contemporary monkey

Ellsworth Kelly: Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance 3

In 1951, the American artist Ellsworth Kelly purchased a pre-packaged set of coloured paper squares from a Paris shop (he already had Duchamp’s idea of ready-made art in mind).  Then he drew a grid of squares, numbering in the hundreds, on paper.  In each of these squares, he randomly assigned numbers between 1 and 18.  Sorting through his limited number of coloured paper squares, he arbitrarily assigned each with a number, you guessed it, between 1 and 18.  It only took the matching of numerical paper to grid for a work completed, and young Kelly was on his way to teaching himself the value of colour in art.  All this without having to endure the tedious boredom of classroom ennui.  A direct snub to the Bauhaus and other contemporary art schools.

That was modern art back then, you had to define it.  Thinking about it today, we might say, yeah, I could do that.  And we could have, but we didn’t.  Someone beat us to it.  That’s the best thing about art, some of it gets us to scratch our heads, wondering why we didn’t think of that.

At the time, Kelly was rebelling against the science of colour during a time when American abstract expressionism was thriving against form.  Kelly thought outside the canvas however, by revolting against the the limitations of the early 20th century Bauhaus theory.  He was stuck with the Josef Albers/Johannes Itten/Goethe school of colour management, with their perfect world of numbers and frequencies and pleasure measurement.  This was Kelly’s personal gambit into abstraction of what colour meant as a work of art.  In his mind, it wasn’t an empirical science as the Bauhaus claimed, but a random selection made out of thin air.  Chance placement of colour, IS the art.

Johannes Itten's Colour Wheel

I came across Kelly’s idea after visiting the Tate Liverpool’s “Colour Chart”.  On the surface, it’s the type of art where silently you’re thinking, that’s not so imaginative, anyone could have done that.  It doesn’t require artistic technique; no drawing, sketching, even welding.  But it did require someone to think differently about the nature of what art could be.  Someone did, and it wasn’t you or me.

These sorts of realizations are in turn personally annoying, but hugely gratifying.  It’s like watching a child solve what appears to be a complex “adult” problem with simplicity.  You’re dissatisfied with yourself for not thinking of it, and impressed that the kid did.  These are the moments in art that are real turning points in the way we should, and have, thought about art.  Given today’s disingenous [link: damian hirst dots] reproductions of yesterday’s art, I hope we find our own Ellsworth Kelly soon.

Damien Hirst's "LSD". Nearly fifty years after Kelly.

Frank Stella

Are the colours of modern society, un-natural?  The argument made thoughout a recent exhibition at Tate Liverpool is that off-the-shelf colour (their term: ready-made colour) can’t be found in nature.  Surely man invented the hyper-active, vibrant colours of such stuff as cars, signs and iPods.  Wouldn’t their alien surface properties have to be natural because, well, we’re natural, aren’t we?

The theme threaded throughout the show, “Colour Chart: Reinventing Colour, 1950 to Today” is the absolute nature of modern colour, and in this case the reference is to the commercial type - the cans you buy off the shelf.  In fact, for some pieces the point is that colour itself is art, not to be subsumed by a larger spiritual, cultural, or political meaning.

I love the suggestion made at the event, because I found myself liking many of the works simply because they were colourful.  The argument could be made that modern colour itself is more pleasurable than the shapes and forms constructed by contemporary artists.  In fact, rather than constructing the cliche vitrine with this year’s dead farm animal, I wish Damien Hirst would just write down the colours he’s thinking about at the time, and paste the Pantone list onto a stretched canvas.  I’m willing to bet it would be an improvement.

Ellsworth Kelly

Man invented machine with his hands, the productive results from which are no more than extensions of man himself.  Andy Warhol claimed he wanted to be a machine, and I think he was successful in his search.  Showing that machine paint applied through a machine process (silk screening) by a Factory employee suggests colour might be only one element to the finished work.   If post-mid-century colour is un-natural, then so are we humans.