M. Borgella, originally published as eleven volumes between 1853 and 1860. Thomas Madiou (b. 1814, Port-au-Prince; d. 1884) left Haiti in 1824 for his education in France; in 1835, he returned to Haiti as an official in Boyer’s government, 1837–41; he later served as director of the lycée national, editor of Le Moniteur, ambassador to Spain and secretary of state for education. Madiou’s principal publication was the Histoire d’Haïti (originally published 1847–48). On Madiou, see Lescouflair 1950. Joseph Saint-Rémy (b. 1816, Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe; d. 1858) studied law in Paris before returning to Haiti to practise in Les Cayes; he was banished under Pierrot, moving to Paris; in 1853, he returned to Haiti to practise law in Gonaïves. His biography of Toussaint (Saint-Rémy 1850) was followed by an edition of the revolutionary’s memoirs (Saint-Rémy 1853). On representations of Joux, see Forsdick 2003. For a discussion of the status of Toussaint in the light of tragedy and romance, see Scott 2004. On ‘sister republics’, see Harouel 1997. There is distinct uncertainty surrounding the question of Toussaint’s relationship to vaudou. Whereas Joan Dayan (1995: 23–24) highlights Dessalines’s status as a lwa, Madison Smartt Bell – in his trilogy of novels on the Haitian Revolution (1995, 2000, 2004) – continues a traditional belief in Toussaint’s own close association with the religion. See e.g. Lamartine ([1850] 1998), the melodramatic elements of whose family romance were immediately parodied by Labiche and Varin (1850). A copy of a letter to Charlier from James exists in the C.L.R. James archive at UWI, St Augustine (dated 24 August 1955; box 7, folder 190) in which James defended his analysis of Toussaint against that of Charlier, but showed a growing interest in Moyse. He claims that ‘the revolutionary power of untaught slaves is what interests [him] about the revolution in San Domingo more than anything else’. James himself (2000), in the 1971 lectures at the Institute in the Black World in Atlanta on the genesis of The Black Jacobins, claimed that were he to have rewritten the book four decades later it is this aspect that would be privileged. For a discussion of Glissant’s play, see Forsdick 1999a, 1999b. The current chapter was written whilst its author was a British Academy Senior Research Fellow; the support of the academy in its preparation is acknowledged with gratitude.

Bibliography Ardouin, B. [1853–60] 1958. Etudes sur l’histoire d’Haïti suivies de la vie du général J.-M. Borgella. Port-au-Prince: F. Dalencour. Bell, M.S. 1995. All Souls’ Rising. New York: Pantheon. ———. 2000. Master of the Crossroads. New York: Pantheon. ———. 2004. The Stone the Builder Refused. New York: Pantheon. Buscaglia-Salgado, J.F. 2004. Undoing Empire: Race and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Carby, H.V. 1998. Race Men. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. Césaire, A. 1960. Toussaint Louverture, la Révolution française et le problème colonial. Paris: Club Français du Livre.

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———. [1939] 1983. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Paris: Présence Africaine. Charlier, E. 1954. Aperçu sur la formation historique de la nation haïtienne. Portau-Prince: Les Presses Libres. Condé, M. 1993. ‘Order, Disorder, Freedom and the West Indian Writer’, Yale French Studies 83(2): 121–35. Daguillard, F. 2003. Mystérieux dans sa gloire. Port-au-Prince: Musée du Panthéon National Haïtien. Dash, M. 2004. ‘Nineteenth-century Haiti and the Archipelago of the Americas: Anténor Firmin’s Letters from St. Thomas’, Research in African Literatures 35(2): 44–53. Dayan, J. 1995. Haiti, History and the Gods. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Dubroca. 1802. La Vie de Toussaint-Louverture, chef des noirs insurgés de SaintDomingue. Paris: [Dubroca]. Fick, C. 1990. The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press. Firmin, A. 1885. De l’égalité des races humaines. Paris: Cotillon. Fluehr-Lobban, C. 2006. ‘Anténor Fimin: His Legacy and Continuing Relevance’, in Martin Munro and Elizabeth Hackett-Walcott (eds), Re-interpreting the Haitian Revolution and its Cultural Aftershocks. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, pp. 86–101. Forsdick, C. 1999a. ‘“Chaque île est une ouverture”: Representing the Revolutionary in Edouard Glissant’s Monsieur Toussaint’, International Journal of Francophone Studies 2(1): 28–35. ———. 1999b. ‘Refiguring Revolution: The Myth of Toussaint L’Ouverture in C.L.R. James and Edouard Glissant’, New Comparison 27–28: 259–72. ———. 2003. ‘Transatlantic Displacement and the Problematics of Space’, in M. Gallagher (ed.), Ici-Là: Place and Displacement in Caribbean Writing in French. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 181–209. ———. 2005. ‘The Black Jacobin in Paris’, Journal of Romance Studies 5(3): 9–24. ———. 2006. ‘The Travelling Revolutionary: Translations of Toussaint Louverture’, in M. Munro and E. Hackett-Walcott (eds), Re-interpreting the Haitian Revolution and its Cultural Aftershocks. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, pp. 150–67. ———. 2007. ‘Situating Haiti: On some Early Nineteenth-century Representations of Toussaint Louverture’, International Journal of Francophone Studies 10(1): 17–34. Garraway, D. 2005. The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Geggus, D. 2002. Haitian Revolutionary Studies. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Glissant, E. 1981. Le Discours antillais. Paris: Seuil. ———. [1978] 1986. Monsieur Toussaint. Paris: Gallimard. Harouel, J.-L. 1997. Les Républiques sœurs. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, coll. Que sais-je? James, C.L.R. [1938] 1980. The Black Jacobins. Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. London: Allison and Busby. ———. 2000. ‘The C.L.R. James Lectures’, Small Axe 8: 65–112. Kachun, M. 2006. ‘Antebellum African Americans, Public Commemoration, and the Haitian Revolution: A Problem of Historical Myth Making’, Journal of the Early Republic 26(2): 249–73. Labiche, E. and C. Varin. 1850. Traversin et Couverture, parodie de Toussaint Louverture, en 4 actes mêlés de peu de vers et de beaucoup de prose. Paris: Michel Lévy frères.

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Lamartine, A. de. [1850] 1998. Toussaint Louverture, ed. Léon-François Hoffmann. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Lescouflair, A. 1950. Thomas Madiou: homme d’état et historien haïtien. Port-auPrince: Instituto Panamericano de Geografia & Historia. Lorimer, D. and F. Duvalier. 1948. Problème des classes à travers l’histoire d’Haiti. Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de l’Etat. Madiou, T. [1847–48] 1989. Histoire d’Haïti, 8 vols. Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps. Mudimbe-Boyi, E. 2005. ‘Unfathomable Toussaint’, in A. Donadey and H.A. Murdoch (eds), Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, pp. 37–54. Nesbitt, N. 2004. ‘Troping Toussaint, Reading Revolution’, Research in African Literatures 35(2): 18–33. ———. 2005. ‘The Idea of 1804’, Yale French Studies 107: 6–38. Nicholls, D. 1988. From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan. Pluchon, P. 1989. Toussaint Louverture. Paris: Fayard. Prown, J. et al. 2002. ‘“The Very Man for the Hour”: The Toussaint L’Ouverture Portrait Pitcher’, in R. Hunter (ed.), Ceramics in America 2002. Hanover and London: Chipstone Foundation, pp. 110–29. Saint-Rémy, J. 1850. La Vie de Toussaint-L’Ouverture. Paris: Moquet. ———J. (ed.). 1953. Mémoires du Général Toussaint-L’Ouverture écrits par luimême. Paris: Pagnerre. Scott, D. 2004. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Trouillot, H. 1950. Beaubrun Ardouin: l’homme politique et l’historien. Port-auPrince: Instituto Panamericano de Geografia & Historia. Tyson Jr., G.F. (ed.). 1973. Toussaint Louverture. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Viau, A. 1958. Toussaint Louverture, considéré à la lumière de ses actes et attitudes. Ciudad Trujillo: Editora Montalvo.

