“In a sea of possibilities”: the work of new colourists Georgina Gratrix and Michael Taylor by Michael Smith

In Patti Smith’s epic 1975 track “Land” the word ‘possibilities’ recurs numerous times at the song’s culminating verse. Smith’s lyrical style in this track, one of free association, with one sound and idea building on and expanding the previous, is perhaps a useful metaphor for colour’s function in visual art.

Colour’s associative promiscuity and suggestibility help it lend art a value beyond simple, empirical reportage or social mirroring. In apartheid South Africa, where the system functioned to shut down so much possibility, rendering various forms of image-making (and thereby thought) undesirable, ill-advised or downright illegal, colour remained transgressive in its suggestion of conceptual and emotional multiplicity. In post-apartheid art, blighted for the bulk of the post-liberation period by arguably conservative delineations of identity, painting in colour seems to hold possibilities for expression that sidesteps the predictable and the coagulating.

This paper will consider that colour never left us, and that despite various forms of agit-prop-style art and the moral binarisms their monochrome palettes expressed, there remained at the heart of SA art production artists like Robert Hodgins who used colour as expressive of more nuanced moral and political positions. I will argue that Hodgins’ work presented positions along the spectrum between good and evil, and between moral outrage and morally bankruptcy.

I will then explore the work of two young painters, Georgina Gratrix and Michael Taylor, placing them within a lineage established in SA by Hodgins, and considering how their work taps into certain notions of fluid subjectivity and mobile positioning, which extend the possibilities of SA art beyond the confining impulse towards marking out territories of identity.

The de-saturation of the commonplace: A meditation on South African photography by Matthew Partridge

In this paper I will take David Goldblatt’s move to colour in his recent series Asbestos (2003) and Intersections (2005) as well as Intersections Intersected (2007) as an entry point to discuss the de-saturated aesthetic that has come to typify much of South African documentary photography.
In many ways Goldblatt’s shift in stylistic emphasis can be said to be inspired by the current developments in digital photography. However, the nuance is more discrete than merely traversing the barriers of the silver gelatine print which has come to typify Goldblatt’s documentary oeuvre.

In his recent work there is a distinct sense that the colour that he uses is de-saturated and bleached of its chromatic veracity, thereby accentuating the superficial banality of his lens’ subject. Here the routine existence that he captures is mystified and almost aged prematurely, similarly attesting to recent trends seen in photographers such as Guy Tillim and Pieter Hugo.

What this paper seeks to explore is the relationship of de-saturated colour to the subject and more importantly, its semiotic affect on the photographic object. Here the materiality of colour becomes intricate in the muted power relations between the subject and the object. It will be suggested that this expands problematic questions of photographic fidelity, not only to that which the photograph represents, but to the digital manipulation of the environmental light which gives the image its auratic presence.

‘Fading From History: The Print Culture of Vladimir Tretchikoff and its Legacy’ by Andrew Lamprecht

This paper will examine the manner in which Vladimir Tretchikoff used mass-produced prints as a vehicle publicise his work as well as to take it to markets outside the usual channels of ‘high art’. Dubbed ‘The King of Kitsch’ by some of his critics, he nonetheless created a new aesthetic which drew praise (and purchases) from ordinary middle- and lower class audiences who would not buy another artwork in their life.

The significance of colour and its application to subjects both everyday and extraordinary is of considerable significance here. Today we tend to be familiar only with faded vestiges of the prints bought in unprecedented numbers in the 1950s – 70s but these works were suffused with colour at a time when critically acclaimed South African art frequently tended towards the dung colours in their palette.

An examination of significance of these ubiquitous prints to popular culture both in the time they were first marketed and subsequently as a trope will conclude the paper.

The South African Question and the Aesthetics of Disappearance by James Sey

Rather than tackle the nuances and complexities of the question of the uses of colour in recent South African art, which would have numerous counter-examples for every example adduced, this paper takes a different tack.

The paper argues that the major historical currents in SA art of the last thirty years or so fall into two general streams. Firstly, they were conditioned by protest and reflectionist critique in the apartheid era, which did indeed lend itself to the stark and monochromatic styles and palette of the constructionist agitprop poster, mural and realist scene. Secondly, a range of conceptual and ‘neoconceptual’ styles arose in the latter part of the apartheid era, and the post-apartheid years. Much of this was focused on so-called ‘new media’, characterised in turn by either impressionistic and widely varying video and installation work, or by shades of documentary photography, which carried on the anti-apartheid agitprop lineage.

In the first post apartheid decade, the simultaneous rise of the internet as a graphic and aesthetic medium and the globalisation of capitalism meant that the concept of a national character, and national identity itself, came under pressure.

If the ‘South African Question’ for art, then, is how to understand the colour palette in such a way that the country’s political and racial diversity is productively represented, how is such an ambition to be understood in the context of a globalised ‘aesthetics of disappearance’?

