PUBLIC 51: Colour by PUBLIC Journal: Art Culture Ideas

PUBLIC 51 ART CULTURE IDEAS

Colour edited by

Christine Davis and Scott Lyall

IX / MMXV

Public 51 Colour

INTRODUCTION

The question is the desire of thought. “The sky is blue. Is the sky blue? Yes.” [T]ransformed for an instant into pure possibility, the state of things does not return to what it was. The categorical Yes cannot render what was, for a moment only possible; still more, it withdraws from us the gift and the richness of possibility since it now affirms the being of what is, but affirms it in response, thus indirectly and in a manner that is only mediate. So in the Yes of the answer we lose the direct, immediate given, and we lose the opening, the richness of possibility. The answer is the question’s misfortune, its adversary. —Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation

Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, [Baby Suggs] couldn’t get interested in leaving life or living it […]. Her past had been like her present— intolerable, and since she knew death was anything but forgiveness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color. “Bring a little lavender in, if you got any. Pink, if you don’t.” —Toni Morrison, Beloved

What does colour—the visible spectrum of light—have to do with the way we perceive of our epoch? How do colours register and project our ideals? And how does colour record our aspirations for endurance in respect of shifting perspectives and accelerated change? This edition of PUBLIC came about with these questions, and is framed by a broad conversation on the topic of how artists bring colour to the process of their work. We already knew that colours flicker and mutate, appear and disappear, as both forces and facticities. We knew that they were called and given much of their effectiveness by technical, political, and sociocultural means. But we also had a sense that many aspects of colour must have little to do with how human agents perceive them. And further, we agreed that in contemporary culture the astounding over-production of colourful material has diminished colour perception, its relationship to value, and even raised doubts about the future of visual art. We asked: are there artists who still wonder about colour? Do colours cause emotion, creativity—soul even—in ways that still authorize (if not to say “liberate”) ingenuity and vital aesthetic investigation?

Public 51 Colour

Giotto di Bondone, detail of stars in the Scrovegni Chapel, 1305, Padua.

Public 51 Colour

AN ETERNAL OBJECT

The mountain endures. When after ages it has been worn away, it has gone. If a replica arises, it is yet a new mountain. A colour is eternal. It haunts time like a spirit. It comes and goes. But when it comes, it is the same colour. It neither survives nor does it live. It appears when it is wanted. The mountain has to time and space a different relation from that which colour has (SMW, 86–87).

“A colour is eternal.” Color already played a highly peculiar role in The Concept of Nature, as it is the paradigmatic hostage of the bifurcation of nature in the same way as qualia are today in the sempiternal controversies organized around the mind-body problem. Whitehead does not limit himself to confirming the answer he had given in The Concept of Nature: color as sense-object, and all objects make ingression. Here color appears endowed with an adjective, eternal, that topples us into a new world of questions. The sense-object is no longer defined as the basis of the empiricist question; what raises problems is no longer the relation between the set of sense data I can perceive and this “stone” to which I attribute them. The bifurcation of nature between primary and secondary qualities yields to the question to which the poets oblige us, the difference between modes of experience of the brooding mountain, always there, and of color, without age or memory, which appears when it is “called.” The adjective “eternal” has a rugged, and highly controversial, future ahead of it. When he finished writing Science and the Modern World, Whitehead conferred a decisive role upon “eternal objects,” a role that would not cease to be redefined in subsequent times, on the occasion of each technical transformation of his thought. What is important, at this point, is to eliminate any possible confusion. For the moment, the adjective “eternal” is connected with a contrast. One may baptize what endures with a proper name—each human being, of course, but also a dog, a mouse, or even a mountain—but proper names are not appropriate either for colors or sounds, or for the geometric objects Whitehead also associates with the mode of experience designated by the adjective “eternal.” When I say “it is blue,” but also “it is a circle,” I am not naming a blue object, or a circular one, but I testify to the ingression into my experience of an “eternal object.” Whitehead is not mad enough to calmly announce that “red” as we perceive it existed before the biological invention of the visual organs. This is why he speaks of “eternality,” a neologism that enables him to avoid “eternity.” “Eternality” designates a dimension of the concrete, complete fact that must belong to the job specifications. The testimony of the poets must be heard, but it

Public 51 Colour

PROGRESSIVE NATURE STUDIES

George Washington carver with his award winning botanical painting Yucca and Cactus, Iowa State University 1892

Terry Adkins, Progressive Nature Studies (Portfolio), page 2, 2013. Inkjet on pulled press paper, 24 pages, 36 x 28 cm (14 x 11 inches). Courtesy of Salon 94, New York.

