Maggie
Nelson’s Bluets (2009), a train of thought about just one colour in numbered
sections, starts, “1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in
love with a colour”, and goes on to explore blues, the blues, blueness, blue
things and herself. Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red (1998), on the other
hand, follows a red-winged monster named Geryon and starts, “He came after
Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.” In each
colour, though, we see in unity, the guardrails humans have created in order to
name colours, a watery depth, an arbitrary assignation (why is sadness blue,
anger red?), and the isolation of tone from meaning.
1. The
word black has meant so many things, just like the colour has, and the clothes.
In much of the world, black has historically represented death and uniform – a
pious class.
2. Back
when wealth was best represented by materials, brighter, cleaner hues easily
informed their fineness, whereas black could hide anything. Eventually, though,
high fashion became a new kind of elitism, and black was prioritised. The
innovation of haute couture was explained with a garment’s structure more than
its make-up, and to the human eye, black is best for seeing silhouettes.
3. In
small cities, black is a scary colour to wear, a sign of outside interests.
Visiting large cities like New York or Chicago or Berlin, one is struck by the
amount of black everyone wears: professionals, writers, tech people, designers,
security guards, waiters, even children. (Back home, maybe the only people who
wear monochrome black are hairdressers.)
4.
Something about having to move around this big set in all black makes sense:
stage-hands wear black so they can disappear behind scenery, unlike the actors,
vying for attention. The goal is to look like one is part of this place,
integral to the show.
5
.“Venice,” as Peter Ackroyd writes in Venice: Pure City, is “not so much a city
but a representation of a city”, an “endless drama”. In 17th-century Venice,
black clothing was “a costume with which to express uniformity … the colour of
gravity. Black was the colour of anonymity. Black also held elements of
intimidation. It represented death and justice.”
6. There
is blackness and there is blackness and there is blackness, but we are focused
for the moment on this season’s BBD (‘big black dress’) that comes in all
volumes: graduation gown, layered ‘Goth Lolita’, corseted period piece,
mouse-ear-topped t-shirt dress or shapeless shift-in-felted-something.
7.
Saying anything is the new black is déclassé now, an empty adage because it
never worked – nothing ever replaced black as black, even when black was the
new black, meaning something racial, and then something not racial, ad
infinitum.
8. At
some point, each subculture owned black: bikers wore black leather, gallerists
wore black linen, the upper crust had black tie events, single women claimed
the little black dress. But because it is everything, it is nothing, and so
reclaiming black as subcultural today feels almost satirical, an echo of
naiveté.
9. Even
when Morrissey (not known for wearing black) sang, “I wear black on the outside
because black is the way I feel on the inside”, he was mimicking a type of
melodrama, and when Lana Del Rey (also not known for wearing black) later sang,
“I paint the house black, my wedding dress black leather, too”, she was
pandering to a depressive, hoping to point out the absurdity of her song’s
subject’s lifestyle. The Rolling Stones’ ‘Paint It Black’ is sped up and
slightly hysterical; its lyrics feel distant from Mick Jagger (never one to
exclusively wear black, either) as if he is quoting someone.
10. It
is imbued with more meaning than the others, but it is still a tone, a nameable
one, with varying depths and warmths: black denim is washed. Black iron
absorbs. An oil spill is iridescent. A tattoo fades to green.
11. The
English word ‘black’ sometimes means evil: death’s cloak, a bad witch’s cape, a
bad luck cat, immoral magic, a plague, the darkest humour, the great beyond,
the deep unknown. But black is a symbol of simplification, too. Black and white
means an easy binary, a heightening of contrast, a yes or no answer.
12. When
we say “black people” – a fraught construct – we refer to a giant spectrum of
origins, ethnic descents, and experiences, which is de ned differently in
different countries, eras, communities and contexts.
13.
Black is at once all colour combined and the absence of all colour: the most
and the least. A ‘blackout’ means the lack of something (power, light, memory)
and a ‘black eye’ means a bruise that looks like a rainbow trout.
14. A
travelling exhibition of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s black dresses, Balenciaga,
l’oeuvre au noir was recently curated to show the designer’s capacity for
impressive construction by directing the focus away from his wild colour
choices.
15.
Looking at the Fall/Winter 2019 runway shows, black palettes look particularly
dark, as in nightmarish: Prada’s Anatomy of Romance collection, Balenciaga’s
Asphalt showspace, Bottega Veneta’s quilted leather, Comme des Garçons’s
all-black poofs, and Rick Owens’ models’ blackout contacts look more creepy
than formal, answering the Anthropocene with supernatural villains.
16.
Vampires – because they are nocturnal and elusive, or because they turn into
bats, or because they were first seen in black-and-white movies—wear black, and
therefore black is a goth colour, the gothest colour.
17. For
all of its cultural cache, its darkness and metaphorical darkness, its ‘absence
of’, its ability to stand in for the whole as a hole – as in Malevich’s Black
Square, viewed as the ultimate conclusion to a breaking down of visual codes
that went from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism to primary-coloured grids and
then the shape of a painting in pure black, framed by white and the white of a
gallery – black is an intellectual colour but it is also, in every sense of the
word, the most basic.