 CHAPTER 11 

SKIN

‘LINDA MORENITA’: COLOUR, BEAUTY AND THE POLITICS OF MESTIZAJE IN MEXICO Mónica Moreno Figueroa

I had a classmate while doing my Ph.D. He was the best in his class, better than the gringos1 and other foreigners, but when you see him you think: ‘In Mexico, they wouldn’t give a penny for this guy’. Because he was the typical Mexican: short, morenito,2 skinny … I mean like ... very insignificant physically. (Paulina, 49, Mexico City)

Beauty, appearance, and racialized perceptions of skin colour, as ‘regimes of difference’ (Ahmed 1998), are notions that inform each other within specific social and historical configurations. In this chapter I will explore the workings of such regimes within the specific configurations of Mexicanness and mestizaje (racial mixing).3 How do these regimes of difference collide ‘differently’? Is there an unequal basis on which they operate? These questions will guide us in a discussion of the relationship between skin colour, beauty, visibility and racial discourses, as well as the accumulation of meaning that such ideas have in their empirical experience. This analysis draws from a research project concerned with the ‘quality’ of contemporary practices of racism in Mexico in relation to discourses of mestizaje, ‘race’ and nation. Through focus group discussions and life-story interviews based on family photograph albums, I explored how the women who participated in this study understand and experience their racialized, gendered and classed bodies and national identity in a context where racism has been rendered invisible. Here I will concentrate on the participants concern with skin colour and beauty as identifiable aspects of contemporary racist practices in Mexico. Throughout the women’s accounts, their experience of, and relation to, skin colour and beauty emerged as key elements in their self-perception. Skin colour and beauty also appeared to be clearly linked with a series of emotions such as shame,

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pain, inadequacy, and the desire to be ‘normal’ and to not be ‘insignificant’. The connections between the shame of being or not being beautiful, the desire to look and be ‘normal’, the sense of uneasiness with their appearance and the fear of being perceived as ‘insignificant’, revealed precisely that relationship between racism, visibility and the construction of the feminine. Such connections and collisions also revealed the ways in which they were affected by the specific cultural and social formations of Mexican racial and national identities. The body is being permanently and unavoidably read and, as Craig wrote when analysing the links between beauty, racism and the body, ‘any body … exists at a congested crossroad of forces. Bodies provide us with a principal means of expression, yet our bodies are read in ways that defy our intentions. We act on others through our bodies, but nonetheless our bodies are the sites of the embodiment of social control’ (Craig 2006: 160). Bodies are then metaphors, mediums of culture (Bordo 1997), and as such they have also become a battleground – a site of struggle where ‘the collision between regimes of difference’ (Ahmed 1998: 47) in a ‘congested crossroad of forces’ takes place. But can ‘regimes of difference’ or ‘forces’ collide and coexist at the same time? The term ‘collision’ encapsulates a striking contradiction. On the one hand, the action of colliding implies the use of force: it is the ‘violent encounter of a moving body with another’. Collision refers to the ‘encounter of opposed ideas, interests, etc.’, which is characterized as hostile. On the other, collision also refers to ‘coming into contact (with no notion of violent opposition or hostility); action of mind upon mind, or the like’.4 So, simultaneously, ‘collision’ might or might not be accompanied by hostility, conflict or force; but mainly, ‘collision’ refers to the encounter of ideas, ways of thinking, and bodies in movement. We then have the notion of a ‘regime’, which is ‘the set of conditions under which a system occurs or is maintained’.5 Regimes of difference will then organize and reproduce social understandings of beauty, femininity, ‘race’, class, gender, age, and so on, as markers which are basically dissimilar and sometimes exclusive of each other. All of these regimes of difference coincide in the body, inscribing on it their own hierarchies, rules and demands. In this light, I want to explore the ways in which a sense of ‘inequality’ operates in the collision of regimes of difference. I am interested in both the ‘encounter’ but also the ‘value’ assigned to each of these sets of conditions – the specifics of the collision of difference in the mestiza female body. More concretely, in this chapter I am concerned with the ways in which notions of ‘race’, nation and femininity get configured and are constantly (re)done/(re)created in the participants’ bodies. So the questions are: ‘what might the cultural rules and hierarchies inscribed on the mestiza body be in terms of ‘race’ and femininity?’ and ‘what does the concern with body and beauty reveal about these women’s racialized everyday experiences?’

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In the extract that started this chapter, Paulina expressed her opinion of one of her classmates while studying in the United States, and remarked on the physical ‘insignificance’ of the ‘typical Mexican’. This extract, apart from being one of the very few references to Mexican men’s appearance, reveals in its rawness a popular perception of the looks of the ‘typical Mexican man’, and it gives an example of the prevailing ways in Mexico of expressing judgement on others’ appearance. This physical description, ‘short, morenito and skinny’, works as part of the criteria that generally informs the sort of looks that are considered ‘adequate’; that is, they correspond to how a Mexican person is ‘expected’ to look. Although that does not necessarily mean that such looks are therefore desirable, they can certainly be accepted as ‘how things are’. In this brief sentence Paulina revealed the different layers which make up the perception of the ‘other’ and which interact with the field of vision within which these judgements are recreated: from broader aspects such as education and class, to notions of nation and belonging based on physical appearance. Paulina talks about the ‘typical’ appearance of the Mexican, using these terms to configure a national identification, and implies that this particular image offers a sense of belonging. What is most interesting is the ‘insignificant’ value with which this image is attributed, which can also be applied to the notion of being Mexican itself. To be ‘insignificant’ is to be ‘devoid of meaning; meaningless: of speech, word, gestures, etc’.6 It also means to be ‘without efficacy; ineffective; of no importance; immaterial; trivial’. However, it can also refer to being ‘an unimportant or contemptible person’, and thus to be ‘despicable’.7 I remember though that in the interview Paulina talked about this example with both a sense of indignation and a straightforward understanding of ‘how things work’: ‘In Mexico, they wouldn’t give a penny for this guy’. The issues that this idea raises are interesting. Paulina is deducing, with what seems a sense of practicality, that regardless of her classmate’s status as an excellent Ph.D. student, his physical appearance (height, skin colour and size) is completely bound to his Mexicanness and, rather than guaranteeing his success, will be an obstacle to it. What does it mean to relate appearance with nationality, image with belonging, or physical insignificance with being Mexican? Moreover, what does it mean to suggest therefore that his value as a person is at stake? Firstly, these sets of relationships can tell us about the historical and homogenizing configurations within which identities are constructed, where the visual plays a fundamental role in filtering or distinguishing people’s social positions. To deduce that those social positions and distinctions end up being fundamental criteria for deciding people’s fate would be simplistic. However, what is significant is that the possibility of the existence, circulation and reproduction of such perceptions has a pervasive impact on people’s self-understanding, as well as on the organization of social relationships.