Public 51 Colour

Terry Adkins, Progressive Nature Studies (Portfolio), page 15, 2013. Inkjet on pulled press paper, 24 pages, 36 x 28 cm (14 x 11 inches). Courtesy of Salon 94, New York.

Public 51 Colour

MIXTURE

According to Simplicius, the following fragment appeared toward the beginning of Anaxagoras’ book: All things were together, unlimited both in amount and in smallness, for the small, too, was unlimited. And because all things were together, nothing was evident on account of smallness; for air and aether covered all things, both being unlimited, for these are the greatest among all things both in amount and in largeness.

The original state of the cosmos was apeiron, an unlimited mixture of parts or ingredients. This mixture—all with all—was eternal and continuous. Up until a moment in the past it was motionless, and it was everywhere undifferentiated, or almost so. This undifferentiated mass included all there is of all the natural ingredients that would eventually form the natural constructs of the cosmos. Nothing could be added to or subtracted from this storehouse of stuff, although the mass was not always homogeneous. In fact, there were many different densities of ingredients even at the earliest stages of being. Because air (dark moist stuff) and aether (bright fiery stuff) were the most emergent ingredients (that is to say, the largest), their dominance meant that the original mixture must have been like a dense bright cloud—something like the look of an explosion of particles. (However, this would not have been manifest, even had there been an observer to encounter it.) At some point nous set the mixture in motion and caused it to begin to revolve on itself. (“Turning” is the root of our own word, universe.) The turning then affected an ever-widening area. The rotary motion caused the mass to shift, and this shifting had the effect of a “separating off.” Because the mass was already (and eternally) a plenum, any local separation only allowed new mixtures. The universe was the same as, defined as, mixing. The continuous rotation produced eternal separations. But the Everything-in-Everything principle still held, and so there are, even today, all ingredients at all places at all times, and unlimited [apeiron] mixtures and variations. There are many different bodies, and they are differentially qualified.

Pascale Marthine Tayou, BOOMERANG. Installation view, Serpentine Sackler Gallery (4 March–17 May 2015). Image © READS 2015.

Public 51 Colour

Scott Lyall, Black Glass [οiνοπα πόντον], 2015. Ink on low iron glass, colour infused laminate, graphite stained oak frame, 168.4 x 118.9 x 5.08 cm (66 x 46.5 x 2 inches). The Greek words in the title are from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and are usually translated “the wine dark sea.” Courtesy of the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York.

Public 51 Colour

SEA NOISE

There, precisely, is the origin. Noise and nausea, noise and the nautical, noise and navy belong to the same family. We mustn’t be surprised. We never hear what we call background noise so well as when we do at the seaside. That placid or vehement uproar seems established there for all eternity. In the strict horizontal of it all, stable, unstable cascades are endlessly trading. Space is assailed, as a whole, by the murmur; we are utterly taken over by this same murmuring. This restlessness is within hearing, just shy of definite signals, just shy of silence. The silence of the sea is mere appearance. Background noise may well be the ground of our being. It may be that our being is not at rest, it may be that it is not in motion, it may be that our being is disturbed. The background noise never ceases; it is limitless, continuous, unending, unchanging. It has itself no background, no contradictory. How much noise must be made to silence noise? And what terrible fury puts fury in order? Noise cannot be a phenomenon; every phenomenon is separated from it, a silhouette on a backdrop, like a beacon against the fog, as every message, every cry, every call, every signal must be separated from the hubbub that occupies silence, in order to be, to be perceived, to be known, to be exchanged. As soon as a phenomenon appears, it leaves the noise; as soon as a form looms up or pokes through, it reveals itself by veiling noise. So noise is not a matter of phenomenology, so it is a matter of being itself. It settles in subjects as well as in objects, in hearing as well as in space, in the observers as well as the observed, it moves through the means and the tools of observation, whether material or logical, hardware or software, constructed channels or languages; it is part of the in-itself, part of the foritself; it cuts across the oldest and surest philosophical divisions, yes, noise is metaphysical. It is the complement to physics, in the broadest sense. One hears its subliminal huffing and soughing on the high seas. […] The noise—intermittence and turbulence—quarrel and racket—this sea noise is the originating rumor and murmuring, the original hate. We hear it on the high seas. —Michel Serres