I use Virilio’s term here with some focus – his theorisation of a culture of ‘dromology’, of the realisation of the futurist dream of a culture of ‘speed and dynamism’, has been dramatised by the spread of ‘technologies of light’ – primarily the internet. These technical possibilities have homogenised national cultures and ‘flattened out’ the palette – both in the sense of colour and that of cultural experience – it is possible to have in our era. How is the South African Question – that of a national idea of colour – to be addressed in this context?

When White Was The Colour And Black The Number: Colour Tests From The 1970s by Sean O’Toole

In 1970, having completed his undergraduate studies at Michaelis School of Fine Art, Gavin Jantjes left South Africa on a scholarship to study at the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, Germany. In 1972, similarly enabled by a bursary and fresh from winning the 1971 Art South Africa Today exhibition for his sculptural work Swing (1971), Malcolm Payne travelled to London to begin his postgraduate studies at Central St. Martins. In 1974, two years on from graduating and still based in Hamburg, Jantjes started work on A South African Colouring Book (1974-75), a series of eleven collage prints that juxtapose found images and text related to South Africa’s then apartheid context. At almost exactly the same time, Payne, working in a self-consciously Duchampian mode, oversaw the production of Colour Test (1974), a screenprint depicting a South African identity card with the face of its holder removed.

Both these works, authored in absentia so to speak, are seminal examples of South Africa’s agitprop graphic style, a declaratory practice often devoid of metaphor and bounded by the historical context out of which it emerged. Unlike many subsequent examples of work created in response to the apartheid context, A South African Colouring Book and Colour Test are marked by their conceptual clarity; while politically strident, both these graphic works retain an autonomy that is pivotal to the afterlife of any art object. Partly, I will argue, this is because they do not abdicate invention and thought to ideology, a feature of so much art making (including photography) authored by South African artists in the period 1970 to present. Colour, always a woolly concern for an engaged artist, is partly to account for the persistent afterlife of these two works, the former included in the collection of the Tate Modern, the latter shown on Okwui Enwezor’s survey exhibition, Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s-1980s.

Produced in the wake of the massive proliferation in artistic strategies of the preceding decade, Jantjes’ work deploys the formal strategies of Warhol’s paint-by-numbers work, Do it Yourself Flowers (1962), to markedly different effect, while Payne, a notable colourist, demonstrates both continuity with, and opposition to the exuberant graphic style of his mentor, Walter Battiss. Which highlights a possible critique of both their works. Remarking on the commonalities that bound many of the practices refined in the 1960s, Clement Greenberg, in a 1968 essay revisiting his celebrated 1939 essay ‘Avant Garde and Kitch’, states: “Design or layout is almost always clear and explicit, drawing sharp and clean, shape or area geometrically simplified or at least faired and trued, colour flat and bright or at least undifferentiated in value and texture within a given hue.” The great champion of abstract expressionism compressed his dismissal of this new art into a single word: linear. A fair synonym for linear, albeit not a singular word, is the phrase “free from irregularities”: in this close reading, I will argue that A South African Colouring Book and Colour Test achieve their ongoing impact precisely because of the irregularities they manifest as artworks authored during a period of heightened social and cultural activism.

Red: The Iconography Of Colour In The Work Of Penny Siopis By Brenton Maart

Painting is a particularly powerful way of embodying the imagination, the unconscious, fantasy.  As a carnal medium, it is violent, erotic and beautiful. - Penny Siopis (2005) in response to Sarah Nuttall in the interview “On Painting”, Art South Africa, 4:2, 36

Within the visible spectrum it is the colour red that – through ages and cultures, across geographies and histories, spanning time – has acquired the greatest number of associations. Taking its vacillating meanings from direct and specific human experience, red is sometimes the colour of passion, of guilt, of sin. At other times it may be the hue of anger, fire, violence, revolution. It can adopt the meaning of courage, sacrifice, martyrdom. Red is also the colour of warning. But above all, its most enduring link is to the colour of blood. Blood-red is the evidence of wounding and the experience of trauma. Eyes that are blood-shot are rimmed in red.

The South African artist Penny Siopis (born 1953) has, consistently and with increasing allegorical agency, made the colour red central to her signature. Each new exploration (every successive body of work, regardless of its medium, approach, composition, language, concept, concern) returns to the application of red.

Curated by Brenton Maart, the exhibition Red: The Iconography of Colour in the Work of Penny Siopis (KZNSA Gallery, Durban, South Africa: 23 June to 19 July 2009) examined the artist’s use of this range of pigments over a period of 27 years. Using visceral and explosive key examples from important bodies of artwork, the project analysed the changing meaning of red in South Africa: from the base layer of sexual and grotesque excess from the early-1980s; through the colour of political revolution and fear in the late 1980s, and the colour of fear and xenophobia in the 1990s; to the artist’s more recent application of the colours of trauma and shame.