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Throughout the interviews, the participants expressed a concern about establishing their distance from these physical descriptions: they ‘know’ that in so far as you look like the typical Mexican ‘nobody would give a penny for you’. How can one recreate a sense of national identity if the identification with one’s space of belonging implies an intrinsic devaluation? In this sense, beauty could be thought of, in this specific context, as an aspiration, a lure (Felski 2006) or a tendency (Berlant 2002) that works as a way out of the stigma of Mexicanness, of insignificance. Here we are witnessing the collision within the mestiza body, not only of regimes of difference in relation to ‘race’ and beauty, but also the regime of Mexicanness, of national ascription, which simultaneously carries racial underpinnings. If the value of insignificance is attributed to the appearance of a person and to what a Mexican should ‘look’ like, we are witnessing a quite confusing and distressing scenario. If to be Mexican is to be insignificant – or even contemptible – the constant struggle over beauty is no surprise; that is, the consideration of beauty as a way out of the stigma of Mexicanness and, therefore, of insignificance. However, the difficulty arises when the cultural understandings and everyday experiences of notions such as femininity, racial identity or national ascriptions, as distinctive and exclusive ‘regimes’, make the lives of these women utterly confusing.

In Mexico ‘There is No Racism’ The Americas have long been an arena for extraordinary mixtures of cultures and peoples born of diasporas from Africa, Asia and Europe. These mixtures have given rise to different racial constructions, known in the Caribbean as creolization and in Latin America as Mestizaje, that have been used to syncretize and refashion race and ethnic mixture into distinct forms of national identity. (Safa 1998: 3)

In Mexico, the term ‘mestiza’ has passed from being used to refer to the children of Spanish and indigenous inhabitants of what was called New Spain after the Spanish Conquest in 1521 and is now the Mexican territory, to being the prototype of the individuals who made up the new nation after independence from Spain in 1821. From this moment onwards, Mexico entered a process of modifying the law in terms of racial discrimination, and common ideas of equality were widespread as a consequence of the challenge from strong liberal ideologies of the time. Nevertheless, the imposition of the mestiza as the subject of national identity, the heritage of the colonial process of miscegenation but ideologically reconstructed in order to create the new sense of nation with the revolution of 1910, has hidden and grown different forms of racisms. In this context I argue that old colonial racial categories remain, and ‘passing’ towards ‘whiteness’ – in its peculiar

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Mexican version – is still a goal for the inhabitants, a problematic area in terms of identity, and a non-spoken rule of social stratification. One of the concerns that guide this chapter is precisely the debate about the existence of notions of ‘race’ and practices of racism in contemporary Mexico. Knight (1990) discusses how some Mexican authorities have denied the existence of racism since the revolution of 1910 due to the conscious efforts of the political elites to homogenize a sense of nation in a rather complex and heterogeneous society. However, ‘racism can be driven underground (not necessarily very far underground); it can shift its premises (e.g. from biological to other, ostensibly more plausible, determinants) without that ideological shift substantially affecting its daily practice’ (ibid.: 98). So for Knight, racism, racist beliefs and practices have been transformed in Mexico underpinned by both a change in discourse (that denies racism) and a constant discriminatory practice that has allowed a social space where exclusion and social inequality maintain their shaping force of social relations. Knight then writes: But racism did not wither on the vine. Against the confident obituaries of Mexican racism … we could set more sombre estimates of an ‘omnipresent dimension’ of racism in Mexican society, or of a ‘profoundly racist ideology’ which, according to one analysis, underpins the rule of both traditional rural caciques and also newer ‘liberal technocratic’ regional bourgeoisies. (Knight 1990: 99)

It is in this sense that I am concerned with the exploration of this ‘omnipresent dimension’ of racism in Mexican society and its ‘profoundly racist ideology’. My aim is to give an account of the forms in which racism has taken shape: how racism permeates people’s lives. In the context of my research, the ‘omnipresent dimension’ of racism is expressed both in a variety of everyday practices that have deep effects on women’s life experience, and in the ways in which women relate to what I call ‘mestizaje logic’. Indeed, I want to suggest that central to racist practices in Mexico has been the concept of racial mixture, or mestizaje, its cultural and historical ‘omnipresent dimension’, and the coexistence of its variety of understandings within miscegenation discourses, official nationalistic governmental policies and invisible and all-pervasive logics of prejudice. Although racial signifiers in Mexico have been transformed by the perception of ‘mixing’ throughout time, as well as by the effect of social stratification along class lines, they remain part of more complex logics of discrimination. It is through these mestizaje logics that the negotiating of belonging to the nation takes place. Mestizaje logics are strategies of racial differentiation that permeate Mexican social life. They are in operation when, for example, there is a discourse towards improving one’s appearance or achieving fairer skin colour without making explicit links to the notions of ‘race’ that underpin

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such discourse or reference to how those understandings have come into being through history. What a ‘mestizaje logic’ does is to disconnect the personal experience of racism from the broader social context that reproduces it, and also to erase the links with its historical process of formation. When operating through such logic, racism loses its name and its referents, and becomes ‘just what we do’ and ‘just how things are’. It is in this context that I want to focus on the significance of skin colour in its relation to notions of beauty and Mexican women’s experiences of racism. Beauty, appearance, physical features, and racialized perceptions of skin colour are notions that inform each other within the specific historical configuration of mestizaje and Mexicanness. Taking this into account, I want to think of beauty in its materialization in female racialized bodies, where their skin is a witness to and bearer of history. At the same time, I want to consider skin colour and beauty as notions that struggle with the visible in the construction of the feminine, and the problems this raises for the racialized body.

The Uneasiness with Skin Colour From the analysis of the focus groups and the life-story interviews, the relevance of skin colour appeared to be extremely important, and an uneasy issue for the participants. This uneasiness is commonly referred to when talking about racial and racist experiences. I want to suggest that such uneasiness is strongly linked to a relatively complex, overshadowed and unspoken association of skin colour with beauty, physical features, racist practices and the specific Mexican history of racial discourses, where the different uses of mestizaje play a key role. A good way of introducing elements to understand the uneasiness with skin colour is reflected in the following extract of a focus group discussion. The difficulty of agreeing what it means to be white/fair (güera/güerita) or dark (morena/morenita or prieta/o) appeared clearly in one of the discussions. The following extract points out women’s difficulties in determining skin colour variations and tonalities with any precision. Roxana: But look, it’s very funny, well that’s what it’s like at my house: when my boy was born, he came out very red and one nurse said: ‘oh he is going to be güerito’, and all the nurses called him ‘El Güero’, he was ‘The Güero of the Hospital’, and I said: ‘hey, wait a moment, my boy is morenito, and the father is moreno, why he is not going to be like that?’ Carla: Did you bring the photographs? Roxana: Yes, I’ll show them to you, and you’ll see the father too … [She shows the photographs] This is my boy. Margarita: Mmm … Well … moreno, moreno, moreno, not really … Roxana: Why would he not be moreno? He is prieto moreno …