Public 51 Colour

TECHNIQUES OF EXISTENCE

I. “We judge colors by the company they keep” (Lamb and Bourreau 1995, 149). Colors are convivial. “A” color “is an alteration of a complete spectrum” (Westphal 1987, 84). However lonely in appearance, a color is in the company of its kin—all its possible variations. The spectrum is the invisible background against which “a” color stands out. It is the ever-present virtual whole of each color apart (Brian Massumi).

A colour-event—can we say—has two levels: discursive qualification and affective intensity. “The former entails a conscious, sociolinguistic, and in many cases ideological fixing of the image-event; the latter marks the unconscious, sensual register of the event’s phenomenological force.” Colours occur between these copresent levels: they are “qualified intensity” and “subjective content,” the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of experience which points toward and defines a realm of personal observation. Colours-apart are qualified intensity. Modulated, mixed, and mediated intensity. By contrast, the spectrum is unqualified intensity. Colours are emotional, the spectrum affective. Affect is “immanent” but not accessible to experience. This implies an absolute dimension of being (absolute: “separated, cast off, released”). It operates on an immanent and implicated material that is prior to the conscious putting together of montage. Massumi follows Deleuze: this dimension is “the virtual.” II. I was in a totally white room. As I held the prism before my eyes, I expected, keeping Newtonian theory in mind, that the entire white wall would be fragmented into different colors, since the light returning to the eye would be seen shattered in just so many colored lights. But I was quite amazed that the white wall showing through the prism remained as white as before. Only where there was something dark did a more or less distinct color show….It required little thought to recognize that an edge was necessary to bring about color. I immediately spoke out to myself, through instinct, that Newtonian theory was erroneous….Everything unfolded itself before me bit by bit. I had placed a white sheet of glass upon a black background, looking at it through the prism from a given distance, thus representing the known spectrum and completing Newton’s main experiment with the camera obscura. But a black sheet of glass atop a light, white ground also made a colored, and to a certain degree a gorgeous specter. Thus when light dissolves itself in just so many colors, then darkness must also be viewed as dissolved in color (Goethe 1972, 35). The spectrum is convivial. It is always in the company of darkness. The range of achromatic variation forms a larger encompassing whole against the background of

Public 51 Colour

Glenn Ligon, Impediment, 2006. Neon and paint. From an edition of 7 and 2 artist's proofs 12.7 x 130.33 cm (5 x 51 c inches). ÂŠ Glenn Ligon. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Thomas Dane Gallery, London.

Public 51 Colour

PUFFS OF EXISTENCE

The Thought-Form drawings of 1901 used shapes, colours, and textures (three “eternal objects”) to convey observations about the common states of mind. Fraught with limitations (the use of “earth’s dull colours,” the need for two-dimensional sectioning of very high-dimensional experience), the works were nonetheless an attempt by the authors to convey to their readers (mostly fellow theosophists) the intense material presence of the objects they called “thoughts.” A “form” of thought was described as an astral outer lining, and was characterized in particular by three related aspects: a vibratory energy; a shapely suspended figure, and colours which (if they were visible) would be brilliant, like dancing fire. Man, the Thinker, is clothed in a body composed of innumerable combinations of the subtle matter of the mental plane, this body being more or less refined in its constituents and organised more or less fully for its functions, according to the stage of intellectual development at which the man himself has arrived. The mental body is an object of great beauty, the delicacy and rapid motion of its particles giving it an aspect of living iridescent light, and this beauty becomes an extraordinarily radiant and entrancing loveliness as the intellect becomes more highly evolved and is employed chiefly on pure and sublime topics. Every thought gives rise to a set of correlated vibrations in the matter of this body, accompanied with a marvellous play of colour, like that in the spray of a waterfall as the sunlight strikes it, raised to the nth degree of colour and vivid delicacy. The body under this impulse throws off a vibrating portion of itself, shaped by the nature of the vibrations—as figures are made by sand on a disk vibrating to a musical note—and this gathers from the surrounding atmosphere matter like itself in fineness from the elemental essence of the mental world. We have then a thought-form pure and simple, and it is a living entity of intense activity animated by the one idea that generated it. If made of the finer kinds of matter, it will be of great power and energy, and may be used as a most potent agent when directed by a strong and steady will. [...] (TF, 17).

