chromodystopia: noun: from the Greek khrōma, meaning color and the English dys, meaning bad, + utopia. Chromodystopia: 1. A state or condition of colorlessness; 2. The physical, psychological or emotional experience of being without color; 3. A drab, flat, existence without vibrancy or purity; 4. A dirty place; 5. A place without art.
Read any color theorist writing over the past one thousand years, give or take, and you will find that there is one basic assumption common to all. In The Art of Color, Johannes Itten, colossus of the Bauhaus, speaks as a teacher and painter, theorist and practitioner, when he talks about the “continuum of color from art to nature.”
This underlying premise, that there exists an unbroken continuum from the natural world to art, is a given not only for painters and color theorists, but for every writer, philosopher, linguist, art historian and anyone else wading in to the surprisingly complex conversation about color; about what color is and what color means and what color says about who we are.
Ubiquitous color, our primary visual messenger, seems like an obvious place to start any search for a universal theory, the Holy Grail of philosophers and the like. The attraction of color is undeniable. Color is absolutely democratic and undiscerning; it knows no boundaries. Color is cross cultural, cross gender, goes everywhere and touches everything in our lives.
While we covet bright and shiny objects, and manipulate color to serve any cause or purpose, color itself is not a thing that can be bought and sold, owned and controlled. The enigma of color is that while color is common to just about every human being who has ever lived, it is also absolutely intangible, a physiological and psychological phenomenon. Color, by definition, is the visible portion of the spectral band, and of interest mainly to those who can perceive it.
There is no “actual” color to exist as a thing in the physical world. So color is everything and nothing, everywhere and nowhere, at the same time. What self-respecting philosopher can resist such a vexing conundrum?
In every moment of our waking and dreaming life, color is the common thread that ties us together and reassures us of a common humanity, weaving the polychrome web that binds us, in apparent unity, to our corporeal bodies. There is power in being connected to the world under our feet. But what if, now, Itten’s continuum from nature to art has been stretched to the breaking point, or even snapped?
It may seem anachronistic in the 21st century to worry about the underpinnings of the theories on color, art, and meaning from a mere painter, and of the last century, no less, but that is exactly the point. Painting, the record of human beings mucking around with pigment, sticks, animal hair and fat, is an excellent barometer of the history of color. We have 70,000 year old evidence of human ancestors mixing up colors in seashells. For that long, sentient beings have had a primal relationship with the physicality of color. Just as we did ourselves, color came from the earth and the sea, its mineral elements hunted, harvested, and transformed, often at great expense and sacrifice.
The history of color is the history of civilization, of kings and queens, wealth and wars, exploration, conquests, and art, and for two centuries at least it was painting that recorded the whole saga. Even as alchemy and chemistry, science and industry have altered color making, and art has morphed from glorious storytelling and extravagant propaganda to cultural mainstay and eye candy for the leisure classes, painting has been civilization’s laboratory of color.
Color may be ephemeral, but as painting, color has had great value. The progression of colorants from pigments made of soot and clay to alchemical magic to chemical byproduct to full-on corporate industry has been slow but steady, accelerating exponentially. Pigments and dyestuffs, once the uncontested mediums of color communication, have been replaced by digital light. Over the past fifty years, the color wheel, that familiar encapsulation of primary and secondary colors, has switched from red/blue/yellow to RGB.
First through color photography, and then color television, video, and on, today the internet weaves the world together with a tapestry of spectral radiant energy. Color still promises to unify humanity, but for the first time ever, the means to that end has changed from earth bound pigment to celestial light. We live in an RGB universe, a high-def world where we expect our color to be cranked to the max.
Color is no longer referenced to the natural world but to the alternate, virtual reality on the screens we depend on to communicate everything about us. We have learned to immerse ourselves in a glorious sea of, literally, out of this world color. And we expect it to be good. Just pop a video of one of your favorite movies from the 1970’s in to your dusty VCR and be amazed that you could have ever thought the color quality was so great. The digital revolution promises us a gazillion colors, but we are swamped by the tidal wave of chroma.
Interest in all things color is booming, but, ironically, while our world may be more colorful, our sensitivity and sophistication for color recognition within the ambient world is on the decline. We are all the less in touch with the effects of color on ourselves than ever before.
As David Batchelor explains brilliantly in his treatise Chromophobia, published in 2001, chromophobia and chromophilia are just two sides of the same coin. Too much color indiscriminately used is the same as no color at all. Digital color, ratcheted up to the nth degree, blinds to the actual color around us. It is as if we are experiencing a kind of cultural simultaneous contrast; our sensors, overwhelmed, respond with the equivalent of a chromatic white-out.
Over saturated, over stimulated, we are indifferent observers of the natural world and require brighter, gayer signposts to direct our attention. Slowly, unknowingly, lured to drift from Kansas to Oz, we become inured to the wonders of the world around us. We have come to live in a state of chromodystopia.
Disconnected, we are, if not powerless, surely less powerful. Our Paleolithic visual navigation system is trying to learn to manage the tsunami of data thrown at it by 21st century technology. Surely, the shift from actual to virtual color is not, in and of itself, necessarily a bad thing. Today we take in stride untold advances in medicine, science and art made possible by digital color absolutely unimagined just a hundred years ago. From electron microscopes to radio telescopes, digital color has exploded our universe of knowledge, all to the benefit of humankind.
The question is, has the scale become unbalanced. Has the digital coloration of or lives so completely taken over in full replacement mode so as to marginalize our relationship to nature to the point of irrelevance? And if so, could that mean that we, as a human mass, have become so invested in our virtual reality that we have lost our bearings, and all sense of self?
With our head in the clouds but no feet on the ground, how much more easily manipulated are we by crass commercialism, mind-numbing cultural pap, and the politics of fear? How close are we to becoming members of the earth’s population evacuated to the floating starliners in Pixar’s WALL-E.?
Distracted in RGB-land, mooring lines cut, we float through our digital days, our actual physical surroundings left to gray and fall away. If art is the language we use to say that which cannot otherwise be said, what then happens to our songs of the soul when color is divorced from our material, sensate experience?
Aldous Huxley wrote in Heaven and Hell of the antipodes of the mind, where color is disconnected from narrative meaning and can be experienced as pure, radiant beingness. The antipodes are a fine place to visit, but don’t linger too long, as the risk of madness is too great. For Jacqueline Lichtenstein, coloris is the dazzling pleasure of color beyond words. ⁴ If the Antipodes are coloris, found at the end of an orgiastic fall in to Original Bliss, then Chromodystopia is the bland netherworld at the other end of the spectrum.
© copyright 2015 J K Studio Ltd.
References:
1. Johannes Itten, The Art of Color, (orig. published as Kunst du Farbe, Otto Major Verlag Ravensburg, 1961)
2. David Batchelor, Chromophobia, (Reaktion Books, 2000), Chapter 5
3. Aldous Huxley, Heaven and Hell, (London, 1994)
4. Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age, trans. E. McVarish (Berkeley, 1993)
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