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Bertha: Look, I am morena and your husband is lighter than me. Carla: Well … you are light morena. Roxana: But the funny thing is that he’s always saying: ‘Hey, why is the boy moreno?’ My husband is the one asking why he is moreno. And I say to him: ‘Well, because he’s your son’. I always tell him that it’s because he is his son. Carla: But what was he expecting? Margarita: Yes, it’s like in the villages in the countryside, where all the women are morenitas and they still say: ‘oh, hopefully my baby will come out güerito!’ Roxana: Yes … you say: ‘it’s not possible …’ Lorena: Yes you hear that a lot: ‘the baby is very pretty; it came out güerito …’

Morena, prieta and güera are all adjectives that refer to particular types of skin colour. Morena and prieta are very similar in their meaning; they both refer to a female with dark skin colour, or to be more precise, with ‘darker-than-others’ skin colour in a given context, although prieta could be used in a pejorative way depending on the intonation. Güera is an adjective used to describe a female who is perceived as having either white or ‘whiter-than-others’ skin colour, or maybe with blonde or light brown hair. Similar to morena, it can also be said of the fairest person in a given group, such as a family. When these words end in ‘o’ they refer to a male: moreno, prieto, güero. In this extract we can see how these women’s views reflect two important issues about skin colour: its visual ‘relationality’ and the unspoken shared cultural understanding it implies. So if skin colour is defined in relation to another person’s skin colour, it seems that Margarita, Roxana, Bertha and Carla have completely different perceptions of what ‘having dark skin’ means. However, through their conversation they are repositioning their perception of their own skin colour and the people they are talking about (Roxana’s son and the women in the countryside) within the specific setting of the focus group. The focus group here becomes an experiential event: it is the gathering together of these women in the space of the focus group that facilitates this repositioning and mutual assignation of, in this case, skin colour. In other words, and as Lancaster (2003) argues, if skin colour and colour-related words are relational, and more concretely visually relational, then they have to be renegotiated through ‘comparative assessments and shifting contexts’ (ibid.: 103); I would argue that this is what the participants are doing when they look at themselves and at the photographs, and make visible and explicit their perceptions of difference. Moreover, they are making evident the non-fixity of skin colour perceptions, because it is not what skin colour you ‘have’ (since this is indefinable and somewhat unimportant), but what colour you are ‘perceived’ to ‘have’ and ‘be’ at a precise moment and place in time. Skin colour is constantly (re) assigned through situated interactions and experiences.

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The second issue, brought up in this conversation, is that if such a visually relational event was possible, then at the same time as such negotiation is enacted, a circulation of shared cultural understandings is also occurring. Different discourses of national identity and mestizaje conflate in these shared cultural understandings. For example, when the participants are talking about the expectations of the women in the pueblos of the countryside, they are referring to the idea that the women expect their children to be born with fairer skin colour than themselves and their partners. Another part of the extract that expresses these links between national, racial and mestizaje discourses is when Roxana’s husband asks her about the skin colour of their child, wondering with surprise why their child has dark skin. Roxana replies: ‘Well, because he is your son’. While the answer seems obvious, as if talking of inherited characteristics, what is striking is that the husband was puzzled enough to have posed the question, and that she had to reiterate this seemingly obvious detail. The disbelief suggested in his question does not indicate that he is being naïve, but instead is responding to an expectation of different and ‘improved’ (i.e. fairer) skin colour and physical features for their child. This expectation of ‘improvement’ links to another example from the above extract: the use of the verb ‘salir’, which literally means ‘to go out’. This is a very particular term used in relation to small children at the moment when they are born. For the translation, I believed the phrase ‘to come out’ gave a better sense. Relatives, friends and medical staff, as well as passers-by, will often ask the new mother and/or father how the baby ‘came out’. This term does not relate to the health of the child or how is the mother doing, or even a general enquiry about how the delivery was, but to the baby’s skin colour. Significantly, the fact that such a question can even be asked indicates that a degree of uncertainty and unpredictability is ‘allowed’, ‘permitted’ or ‘expected’. It is as if the child’s skin colour will not necessarily be related to that of the parents, as if maybe some ‘magical’ combination, genetic inheritance or white European blood could show up and bestow upon the parents the ‘good luck’ of a güerita/o, and therefore a ‘pretty’ baby. In other words, an implicit understanding or logic of mestizaje, as both a biological and desirable process, and its possible outcomes, is still current in people’s imaginations. It is then the character of relationality, the possibility of negotiation and the expectation of improvement which give women’s concerns with skin colour and appearance a deeper interconnection and significance. In relation to notions of ‘race’ within which, for example, skin colour has been worked into a vital physical/visible signifier of difference (Wade 1997), it is also the one with black or darker skin who is unmarked in relation to the marked white/lighter individual (Phelan 1996). When trying to understand the basis for the distinction between ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’, or in the Mexican case, between indígenas,8 mestizas or güeras, visual representations lead to multiple

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interpretations that depend on specific racial discourses – with particular historical formations – and ongoing performances of identity. As Phelan says, ‘the focus on the skin as the visible marker of race is itself a form of feminising those races which are not white. Reading the body as the sign of identity is the way men regulate the bodies of women’ (Phelan 1996: 10). These approaches to sexual and racial difference become rather complex when applied to the study of subjects who have been constructed within postcolonial discourses; that is, subjects who have developed themselves within a context of being a visually fixed, stereotyped other (Bhabha 1999). Here, I am interested in Mexican mestiza women and their experiences in relation to skin colour and beauty, but from the particular perspective of the visible: the ways they see and are seen, the elements that interact to inform their gaze, the meanings and values of the metaphor of their own image. From Phelan’s perspective, mestiza women could be regarded as ‘unmarked’ beings struggling with both the desire to see themselves and the impossibility of doing so other than through another’s gaze – which is already informed as much as their own. Their social conditions as women and mestizas located in a postcolonial developing country are ideal for reproducing sexual and racial identities as stereotypes that facilitate prevailing discriminatory relationships. Their bodies and skins are ‘signifiers of discrimination [that] must be processed as visible’ (Bhabha 1999: 376).

