On Color

by David Kastan

  But this is to get the painting almost entirely wrong. Color is indeed its subject, and color appears as an object, but Kim is profoundly interested in representation and signification. “Purity in color is an anachronism,” he has said.17 Abstract color is so very twentieth century, at least in the history of art. Each of Kim’s panels is uniquely colored, not only in terms of the subtly differentiated tones of each one, but also in terms of the process by which it was achieved. Beginning with friends and family, and then stopping strangers on the street, Kim mixed colors to match the exact skin tones of each person who agreed to sit for him. The panels are arranged according to an alphabetical arrangement of the sitters’ first names, and the full names of the sitters are displayed in an accompanying directory attached to the wall.

  Color is what he paints, but here, unlike in the work of other color grid painters, it is skin color. So much of modern art could be understood as the belief, as the French conceptual artist Daniel Buren has claimed, that “colour is pure thought.”18 But not for Kim. “Why are you making abstract paintings?” he once imagined himself being asked: “The ‘you’ meaning Asian-American artist, artist-of-color, artist-with something-to-say.”19

  Whereas painters and color theorists from Leonardo to Josef Albers have always understood that color is determined by context, for them the context is other colors. This is the basis of any number of familiar color illusions, in which a single color seems to change depending on what other colors it is placed against. But for Kim the context is not merely the other colors that determine what colors we see, but the other lives and other histories that over-determine them. Albers famously said that “color deceives continually,” but the deception for Kim is not merely an optical effect.20

  Synecdoche understands that color carries extraordinary freight in our modern world; it doesn’t float free of individual experience and cultural meaning. Kim’s panels could almost be thought of as 8-by-10-inch portraits, although representing, not an individual face, but a unique patch of skin. The painting’s title refers to a rhetorical device by which a part of something is substituted for the whole—as in “learning your ABCs,” though ideally one learns the rest of the alphabet as well. (And it is probably not irrelevant to Kim that rhetorical figures were once themselves known as “colors.”)21 In Synecdoche skin color stands in for an individual, and an individual for a community, and a color for a race. Kim has said of the piece, “The part of it that is most dear to me is the signage, which is composed of all the people’s names.”22 These lives matter. In several senses, they bear the colors that he paints.

  What may be visually most significant about the painting is not only that no two panels are exactly alike (a chromatic argument against stereotyping) but also that the range of color is so narrow. There is no green or orange or blue or purple. But also there is no yellow, red, black, or white. There are only the meticulously nuanced, almost always unnamable shades of brown, variously tinged by pink, yellow, or orange: from the beiges and tans to coffees with and without milk to some plain and a few dark chocolates. These are our shades of difference. We may all be colored people, but in reality we aren’t so very colorful.

  There is an awkward moment described in A Passage to India, E. M. Forster’s novel set in the India of the British Raj. The book is about many things, but almost all of them are inflected by color and race. Cyril Fielding is the British headmaster of a local college and a member of a restricted club for whites only. “The remark that did him most harm at the club,” says Forster’s narrator, “was a silly aside to the effect that so-called white races are really pinko-grey. He said this only to be cheery; he did not realize that ‘white’ has no more to do with color than ‘God Save the King’ has to do with a god, and that it is the height of impropriety to consider what it does connote.”23

  The color names that we have come conventionally to use as some inexact metaphor for race do in fact have little to “do with color,” but they have everything to do with power. What “white” connotes shouldn’t go without saying, even in the name of supposedly good manners—and certainly it doesn’t go without being observed, except by those whose power has come to seem to them both natural and inevitable.

  Another contemporary artist, Glenn Ligon, who has collaborated and shown with Byron Kim, has created a series of text-paintings that observe and in turn solicit, if not actually compel, the viewer’s observation. In much of his work, texts turn into images, as appropriated phrases are repeatedly stenciled in black oil stick onto hand-painted white backgrounds. The letters thicken and blur as they move down the picture space, making them increasingly difficult and sometimes finally impossible to read.24 In one, Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background), a line from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” is stenciled onto a painted wooden panel (actually a door), but it begins to grow illegible about one-third of the way down from the smearing of the medium (Figure 17).

  What begins as the proliferation of text ends as the obliteration of it, undoing the distinction between writing and erasing, between creating and negating. The black smudges from working with the oil stick finally overwhelm both the stenciled words and the “sharp white background” on which they appear. We are at first invited to read, but then the painting prevents us from doing so. All we can do is look.

  Looking is unsettling. We see what is there, not what someone tells us. Words in Ligon’s work are slowly removed from the system of signification that is language, and then they are rematerialized as line and color. It is oil paint on a wooden platform. Hurston’s words give way to Ligon’s shaping imagination. Her linguistic structure is disfigured in his visual one.

  The politics of the gesture are elusive here, perhaps deliberately evasive. But they do read as politics. We are invited at first to interpret the statement as Ligon’s own. The unanchored “I” of the text—“I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background”—seems to be Ligon himself. He is an African American. The quotation is unidentified and unmarked as a quotation. Even if we recognize it as Hurston’s, it still seems to be something Ligon identifies with or endorses. But the visual repetition produces illegibility (just as verbal repetition produces unintelligibility; say a word over and over and see what happens). Paint triumphs over language as the letters disappear into another form of black art.

