Literature Review

Chrissie Calvert

Literature Review

MFA, 2023

Colour, Perception, Beauty and Art

Chromophobia

The book Chromophobia by David Batchelor explores the phenomenon of the term Chromophobia, which he defines as the fear of contamination through colour. He argues that the feminine, the oriental and the infantile are all associated with colour in the West, which relegates them to a category of the superficial. Batchelor analyses the occurrence of chomophobia in Western history through its artists, philosophers and authors.

In Chapter One Batchelor introduces us to one of the most obvious instances of chromophobia apparent in modern times: minimalist architecture. Specifically the minimalist architecture of an art critic’s immodest abode he visited at a party in the 90s. Of the interior he says: “This was assertive silence, emphatic blankness, the kind of ostentatious emptiness that only the very wealthy can afford.” Batchelor argues that minimalism has been carelessly associated with white. He reasons that in reality minimalism was not always so overrun by a concept of ‘pure’ white. He uses Carl Andre and Donald Judd as examples of artists involved with the minimalist movement in the 60s who incorporate colour in their works. Be that the organic colour found in Andre’s work or the bright colours found within the industrial material of Judd’s sculptures. He argues, “In truth, the colours of Minimal art were often far closer to that of its exact contemporary Pop art than anything else” He expounds upon this idea by pointing out that white was seen as a colour among many in early minimalism, instead of an opposition to colour. This leads to an explanation that it is the generalisation of white that is the problem. “Pure white: this is certainly a western problem.” Whiteness, he says, has been woven into the fabric of Western culture, at least since Biblical times. Bachelor quotes the Bible: “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” Although, as shown by Henri Michaux, it can indeed be possible to escape the doctrine of white = pure with the help of psychedelics like Mescaline. “White in bursts of white. God of ‘white’. No, not a god, a howler monkey... I have a feeling that for a long time to come white is going to have something excessive for me.”

Batchelor’s experience with the “inside-out interior of a colourless whiteness” led him to question why it was so important to exclude colour so forcefully if it was indeed so unimportant. He calls the interior of that art critic’s house seemingly ambitious. Ambitious in the way it wanted to ‘rescue culture and lead it to salvation’. In this chapter Batchelor solidifies his argument; “It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that, in the West, since antiquity, colour has been systematically marginalised, reviled, diminished and degraded.” He blames generations of artists, critics and art historians for the vitality of chromophobic tendencies. Through association with the foreign, the infantile and feminine, colour has been marginalised. It is either feared through its association with the queer, vulgar or the pathological; or it is relegated to the camp of the inessential or supplementary through its association with cosmetics and decoration. He provides an example of this in a historical context with a quote from Charles Blanc, a French art critic and colour theorist, "but design must maintain its preponderance over colour. Otherwise painting speeds to its ruin: it will fall through colour just as mankind fell through Eve.” This is, according to Batchelor, evidence of historic chromophobia. Civilisation according to Blanc has arisen from colour into the sublime. Authors and artists through time elude a fall into colour as equal to a fall from grace. Examples are provided of the connection between bright colours and drugs from Roland Barthes, a French semiotician, “Colour... is a kind of bliss... like closing an eyelid, a tiny fainting spell” To Aldous Huxley’s Doors of perception, “...with brighter colours, a profounder significance.” Batchelor provides example after example of instances where colour is equal to a fall from grace in the eyes of Western thinkers. He ends this chapter with his understanding of Blanc’s desire to make colour ‘safe’: “No longer intoxication, narcotic or organismic, colour is learned, ordered, subordinated and tamed. Broken.”