18. When black is not standard, the cover of a
notebook, it is dramatic, the colour of wrongness, a reversal. As Anne Carson
writes in “Totality: The Colour of Eclipse”: “The sun quits us, we are forsaken
by light. Yet people who experience total eclipse are moved to such strong
descriptions of its vacancy and void that this itself begins to take on colour.
What after all is a colour? Something not no colour.”
19.
Black is a mask for high-octane emotion. It is the veil worn over tears at a
funeral, the ski hat worn by a thief, the top hat tipped by the master of
ceremonies. Black is a turned-off screen, the end of a movie, a relief for eyes
sensitive to light, a cool cover after hours of daytime strain.
20. It
is the colour of vacancy and no vacancies, the expression of infinity and of
nothingness. When speckled with white stars, or ribbed with the reddish caves
of bodily interiors, or dappled with the blue reflection of the sky that can
survive the pressures of watery depths, a black eld looks beyond our existence.
21.
Style advice: imagine the staying power of black shoes and undergarments.
Imagine blackness, true blackness, the expanse and depth of it, if you can, if
it is possible, and layer it.
A short
history of the colour black. By Natasha
Stagg. Sleek Magazine, October 28, 2019.
Black is
where art begins. From the moment mankind felt an urge to scrawl on walls, it
reached for black. Analysis of early cave drawings reveals that our paleolithic
ancestors forged from fire the first tints, smelting from bone a charcoal
pigment that gave art legs. Every subsequent application of black in cultural
history echoes its ritualistic origins and resonates with a sense of
resurgence: burnt skeletons into living symbol.
From the
smooth silhouettes of black-figure pottery in Ancient Greece to the dark
enveloping veils of the Rothko Chapel three and a half millennia later, this
anti-colour has signified the transformation of fleeting flesh into enduring
emblem. Unlike more emotive reds or sombre blues, black is the default tone we
give to words and fonts. It’s a shade we read more than feel.
Associated
superficially with melancholy and mourning, the macabre and malevolence, black
seals within itself an unexpected paradox of optimism. Every origin story, from
Genesis to the Big Bang, is predicated on a pre-existing blackness as the
foundation for the effulgence that follows. Black isn’t simply where we start,
it was before we started. Without black, neither the stars nor soul would have
anything to kick against.
The
history of the word itself is telling and can be traced back to a
Proto-Indo-European forebear, bhleg, meaning ‘flash’, ‘shine’ and ‘gleam’.
‘Black’ is thought to be a close cousin too of Latin flagare: to ‘blaze’ or
‘glow’. Though, optically, it may denote the complete absorption of light, on a
profounder artistic level, black is hardwired for brilliance. Wherever we
encounter black in art, we must look past what is sad, sullen or sinister on
the surface to a secret splendour glowing within.
Ancient
Egyptians were accustomed to such subtleties of insight, as is evident by the
face of Anubis, the god responsible for ushering souls into the afterlife.
Embalmer of the flesh and weigher of departing souls, Anubis was himself a
hybrid being – a curious concoction of man and jackal. His canine head was
invariably depicted by artists as the same gruesome obsidian that mortal flesh
turns during the process of mummification, which Anubis oversaw. As any native
of the Nile valley would have also known, however, intense black is likewise
the shade of the richest and most fertile silt. Anubis’s black countenance
looked, therefore, in two directions – towards the frailty of our skin and
fecundity of the soul.
In
Western art, no artist more skilfully sculpted shape from shadow than Michelangelo
Merisi da Caravaggio. The unremitting darkness from which his two versions of
the biblical Supper at Emmaus (1601 and 1606) are chiselled demonstrate a keen
sensitivity to the mystical qualities of the colour black.
Both
canvases imagine the instant when the resurrected Christ, travelling incognito,
reveals himself to two of his oblivious disciples, before dramatically
disappearing from view. In both works, black sets the spiritual temperature of
the extraordinary scene and thickens mysteriously into the semipermeable veil
between worlds that Christ alone traverses.
In
Caravaggio’s imagination, the profounder the spiritual illumination, the
blacker it burns – a sleight of light and trick of the wrist he may have
learned from his Italian Renaissance forebear and namesake, Michelangelo
Buonarroti. Consider, for example, the ceiling frescoes of the Sistine Chapel,
whose stirring effect does not rely so much on the merging of black pigment
with wet plaster as it does on the gathering blackness of the space in which
the frescoes are experienced.
Choreographed
to flicker in sync with the slow extinguishing of Tenebrae candles during
services held in Easter week, Michelangelo’s frescoes (the first of which,
instructively, depicts the ‘Separation of Light from Darkness’) installed a
vibrancy against which an almost palpable blackness pulsated. The lowering and
lifting of blackness around believers was as integral to the power of the
scheme as the jamboree of muscles Michelangelo made flex above them.
Though
Michelangelo and Caravaggio set the tint and tone for the myriad majesties of
blackness that would follow them in Western art history (from the shade that
shadows Rembrandt’s piercing stare in his serial self-portraits to the
engrossing grotesquerie of Goya’s Black Paintings), it is worth remembering
that not every black hole is deep.