Skin Colour, Beauty and Mestizaje Logic Consuelo, when looking at one of her photographs, shared her experience of what can be thought of as the possible terms for beauty, skin colour and physical appearance: ‘They used to call me “prieta [dark], cabezona [big head], and dientuda [goofy]”, and I used to say: “Why do I have such big teeth? Why am I so morena?”’ (Consuelo, 29, Leon). Prieta, as explained before, refers to a female with ‘darkerthan-others’ skin colour, and it can have a pejorative connotation depending on intonation (as in this case); cabezona refers to a female with a large head (cabeza); and dientuda, which I translated as ‘goofy’, refers to a female with big teeth (dientes). Due to the context of this expression and Consuelo’s intonation when sharing her experience, it seems that these three words were used with a pejorative sense and were meant to be offensive. Consuelo approaches her understanding of beauty via what it is not. If ‘they’ call her those names with the intention to offend and bully her, then for Consuelo it seems to mean that her appearance is in contrast to what is considered adequate and acceptable. To be beautiful means not to have dark skin colour, not to have a large head, and not to have big teeth. But this belief leaves Consuelo in an

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upsetting situation where she asks herself: ‘Why do I have such big teeth? Why am I so morena?’ As in the case of Roxana and her husband mentioned above, these questions have no satisfactory answer. They seem to be asked as if an answer is both possible and impossible: they are poignant. Is there something to be explained? Is it just a rhetorical complaint without any expectation of resolution? How and why it is even possible to ask for a reason for one’s appearance? On the one hand, these questions seem to arise from the notion that ‘things’ can happen to the body. It seems that ‘things’ such as specific sizes, colours, heights, and features work in favour of beauty and against ugliness. But, on the other hand, these questions also suggest that such things ‘could’ have been manipulated, planned or worked out previously; they could have been negotiated. The possibility of negotiation appears as central to the development of Mexican people’s sense of belonging and can be observed in transformed modes in everyday practices, experiences and identities. The recurrence of this sense of a negotiation extends this discussion to its possible links with the interaction between the performance of femininity and the specificity of contemporary Mexican racial discourses and practices of racism; in other words, the ways in which mestizaje logic operates in the realm of beauty. Let me explain further. Consuelo’s complaints could be directed towards personal family stories, which is how in a commonsense fashion such accounts are usually understood: ‘it is my problem’, ‘my family is just like that’, ‘this is how things are’. However, they also point towards a social history that has granted to the process of mestizaje the promise of the power of flexibility, of moulding and directing Mexican people towards perfection. Here the notion of mestiza as both an achieved and ascribed status (Knight 1990) is particularly significant. The promise of achievement proclaims that the ‘race will be improved’, and if this does not happen is such a way – if people’s appearances do not approximate to the ‘white ideal’ – individuals can be blamed, since they have not foreseen or planned adequately, as part of a personalized project of the self, where ‘negotiating one’s appearance’ is possible and desirable. This specific promise of mestizaje has proven to be more of a myth than a trustworthy reality, bringing in the element of chance as the only explanation when ‘the race is not improved’. Has mestizaje worked in favour of randomness, giving some Mexican women and men the ‘benefit’ of beauty and others the ‘benefit’ of dreaming what it could have been like to ‘look’ different? Would this difference make them look the same as the admired ‘white’ others? Would they perhaps have fair skin, ‘coloured’ eyes, ‘fine’ features – could they perhaps be beautiful? As pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, there seem to be traces of the colonial understanding of mestizaje as a ‘highly flexible’ social identity within the caste system in this extract. The logic of ‘improving the race’ by ‘whitening’ the population and approaching people’s appearance to

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a ‘white-Europeanized’ ideal is implicit in Consuelo’s story. The questioning of her appearance bears this racist logic – mestizaje logic – and is a testimony of the unspoken rules of a social hierarchy of distinctions, and of the codes that circulate within the particular Mexican configuration of the visible world. The significance of beauty here goes beyond its conception as a space of submission through which women are determined and objectified by a male gaze (Bartky 1990). Furthermore, it challenges such understandings of women’s experiences and asks for a deeper and renewed ‘complicated’ analysis (Felski 2006, Craig 2006, Colebrook 2006). What these women experienced is the sharp pain of feeling fundamentally inadequate, together with the constant fear of being perceived as ‘insignificant’, beyond their own psychological profiles or specific personal stories. These women’s ‘beauty talk’ revealed the ways in which the shame of not being/feeling beautiful and the desire to be/look ‘normal’, interact with the relationships between racial discourses, the visible and the construction of the feminine. Such interaction re-creates the links between emotions and the reproduction of racism, which are at the core of Mexican culture and society, calling for a renewal of the claim of the personal as clearly political. Practices and concerns around and about skin colour and beauty are by no means trivial; they actually reveal the depth of racial attitudes and their consequences for the performance of femininity and the sense of self-worth. Moreover, as Brand argues, ‘[f]or women, beauty has always mattered – in a personal way and as an inevitable and underlying sociopolitical framework for how they operate in the world’ (Brand 2000: 5–6). Skin colour and beauty, and the practices and concerns around them, raise alternative ways of approaching, from a feminist perspective, the analysis of women’s experiences in contemporary postcolonial societies. These practices are strongly linked to the uniqueness of the ‘omnipresent dimension’ (Knight 1990: 99) of racism in Mexico, the notion of ‘mestizaje logic’, and the stereotypes that inform women’s sense of national identity.

Mestizaje, Mexicanness and Beauty The questions that follow then are: how should this Mexican mestiza female body be seen and read? How can we build a complex reading that can explicate the collision between regimes of difference? Could skin colour and beauty be concerns that exemplify this collision? Ahmed proposes ‘to think through the skin as a surface upon which differences collide’ (Ahmed 1998: 47). In the first instance, beauty could be thought of as something that happens on the surface of the body and that is valued visually. Although the ‘thing by which beauty is judged’ (Weekes 1997) is inscribed on the female mestiza

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body, in the specificity of her skin and her features, this perspective would not necessarily account for the moment and the process in which the act of seeing enacts a particular social configuration of the visual and makes a judgement about specific bodies. The female mestiza body not only carries meaning on its surface, but, more significantly, its meaning is negotiated in relation to and in comparison with other bodies. This is to say that beauty in the mestiza woman is not something she ‘has’, but is a characteristic that is socially ‘given’ to her and which she has the potential to ‘negotiate’. The specific surface of the body can provide clues for racial identity, national belonging, familial resemblance and cultural capital. Nevertheless, it is the performance of each body, the specific interaction between bodies, and the embodied distinctions between regimes of difference, which locates bodies socially. The skin then becomes, effectively and affectively, ‘a surface upon which differences collide’ (Ahmed 1998: 47) and a ‘site of social crisis and instability’ (ibid.: 52). It is on the skin that issues such as beauty, appearance and colour are debated and are literally worked and suffered for; it is there where they are also felt, some or many of the times with shame, fear or disgust. It is on the skin where ‘body work’ (Gimlin 2002) is performed and reflected. It is through the discourses of the skin that bodies are diagnosed as healthy or diseased, are ‘normalized’ or ‘stigmatized’ (Goffman 1963), are racially marked or unmarked (Phelan 1996), are made visible or invisible (Goldberg 1997). As Probyn (2001) argues, it is through the different shades and textures of the skin that histories of inequality can be read. She writes: Any investigation of skin must start here. It must start in the present in order to seek ways of connecting to the past. It must start in the acknowledgement of the fact that skin matters, matters viscerally, and in different ways. It must begin in an acknowledgement of the different shades, textures and feel of skin, of skin as testimony both to the subjective state of individuals and to the histories that have moulded them … Skin becomes a living proof of the ways in which individuals seek to inhabit this land. (Probyn 2001: 87)

Feelings of lack and shame, and the willingness to improve one’s appearance, are reproduced within a social context where the ‘omnipresent dimension’ (Knight 1990: 99) of racism – ‘mestizaje logic’ – operates. The irreconcilable relation between beauty and the mestiza body, the dark-skinned body, makes the performance of femininity difficult and sometimes impossible. How can you be dark, morena, mestiza – and beautiful? How can you be Mexican mestiza without relating to insignificance? How could these women’s racialized bodies and their informed gazes not confront their everyday experience? This analysis has pointed to the accumulation of meaning that informs a notion such as skin colour and beauty in its

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empirical experience. When these women see themselves in a mirror, in their photographs, in the stories that others tell about them, they cannot avoid the social configuration of the visual world, where beauty, skin colour, bodily features and the performance of femininity collide. To contemplate a social configuration of the visible is to confront the idea of looking as an unmediated act, and to confirm the constructed character of the informed gaze. It is precisely the collision of regimes of difference that points to the social configuration of the visible. In such a configuration, in such a collision, several elements come together – the informed gaze, notions of beauty, feelings of shame – creating a sort of ‘mestizaje moment’. The ‘omnipresent dimension’ of racism is then fully revealed when that configuration/ collision occurs.