Batchelor refines his proposed connection between the fall into colour and western society’s phobia of falling into barbarism. Modern society highly values order and reason. Order and reason are associated with the transparent. The transparent is opposite to the opaque. The opaque, the hidden, is often covered with something, like make-up. Make-up could be seen as a kind of lie, a blatant attempt at covering up the truth. Colour is seen as a kind of cosmetic for painting in Western thought. This could be, according to Bachelor, a cause of chromophobia. The fear of colour can be found in its connection with make-up, “If surface veils depth, if appearance masks essence, then make-up masks a mask, veils a veil, disguises a disguise. It is not simply a deception; it is a double deception.” Batchelor quotes Immanuel Kant, “The colours ... enliven the object for sensation, but make it really worth looking at and beautiful they cannot.” The artist Jean Ingres states “Colour enhances a painting, but she is only a lady-in-waiting, because all she does is to make more attractive the true perfections of art.”As seen in movies and books such as Flatland, Pleasantville and the Wizard of Oz, colour is the corruption of decency. “Colour is disorder and Liberty; it is a drug, but a drug that can intoxicate, poison or cure.” Batchelor interrogates this fear of societal collapse through indecency brought on by colour, and reveals the flimsy nature of that belief.

Gems and precious stones are often intertwined with colour. Gems are found and not made, and therefore do not signify skill but instead luckiness. This, according to Batchelor, is a cause of chromophobia in the West. The West is obsessed with progress, and in the West progress is the opposite of the infantile. A child drinks in the shiny, the colourful and the gem-like. Batchelor quotes Faber Birren, “Youngsters are more responsive to colour than to form and will delight in it through sheer pleasure. As they grow older and become less impulsive, as they submit to discipline, colour may lose some of its intrinsic appeal.” Colour as simply a pleasurable thing, colour as something which predates language and society and still defies concise articulation is a cause for concern for a populace intent on progress. Batchelor quotes French philosopher Jacquiline Lichtenstein, “it is also the irreducibility of colour, and in particular its irreducibility to language, that marks it out as suspect, deviant and dangerous.” Batchelor believes this doesn’t denote a deficiency of colour, but instead the insufficiency and impotence of language. We often rely heavily on gestures where language falls short. Batchelor expands upon this, “we reach outside of language with the help of gestures. We point, we sample and show rather than say. And in our pointing, sampling and showing we make comparisons.” According to Batchelor, “To fall out of colour is to run out of words.” He reasons this indescribable phenomenon could be due to the fact that colour is so indivisible. Humans can distinguish several million different colours. This being so, English has only eleven general colour names: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and grey. Issac Newton divided the rainbow of light into seven as he loved musical harmonies, and there are seven distinct notes in a musical scale. This is only one man’s deduction of colour categorisation. Colour can be categorised in many ways. “Colour is natural and colours are culture. Colour is analogical, and colour is digital. Colour is a curve, and colours are points on that curve. Or colour is a wheel, and colours are the infinite and infinitely thin spokes inserted on the wheel.”

In his final chapter, Batchelor admits his book isn't as he planned. His ideas around colour were meant to be art specific and they have ventured beyond. He says that is because colour is interdisciplinary, despite his discomfort with that word. “The interdisciplinary is often the antidisciplinary made safe. Colour is antidisciplinary.” Batchelor believes something important happened to colour in the 1960s. Artists like Frank Stella started using paints not made for the explicit use of artists, but instead started using commercial paints. Batchelor: “Perhaps this was the attraction of commercial paints: they seemed to contain the possibility for both the continuation and the cancellation of painting. And perhaps that is why they looked so good in a can.” An escape from the constraints of the artist’s palette, away from the triangulation and hierarchy of colours with their primaries and secondaries and tertiaries; “The colour chart offers an escape from all that. It is in effect, simply a list”Commercial colours offered a new insight into the potential of colour. Batchelor states that commercial colour is digital colour, in the way it is segmented into discrete units, whereas the artist palette is a continuum, a circle without a beginning or end. The shiny and flat are also a sign of the mechanisation and digitisation of colour. Yves Klien’s International Klein Blue was flat, a deep saturated kind of commercial flat. According to Batchelor, “Colour is excess, but colour in art is also the containment of excess.”

Bachelor challenges modern Western thought around the associated infantility of colour. He expounds upon his ideas by identifying key Western thinkers, artists and writers who contributed or rebelled against this dogma of white = pure.

Chromophilia: The Design World’s Passion for Colour.