A Shifting Discolour: Chromatic Grey by Mark Hipper

Grey is ashen, we think, dull, colourless, the world of colour etiolated and reduced to a tonal scale or, alternatively, it can offer the eye the drama and intensity of light and dark, of shadow and chiaroscuro.

Grey is also however the mixture of all colours into something quite other and far more subtle and complex and ambiguous. Chromatic greys are made up of all colours and ascribing to them a singular chromatic identity is confounded by the shifting signification and suggestion of hue that marks them. They are translucent, opaque, ambivalent, dense and rich with echoes and properties of all the colours of the spectrum.

All colours, particularly in a painting, are modified by those around it and a chromatic grey, like a chromatic scale in music, offers a richness that is unbounded by our usual understanding and recognition of colour.   As a palette it is colour mediated and removed from the immediate sensory experience of the world. I intend to elaborate on this in a discussion of the work of Luc Tuymans, Gerhard Richter and Zola Toyi.

Blue – a Shifting Horizon by Virginia MacKenny

 

Free Fall, 2008, oil on acrylic on canvas, 2 x 1.6m

Blue planet, bluetooth, Big Blue, blue sky thinking, blue screen, blue movies … the list is long so long that when Annie Mollard-Desfour, a linguist with the French national research agency and president of the French Centre of Colour in Paris produced a Dictionnaire des Mots et Expressions de Couleur (Dictionary of Words and Expressions of Colour) the first volume was Le Bleu (Blue) (1998). Reinforcing the importance of the colour a recent edition of New Scientist (Sept 2009) dedicated to the origins of things included blue – not once, but twice. No mention of any other colour occurs in the issue. On Wikipedia’s page on pigment (all pigments) blue is the colour they choose to represent on the page.

The paper explores the continuing fascination with the colour Blue for artists. It aims to briefly contextualise the colour by sketching some of its historical importance and its value both financial and symbolic.  Initially one of the most expensive colours to produce (ultramarine blue was ground from pure lapis lazuli mined in Afghanistan) it only adorned areas of great symbolic importance like the Virgin’s cloak. Yet with the drop in costs of production (a competition was held in the nineteenth century to encourage the invention of a cheaper alternative) it has not lost its allure.

Its importance in the work of more recent artists is attested to by Yves Klein’s invention of Klein Blue and the winner of last years Turner Prize Roger Hiorns choice of the colour when he soused an abandoned apartment with blue copper sulphate solution. Left to develop blue crystals grew in a shimmering surface over every aspect of its interior. Derek Jarman used it as the only colour in his twelfth and final feature film Blue, released just four months before his death.

The blue screen in Jarman’s work is not a backdrop for the projection of other images, but remains ‘blank’ with voice-overs that are a testament to his life. Imageless it remains a place of interior imaginative projection much as does the night sky where people have created pictures by “joining the dots” as it were, possibly making the sky the biggest canvas available to us.

Intriguingly the astronomer Sir John Herschel (1792-1871), who came to South Africa to map the stars in the Southern hemisphere invented the cyanotype during his time here using it to record the indigenous flora of the region. Soon usurped by other photographic means the cyanotype persisted becoming a staple of the architect’s office in the form of a blueprint. 

This link with ‘origins’ and sources remains somehow central to the use of blue, whether it is the blue of the ‘void’ or a place of blue screen projection – both empty and endlessly full. Some small reference in this context would be made to my own production and its utilisation of blue in what seems to have become a fundamental element of my palette. 

Aberrant Light And Colour (After The Rainbow) by Maureen De Jager

Rainbow Over Grahamstown, 7 February 2010

The term ‘rainbow nation’ was coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to describe post-apartheid South Africa after the 1994 elections. It was re-iterated by President Nelson Mandela in his first month of office, when he spoke of ‘a rainbow nation at peace with itself and with the world’ (Manzo 1996:711). Thereafter the term ‘rainbow nation’ quickly gained credence as a signifier of multi-culturalism and diversity, contra Apartheid’s discriminatory division of South Africans into ‘black’ and ‘white’. However, detractors of the term have also been quick to offer critique, arguing that it glosses over the legacy of racism by evoking a false semblance of peace, stability and reconciliation.

My paper considers an alternative angle on the problem of ‘smug rainbowism’ (Jeremy Cronin quoted in Manzo 1996:71), by detouring back to an ‘original’ rainbow and hence to a pivotal moment in our understanding of light and colour: Sir Isaac Newton’s 1665 experiment wherein he split light into the spectrum by passing a sunbeam through a prism. Taking Newton’s prism as both starting point and metaphor, my argument aims to unsettle the rainbow’s status as a stable, dependable and unambiguous signifier. Instead, I suggest that the rainbow – as optical phenomenon – is aberrant and unstable, a spectral spectrum, summoning the vicissitudes of indeterminacy and doubt rather than some steady reality.