Notes 1. ‘Gringo’ is a popular Mexican way of naming ‘white-looking’ foreigners, mainly from the United States. With the ending ‘o’ it refers to a male, and with ‘a’ to a female (gringa). 2. Morenito/a comes from moreno/a which refers to a dark-skinned male (o) or female (a) and the ending –ito/ita indicates its diminutive. ‘Linda Morenita’ from the title means ‘pretty dark-skinned woman’ in Spanish. This does not necessarily mean the phrase refers to a child or young woman but as it is a way to show ‘softness’, approachability, and/or tenderness. 3. Mestizaje is understood here as a set of discourses of racial mixture. The OED defines it as: ‘interbreeding and cultural intermixing of Spanish and American Indian people (originally in Mexico, and subsequently also in other parts of Latin America); miscegenation, racial and cultural intermixing’, The Oxford English Dictionary (2002). 4. ‘collision’, The Oxford English Dictionary (2006). 5. ‘regime’, The Oxford English Dictionary (2006). 6. ‘insignificant’, The Oxford English Dictionary (2006). 7. ‘contemptible’, The Oxford English Dictionary (2006). 8. ‘Indígena(s)’ is the name given to the indigenous population of Mexico, nowadays comprising fifty-six different ethnic groups. Some authors use the more traditional ‘india/o(s)’, which has a clear pejorative connotation in its everyday use. Although both terms (indígena/india) are problematic, I have decided to use indígena as a more ‘respectful’ word. I discuss the problematic of both terms elsewhere (Moreno Figueroa 2006).

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Bhabha, H. 1999. ‘The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse’ in J. Evans and S. Hall (eds), Visual Culture: The Reader. London: Sage, in association with the Open University, pp. 370–78. Bordo, S. 1997. ‘The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity’, in K. Conboy, N. Medina and S. Stanbury (eds), Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 90–110. Brand, P.Z. 2000. ‘Introduction: How Beauty Matters’, in P.Z. Brand (ed.), Beauty Matters. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 1–23. Colebrook, C. 2006. ‘Introduction’, Feminist Theory 7(2): 131–42. Craig, M.L. 2006. ‘Race, Beauty, and the Tangled Know of a Guilty Pleasure’, Feminist Theory 7(2): 159–77. Felski, R. 2006. ‘“Because It Is Beautiful”: New Feminist Perspectives on Beauty’, Feminist Theory 7(2): 273–82. Gimlin, D.L. 2002. Body Work: Beauty and Self Image in American Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Goffman, E. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books. Goldberg, D.T. 1997. Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America. New York and London: Routledge. Knight, A. 1990. ‘Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910–1940’, in R. Graham (ed.), The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Lancaster, R.N. 2003. ‘Skin Color, Race, and Racism in Nicaragua’, in J. Stone and R. Dennis (eds), Race and Ethnicity: Comparative and Theoretical Approaches. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 99–113. Moreno Figueroa, M.G. 2006. The Complexities of the Visible: Mexican Women’s Experiences of Racism, Mestizaje and National Identity. Ph.D. in Sociology thesis. London: Goldsmiths College, University of London. Phelan, P. 1996. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge. Probyn, E. 2001. ‘Eating Skin’, in S. Ahmed and J. Stacey (eds), Thinking through the Skin. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 87–103. Safa, H.I. 1998. ‘Introduction: Race and National Identity in the Americas’, Latin American Perspectives 25(3): 3–20. Wade, P. 1997. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. London: Pluto Press. Weekes, D. 1997. ‘Shades of Blackness: Young Black Female Constructions of Beauty’, in H.S. Mirza (ed.), Black British Feminism: A Reader. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 113–26.



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CONTRIBUTORS

Chris Horrocks is a Principal Lecturer in Art History in the School of Art & Design History and the Visual & Material Culture Research Centre at Kingston University, UK. His publications include Baudrillard and the Millennium (Icon Books, 1999), Genteel Perversion: The Films of Gilbert & George (forthcoming, Solar Books, 2013), and Objekt: Television (forthcoming, Reaktion Books, 2014). Michael Corris is Professor of Fine Art at the Art and Design Research Center, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK and holds posts as Visiting Professor of Art Theory (The Bergen Art Academy, Bergen, Norway) and Visiting Professor of Fine Art (Newport School of Art, Media and Design, University of Wales, Newport). Corris’s writings on art have been published internationally in Artforum, Art-Language, Artscribe, art+text, Art Monthly, Art History, MUTE, The Fox, Studio International and Word and Image; they have also been included in Alex Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds), Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (MIT Press, 2000), John Roberts (ed.), Art Has No History! (Verso Press, 1994) and Diarmuid Costello and Jonathan Vickery (eds), Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers (Berg Publishers, 2007). Corris’s most recent publications include Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2004), David Diao: Works 19682005 (TimeZone8 Books, Ltd., 2005) and Ad Reinhardt (Reaktion Books, 2007). Antony Hudek is a Mellon Fellow at University College London. After studying visual art, he turned to art history as an undergraduate. Since completing his PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London in 2006 (on ‘postmodern’ painting in New York), Hudek has been Researcher at Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (working on the exhibition ‘Les Immatériaux’) and AHRC-funded Research Fellow at Camberwell College of Arts (working on the John Latham Archive).

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As an integral part of his practice, Hudek curates exhibitions and translates art theory from French to English. In 2008 he co-founded, with Sara De Bondt the non-profit publishing house Occasional Papers, presenting affordable books devoted to the histories of architecture, art, design, film and literature. Nicholas Chare is a Lecturer in Gender Studies at the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne and Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History, University of Leeds. He is a former editor of the journal parallax. His monograph Auschwitz and Afterimages (I.B. Tauris) was published in 2011. Mary Pearce has a Masters degree in Art History and Aesthetics from University of Essex, was awarded a Don Pavey Bursary and completed a PhD at Kingston University on the theme of ‘Colour and Communication in 20th Century Abstract Art’, combining art history with multimedia to create a digital application as an educational aid to the interpretation of abstract art through graphics and commentated animation. Continuing this interest in increasing the accessibility of complex visual ideas through the possibilities of ‘new’ digital multimedia, Mary became a partner in a small production company specializing in video and multimedia projects in artistic subjects. In recent years she has been participating in an interdisciplinary research study at the University of São Paulo (USP), where her fascination for the relationship between art and science, with increasing relation to Latin American history and culture, has led to involvement with various practical projects in institutions such as Itaú Cultural (documentaries on kinetic and cybernetic art), the Centre Cultural Banco do Brazil (exhibition and institutional documentaries) and the Catavento Museum of Science for children, where the creation of three installations for the museum put into practice the possibility of using art to explain science. Other creative outputs include publications in both the UK and Brazil, courses, occasional lectures in universities and art colleges, mainly in São Paulo, Brazil, and involvement with the Sociedade Científica de Estudos da Arte (CESA) at USP. Beverley Lear is a practising landscape architect with a specialist interest in heritage parks and gardens. She read anthropology at University College, London and Oxford University, where she carried out research into the social contexts of domestic gardening in England. She is a passionate gardener and allotment holder and strong advocate for the inclusion of gardens in new development schemes.