The article “Chromophilia: The Design World’s Passion for Colour” by Regina Lee Blaszczyk featured in Journal of Design History, talks about the emergent understanding of colour within both the Design and Fine Art spheres of understanding. There is a heavy importance placed on Josef Albers and David Batchelor, and how they fit within the Modernist movement.

Blaszczyk begins by acknowledging Josef Albers’ essential contribution to the understanding of colour through his highly regarded book ‘Interaction of Colour’. As a Bauhaus professor, Albers was intent on interrogating colour in a practical way, and created a pedagogy that expounded upon his own theory that colour was situational and relational as opposed to objective and subjective. His interrogation of colour diverged from ‘The Munsell Color System’, which looks at colour in a purely scientific way. The Munsell system preached that colour was not subjective and the experience of colour does not differ from person to person, and enforces a numbering system which is helpful for colour matching purposes. According to Blaszczyk, Albers saw the limitations of the Munsell system and, in reaction, introduced a rhetoric that challenged the notion that a specific colour would appear the same in any situation. This was achieved through observational facts such as: how the quantity of a colour can change its perception, how surrounding light affects colour, how the atmosphere affects colour, and finally, how adjacent colours affect a colour's perception.

Albers colour theory, according to Blaszczyk, was rooted in a Modernist’s perspective. In this sense, his book Interaction of Colour was his roadmap to universal truth in regards to colour. She states that Alber’s shared the value ‘art as experience’, with a number of Modernists such as: Albert C Barnes a renowned art collector (1872-1951), John Dewey an American Philosopher (1859-1952), and Denman Ross an American art collector, educator, and museum administrator (1853-1935). Despite this Albers was not to be unchallenged. Briony Fer, a well known British art historian and critic, described Albers theory as “...quasi-scientific rhetoric, the kind of discourse that seemed like an exhaustive hangover from Bauhaus aesthetics”. Blaszczyk intuits this quote to mean that, “... Albers had rejected the perceived orthodoxy of commercial colour systems- only to replace them with a new doctrine.”

Blaszczyk acknowledges the possibility that the trivialisation of colour in popular culture initiated Alber’s obsession with colour. She expands on this hypothesis by introducing the critical theorist David Batchelor. Batchelor explains, “It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that, in the West, since Antiquity, colour has been systematically marginalised, reviled, diminished and degraded. This... needs a name: chromophobia.” Blaszczyk expounds how Chromophobia helps us place Josef Albers in a historical context. She connects Batchelor’s theory of Chromophobia with the tendency to proliferate white walls in the disciplines of Interior Design and Architecture. Theodor Adorno’s ‘Aesthetic Theory’, which according to Blaszczyk, “...implied that there was something infantile in bright colours”, is another example of historical Chromophobia in Western thought.

Blaszczyk asserts that Albers downplayed the long practice of Western colour practice which began in the 1600s and matured in the 1900s within the fields of philosophy, industrial art, science, textiles, fashion and commerce. In light of this, there was push back against Albers in the 1960’s- onward. Blaszczyk explains how colour field painters took initial cues from Albers before rejecting his anti-commercial position. An example was the Abstract Expressionist Josef Stella’s obsession with the then newly developed industrial paints. Ready-made colours and charts were celebrated. Briony Fer commented on the popularity of commercial colours amongst painters, “Just because the colour chart is rooted in a desire to rationalise and standardise, it does not follow that its aesthetic effects are either rational or standard.”

Blaszczyk declares that Albers was one of the last Modernists. His desire to search for the universal truth of colour appears rigid from our perspective, in the relational future. She states “His... approach to colour stemmed from the catholic belief that the role of art in society is to challenge tradition and to capture and re-present authentic reality.” She believes it is possible for colour to be intuited in a commercial setting, and she believes it is desirable to mix these intuitions with rational imperative. A combination of perception and formulae.

The Doors of Perception, Heaven and Hell

The essay “Heaven and Hell” by Aldous Huxley delves into the deepest parts of human perception. Huxley talks about our historical obsession with colour as something transcendent from the drab, earthly colours of the everyday. He talks about the methods used to transcend the mind into the ‘antipodes’ of human consciousness, and the results relation to religion and the reason we, humanity as a whole, value highly coloured gems such as emerald, ruby and sapphire. He touches on our modern resistance to the transporting powers of the highly pigmented as a reaction to the bright obnoxious pigments used in superstores to allure us to buy, spend and collect things.

