[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: February 29, 2008]
At some moment in modernity, according to MOMA, color became "a mass-produced and standardized commercial product" - and, so this show implies, some artists responded accordingly.
Now we can certainly call color "a commodity" - as the commentary here does - and swan around feeling radical and post-Marxist. But of course it isn't. Paint certainly is, and no less is the art-work. Color, however, is something quite different, and it's worth pausing to wonder what it is.
It's a property, I'd suggest, and a property of something.
A property of objects, or less tendentiously, of things. But that's not enough, because all that can be measured in the object world is light of certain wavelengths. Color occurs thanks to the way the eye works; and even then, the experience of color is not reducible to the purely sensorial. We have a color language, and we have a culture, or series of cultures, in which colors have semantic content.
Color is not a commodity; although, thanks to its semantic content, it is often a key element in a brand.
Enough: or go and read the relevant parts of Hegel's Phenomenology.
What is to be found in this new MOMA blockbuster is, for the most part, artists in the wake of Abstract Expressionism treating color as if it's reducible to what paint-makers, fabric-makers, offer for sale. For the most part, the exhibition resembles a series of slightly off-kilter Sherwin Williams sample books, and one wouldn't be surprised to find a paint company supporting the show.
And so we find Frank Stella painting his monochrome square-spirals, "straight out of the can", Andy Warhol's renditions of the do-it-yourself painting-by-numbers experience, and any number of almost interchangeable arrangements of color fields, up to and including Damien Hirst's colored dots.
There's a historical context, of course, to this systematic banality. From Minimalism to Pop-Art, post-war painters understandably labored to shed the load of an emotional, individualist spirituality which must have seemed to stretch back from Rothko and Newman and Clyfford Still, through the impressionists, to Greco and beyond.
The modern world (and nothing now looks more old-fashioned) was cool, in both the hip and the MacLuhan senses of the word. Cool colors: metal, industrial, automatic, technical. Sheen, not shading. Cartoons, not etchings (and I mean Hannah-Barbera, not Da Vinci). Graphs, not designs.
In the wilful and radical promotion of banality, I can find analogies in 1970s popular music. Young British and American songwriters could suddenly no longer present themselves as heirs of the blues or as avatars of mystical-hippie-spiritual progressivism. Woodstock as much as the Mississippi Delta was not their subject. Rather, shopping malls, television, plastic toys, public housing and the "suburbs".
And so Devo and the B-52s and; X-Ray Spex and The Members and The Rezillos; in their own ways, they each held up a mirror to a banal consumerist plastic environment: "The Day The World Turned Day-Glo".
If the embrace of commercial banality makes sense as a negation of "long-held convictions regarding the spiritual truth or scientific validity of particular colors" - as MOMA puts it - one nevertheless looks for the seeds of new, positive, even emancipatory semantic uses of color. (Touchstone: Derek Jarman's film Blue). The rejection otherwise begins to seem somewhat vacuous. What relationship do Binky Palermo's large horizontal color planes have to Rothko's, except that they are aesthetically shallower?
Forunately, one looks not entirely in vain.
Ed Ruscha is far from my favorite artist, but the two vitrines containing heavy sheets of paper to which he has applied "27 Stains" command quiet attention among the flashy technicolor surroundings. The derivation of each stain is listed: bacon grease, cosmetics, even a squashed ant. There are several strategies at work here - the isolation of simple, interesting colors; relating the colors back to things as concrete properties of things; and playing with the shifting signification the colors have for the viewer, observing them alone or relating them back to the index of their sources.
Mike Kelley's contribution, Sex to Sexty, playfully uses the covers from an incomplete series of comic books (of that title), formally related by interspersed planes of color which reflect the tones of the original comics.
Poly Styrene, the young songwriter with X-Ray Spex, had traded in supermarket banality not for its own sake, but as a way of making space for a voice hitherto repressed in rock and roll music ("little girls should be seen and not heard"). The synthetic, cosmetic day-glo oranges and yellows of the band's image and her words created an aesthetic environment in which she could be a participant.
Carrie Mae Weems' stunning series of silver prints in this exhibition have a cooler palette than Poly Styrene's lyrical world. But they use the semantics of color and color language to make a precise, economical, and true statement about uses of color descriptors. It's also a statement which is not easily reducible to a neat, radical, post-Marxist text, because it is enacted aesthetically, and quite beautifully.
"Golden Yella Girl". "Blue Black Boy". You'll find her work at this gallery's site, if you scroll along. In which color is recovered from the commercial chart and new uses for it found.
Be careful how you leave and enter, because MOMA has enthusiastically painted the stairs around Balzac's feet every color in the rainbow, and I see a personal injury suit in the making. At some point, I assume MOMA will upload more detail to the web-page devoted to the exhibition.
"Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today", opens on March 2 and runs through May 12. And no, you won't hear X-Ray Spex at MOMA - that was in my head.