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Kiri Karatheodoris has an MFA in painting and printmaking from the University of Alabama and has exhibited her work both locally and nationally in juried shows and one person exhibitions. For the past several years she has focused exclusively on the study of colour and its ephemeral illusiveness. She currently works for the University of Alabama Honors College, Tuscaloosa, Alabama (USA) as its registrar. Her position in the college has also provided her the opportunity to lecture about her work and exhibit it to honours classes studying art and the creative experience. Her website is www. transparencyincolor.com. Liz Watkins is a Lecturer at the University of Leeds. Her research interests include the significance of colour for film theories of subjectivity, perception and sexual difference. She has published on feminism, film/philosophy, cinema, archive and the materiality of film in parallax, Paragraph and the British Journal of Cinema and Television. Charlotte Baker is a Lecturer in French Studies in the Department of European Languages and Cultures at Lancaster University. She is interested in contemporary French fiction, Francophone and Anglophone writing from sub-Saharan Africa, and recent developments in the field of postcolonial theory. Her research focuses on representations of marginalised and stigmatised groups in subSaharan Africa, theories and representations of disability, as well as comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to the body and identity. She also researches on the realities and representations of the genetic condition albinism and recently published an article on the trope of albinism in the work of Guinean writer Williams Sassine in the International Journal of Francophone Studies. She also recently completed a study guide to Williams Sassine’s novel Saint Monsieur Baly (Glasgow French and German Publications, 2010), and a monograph Enduring Negativity: Representations of Albinism in the Novels ofDidier Destremau, Patrick Grainville and Williams Sassine (Peter Lang, 2011). Charles Forsdick is James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool. He was until recently Director of an AHRB-funded project into ‘New Approaches to Twentieth-Century Travel Literature in French’, and is Treasurer of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies. His research focuses principally on exoticism, travel literature, postcolonial literature in French, the francophone dimensions of postcolonial theory, and the contemporary French novel. His publications include Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures (OUP, 2005); (with Basu and Shilton) New Approaches to Twentieth-Century Travel Literature in French: Genre, History, Theory (Travel Writing Across the Disciplines) (Peter Lang, 2006); and Ella

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Maillart, “Oasis interdites” (Zoé, coll. Le Cippe, 2008). He is a member of the Society for French Studies. Mónica Moreno Figueroa is a Lecturer in Sociology at Newcastle University in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology. With a PhD in Sociology from Goldsmiths, University of London, Mónica has taught at Goldsmiths and Birkbeck College, University of London, and at the University of Nottingham and El Colegio de Mexico. Her research and teaching has been concerned with contemporary practices of racism, mestizaje, feminist theory, beauty, embodiment, visibility and emotions. She has published in the Journal of Intercultural Studies; the Journal of Cultural Research; Ethnicities; and History of the Human Sciences; as well as in the edited collections Contesting Recognition; Hope and Feminist Theory; Mestizaje, Diferencia y Nación; and Raza, Etnicidad y Sexualidades.

 

INDEX A abolitionist, 154 Abstract Expressionism, 18, 71n18 abstract painting, 4, 5 ‘achromatic values’, 100 aesthetics, 4, 6 African, 9 Albers, Josef, 16 and Charles Blanc, 101 Homage to the Square and, 16 Interaction of Color and, 49 non-representational work and, 98 psychical fact and, 102 albino, 3, 9, 10, 143 body and, 144, 151 genetic condition and, 9 stigma and, 144 Alphen, Ernst van, 55 analogue colour, 8 Ancient Greek philosophy, 7 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 64 Arnheim, Rudolf, 99, 101 B Bacon, Francis, 4 colour and, 44 Kristeva, Julia and, 54 Study after Velázquez (1950), 48, 55 synaesthesia and, 55 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), 52 Barthes, Roland, 54 colour and, 53 The Grain of the Voice, 5, 45 Batchelor, David, 47 Beagle 2, 70n3, 70n4 Betts, Tom, 67 Betty Parsons Gallery, 16 Bhabha, Homi, 9 Blanc, Charles, 70n11

Bois, Yve-Alain, 30 Boyer, Jean-Pierre, 158 Buddhism, 19, 20 Burke, Edmund A Philosophical Enquiry, 28 sublime and, 28 C Cage, John, 27 Campion, Jane, 8, 122 Caribbean, 163 Cartesian cogito ergo sum, 21 castes, 160 castration, 36 Catholic, 20 Celant, Germano, 34 censorship, 46 Chevreul, Michel-Eugène, l7, 63, 98, 113 chromatic charts and, 38 horticulture and, 77 Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours, 78 simultaneous colour and, 63 theories of complementarity and, 81 Chion, Michel, 121, 124, 130 Christianity, 5, 18, 20 chromophobia, 47 cinematography, 115 class, 3, 6, 7 distinction and, 80 colour, 1 body and, 55, 68 interactivity and, 66 mixing and, 8 music and, 68 noise and, 56 prejudice and, 162 ‘colour-blindness’, 80 ‘colourlessness’, 15, 22 complementary colour, 63, 105

186 computer, 3, 4 computer technology and, 3 graphics and, 3 screen and, 7 three-dimensional models and, 66 contemporary art, 64 continental philosophy, 4 Corbet, Edward, 16, 22n4 The Origin of the World, 37 ‘creolization’, 10 Cruz-Diez, Carlos, 64, 66, 70n13 D de Duve, Thierry, 30–34 De Yepes, Juan, 19, 23n11 death, 6 Delacroix, Eugene, 64 Delaunay, Robert, 71n15 Delaunay, Sonia, 64 Deleuze, Gilles, 8, 52, 133 affection-image and, 126 affects and, 8, 124 Christian Metz and, 123 cinematography and, 120 Francis Bacon and, 52 movement-image and, 8, 122 sensations and, 8 ‘depth-of-field’, 6 Derrida, Jacques, 40 Destremau, Didier, 9, 143 digital colour, 8, 107, 112, 117 Doerner, Max, 34–35 Duchamp, Marcel, 7, 33, 37 Chocolate Grinder No 1 (1913) and, 36, 39 Étant Donnés (1946–1966) and, 33, 40 The Large Glass (1923) and, 35, 36 E education, 9 electronic imaging, 6, 8 ‘empirical turn’, 107 Enlightenment, 2 epistemology, 3, 116 ethnography, 4, 6, 7, 9, 83 F Fanon, Frantz, 9, 150 Festing, Sally, 81 ‘figure-ground illusion’, 16 Flavin, Dan, 64 flowers, 79 Foster, Hal, 29, 30 France, 10 colonies and, 150