First, Aldous Huxley expands on what he calls the mind’s antipodes. This refers to the farthest reaches of the mind, which is where the antipodes dwell. It;s an area of consciousness, or awareness, that exists above the survival mode which we inhabit during our day to day life. The antipodes of the mind are described by Huxley to be a place of childish wonder. Where the wild things roam. Oddity is perceived at the antipodes of the mind. Oddities which recognise the repeating patterns of the usual, yet which are unusual. So how do we reach this alluring paradise? Huxley mentions a few. Hypnosis is one, and then psychedelics such as mescaline, (cactus), and lysergic acid, (LSD), are mentioned. Simply a deprivation of the senses could transport one to the mind’s antipodes. Located someplace devoid of the usual symbols our minds construct to contextualise the universe and our place within it, are the antipodes of the mind.

Now we know how to get there, what can we expect? Huxley talks about a heightened sense of pattern and colour. “All colours are intensified to a pitch far beyond anything seen in the normal state, and at the same time, the mind’s capacity for recognising fine distinctions of tone and hue is notably heightened.” What does this mean for the antipodes? Are they located in the same space of consciousness dreams occupy? Apparently not. According to Professor Hall, who collected many thousands of dreams, only one third dream in colour. An explanation to this revelation is that we dream to contextualise, and to contextualise we use symbols. Symbols do not require colour to be interpreted. “That which is given is coloured; that which our symbol-creating intellect and fancy put together is uncoloured,” And, “We are forever attempting to convert things into signs for the intelligible abstractions of our own invention. But in doing so, we rob things of their native thing-hood.” The antipodes of the mind are free of language and representation and conceptual thought.

Next Huxley turns to Irish poet A.E, otherwise known as George Russell; an advocate of Irish culture, a painter, writer and also a philosopher. Specifically, Huxley talks about the poet’s experience of the mind’s antipodes, “...but there are windows in the soul, through which can be seen images created not by human, but by the divine imagination.” Huxley’s point in reference to the poet was, that, an intensity of colour is common to all those who pull back the curtain of reality, from the mundane toward the visionary.

So, we have an intensity of colour when experiencing the mind’s antipodes. What of it? Religion, religious experiences and existential meaning can be found or, (or lost), within the antipodes. Think of worldwide religious phenomena. Iranian architectural mosaics, stained glass of the pre-Presbyterian churches, gemstones, ponamu, and golden ornaments of the many queens and kings. These are all of the other than ordinary. All brilliantly hued, all play with or reflect light. Glass or diamond chandeliers, fire from candles, sapphires and emeralds are further examples. If you were from a time before Cosco, The Warehouse, Pak N Save and any brand which bombards us with its colourful, attention-grabbing packaging, these gems, ceramics, stones and jewels would seem transfixing. Transfixing, transportive and hypnotising alluring us to the antipodes; Which may be why they were used in the first place. Until they were less alluring due to the oversaturated colours of today. Think of the jewel-like cajoling of McDonalds or Countdown. “Every paradise abounds in Gems, or at least in gem-like objects resembling, as Weir Mitchell puts it, Transparent fruit.” Huxley argues that precious stones are precious because of their resemblance to the visionaries’ inner eye.

Huxley then talks about the power of colour in artworks; in particular, colours' ability to transport the viewer's mind to the antipodes. “Consequently works of art painted in bright, pure colours are capable, in suitable circumstances, of transporting the beholder’s mind in the direction of the antipodes.” He then juxtaposes this idea with the lack of desire for colour in our modern world. The reason for this, according to Huxley, is the fact that we are oversaturated by colour today. We can buy any colour we please at a commercial colour shop. We can see the bright, vibrant colours while playing games such as Zelda, or Tetris or Animal Crossing. Just like over highlighting reduces the validity of the use of the highlighter, bright colour can no longer easily transport us to the antipodes. “What was once a needle of visionary delight has now become a piece of disregarded linoleum.’ Can artwork still transport us? Yes, according to Huxley. Specifically artworks which depict objects close up or far away. Close up reveals the intricacies of patterns within the universe, while far away is naturally transporting. Mid-view is mundane and ordinary.