Some may
find it tough to stare squarely in the eye American painter James McNeill Whistler’s
iconic sidelong portrait of his seated mother (painted in 1871) knowing, as we
do, the artist’s penchant for racist remarks and his fondness for slapping
abolitionists in the face. The artist of course shouldn’t be tarred by the
appalling allegiances of his brother, who wore the grey uniform of the
Confederacy in its doomed efforts to perpetuate slavery, but the fact adds
context. Whistler’s mother herself, who once tried to stop the black wife of
her uncle and their children from acquiring family land, makes an ironic
subject for a painting whose official title, on reflection, feels more than a
little racially charged: “Arrangement in Grey and Black”.
But it
is a painting from a subsequent generation of artists, Russian Suprematist
Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915) – often credited with being among the
first abstract works ever painted – that reveals just how easily the colour can
curdle from soulful luminosity into something rather shadier. In 2015, fresh
analysis of the celebrated work (which Malevich said signified where “the true
movement of being begins”) traced the outlines of a barely visible bigoted quip
scrawled by the artist beneath the varnish.
The
lurking words “battle of the negroes”, too gutless to show their face in full
view, are thought to be an allusion to a racist phrase – “negroes battling at
night” – used by a French humourist for an 1897 cartoon of a black square. With
that disappointing discovery, which succeeded in recontextualising the work
from pioneering masterpiece to appalling misadventure, the inner light of a
painting that had, for decades, been the source of meaningful meditation,
suddenly went out.
In more
recent years, the dark way lit by the black light of Anubis and Caravaggio,
Michelangelo and Rembrandt has been kept gleaming by the genius of American
multimedia maestro Kara Walker and British artist Mark Alexander. Walker’s
stark cut-outs have, since the 1990s and her mesmerising mural Gone, An
Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of
One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994), shone a penetrating light on prejudice
and misogyny when many in the mainstream art world preferred to keep such
issues in the dark.
Alexander’s
smouldering reinvention of Vincent van Gogh’s poignant portrait of his
physician Dr Gachet (which has not been seen in public since its owner, the
Japanese businessman Ryoei Saito – who died in 1996 – threatened to be cremated
with the post-Impressionist canvas) is a masterclass in black’s enduring
capacity to resurrect the spirit of physical loss. The eerie Blacker Gachet
(2006) sees the artist’s echoing hand rescue from oblivion every brushstroke of
Van Gogh’s original to sculpt a gaze that glows longingly from whatever
undiscovered realm lies waiting for us in the great beyond.
If
Walker and Alexander (as well as such contemporaries as Polish installationist
Miroslaw Balka and Indian sculptor Sheela Gowda, who have each constructed bold
black interiors) are the truest heirs of a tradition that seeks to share the
splendour of black, one artist has striven instead to stake a personal claim to
the colour’s eternal mysteries. In 2014, Bombay-born British artist Anish
Kapoor began experimenting with one of the darkest shades of black ever devised
– a tint he tightly controls and has copyrighted under the trademark ‘Vantablack’
(coined from the acronym for ‘Vertically Aligned NanoTube Arrays’ which
describes the substance’s chemical construction). In optical terms, Vantablack
is ordinary black on steroids and creates within itself an enervating ricochet
of light that, once trapped, eventually wearies itself out into invisible heat.
With a
proprietary claim on the use of Vantablack, which was recently permitted to
darken the walls of a Winter Olympics pavillion in PyeongChang, Kapoor has
controversially appointed himself gatekeeper to at least one wing in the
mansion of black’s timeless enigma, controlling what objects and images can
ever be cloaked in it. But if the history of art has told us anything, black is
uncontainable as a cultural force. The deepest black transcends the jealousies
of intellectual property law. Black is the bright bloodline that runs through
humanity – the luminous ink in which we scrawl on the walls of the sky for our
descendants to see: “Don’t forget me. I was here.”
The
racist history hidden in a masterpiece. By Kelly Grovier. BBC, March 12, 2018.
When the
group Time’s Up encouraged all actresses and actors who would walk the Golden
Globes red carpet to dress in a show of solidarity against sexual harassment of
women in Hollywood and other workplaces, the color it asked them to wear was
black. On Jan. 30, a group of women in the US congress followed their lead,
donning black for the first state of the union address by president Trump, who
has himself been accused by numerous women of sexual misconduct.
There is
nothing about black that inherently signifies protest, but really no other
shade would have sent so clear a message. There’s a reason country legend
Johnny Cash also chose to wear black as a reminder to Americans of the everyday
injustices in their midst.
Black
clothing has an undeniable power. Unlike red or green, which represent specific
wavelengths of light, black isn’t exactly a color; it’s what we see when an
object absorbs all visible wavelengths, putting it in a category by itself. Its
singular darkness has a unique visual potency, and its adaptability has long
made it open to interpretation by the numerous groups that have adopted it.