 Rainbow Over Grahamstown, 7 February 2010

Optically and philosophically, Newton’s dispersion of light into the spectrum undermined the ostensible stability of vision and replaced this with mutability and flux. It did this by insisting that colour is both relative and non-intrinsic: colour is the result of the different rates of vibration of the waves comprising the spectrum. Entering the prism as a unitary beam, these waves are deflected proportionate to their speed of vibration. Red pulsates slowest and is thus least refrangible, whereas violet vibrates fastest and is thus deflected more from its course. Colour waves, in this sense, ‘model a universe whose constituents move at different rates, reaching locations at different times’ (Armstrong 2008:267-82).

Newton’s splitting of light into the spectrum thus initiated some surprisingly ‘postmodern’ ideas. It emphasised ‘the ungroundedness existing at the core of perception’ (Armstrong 2008:271) by asserting that the velocity of light rays, and the distances they travel, are differential factors in how and what we see. Because light takes time to reach the observer, and because we occupy different time-space relationships to the things that we observe, the relationship between observer and observed is constantly changing and variable. What we ‘see’, in effect, is the always-belated arrival of light rays and colour waves – an after-image displaced in time and space from the ‘real’.

Like light rays emitted then and visible now, I argue that Newton’s prism experiments still have implications for us today – especially in a South African context, where colour has so often been used as a stable, delimiting marker of race and identity. For, against the logic of classification and certitude, Newton’s colour spectrum prompts us to remember the variable, ungrounded and aberrant nature of light and colour, and hence of all perception.
____________________________
1Manzo, K. 1996. Creating boundaries: the politics of race. Colorado: L Rienner Publishers.
2Armstrong, I. 2008. The lens, light, and the virtual world. In Victorian glass worlds, 253-271. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Colours of Wakefulness by Ashraf Jamal

Colour as palette has peremptorily served its aesthetic demands in South African art but, substantialy, remained peripheral. The reason for this is that South African art has consciously or unconsciously been mired in responsibility. As a consequence SA art has damagingly deviated itself from the reckonings of art expression. So much so that SA art has come to define itself according to the received dictates of “justice,” “rightness,” “propriety.” SA art, therefore, has been declamatory.

While the process made sense as an idea it bizarrely failed to access that protest and outrage in the realm of colour. Why this was the case was perhaps because SA art was driven by the will to make a statement. The need was precise. But the need in the context of this debate was not sufficient. Why, because the monochromatic dominated SA aesthetics. By this I suggest that an overdetermined morality consumed the complexities of living here, and, as a consequence, how we have told our stories has damagingly inhibited the very rub of complexity. Aesthetics as a reactive and preordained energy has diverted the concern with colour-as-palette in this country. This has everything to do with how the perceptual register has been constructed, how we as South Africans have been tutored to see the world.

Call for papers: Colour

Colloquium at Rhodes University in Grahamstown,
Hosted by the Fine Art Department
March 27-28, 2010

Colour in the South African context has immediate connotations with race and identity and these associations have had extended exposure within post-apartheid art making. But as an ongoing trajectory of exploration, once the observations have been made, the tonal variety of this commentary becomes increasingly flat.

Diversity - such a buzz word of the political transitional head-space - is, in general, sorely absent from much of our recent artistic output when what we mean by diversity, in the artistic colour palette, means a full spectrum of colours as well as their complex symbolic, cultural and emotive resonances.

Black and White, the Monochrome of High-Modernism, served well within the apartheid struggle period to subvert grand narratives. There was little appeal to delve into the complexity of the colour palette at a time where in our context ‘right’ and ‘wrong’; ‘justice’ and ‘injustice’ seemed so clearly and immediately definable. Now we come to a point in which we must question how in fact might we use or be using colour to express the complexity of human existence. If we look at the contemporary art of the rest of our continent, bright colour has oft been used to express profound and painful observations. Why then here, do we relegate bright colour to the realm of the merely decorative, the primitive, denying its complexity and consider the monochrome persistently as sophisticated? Why are primary tones relegated to the primary school art-box?

But it is not merely the bright or colourful which we wish to consider. Colour after all has the ability to be as technically multifaceted as that which it expresses. Colours all mixed together have a specific tone: greyish, brownish mud and what is that mud if not a grand space for new creation?

We invite thinkers, writers and critics to submit 500 word abstracts on the theme of colour as pallete, with specific attention to its applications or innovations in South African art.

Deadline for submission of Abstracts: February 8, 2010
Deadline for Final Submissions: March 13, 2010
Duration of paper: 15minutes

Contact either:
Rat Western
Ashraf Jamal