Public 51 Colour

Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, Vague Pure Affection, print illustration from Thought-Forms (1901).

Fig. 8 is a revolving cloud of pure affection, and except for its vagueness it represents a very good feeling. The person from whom it emanates is happy and at peace with the world, thinking dreamily of some friend whose very presence is a pleasure. There is nothing keen or strong about the feeling, yet it is one of gentle well-being, and of an unselfish delight in the proximity of those who are beloved. The feeling which gives birth to such a cloud is pure of its kind, but there is in it no force capable of producing definite results. An appearance by no means unlike this frequently surrounds a gently purring cat, and radiates slowly outward from the animal in a series of gradually enlarging concentric shells of rosy cloud, fading into invisibility at a distance of a few feet from their drowsily contented creator. (AB/CL)

102

Public 51 Colour

Cheyney Thompson, StochasticProcessPainting(15504)=FunctionalPath9paper915.503meters): //munsell color space, 2015.

Public 51 Colour

103

Cheyney Thompson, FunctionalPath(ModifiedWilsonsAlgorithm(paper(15.503meters))://transforms resultant data from a discrete time stochastic process into a graph with uniform spanning localization properties with compactness criteria.

130

Public 51 Colour

Helen Frankenthaler, The Bay, 1963. Acrylic on canvas, 205 x 208 cm (80 w x 81 w inches). Detroit Institute of Arts, USA / Bridgeman Images. ÂŠ Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / SODRAC (2015).

Public 51 Colour

131

COLOUR ISSUES

Artist Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) once described her approach to the use of colour as “born out of idea, mood, luck, imagination, risk, into what might even be ugly.”1 Arising from her curiosity about how colours operate in relation to one another, her desire to convey an allusive sense in her work of what she often referred to as atmosphere and, at times, as a purely pragmatic exploration of how to use what was at hand in the studio, Frankenthaler’s paintings reveal an agile, intuitive, and investigatory engagement with colour. Over the course of her 60 year career, Frankenthaler’s colour palette and her methods of applying paint changed and evolved significantly, yet her thinking about and approach to colour remained largely consistent. For Frankenthaler, it was one of a set of possibilities put into play during the process of making a painting. Rejecting the notion of starting a work with decisions already made about the outcome, she once stated “I did not have a vision or a notion about color per se being the thing that would make me or my pictures work or operate.”2 Instead, working in a way analogous to “call and response,” she developed each painting as a distinct problem in which one action or gesture would stimulate another, never depending wholly on colour but rather exploring its properties—along with line and drawing—as an agent of illusionism to create space and depth. Frankenthaler’s complete corpus of work varies dramatically in terms of the range and juxtapositions of colours utilized, the relative surface area occupied by chromatic zones, and the density or thickness with which colour is a material property of her art. In 1965 she commented, “I will sometimes start a picture feeling, ‘What will happen if I work with three blues and another color, and maybe more or less of the other color than the combined blues?’ And very often midway through the picture I have to change the basis of the experience. Or I add and add to the canvas… I don’t start with a color order but find the color as I go.”3 Colour, for Frankenthaler, functioned as a framework of open-ended investigations and expressive possibilities rather than a rigid or rational system. Refraining from articulating a theoretical position about colour—or for that 1 2 3

Frankenthaler, quoted in John Elderfield, Frankenthaler (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1989), 185. Barbara Rose, “Oral History Interview with Helen Frankenthaler,” in Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1968. Frankenthaler, quoted in Henry Geldzahler, “Interview with Helen Frankenthaler,” Artforum 4, no 2 (October 1965): 38, reprinted in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, eds, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 30.