Black connotes seriousness and diligence, as in the black worn by religious
orders. It can be sinister or rebellious, like the black cloaks of witches or
the black leather jackets worn by biker gangs. In many cultures, it’s the color
of mourning. But it can simultaneously be the epitome of chic and
sophistication, yet charged with eroticism.
All
these qualities have given black a distinctive position in fashion enjoyed by
no other color. The Little Purple Dress is not famous. “Yellow tie” is not a
recognized dress code. Only black will ever be the new black.
Among the endless variety of colors and combinations
that fashion retailers stock, black is a perennially popular choice. In a
recent analysis of more than 183,000 dresses retailing online in the US, retail
technology firm Edited found that about 38.5% were some shade of black, making
it by far the most common color available. Only about 10.7% of dresses came in
the second-most popular shade, white.
At the
moment, black’s popularity also appears to be surging. According to Edited’s
data, black dresses sold out in far greater numbers in the first few weeks of
January 2018 than during the same period last year. Edited did point to Time’s
Up having an effect, though it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what’s fueling
the trend, since an increase in the availability of black clothing online
predates the movement. From the third quarter of 2014 to the same time in 2017,
Edited found that black clothing for women grew substantially at a number of
fast-fashion brands—by 269% at Boohoo, 145% at Zara, 114% at H&M, and 89%
at Forever 21.
Katie
Smith, the firm’s retail analysis & insights director, attributed it to the
brands “using black to try and establish longevity of their ranges, and appeal
to a wider customer base.”
The
numbers speak to the breadth and endurance of black’s appeal. It works with
every skin tone, every body type, and is generally a safe choice for a
purchase—because even if demand for it ebbs, it never goes out of style.
There’s
no official start to the modern popularity of black in European and American
women’s fashion. Historically it’s been a signifier of grief, dating back to at
least the ancient Greeks. But it has also been widely coveted for its
appearance. In his book The Story of Black, critic John Harvey notes that,
though the Romans principally dyed clothing black for mourning, there are
indications they prized it for its stylishness. In the 16th century, there was
a vogue for black clothing—then notoriously expensive (pdf)—among Europe’s
wealthy, from Spanish nobility in the south to Dutch merchants in the north.
But a
convenient turning point in black’s more recent reign arrived around the early
20th century. That, Harvey writes, is when black “came to centre stage.” The
spotlight fell squarely on it in 1926, with the introduction of Chanel’s famed
little black dress.
Just
prior to that period, black was the standard uniform color for domestic
servants and the “shopgirls” who staffed retail shop floors. Social norms,
however, were losing their trappings of formality. Sportswear was beginning its
rise, and hemlines already climbing higher, as young society women moved away
from eras of lavish, restrictive gowns. Shelley Puhak describes in The Atlantic
how the upper classes co-opted the easy, modern shopgirl style for themselves.
“By the early 1900s, socialites who wanted to appear especially youthful and
edgy donned little black dresses,” she writes.
When
Vogue put a sketch of Chanel’s simple, practical black dress on its cover in
1926, calling it “The Ford” of a woman’s wardrobe, it seemed to make official a
new era in women’s clothing. It also promoted black as smart, elegant,
attractive.
In
addition to fashion, black had another powerful force helping it to stand out:
film. “The other great promoter of the Little Black Dress was the camera,
especially the movie camera,” art and costume historian Anne Hollander wrote in
her excellent 1984 essay (pdf). A novel world of entertainment, romance, and
movie stars was opening up to an eager public—all in black-and-white.
Black’s
effect on the eye gives it an irresistible visual appeal. “A black dress seems
to make the body neater and smaller and to unify the parts,” Hollander
declares. “Since many bodies are not slim and lack either perfect harmony or
absolute coordination, a black dress can help give them that delicious
resemblance to a stretch limousine that seems so desirable in the present
fashion climate.”
Yet
black has a remarkable tendency to be distinctive without overshadowing the
wearer, in a sense amplifying the person. Hollander points to a scene in Anna
Karenina, where Anna attends a ball. Tolstoy describes another woman, Kitty,
remarking on her black gown. She realizes that Anna could not have worn lilac,
that she was most alluring when she stood out from her clothing. “And the black
dress with luxurious lace was not seen on her;” Tolstoy writes, “it was just a
frame, and only was she seen.”
While
it’s not exactly analogous, a recent study of male birds-of-paradise reveals an
intriguingly similar power in their black plumage. The birds are well-known for
their bobbing courtship dance, but according to the researchers, it’s actually
their coloring that determines their success in mating. The mostly black birds
raise their wings to form a light-absorbing field, causing their other colors
to appear all the more brilliant.
“The
juxtaposition of darkest black and colors create to bird and human eyes what is
essentially an evolved optical illusion,” explained Harvard University
evolutionary biologist Dakota McCoy. “This study shows us that black makes us
glow.”
On male
humans, black is often seen as dignified and levelheaded. In his Book of the Courtier,
a sort of guide to life in the aristocratic courts of Renaissance Italy, Count
Baldassare Castiglione states that black is the preferred color for a man, or
at least something dark. Harvey points out in The Story of Black that black has
been the standard for men’s evening wear since the 1810s, in large part thanks
to the advocacy of Beau Brummell. The name may be familiar to some men. He’s
widely considered the inventor of the modern men’s suit and a sort of founding
father of contemporary menswear.