  Hurston’s statement obviously interests Ligon, almost certainly because of Hurston’s recognition that racial identity is not essential but develops within a system of differences. Colored people are colored only in relation to the whiteness that has become normative, while whiteness is somehow exempted from the burden of being colored at all. It marks privilege, even in the most familiar activity of the painter preparing a space on which to paint. But perhaps what also interests Ligon is the ambiguity in Hurston’s sentence about what it means to “feel most colored.” Is that a good feeling or a bad one? Is that to feel more fully alive, or is it to know oneself more completely at risk? Or are those the same thing? Does the “sharp white background” serve as a clearly differentiated foil against which Hurston’s own black identity is highlighted and shines powerfully forth, or does it just hurt as she is pinned against it?

  FIGURE 17: Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background), 1990. Oil stick, gesso, and graphite on wood, 80 × 30 in. (203.2 × 76.2 cm). Private collection.

  In either case, it is a background that Ligon makes disappear. Does he feel more or less “colored” after its disappearance? Are there other systems of difference that might matter more? Or might identity not need any system of difference to form? Or, at least, might it be better if it didn’t need one? Those are all hard questions to answer, at any rate on the basis of looking at a painting.

  An easier one might be: Does he object to the word “colored”?

  Probably not. He is a painter, after all, and clearly, like his friend Byron Kim,
remarkably sophisticated about both the material and the metaphoric usages of color. Each artist could be called “an American abstract painter of color.” But is that an American of color who paints abstractly, as each is and does; or is it an American painter who paints abstract color paintings? Each is that, too. Another one of Ligon’s text-paintings isn’t smeared, but in it (on it?) a set of racialized color words—“black,” “brown,” “yellow,” “red,” “white”—is repeatedly stenciled in black lettering on a white surface divided down the middle like the facing pages of a book. The words appear either whole or broken up as they fit, or don’t, onto what seems a line of text.

  Ligon’s piece might usefully be compared with Jasper Johns’s well-known painting False Start (1959), though Johns’s exuberant use of color is so very different from the austerity of Ligon’s black and white. Both make use of stenciled color names, but in False Start they seem randomly placed on (and sometimes covered by) irregularly shaped bursts of bold color, only twice with the color name and color patch in alignment, and never with the color of the letters corresponding to the color of the word the letters spell. Johns’s painting is a release of energy seemingly originating in the color itself, bursting across the canvas and rendering the color names arbitrary and irrelevant. In Ligon’s work, the color names matter, but they matter only because they turn out to be no less arbitrary or no more accurate than they are in Johns’s painting. They are black letters forming words for color, or at least trying to in so far as the structure of the line allows. Sometimes they break apart as one or more letters in the word must move to the next line.

  The point seems to be that skin color is not a visual reality but a cultural construction that creates and attaches meanings to colors we inaccurately see. We are all unmistakably colored people, but what colors we are and how we feel about it (or are made to feel about it) have little to do with visual information. Ligon’s paintings force us to look at skin color no less intensely than Kim’s Synecdoche. And no less than that painting, the visuals denaturalize the color codes of race, even as they contest the idea that color can ever be decontextualized or disinterested. Kim paints the colors that are there to be seen; Ligon paints the envelope of discourse that keeps us from seeing them.

  None of us is color-blind, at least as the phrase is often used to insist on one’s own freedom from racial prejudice. Even as a mere visual deficiency, almost no one is actually color-blind. But neither Kim nor Ligon wishes we were. They set out to teach how to see color and to recognize both how much and how little it means. We often see colors, even when they aren’t there. Kim and Ligon show us what is in fact there, though that may not be what we (are willing to) see.

  Color matters, and in spite of our occasional empty gestures of denial (“I don’t care if she is green or purple”), we know it. In 1999, Crayola changed another of its color names. Indian Red, which, like the awkwardly named Flesh Tint, had been present in the very first box the crayon maker had issued in 1903, was renamed Chestnut. The company worried that people would think the color name referred to the skin color of American “Indians” instead of to the source of the pigment from which the color came. Maybe Crayola needn’t have worried about that; had Indian Red referred to skin color, surely it would have already been changed to Native American Red. But then again there are still those Washington Redskins.

  Crayola, anyhow, has evolved. Now you can buy a “multicultural” pack of crayons, which, as the company says in its advertising, “meets the artistic needs of today’s culturally diverse classrooms”: six colors—­Mahogany, Apricot, Burnt Sienna, Tan, Peach, Sepia—plus Black and White “for blending.” And the crayons are advertised as “nontoxic.” At least one can hope so.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I plant my hands in the small garden—

  I will grow green.