148

Public 51 Colour

SATURATION

J McN Whistler advises: “a picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared.” Meaning to reform the look of a finished work beyond clarity of detail, Whistler believed a work requires only that which is necessary to satisfy the artist’s response to the subject. Finish being as much about obfuscation, the muted, and withholding. The artist’s own labour, present in the painting’s creation, must become invisible. As a means of achieving this result, using pigment bound in liquid laid onto a surface to dry is familiar alchemy. But unlike the fixity offered by oil, watercolours (like these of the Fogo Island shoreline) seem more fragilely suspended on canvas. Away from its traditional match, paper, Otto-Knapp’s watercolour climbs a rung in the material hierarchy and becomes painting; it carries with it drawing’s longing and possibility, unframed and vulnerable. Vapors, mists, moon-glow and other watery effects are the subjects in her modernist souvenirs (inflection towards the French for memories); as much as they are of dancers and seascapes, they are subsumed by immaterial grey weather. To the watercolourist the quantity of water used in Otto-Knapp’s work, a method of horizontal application (subtle, tonal, Frankenthaleresque), is considerable. Waterlogged paper ripples whereas canvas becomes taught as a drum. The pigment laid onto her surfaces become deftly manipulated pools—each successive wash reactivating the reduction underneath—within which she makes her subtractive drawing before a slow evaporation leaves a dispersion of sooty residue, the sediment, the saturation, that completes her pictures. —Paul P.

Public 51 Colour

149

Silke Otto-Knapp, Moontrail (Rock), 2011. Watercolour on canvas, 100 × 130 cm (39.37 × 51.18 inches). Photo by Marcus Leith. Courtesy of greengrassi, London.

156

Public 51 Colour

Mario Doucette, Nouvelle Écosse II (study), 2009. Ink and pencils on paper, 28 x 43 cm (11 x 17 inches). Mario Doucette, Camps d’Espérance (study), 2009. Ink and pencils on paper, 28 x 43 cm (11 x 17 inches). Courtesy of the artist and Division Gallery, Montréal/Toronto.

Public 51 Colour

157

SETTLEMENTS

Our first attraction here was the small colour spots that do not so much evidence the selection of a palette (the pencils do not mix like a liquid medium), but consider the right sharpness or dullness to apply, as well as the angles of the marks’ application. These suppose relations between the colours and the paper, the grain, the definition of the objects to be drawn. At issue is the refinement of a material technique that will make its propositions attractive to thought. A colour can alight, as though landing very gently, or can rush forth in torrents. Ingressions can cascade. The spots can be accounted for as footholds for the scene. Past actual entities can ingress with colours, which include the particular family and culture I belong to, its language, its landscape, its climate or environment, its relationships with nature through planting and animals, and by contrast, the experience it remembers for itself. This past is always settled, but its settlement is active in all the present determinations and decisions I make. The settlement of the past is thus a factor in concrescence. This involves emotion which can “value” it up or down, according to the richness of my prehensional ability. If prehensions are affected by the settlement of the past, they can also be considered as imaginative accidents that work for the infection of a present that can change. Drawing upon the story of Acadian expulsion (a history of conflict in the eastern part of Canada best known by sublimation, in the figure of Evangeline), Doucette affirms a stance in which an “image” from the past is empowered in the present as concrete experience. The past exists here as an engrossing element— a vitality, a force, a persistent actuality. Drawing plays the role of its support by a technique. Many of these pictures are made by projecting their content onto templates drawn from European masterworks, a perspective from which these drawings might seem “folk” or “derivative.” By implication, those are techniques that can eliminate creativity and work toward desettling its capacities. (Thus, the avant-garde proposed to burn the museums.) But even a painful past is enfolded, or intimated, in the drops of coloured pencil that ingress on Doucette’s page. Here, the colours “break” on pictures which are added to the past, and which increase it, each time, and once, again.

172

Public 51 Colour

Barbara Balfour, From DFW: Yellow and From DFW: Grey, 2012. Each 26.7 x 76 cm (10.5 x 30 inches). Photos: Thomas Blanchard. Courtesy of the artist.