In the
decades since Chanel’s compact black number graced Vogue‘s cover, numerous
designers have adopted and elevated black for their own purposes. Cristóbal
Balenciaga used it for his elegant, architectural silhouettes, and Yves Saint
Laurent for his androgynous “le smoking” women’s tuxedo. In the latter half of
the 20th century, it became closely linked to fringe groups and rebellion.
Bikers and beatniks donned black. Then, the Japanese design wave of Issey
Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons made a new art
form of the black look.
Fashion
journalist Suzy Menkes asked Yamamoto what was behind his well-known
predilection for black in a 2000 interview for the International Herald
Tribune. Yamamoto’s response has evidently summed up the feelings of black’s
devotees so well that it has circulated for some time on social networks such
as Tumblr and Instagram. ”Black is modest and arrogant at the same time,” he
said. “Black is lazy and easy — but mysterious….Black can swallow light, or
make things look sharp. But above all black says this: ‘I don’t bother you —
don’t bother me!'”
Given
black’s adaptability and allure, it’s little wonder it remains a popular choice
for all sorts of styles today. Black-obsessed artisanal menswear designers
deploy it for their exquisite leather jackets. Designers such as Ann
Demeulemeester have gravitated toward its romanticism, others like Balmain’s
Olivier Rousteing to its sleekness. Black colors fancy cocktail parties, and
goth kids match their clothes to their black eyeliner as readily as socialites
thrown on black for a night out.
By all
indications, its attraction isn’t diminishing. We’ll be flying the black flag
for years to come.
Only
black is the new black: a cultural history of fashion’s favorite shade. By Marc
Bain. Quartzy, February 4, 2018.
Some
time ago I was doing research for a seminar I planned to offer on “media and
magic”. I was interested in the concept of magic as it existed in the
Renaissance, and in particular with the so-called occult philosophy of thinkers
like Marsilio Ficino, Giordano Bruno, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Robert
Fludd. It was while reading about Fludd that I discovered a startling image. It
was from his major work, an ambitious, multi-volume, syncretic
theory-of-everything with the cumbersome title The Metaphysical, Physical, and
Technical History of the Two Worlds, the Major as well as the Minor. Fludd
published his work between 1617 and 1621, and each volume is generously
supplied with diagrams, tables and images. The image that jumped out at me is
quite simple. In a section discussing the origin of the universe, Fludd was
compelled to speculate on what existed prior to the universe, which he
describes as an empty nothingness, a sort of “pre-universe” or “un-universe”.
He chose to represent this with a simple black square.
The
image was startling to me because it was so different from the other images of
Fludd’s that we are used to – elaborate, ornate, hyper-complex diagrams that
detail all the movements of the planets or of the mind. The black square was
also startling because it immediately brought to mind examples from modern art,
the most noteworthy being Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square on a White Ground
from 1915. Being a former literature student, I was also reminded of the
enigmatic “black page” from Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram
Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67). Fludd’s black square was, to be sure, enigmatic.
Not only that, but Fludd also seemed aware of the limits of representation,
noting on each edge of the black square, Et sic in infinitum, “And so on to
infinity…”
Looking
at it out of context, I find Fludd’s image indelibly modern, in both its
simplicity and its austerity. It was as if Fludd had the intuition that only a
self-negating form of representation would be able to suggest the nothingness
prior to all existence, an un-creation prior to all creation. And so we get a
“colour” that is not really a colour – a colour that either negates or consumes
all colours. And we get a square that is not really a square, a box meant to
indicate boundlessness. For the image to work within the context of Fludd’s
cosmology, the viewer must not see the image for what it is – a black square.
The viewer must understand the square as formlessness and the black inside as
neither a fullness nor an emptiness. This simple little image requires a lot of
work on the part of the viewer, perhaps as much work as in Fludd’s other, more
complex diagrams. For a synthetic, systematic thinker like Fludd, this must
have been a difficult move. After all, The Metaphysical, Physical, and
Technical History is, if nothing else, a totalising work, and work whose
ambition is to include and to account for everything — even nothing.
That
Fludd would choose to do this is not surprising. His own syncretic philosophy
combined elements of Neoplatonism, hermeticism, and Christian Kabbalah, with a
touch of alchemy, music theory, Renaissance mechanics, and Rosicrucianism.
Trained as a physician, Fludd was influenced early on by the work of Paracelsus
and was intrigued by the idea of God as an alchemist, mixing matter to produce
the strange brew that is the universe. At one point, Fludd describes the state
prior to creation as “the mist and darkness of this hitherto shapeless and
obscured region”, in which the “impure, dark, and dense part of the abyss’s
substance” is dramatically transformed by divine light. The black square is
quickly followed by a series of images — almost like a stop-motion animation —
in which the divine fiat of creation and light flows forth. The Neoplatonic
theme of the divine as a central source of radiating light takes over,
producing the macrocosm and the microcosm, the ethereal and the earthly
domains, all the stuff of the world.