  FOROUGH FARROKHAZAD, “Another Birth”

  (trans. Hamid Dabashi)

  MIXED

  Greens

  FIGURE 18: The Green Path of Hope

  As a pigment, green is not a primary color. It can be made by mixing blue and yellow paint, so it fails the test. There are, however, other definitions of color primaries, which reflect different ways of mixing colors. Color televisions produce the range of visible colors by mixing red, green, and blue light; so in this sense green is primary. Color printers work still differently; they mix four “primary colors”—cyan, magenta, yellow, and black—to produce their color spectrum, so in this context green is not one.

  But in a political sense, green has unquestionably become a primary color. It now shows up on the ballot in both primaries and general elections almost everywhere. At one time the color of nature itself, divided between the fresh greens of springtime and the moldy greens of decay, between bright emerald and dusky olive, between, as the French once said, vert gai and vert perdu, green is now the color of nature’s defenders: Die Grünen (Austria), Groen (Belgium), GroenLinks (Netherlands), Federazione dei Verdi (Italy), Europe Écologie Les Verts (France), Miljøpartiet De Grønne (Norway), Strana Zelených (Czech Republic), Vihreä Liitto (Finland), Midori no Tō (Japan), Sarekat Hijau (Indonesia), Les Verts (Senegal), Ĥizb-al-Khodor (Egypt), or the Green Party (in almost every English-speaking country). Black, red, yellow, and white people (who are not of course actually black, red, yellow, or white) have all become green. They are rainbow warriors, like the name of Greenpeace’s ship, dedicated to protecting the environment.

  As a color on the spectrum, green is in the middle, halfway between red, orange, and yellow on one side and blue, indigo, and violet on the other. As a political party, Green is usually much further left of center. About 20 percent of people choose green as their favorite color; electorally it doesn’t usually do quite as well.

  In 2016, however, Alexander van der Bellen, former leader of his country’s Green Party, was elected president of Austria, but for the most part Green parties have been more effective in shaping policies than in achieving political majorities. Government investment, regulation, and construction have all gone green. Now there is green engineering, green building, green investment programs designed to have a positive environmental impact, insuring clean air and water, protecting the safety and the sustainability of our food supply, encouraging the development of renewable energy sources, eliminating toxic waste, and recycling materials to save finite natural resources. It used to be Martians who were green (at least since Edgar Rice Burroughs, best known as the creator of Tarzan, first described the “green men of mars” in his earliest science-fiction publication in 1912).1 Today it is earthlings who are green, in their desire to save the planet.

  It can hardly be a surprise that green has become the representative color for the environmental movement. It was seemingly inevitable, even though a green pond might be a worrying sign of the very problem the green movement is designed to alleviate. The English word “green,” like the German Grün, derives from a proto-Indo-European root that means “grow”; the French vert and the Spanish verde come from a Latin root meaning “sprout” or “flourish.” The etymological link of the color word with natural growth is similar in almost every language.

  Although environmentalism might seem a largely noncontroversial, if urgent, commitment, it nonetheless has its critics. To some climate skeptics, it is green only on the outside and red within. The British political writer James Delingpole, for example, calls it a movement of “Watermelons,” for whom the environment is merely a proxy issue for an attack on global capitalism.2 But socialist and environmental parties have found that red and green can be as complementary in politics as they are as pigments, perhaps most notably in the alliance between the left-leaning Social Democrats and the minority Green Party that formed the government in Germany between September 1998 and September 2005.

  It is, however, worth noting that green’s domination of the imagery of a politicized environmentalism could easily have been otherwise. Our “green hopes” for the future could have as appropriately been “b
lue” ones. Two-thirds of the planet is covered by water, whose ability to sustain life is as ecologically critical as those plants that depend on it. The sky (often) appears to us as blue, and it is the medium through which the sun’s energy is made available to those plants (which are green because the chlorophyll absorbs most of the electromagnetic energy in the blue and red portions of the spectrum). But reversing our angle of vision, the earth from space looks like a blue marble streaked with veins of other colors (Figure 19). Arthur C. Clarke, the great science-fiction writer, apparently once wondered, “How is it possible to call this planet ‘Earth,’ when clearly it is ‘Ocean?’”3

  Still, even if blue is the dominant color of the planet, the ecosystem offers a full palette of organic hues, from which we have selected green, the color of the vegetal, to stand for it all, and to carry our hopes for its survival. It is the color of sustainability. But just as easily it could have been blue.

  Green, however, has become the color of our ecological concerns, although what is inevitable is only that green will also carry ideological associations other than environmentalism. There are lots of people “for whom green speaks,” in Wallace Stevens’s phrase, but for whom it speaks to different ends.4 In the Iranian election of 2009, for example, green spoke for many—some thought for most—Iranians, though as a sign not of their environmental commitments but of their commitments to civil rights. It was the aspirational color of a grassroots coalition representing a variety of political interests and social aims in opposition to a government that was widely perceived as oppressive and corrupt.5 This was the Green Movement (Nehzat-e Sabz), as it came to be known, consolidating a set of pluralist democratic values. Its supporters united behind the candidacy of Seyyed Mir Hossein Mousavi, a one-time revolutionary hardliner turned reformer, who had emerged as the only serious rival to the candidacy of the incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.