Public 51 Colour

173

SPECTRAL APOSTROPHE

I want to believe the fiction, in fiction, that the author is speaking directly to you, the reader. Even if I know it not to be true, I’m often convinced that it is. ember-red; mercuric red; violently red; wet-nail-polish red; the dusky red of fire through much smoke; that pushy shade of Canadian red; an odd kind of red, as of old blood My experience of reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest was immersion punctuated by interruption. Certain words literally stopped me from reading further, with a frequency that made it impossible to keep track of vocabulary. This led to my compiling almost 900 words in “Long List,” the first section of my artist’s book The Inkiest Black. In the third section, “White, Black,” in the sequential order and relative placement in which they appear in IJ, I arranged DFW’s references to these two colours. Ranging from single, unadorned words to detailed and elaborately modified terms and phrases, they conclude with my personal favourite—“the inkiest black.” autumnal orange; citrus orange; the deep color of quality squash; rust-colored; the color of low flame To believe the author is engaging in a mode of address, even when the author is dead, would mean one believes in a kind of spectral mediation, albeit a purely literary one. Although I certainly knew DFW was not contacting me, in a version of counter-apostrophe, it didn’t prevent me from replying. jonquil yellow; the color of pallid cheese; urine-yellow; deep autumnal yellow; jaundice-yellow; onionskin yellow; burnt yellow At some point in amassing the lexicon that became “Long List,” I noted of a number of surprising and eloquent colour descriptions I couldn’t help but imagining. What would “obscene pink” or “burnt yellow” look like? Would I recognize “the white of long death”? Familiar with mixing printing ink, I decided to do just that with DFW’s idiosyncratic, “qualified” colours. kind of nauseous dark-green; mint-green; the color of really old olives; indecisive green; the watery green of extreme ocean depths; deep deadwater gray-green

180

Public 51 Colour

SET A RED GREEN BLUE YELLOW ORANGE PURPLE PINK WHITE GRAY YELLOW GREEN BLUE WHITE GREEN RED ORANGE BLUE PINK YELLOW

SET A

GREEN BLUE OW ORANGE E PINK WHITE ELLOW GREEN WHITE GREEN RANGE BLUE K YELLOW

SET B RED GREEN BLUE YELLOW ORANGE PURPLE PINK WHITE GRAY YELLOW GREEN BLUE WHITE GREEN RED ORANGE BLUE PINK YELLOW

SET B

RED GREEN YELLOW OR PURPLE PINK GRAY YELLOW BLUE WHITE RED ORANGE PINK YELL

Public 51 Colour

181

COLOUR SCHEMES: THE STROOP TEST AND THE APPLICATION OF POSTWAR COLOUR In the figure to the left, you’ll find two sets of words. Set A contains a list of colours in which each is printed in the colour that corresponds to the designated word. Set B contains a list of colours in which each is printed in a colour different from the designated word. When attempting to speak aloud all the items in both sets not by reading the colour-words, but by naming the colours in which they’re printed, what flows effortlessly in Set A becomes a formidable challenge in Set B; invariably the brain falters, the tongue trips, and a simple task becomes a taxing, toilsome affair, riddled with mistakes, gaps, and hesitations, and demanding the reader to summon all her powers of concentration. This peculiar phenomenon, known as the “Stroop effect,” demonstrates the cognitive dissonance produced in the gap between the mental registration of a colour’s quality and its designation as linguistic sign. So named after its discovery in 1935 by American experimental psychologist John Ridley Stroop while following lines of experimentation pursued by the late-nineteenth-century psychologists James Cattell and Wilhelm Wundt, its meaningful scientific validation took root over two decades later as a discovery that helped precipitate the decline of behaviourism and the postwar rise of cognitive science. From the late 1950s forward, the Stroop effect moved out of virtual obscurity and became the established test commonly used as a diagnostic standard for cognitive function in applied linguistics, cybernetics, information theory, cognitive psychology, and clinical neuroscience. Several variants of Stroop tests have been used to calibrate theories of human cognition, language processing, signal/noise detection, and the limited capacity theory of human attention, to name but a few. The test’s popularity among the postwar human sciences is often attributed to the fact that it offered the first credible indication of the inner workings of human cognitive function that laid down the Stroop effect as the evidentiary foundation for a model of human perception governed by the principles of information theory. However, the unanimity by which the Stroop test was able to ascend as a gold standard of clinical practice tends to mask a larger context of para-scientific agendas that demanded testable validation. I believe a more fruitful line of inquiry about the phenomenon’s significance must table the discovery of the effect itself and begin from the theoretical silence that enveloped the test for two decades before a scientific consensus was reached on the issue of its importance. Such an impasse, during which the Stroop effect had no meaningful purpose other than as a novel psychological parlour game, indicates that its validation as a benchmark test for an emerging science of human cognition was achieved in part by agendas that exceeded the rationale offered by science.