I lose
interest in much of what follows, detailed and systematic though it is. But I
continue to find the black square fascinating because of the contradictions in
it. An image that, in order to be seen, negates itself. An un-universe that can
only present its own absence. A boundless abyss that gives itself forth in an
infinite austerity. Of course, words fail. For every un-universe, then, an
un-philosophy that must also negate itself.
Fludd’s
use of black in his cosmology is indicative of what modern colour theory has
had to say about black. On the one hand, black is not considered to be a colour
in the conventional sense of the term. Black objects are those that do not
reflect light in the visible spectrum; thus colour theory refers to black as
“non-chromatic” or “achromatic”. A further nuance is the notion that black is
the condition without any light — largely a theoretical proposition, or at
least one that would have to be verified without being seen. But already there
is some ambiguity, for does black designate a “colour” that does not reflect
light (and if so, why label it a colour?), or does black designate the “colour”
that results in the total absence of light? Without light, no colour, and
without colour, there is only black – and yet black is not a colour. But this
is not exactly right, for black is a colour, not only in the sense in which we
routinely designate this or that object as “black” but in the sense that black
contains all colours, the colour that absorbs all other colours into the
non-colour of black — the black hole of colour, as it were. We see black, but
what exactly are we seeing when we see black? Light, or the absence of light?
And if the latter, how is it possible to see the absence of light?
While
black as a colour has a rich and varied history in terms of its symbolic
meanings, it would take a modern, scientific theory of colour to begin to
address such questions. When Goethe published his Theory of Colours in 1810,
such conundrums were largely ignored in aesthetics, and often not discussed in
the science of optics. But Goethe, being the polymath that we was, was not
content to write a treatise of aesthetics. The Theory of Colours is as much a
science of colour as it is an aesthetics; indeed, the aim is to attempt a
synthesis of the two. Goethe’s major contribution was to distinguish the
“visible” from the “optical” spectrum, and to make possible a science of optics
that would be distinct from that of aesthetics, but which would overlap with it
as well. Goethe’s project is determined to consider colour as a physiological
phenomenon, to “search for nothing beyond the phenomena” of seeing colour
through the apparatus of the eye. For Goethe, any theory of colour must begin
from the physiological event of seeing colour.
But
black proves to be a difficult colour to discuss for Goethe. In the opening
sections of his treatise, “black” is often interchangeable with “dark” and
“shadow”, all three terms denoting a physiological state when the eye is
deprived of light:
‘’If we keep the eyes open in a totally
dark place, a certain sense of privation is experienced. The organ is abandoned
to itself; it retires into itself. That stimulating and grateful contact is
wanting by means of which it is connected with the external world…”
Black is
conceived of in privative terms, in terms of the absence of light – not unlike
Fludd’s cosmic black square. And, black is even moralised by Goethe (as it is
in Fludd), for the light that enables sight is not just a physiological
stimulation, but a quasi-divine gift. When Goethe does briefly discuss black
later on in his treatise, it is largely to discuss the combustion and oxidation
processes that produce blackness in objects such as wood or metal. Strangely,
Goethe does not raise the problem of black as a colour, choosing instead to
analyse the chemical process of blackening, and in the process sounding very
much like a Renaissance alchemist.
Goethe’s
Theory of Colours had an immediate impact on the philosophy and science of
colour. One person particularly taken by it was Arthur Schopenhauer, who knew
Goethe and discussed colour theory with him on several occasions. While
Schopenhauer does not depart from Goethe’s distinction between the visible and
the optical, he does attempt to root colour theory in philosophy more than
science. Schopenhauer’s On Vision and Colours was published in 1816, just three
years after the completion of his doctoral dissertation. A short book, it does
not display the systematicity of The World as Will and Representation nor the
aphoristic pessimism of his late writings. What it does do is drive a wedge
into Goethe’s Theory of Colours. Goethe, Schopenhauer claimed, does not really
present a theory of colour, foremost because he never considers what colour is
– that colour exists is something assumed in his treatise.
Furthermore,
Schopenhauer took Goethe to task for another assumption – that the perception
of colour necessarily corresponded to colour itself, as if it were a physical
thing in itself. Being a good Kantian, Schopenhauer tended to understand colour
as a cognitive process that began with the sensation of light and resulted in
the cognitive representation of colour. Schopenhauer was even more precise in
identifying the “intensive activity of the retina” as the main apparatus for
the perception of colour. The trick was to understand what it was that made an
impression on the retina in the first place; was colour something identifiable
in the world as such (i.e. as light), or was it merely a by-product of the
physiology of vision? Where did colour take place? To say that we receive
light that stimulates our retina is one thing, but to show how colour is
necessarily produced from this activity is quite another. In Schopenhauer’s
theory of perception, the theory of colour begins to ever so slightly slip away
– and yet, he admits, some vague entity called “colour” could be identified,
classified, measured, even agreed upon in an everyday context.