Aldous Huxley philosophises about the existence of the antipodes’ of the mind. He describes this as an experience of vibrant colour. This is a state of mind free from symbols, for which our regular human minds crave, a place which can transport us to heavenly visions or to hellish absurdities. Colour is paramount in the antipodes. Colour within ancient mythologies and cultures is proof of the ancients' access to this less common state of mind. Now due to an oversaturation of colour in modern times, a lack of senses or chemical alterations may be necessary to experience this state of mind today. Artwork can be a key to accessing the antipodes, or simply an impression of one's experience to the antipodes of the mind. Either way, colour is the essence of thing-ness while experiencing reality in the antipodes. Symbols in black and white are a human, mundane creation of our day-to-day consciousness, safe and ordinary.

Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty

The essay “Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty” by Dave Hickey featured in his book, The Invisible Dragon, talks to the idea that the critical vernacular of beauty is lacking in the Fine Art sphere of understanding. He explores the different values of art dealers versus art professionals within art institutions. His essay takes a philosophical stance which implores us to reconsider beauty as a legitimate concept which holds the power and potential to inspire.

Hickey begins by explaining the catalyst to his potentially controversial stance. The resounding silence of a lecture hall which was in response to his impromptu declaration that ‘beauty’ would be the hot topic of the 90s. The silence gave him credence that indeed it could be. He recalls the sensation and feeling which his spontaneous outburst caused, “‘Beauty” just hovered there, a word without a language, quiet, amazing, and alien in that sleek, institutional space - like a Pre-Raphaelite dragon aloft on its leather wings.” Hickey explains that the feeling of vacancy and uninterestedness which surrounded the word was an abyss of understanding which he endeavours to explore.

To continue his research he quizzed artists, students, critics and curators about beauty, specifically with the intent to uncover the vernacular of the concept, yet in each instance the subject unequivocally sparked conversation about the marketplace. This was not the response he was looking for. “The transactions of value enacted under the patronage of our new, “nonprofit” institutions were exempted from this cultural critique, presumed to be untainted, redemptive, disinterested, taste-free, and politically benign. Yeah, right.” Further analysis of the reasoning behind this conjecture is that, “Art dealers, I found, “only care about how it looks,” while the art professionals employed by our new institutions “really care about what it means.”’

Hickey expounds upon his idea as to when and where the lack of responsiveness to beauty as a hard concept originates. “I can’t imagine any but the most naif giddily abandoning an autocrat who monitors appearances for a bureaucrat who monitors your soul” Michael Foucault, he says, proposes a variation of this idea in Surveiller et punir. In this aforementioned book Foucault juxtaposed, “with a grisly antique text” the public execution of Damiens to Jeremy Bentham’s theory of reformative incarceration as housed in a structure he calls the Panopticon. Hickey explains that Foucault believed the king’s (the autocrat) method of justice to be more just, than Bentham’s (the bureaucrat). This is because, “The king demands from us the appearance of loyalty...Bentham’s warden on the other hand , demands our souls, and... he relies on our having internalised his relentless surveillance in the form of self-destructive guilt and henceforth punishing and ultimately destroying ourselves.” Hickey proposes that our culture is so heavily weighted on Bentham’s side, that we cannot see them as equally tainted. “We are such obedient children of the Panopticon...we have transformed the complex choice between the king’s savage justice and Bentham’s bureaucratic discipline into..: the “corrupt old market” versus the “brave new institution.” Beauty in this scenario is despised because the art dealers, like Foucault’s king, traffic in objects and appearances.” Hickey explains that the institutions are under pressure to “care what it means”, and therefore out of possible necessity distrust appearances. He describes beauty as “the snake in the garden” and theorises that beauty steals the institution's power by eliciting discomfort from the “artists who have committed themselves to the excruciating tedium of plain honesty.”