Index G Gage, John, 2, 11, 97 Garau, Augusto, 102 Gardeners Chronicle, 79 gardening, 4, 6, 83 television programmes and, 77 gardens, 3, 7, 81, 95 Gardens Illustrated, 77 ‘gaze’, 8, 121 gender, 3, 6, 7, 95 ‘geometric structure’, 16 Gestalt image, 110 Gestalt psychology, 9, 62–63, 70n9 Giotto, 5 God, 20, 23n5, 29 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 7, 71n14, 98 emotive colour and, 64 Farbenlehre, 62 horticulture and, 77 Theory of Colour, 56, 63–64, 79 Grainville, Patrick, 9, 143 Le Tyran Eternel (1998) and, 143, 146, 148, 150 Greenberg, Clement, 31, 34, 98 Grosz, Elizabeth, 133 H Hafif, M., 5, 31, 34–39 Barnett Newman and, 40 Haiti, 9–10, 154–55 Heidegger, Martin, 8, 117 ‘revealing’ and, 107 ‘standing reserve’ and, 8, 109 ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 112 ‘what-for of serviceability’ and, 113 Hess, Thomas, 29 Hill, Gary, 61, 62 Hinduism, 19, 20 Hirst, Damien, 2, 4, 6, 59, 60, 69 historiography, 2, 4, 9, 10 Hobhouse, Penelope, 82 ‘hyperreality’, 107 I Ihde, Don, 108 Irigaray, Luce, 135 J Jacobs, Carol, 122 James, C. L. R., 154–55 Jekyll, Gertrude, 80–81 Jones, Amelia, 40

Index K Kandinsky, Wassily, 35, 55 Kant, Immanuel, 36, 39 kenosis, 18 Kerr, Melissa, 62 Kittler, Friedrich, 107, 116 Klee, Paul, 64 Kohler, Wolfgang, 70n9 Krauss, Rosalind, 38 Kristeva, Julia, 4, 5, 46–48, 54 Kutschat, Daniela and Rejane Cantoni, 68 L Lacan, Jacques, 56 ‘language game’, 61 Lawrence, Jacob, 156 Levine, Jack, 22n4 lighting, 3 ‘linguistic turn’, 61 linguistics, 3 Linnaeus, Carl, 145 liquid crystal display, 109 literary theory, 4 Lloyd, Christopher, 82 Loudon, J. C., 78 Louverture, Toussaint, 10, 154 Lyotard, Jean Francois, 4, 28–29 Étant Donnés and, 36 M Madiou, Thomas, 10, 160 ‘male gaze’, 177 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 29 Marcuse, Herbert, 23n13 Martin, Charles, 149 Marx, Karl, 24n13 ‘maternal plenitude’, 6 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1, 2, 3, 113, 115 Merton, Thomas, 19–21, 24n13 St John of the Cross and, 20 Contemplative Prayer and, 19 ‘mestiza body’, 167, 177 ‘mestizaje logic’, 170, 172 Mexican women, 172 Mexico, 9, 169 class and, 170 experience of racism and, 171–72 racial discourses and, 176 racial discrimination and, 170 ‘middle England’, 83 ‘middle-ground’, 99, 102 ‘middle-class eye’, 80 ‘middle-class gardeners’, 77 ‘miscegenation discourses’, 170

187 ‘mise-en-abyme’, 16 modernism, 4 monochrome painting, 15–16 mosaic, 112–14 Mosset, Olivier, 5, 27 Motherwell, Robert, 17 mulatto, 158–59 Munsell colour chart, 51 N national independence, 10 natural sciences, 2 ‘Negritude’, 10, 155 Neocolonialism, 10, 156 New York, 17 Newman, Barnett, 4, 29, 69, 98 Midnight Blue (1979), 52 sublime and, 65 ‘zip’ paintings and, 27 Nicholas of Cusa, 19 nihilism, 16 ‘Noirisme’, 155 Nyman, Michael, 129 O Olitski, Jules, 98 optical effects, 15 Orientalism, 17 P painting, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 44 palette, 50 Parsons, Betty, 23n5 Pask, Gordon, 68 Pattillo, Allen, 97 performance art, 3, 5 ‘phallocentric language’, 121 phenomenology, 2, 3, 8 Philip Taaffe and the sublime, 29 The Piano, 8 feminist readings and, 121 colour and, 128 Hollywood film and, 120 pigmentocracy, 10, 155 ‘pigmentocratic divisions’, 159 pixel, 8, 109 Plato, 40 Pointillism, 115 Pollock, Jackson, 49 Pope, 6, 48, 50 Pope paintings, 6 postcolonial studies, 3 postcolonialism, 3, 10 Africa and, 143 history and, 155

188 postmodernity, 3–5, 38 and the sublime, 30 power, 3, 10 psychoanalysis, 3–4 drives and, 56 Oedipus complex and, 47 the Real and, 47, 54 ‘pure colour’, 15 R race, 3, 9, 10 racial prejudice, 9 racism, 171 Rauschenberg, Robert, 16 ‘regimes of difference’, 10, 167 Reinhardt, Ad, 4, 5, 16, 19, 21–22 Richardson, Janice, 134 Riley, C. A., 2, 11 Rimbaud, Arthur, 38 Robinson, William, 81 Romantic era, 61 Rothko, Mark, 17, 22n4, 52 sublime and, 65 Runge, Otto, 65 Ruskin, John, 80–81 S Saint-Rémy, Joseph, 10 Sassine, Williams, 9, 143, 150–51 ‘saturated images’, 8 Schlemmer, Oskar, 69 ‘scopic regime’, 125 Serres, Michel, 1, 2, 4, 11 sexual politics, 8 ‘signifying practices’, 4 Silverman, Kaja, 121, 131 skin colour, 156, 167, 173–74, 177 Smith, Alvy Rays, 110 social sciences, 2 sociology, 2, 3, 4 spectrum, 3 sphincter, 26 St John of the Cross, 19 Stable Gallery, 16 stained glass, 118n1 stigma, 9, 178 Still, Clyfford, 22n4 sublime, 5, 32, 65 kitsch and, 32 supernatural, 9 ‘symbolic constructions’, 3 ‘symbolic field’, 7, 78 synaesthesia, 6, 55

Index T Taaffe, Philip, 4, 5, 27 Taos, New Mexico, 22n4 Tauler, John, 20 technology, 3 Turner, J. M. W., 81, 65 Turrell, James, 4, 59, 64, 66, 69 U uncanny, 2 V Van Gogh, Vincent, 56 Verey, Rosemary, 82 Victorian period, 7 virtual image, 22 virtual reality, 115 visibility, 9 W Warhol, Andy, 17 wavelengths, 47 white skin, 10 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 62 ‘achromatic grey’ and, 102 colour and, 38, 56 impure colours and, 51 Philosophical Investigations, 1, 11 Remarks on Colour and, 61, 62 working class, 77, 80 Wyeth, Andy, 17 Y Yale University School of Art, 16 Z Zen Bhuddism, 5, 21, 24n13, 18