192

Public 51 Colour

Keyword search: “Gay Foam Party,” August 12, 2015, detail of a Google search screen grab.

Public 51 Colour

193

CITIZENS IN A VAT OF DYE

Aristotle introduces two allegories into the discussion of political issues that have good prospects of becoming established alongside the well-known Platonic parables. The first is the dyer’s parable, which is evidently constructed to contrast deliberately with Plato’s weaver’s parable in the Statesman dialogue, while the second, the fountain parable, essentially contains the proposal for a political ritual. With his dyer’s parable, Aristotle moves into terrain occupied by Plato: Just as the latter in his Politikós had termed the ‘royal technique’ the capacity to meaningfully interweave the two socially beneficial, basic moods of masculinity (the courageous / aggressive and the self-controlled / harmonizing mindsets) as a weaver makes his fabric using woof and warp, so in the Daedalus Aristotle defines the ‘democratic technique’ as a procedure to immerse all citizens of the commonality in the same dyer’s vat until they are impregnated down to the very innermost fibre of their being. He believes synoikismós will in this way penetrate the citizens’ most basic emotional strands. This vat of dye impregnates the citizens with a shared pride in the freedom of their own polis as well as with respect for the beautiful acts of megalopsychía, or, to couch it in modern terms, the generosity thanks to which some citizens stand out from others. This pride and respect must precede all other statements of a political nature in the city. Far from rendering the city monochromatic and reducing it to some one-dimensional consensus, it is these pre-political ‘undertones’ that enable those polychromatic layers to be added by dint of which each vibrant city can become a forum for debate, party foundations and rivalry among friends. The implicit argument in this parable is interesting because it points to the pre-logical or pre-discursive premises of the art of urban coexistence. To again resort to modern terms, we could say that here the philosopher for the first time gives voice to the climatic or psycho-political conditions for social synthesis. The same is perhaps true of the fountain parable […]. There, Daedalus recommends that all citizens of the polis bathe together once in spring and once in the autumn in a special pool that needs to be built for this purpose on the agora—the so-called city fountain. Now, while we can obviously imagine this to be something of an erotic group escapade or balneological carnival, quite as if Aristotle had already read Bakhtin, the key point in both procedures is the fact that there is no discernible direct reference to political dialogue, to logical argument or to an explicit political semantics. Rather, the allegories express procedures on how to direct the pre-symbolical dimension of the coexistence of citizens. —Peter Sloterdijk

Public 51 Colour

205

Christine Davis, First Incision (fig. b), 2013. Archival pigment print, 120 x 70 cm (48 x 28 inches). Courtesy of the artist and Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto.

206

Public 51 Colour

PHOSPHORESCENCE

[T]he arcades are zones of special effects, optical illusions, tricks of the light, transformations—this is why they appear so magical, but it also intimates a propensity to deception, delusion. In the early days the gas lighting—with its uneven flickering—cast a sparkly gleam over everything. […] In the arcades, Benjamin notes, ‘Falser colours are possible’6 and everything is doused in a special ‘glaucous gleam’7 reminiscent of aquariums, as Gerstäcker imagined in a fictional transposition and, after him, Aragon made so vivid in Paris Peasant. In Gerstäcker’s The Sunken City, the hero sees, to his amazement, ‘that, with the gradual infusion of twilight, these undersea corridors just as gradually lit up by themselves. For everywhere in the bushes of coral and sponge were sitting broad-brimmed, glassy-looking medusas, which already at the outset had given off a weak, greenish phosphorescent light that quickly picked up strength at the approach of darkness and now was shining with great intensity.’8 […] That phosphorescent effect is mentioned again by Benjamin in an early jotting for the project where he draws connections between a palace of optical illusion, a religious site, and places of commerce and travel: ‘Musée Grèvin: Cabinet des Mirages. Representation of a connection between temple, railroad station, arcades, and market hall where tainted (phosphorescent) meat is sold. Opera in the arcade. Catacombs in the arcade’.9 Phosphorescence—from the Greek ‘I bring light’ is a faint luminosity, continuously emitted, not flashing. It is a phenomenon of transition and is at home in both the organic and inorganic world. It can be found in living and dead matter. Minerals may emit the greenish light after exposure to extraneous sources of light. Phosphorescence can appear during the decomposition of animal and vegetable matter. Phosphorescence is a luminous sign of decay, but also phosphor was used to illuminate time on clock faces—it was a sign of time’s passing in both modes— and it produced sparks from fire boxes. Phosphor appeared in all of the parallel worlds of the Arcades Project—animal, vegetable, mineral, human, technological, sparking, sparkling, dead and dying. Its gentle luminosity was just one example of the gleam that inhabited and so characterised the arcades—analogue of the Schein or sheen or appearance—that made the nineteenth century so spectacular and so glitteringly exceeding nature’s pallid beauty. For each element of nature a synthetic version was busy being found, in order to outstrip nature’s 6 7 8 9 11 12