Hickey believes it boils down to one thing, and that thing is the fact that “Beauty sells”. He compares his grandmother’s prejudice against those in trade to those with social high social standing, as parallel to those artists who position themselves squarely against beauty as a serious endeavour. He argues, “Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells something else, it is a seductive advertisement.” Hickey believes the greatest works of art have both an idolatrous quality, while also selling a concept. He ends this section by posing a question: “Is the institution itself not a marketplace?”

Hickey bounces from his last point on the idolatry of fine artworks to make an adjacent point, that “there are issues worth advancing in images that are worth admiring”. He makes the point that all images have the potential to be powerful. “This is the sheer, ebullient, slithering, dangerous fun of it. No image is inviolable in our dance hall of visual politics.” To solidify his point, Hickey talks to the Renaissance, specifically how pictures and images at this point had become political tools to indoctrinate the masses. “The task of beauty is to enfranchise the audience and knowledge its power...to advance an argument by valorising the picture’s problematic content.” Hickey talks to Caravaggio’s The Madonna of the Rosary, of its “successful visual litigation.” He acknowledges that the “argumentative frisson”, the work inspired at the time has now neutralised itself leaving only the “cosmetic superstructure of that antique argument”. Now that Caravaggio’s work has done its job, it resides out of the public eye except for within exhibitions. The point Hickey is making here is, “whether contemporary images are really enhanced by being in a museum at birth and attended as one might attend a movie, whether there might be work to do among the living.” He is questioning the difference between having the church and state dictate the content of artwork to the way artwork currently detours through alternate institutions before the beholder can view them. Continuing on from the analogy mentioned above, Hickey concludes this point by saying, “Beauty has been banished from their domain and we are left counting the beads and muttering texts of academic sincerity.”

The final argument Hickey makes on the vernacular of beauty is in relation to Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio. On Mapplethorpe’s works: “A single artist with a single group of images... directly threatened those in actual power with his celebration of marginality.” Hickey states that Mappelthorpe appropriates a Baroque vernacular of beauty which Hickey believes outperforms the “puritanical canon of visual appeal” that he says is espoused by what he calls the therapeutic institutions. Mapplethorpe, he says, poses an unanswerable question to the institutions. That question is, “Should we really look at art, however banal, because looking at art is somehow good for us, while ignoring any specific good that the individual work or artist might propose to us?” Hickey believes mild appreciation of art is only for artworks where the politics of those artworks are irrelevant. Living artworks, he says, should be beheld in passion, whether that be against, or for, what the artwork proposes. “In our mild appreciation, we refuse to engage the argument of images that deal so intimately with trust, pain, love and the grieving of the self.”

Hickey believes that the vernacular of beauty is a potent instrument for change. Through various points Dave Hickey explores why the vernacular of beauty is lacking, and why that is a problem. He speaks to parallels within histories of church and state controlling the type of art made, and the art institutions of the 90’s, where importance is not placed on what it looks like, but what it means. Beauty as a hard concept, Hickey believes, has an important role in why successful artworks ignite change, and therefore, deserves discussion.

Colour and beauty are perceived by humanity at the individual level. Light, the environment/surroundings, and our individual state of mind all affect our perception of colour and beauty. The likes of David Batchelor, Josef Albers, Aldous Huxley and Dave Hickey have parallel theories concerning colour. If we plait those theories together we can understand that through the use of colour, a discerning understanding of the phenomenon of beauty, and a close study of human nature, we can be transported into the antipodes of the mind, into the deepest depths of colour, and finally into the humanity of the creation, appreciation, and significance of art.

Bibliography

Albers, Josef. Interaction of Color. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963.

Batchelor, David. Chromophobia. Reaktion Books, 2000.

Blaszczyk, Regina L. "Chromophilia: The Design World's Passion for Colour." Journal of Design History 27, no. 3 (2014): 203-217. Accessed February 28, 2023. https;//eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/93592.

Hickey, Dave. “Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty.” In The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, 29-63. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Huxley, Aldous. “Heaven and Hell.” In The Doors of Perception, 44-76. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009.