A DECONSTRUCTION OF COLOR
Ron Buffington

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Ron Buffington is a painter and teacher. He is currently head of the painting program at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Aside from painting courses, his curriculum includes a color theory course based on Albers’ studies and a course on
post-modern art history. Buffington’s own work involves a study of structures as well as the deceptive force of color.

The figure of Thoth takes shape and takes its shape from the very thing it resists and substitutes for. […] In distinguishing himself from his opposite, Thoth also imitates it, becomes its sign and representative, obeys it and conforms to it, replaces it, by violence if need be. […] Sly, slippery, and masked, an intriguer and a card, like Hermes, he is neither king nor jack, but rather a sort of joker, a floating signifier, a wild card, one who puts play into play. […] Thoth is never present. Nowhere does he appear in person. No being-there can properly be his own. Every act of his is marked by this unstable ambivalence. –Jacques Derrida, Dissemination

There is no such thing as colour, only coloured materials. –Jean Dubuffet, “L’Homme du commun a l’ouvrage”

THE MATTER OF COLOR

”Color deceives continually,” opens Josef Albers’ canonical text Interaction of Color. He elaborates: “Colors present themselves in continuous flux, constantly related to changing neighbors and changing conditions.” According to Albers, this makes color “the most relative medium in art.” Albers contends that a color is “never seen as it really is---as it physically is” (Albers 1). Students of Albers learned this lesson (as have generations of color theory students since) through a simple, though endlessly fascinating, experiment: the placement of two samples of the same color into contrasting color fields, thus producing a “psychic effect” (the illusion of chromatic opposition in the original samples) at odds with “physical fact” (Albers 8).

For Albers color was indeed a joker. Like Thoth, the mythical god of writing, color was devious, pure perceptual play. Albers’ entire career as a teacher was dedicated to demonstrating color’s instability and relativity. He designed exercises for his students that made opaque colors appear to become translucent, that made the physical boundary between two colors appear to soften or vanish, that saturated the light receptors of the retina and produced spectacular after-images, on and on. Taken as a whole, Interaction of Color might be understood as a systematic attempt to dematerialize color, and by extension to attribute color’s precociousness to its ethereality. For Albers nothing was more threatening to this idea than paint itself.

Albers encouraged the student of color to employ colored paper over paint, insisting on the elimination of “disturbing changes caused by varying application of paint.” Albers almost seemed to abhor the prospect of pigment mixing, both in his own work (he famously used paint directly from the tube, readymade color, as it were, in lieu of mixing paint for the Homage to the Square paintings) and in the work of his students (he warns students about the hazards of “brush marks and strokes,” about the frustrations one encounters when a color changes upon drying, about the interference of “hard and soft boundaries,” even about the “difficult, time-consuming and tiring” labor involved in mixing paint) (Albers 7). Even with colored paper there were “disturbances” to be “carefully avoided.” In order to produce the “delicate” color effects Albers desired, his students learned to inlay color samples (to place the colored papers “within each other instead of on top of each other”), a procedure Albers calls intarsia. If his goal was indeed to avoid tedious labor, he could not have devised a set of instructions more contrary to this end than the following:

For precision fitting, so that the joints will not show, the papers to be inlaid are formed simultaneously in a single cutting. The finer the knife (best, the thinnest razor blade), the thinner the paper, and the harder the ground to cut on (preferably glass), the better the fitting will be and the less the joints will show. It is also essential that no glue seep in to mark the joints. As the selection of the papers here demands patience, so their presentation demands skill and cleanliness (Albers 65).

All in all Albers treats paint (and in general the physical, material conditions within which color must always be experienced) as a dangerous supplement to color. Would that Albers had the same esteem for paint as the contemporary chemist Philip Ball, who, in his remarkable book Bright Earth, reminds the color theorist that ”painters need color to be embodied in stuff” (Ball 49). Ball attributes his appreciation for the material basis of color (which he calls the “substance of color”) to his education: “I have been trained as a chemist…. I relish paint and pigment as materials, with appearances, smells, textures, and names that entice and intoxicate” (Ball viii). Ball argues that the material basis of art has been neglected historically (though it may be more appropriate to say that it has been suppressed), and he notes a tendency in Western culture to “separate inspiration from substance.” Ball laments this state of affairs:

To deny that color chemistry can have any possible effect on “great painting” is, in the end, to claim that great art is all in the head and cheapened by the sad necessity to reconstruct it from mere matter. (Ball 11)

Ultimately Ball insists that “talk of color needs to be rooted in the physical substances that provide it” (Ball 18). And this is precisely what he proceeds to do throughout the remainder of Bright Earth, to trace the material basis of each and every pigment in common usage, both historically and currently. The crux of Ball’s argument is that pigment is matter, and as such it has mass and occupies space. In this regard, color is physically present; unlike Thoth, color appears “in person” (even as it conjures something absent, someone not-in-attendance) and “being-there” (along with being-elsewhere) is one of its essential attributes. Color doesn’t simply “conform” to a pigmented surface. Rather, the material substance of a surface is pigmented. Color literally inhabits (resides within) a surface.

COLOR AT THE THRESHOLD OF CLOTHING

It scarcely needs to be said what an absurd gesture it is to adorn a dress with a color chart. The peculiar nature of Liz Tapp’s color chart dresses doesn’t arise from recontextualization per se. The color chart is, after all, without context, or rather it is its own context, its own autonomous realm. What is most uncanny about these dresses is the way in which they disclose the architectural metaphor at work in both color and clothing. It is interesting to note that clothing designers draw a clear distinction between the inside and the outside of clothing. Issey Miyake’s mandate that “the outside of clothing should be perceived visually and the inside sensually” could just as well be applied to a discussion of color and pigment (Blaser 13). And as Tapp points out, clothing, after it is worn, is haunted by its wearer, “imbued with its wearer’s aroma, shed hair and sloughed skin” (Princethal 143); color, by analogy, is nothing if not haunted by the physicality of pigment, by its “smells” and “textures.” Finally, what is clothing if not a supplement to the wearer’s body, a kind of second skin (or, to follow Tapp’s analogy, a “shell”)? Inversely, where does color reside if not within the pigmented surface?

Tapp’s dresses bear emblems of what might be called the liminal condition of clothing. One dress features a replica of one of Albers’ more recognizable Homage paintings consisting of a series of yellow squares nested within increasingly green squares. Because of the way the image had to be constructed in fabric (which behaves differently as a material, indeed as material, than paint or colored paper), the alignment of the corners of each square in Albers’ composition is literalized, rendered in material form, which serves to both reinforce (by creating lines of recession) as well as undermine (by dividing the colored planes into discrete bands) the perceptual qualities of Albers’ painting. Suffice it to say that a color theory class could never be conducted with fabric, at least not one of the conventional sort (Albers would certainly never have tolerated its “interference”), because of its assertiveness as matter.

If, as Fritz Neumeyer contends, clothing disguises the body “in order to explain” it, then there may be no more fitting a representation of this condition than the color chart (Blaser 9). Liz Tapp’s color chart dresses remind us that what is at stake with clothing, as with color, is nothing less than spacing; if color occupies space, then clothing is precisely a space to be occupied.
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Albers, Josef. Interaction of Color. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975

Ball, Philip. Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001

Blaser, Werner. Ed. Habit Habitat: Christa da Carouge. Lars Muller: 2000

Princethal, Nancy. “Willard Gallery, New York.” Art News. Feb. 1985