AP, b°, 1. AP, R2, 1. AP, R2, 2. E.A. Poe, ‘The Philosophy of Furniture’, available online: http://www.literatureclassics.com /etexts/104/191/. AP, D2, 1. E.g., AP, A3a, 4 and A3a, 5.

216

Public 51 Colour

Jean-Luc Moulène, n Trous outremeter rose (n Ultramarine Pink Holes), Paris, May 2009. Epoxy resin, lycra, pigment, 60 x 105 x 70 cm (23 s x 41 a x 27 2 inches). Courtesy of Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York.

Public 51 Colour

217

AIR

At first we feel nothing, we are insensitive, we are naturalized. And then suddenly we feel not something, but the absence of something we did not know before could possibly be lacking. Think of the poor soldiers on the front line, deep in their trenches, the 22nd of April 1915 near Ypres. They knew everything about bullets, shells, rats, death, mud, and fear—but air, they did not feel air, they just breathed it. And then, from this ugly, slow-moving, greenish cloud lingering over them, air is being removed. They begin to suffocate. Air has entered the list of what could be withdrawn from us. In the terms of the great German thinker Peter Sloterdijk, air has been made explicit; air has been reconfigured; it is now part of an air-conditioning system that makes our life possible. One could protest that this has always been the case, at least as long as planet Earth has been “polluted”—as Lovelock claimed—by oxygen. Is not air one of the four elements? “Everyone knew” that air was one of the conditions of (aerobic) life. Yet this knowledge was not explicit in the sense Sloterdijk wishes to elaborate. Air was not felt, it was not experienced, no laboratory scientist was able to place his laboratory in between ordinary living creatures and air itself. Air did not count as something that had to come to our collective, political attention. To be sure, Boyle could make a bird suffocate inside his air pump by withdrawing the oxygen—and kids, as we see in the famous picture by Wright of Derby, could witness this experiment with some horrified delight, but they themselves were not inside the glass dome: The bird’s agony was lived only by proxy. Nineteenth-century hygienists had also brought the air to the attention of physicians, statisticians, educators, and city planners. But it was the air of miasmas that was in question, the infected mephitic air of lower classes, polluted cities, and dangerous industries. What happened in Ypres was different: Air had become public; gas had become a branch of the military; a whole science of atmospheric manipulation had been declared. —Bruno Latour

224

Public 51 Colour

PIXELS

Rafael Ochoa, 7 Squashes. C-print from CGI rendering (zBrush, CAD, Photoshop), 89 x 71 cm (35 x 28 inches). Courtesy of the artist and Angell Gallery.

Public 51 Colour

225

BETWEEN A DREAM AND A NIGHTMARE

There is no speculative figure of the cave in Whitehead, no overall judgment emitted against the partial and divergent interpretations that are supposed to predominate in it: if you want to have an experience free of all interpretation, ask a stone for its biography… The Whiteheadean adventure does not aim at awakening, leaving the cave. It is itself a dream, a storytelling: to learn “inside” the Platonic cave, together with those who live and argue within it. Not in the hope that the false appearances will gradually yield their secrets, but in the hope that these “appearances,” if they are appreciated in their affirmative importance, might be articulated into fabulous contrasts (TWW, 516–517). —Isabelle Stengers