Objects of Subjectivity: Seeing in Color
Erase everything you know about a place, an object, an idea…and experience it again for the first time. How do you feel? Excited, overwhelmed, curios, apathetic, lost… Today upon entering the Brooklyn Museum this was an experiment I among peers were prompted to participate in. We were surrounded by precious objects that all shared only one thing in common, they were blue. No other context was available to us, we were intended to remove ourselves from the information and overlook the labels. It was just us and the works, all strung together by the theme of blue. As I walked around I was drawn to certain items. Some I was very familiar with, some I had to make guesses, others were a complete mystery. Each object displayed a beauty that I took in as if it was the first time.
I was relying on the object to speak to me about its story rather than to have someone else act as its voice and relay an interpretation of its origin. I was frustrated, I wanted some kind of confirmation about the guesswork I was conducting, I wanted to know if I was right about the object I was looking at. I also for the first time felt like I was seeing objects through the same lens as my peers and others around me. None of us had any targeted roots in the collections. We weren’t assimilating with objects and seeking roots in them through our cultural heritage, interests, ideas, or nationality…instead we were all taking in information on the same spectrum, the color blue. It was a universal sensation, we all were experiencing objects through color and trying to seek out a bugger picture, a larger scheme as to what color really implied in an object, what it stood for, why it was adorned on so many precious things from so many different parts of the world and different time periods. Despite the fact that we were all engaged at the same level, we all saw something completely unique and different. Each of us felt something that was emotionally stirred by the color blue, sadness, happiness, calm, intensity. The objects didn’t require another context to be meaningful or valuable.
For me, this concept was revolutionary and it completely reshaped the potential for museum’s in how they relay value, purpose, and the integrity of object worth. Part of me was compelled to look deeper and closer at the objects to render their stories more apparent. I realized that object accessibility could outreach to people on basic levels that translate to a higher level of thinking and developing independent concepts. It pushes to people to accept more about an object than just its material, year, and geographical parent. It was a beautiful unfolding that resonated with audiences in different ways and surfaced even deeper through simple means of exploration. Why was the color blue manufactured by so many cultures over different spans of time? What were they linking this color to that made it a need? Why was blue the staple color for so many luxurious artifacts? It was fascinating to discover that we as a human society gave blue power, we invested meaning behind it and carried that with worldwide into today. It acts as its own identity and represents larger things that we need. This idea of what objects convey and how we can push people to come to that conclusion without additional input was a really new idea for me. This was the first time I had been confronted with such a broad context but had to seek out the value in art. It was really refreshing. I hope to explore this idea further.