As with
Goethe, for Schopenhauer the problem is black, which for Schopenhauer is
inseparable from white. Black and white are strange entities in Schopenhauer’s
treatise. At some points they seem to be additions or privations of light, much
in line with Goethe: “The influence of light and white on the retina and its
ensuing activity have degrees according to which light steadily approaches
darkness and white approaches black.” But at other points black and white
function more as logical necessities, forming the absolute poles of colour
perception; that is, black and white are never actually seen, and yet they determine
the perception of colour. And, later in
the treatise, there is even a third, more naturalistic interpretation, one that
has to do specifically with black and not with white: that black is simply the
physiological state of “retinal inactivity.” The eye without sight – or without
vision.
After
all is said and done, Schopenhauer’s questions prove to be more interesting
than his answers. All the same, it is tempting to make some connections between
Schopenhauer’s colour theory and his pessimistic philosophy. A central
ambiguity of Schopenhauer’s On Vision and Colours has to do with black. Is
black something that can be seen, like any other colour? Or is black simply the
name for something in the structure of vision that conditions colour
perception, but which can never be seen in itself? Perhaps there is a black
that is seen, the black of shading and gradients, as well as a black that is
unseen; the black of retinal inactivity. And here again we seem to return to
the paradox of Fludd’s black square – the black that can only be seen at the
expense of ceasing to be black (where black becomes “dark” or “shade”). Perhaps,
and maybe this is being generous to Schopenhauer’s text, there is a retinal
pessimism that secretly underlies colour theory, encapsulated in the notion of
black as privation (Goethe), black as retinal inactivity (Schopenhauer), black
as that which precedes the very existence of light itself (Fludd).
Retinal
pessimism is not simply the failure of the phenomena of perception, the
physiology of the retina, or the science of optics. Nor is it the conviction
that whatever one is seeing is the worst of all possible things that could be
seen. Both are intriguing options. But, retinal pessimism is something else,
and it is encapsulated in the strange status of black: at once present and
absent, at once a fullness and an emptiness, at once the absorption of all light
and the total absence of light. Black is at once the foundation of all colour
and, in its absence or emptiness, it is also what undermines the substantiality
of all colour. If one is willing to go down this path, a retinal pessimism is
not just about the non-colour that is black, but it is about the perception of
colour itself. It is, ultimately, the suspicion that all colours are black,
that all retinal activity is retinal inactivity. Retinal pessimism: there is
nothing to see (and you’re seeing it).
*
The
question is, what would such a retinal pessimism see, if it is not simply the
physiological state of blindness, or the metaphorical state of “inner vision”?
Not surprisingly, artists have thought about this question, and there is, of
course, a history of black painting in modern art. For me the most notable example is that of Ad
Reinhardt who, in the 1960s, produced a number of paintings that, at first
glance, appear to be all matte black, much in the tradition of Malevich. But
after looking at the painting for some time, what appears to be black is not
black at all. Instead, subtle hues of deep mauve, purple, magenta, and grey
become apparent. And the uniform black canvas reveals a grid, or a series of
squares within the canvas, each of a slightly different colour. The painting
actually changes within the duration of its viewing. “Black” literally vanishes
as one looks at it, and what quietly emerges are colours and shapes.
Reinhardt’s paintings are almost visual analogues for Fludd’s cosmology.
But
modern black painting is, in a way, too predictable a place to begin, for black
paintings always push black up front, in front of the viewer, as something to
be seen. My own fascination with black in painting comes not from abstract
expressionism, but from an earlier period – the infinite, stark black
backgrounds in Velázquez’s The Water Seller of Seville (1618-22), the black
clouds that envelop Rembrandt’s The Abduction of Proserpine (1631), the almost
surreal flatness of Zurburan’s Christ on the Cross (1627). As a painter of
black, the artist that stands out from the rest for me is Caravaggio. In fact,
I only came to appreciate modern black painting by seeing paintings like The
Crucifixion of St. Peter (1601), St. Matthew and the Angel (1602), and David
with the Head of Goliath (1605; 1609/10). However, of the paintings of this
period, there is one that I find endlessly fascinating, and that is
Caravaggio’s St. Jerome Writing (c.1606).
Certainly
in paintings like this Caravaggio makes extreme use of chiaroscuro, and he is
not the first to do so. But there is a sense that Caravaggio took as much care
painting the black backgrounds as he did the lighted figures in the foreground.
Caravaggio’s black is ambiguous. In one part of the canvas the black background
is flat and full. In another part it is an empty, infinite depth. In still
another part it is a thick black cloud, miasmatically embracing the foreground
figures. The echo between the saint’s barely haloed head and the skull holding
open the book is accentuated by one kind of black – a black of shadows, shading
and contour. But behind both skull and head there is only outer space, at once
flat and infinite. In a strange optical illusion, this same cosmic black seems
to also inhabit the edges of the books, the space underneath the table, the
creases of the fabric, and Jerome’s own wrists. This is “black painting” –
black as a background that is always about to eclipse the foreground, the
groundlessness of the figure/ground distinction itself, the presence of an
absence, a retinal pessimism.
Black
painting of the abstract expressionist type has had a long career in modern
art. And a survey of contemporary art suggests that black is always back, in
some shape or form. But what I find interesting about black art works today is
the way they seem to combine the likes of abstract expressionism with that of
Caravaggio and his tenebrist contemporaries. An example is Terence Hannum’s
series Veils (2012), which consists of images of disembodied hair on a black
background; St. Jerome as a headbanger, as it were. The wisps of hair not only
recall the black drawings of abstract expressionism, but they give the same
sense of flat depth evoked in Caravaggio, in which we see figures almost drowning
in black. Black is both flat background, but a background that literally
engulfs the foreground figure into a seemingly infinite abyss below, above,
behind, everywhere.
A
further play on the foreground/background distinction comes in Jonah
Groeneboer’s drawings, which often feature luminous, geometric forms against a
cloudy black background. The geometric forms seem to suggest some unstated
significance in their subtle asymmetries, bringing to mind a tradition of
occult drawing that includes Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz, ultimately
suggesting the alchemical diagrams of the likes of Paracelsus and Fludd.
Groeneboer’s drawings, such as Untitled VII (2009), compress several depths
together into one picture plane. There is the dim and luminous geometric
figure, a prismatic optical illusion that is at once flat and
three-dimensional. Then there is the cloudy, foggy, grey mass that occupies an
ambiguous nether-region perhaps behind the prism, perhaps surrounding it.
Finally there is the black background, which is variously textured at different
points. This black background serves several functions; it is at once the
backdrop for the geometric shape and it is the seemingly endless and empty
abyss that contains that shape – much in line with Fludd’s paradoxically
unbounded black square.
As if to
signal a return to the cosmological black square of Fludd, several artists
undertake works that attempt a “pure” black that is flat, square and evenly
distributed. Juliet Jacobson’s recent black drawings pick up a different aspect
of Fludd and the occult philosophers in their material, chemical, and
alchemical commitment to the connection between the microcosm and macrocosm.
Each drawing, while it can be taken on its own, also refers to the other
drawings in the series. Taken together, they seem to depict the phases of the
moon, but some of the drawings are completely black. Seen together, the
drawings can be taken either as a sequence or as a continuous, panoramic image.
This means that while some drawings depict the moon at various stages, other
drawings depict nothing, except the blackness of graphite on paper, worked over
and over through a laborious process of reducing graphite to mere specks.
It is
worth noting that each of these contemporary artists produces their black
artworks through very material, physical processes that are also processes of
negation: rubbing, smearing, smudging, and erasing material like graphite or
charcoal into shards of powder and dust. The process seems adequate for the
result, the showing of nothing, the revealing of black less as a colour and
more as this “nothing-to-see.”
It seems
that we are brought back to Fludd’s cosmic black square, and the paradox of the
flat abyss, the background that is a foreground, the retinal pessimism of the
nothing to see, that we see.
It is
this transition – from black as a colour you see, to black as a non-colour you
don’t see, to black as “nothing-to-see” (and you’re seeing it) – it is this
transition that Fludd encapsulates in his simple black square. That black was
for Fludd the “colour” of non-existence, of pre-existence, of an un-universe
prior to its possibility. This idea has also come full circle in contemporary
philosophy. In a short and opaque text entitled “On the Black Universe”, the
French thinker François Laruelle extends this idea of black as a cosmological
principle. Neither an aesthetics of colour nor a metaphor for knowledge and
ignorance, black is, for Laruelle, inseparable from the conditions of thought
and its limit. Separate from “the World” we make in our own, all-too-human
image, and apart from “the Earth” which tolerates our habitation of its
surface, there is “the Universe” – indifferent, opaque, black: “Black prior to
light is the substance of the Universe, what escaped from the World before the
World was born into the World.”
In such
a scenario, human beings probe the Earth and manufacture the World, but neither
of these respond to the groping around that constitutes being, or being-there,
or becoming-this-or-that, or the event, or what have you. The human being “is
answered only by the Universe, being black and mute.” And yet, it is this enigmatic response that
leads us into thinking that this black universe, the black of Fludd’s
un-universe, is something “out there” – the nature of reality, the fabric of
the universe, a consensual hallucination, something that I can see and touch
and feel, a colour. Laruelle again:
“ A phenomenal blackness entirely fills
the essence of the human. Because of it, the most ancient stars of the
paleo-cosmos, together with the most venerable stones of the archeo-earth,
appear to the human as being outside the World…”
Fludd’s
cosmic black square, his un-universe, is not temporally prior to the universe,
but neither is it some cataclysm to come; it is right here. But you can’t see
it. (And you’re seeing it.)
Black is
the colour of ink, oil, crows, mourning and outer space. Black is not just one
colour among others, and neither is it one element or material among others.
Black bathes all things in an absence, makes apparent an opacity, evaporates
all the nuances of shadow and light. I leave the last word to an alchemist of a
different sort, Yohji Yamamoto, who provides yet another variation of black:
“Above all, black says this: I don’t bother you – don’t bother me.”
Black on
Black. By Eugene Thacker. The Public Domain Review , April 9 , 2015.
