In his final, posthumously published, essay ‘Some Aspects of Colour in General and Red and Black in Particular’ (1994), Donald Judd remarked that, after Abstract Expressionism, ‘colour to continue, had to occur in space’. He also indicated that, in a series of multi-coloured works he began in the early ‘80s, he wanted ‘all of the colours to be present at once’. In painting, even in ‘flat’ abstract painting, colour will tend to function pictorially, to advance or recede relative to other colours, and to detach itself from the picture plane. In sculpture such as Judd’s, colours are stabilised by being present as literal surfaces of three-dimensional elements. The edge of each colour coincides with the edges of the object, and being visibly assembled from discrete units, this leaves less room for optical jockeying, and thus more space for a very wide variety of colours ‘to be present at once’. These works – a large number were made during the second half of the 1980s, and many more unassembled works remained in Judd’s studio after his death – are perhaps the ‘purest’ colour-experiments in recent sculpture. The aim, I think, was no more and no less than an open-ended investigation into the possibilities of colour combination. Derived from the industrial colour-chart, rather than the traditional colour-circle, Judd’s work freed itself from the baggage of traditional colour-theory, with its prescriptions, its grammar of opposites and its hierarchies of primaries, secondaries and tertiaries. It also made colour a kind of Readymade, something to be selected from a stockist, like the range of light-industrial materials which are typical of all Judd’s work.

For a number of other sculptors, particularly during the 1960s, the materials and processes of industry offered a world to work with. While this is well documented, what is often overlooked is how the colours of industrial materials and commercial finishes focused the artists’ attention. John Chamberlain has used the applied spray-painted colour of cellulose car-paints since the early 1960s; Carl Andre’s wide range of metal sculptures are marked by strong intrinsic differences in colour which he sometimes explores within a single work; and Dan Flavin worked with the palette of commercially available colours in fluorescent light, again either singly or in combination. There are obvious and important differences between these types of work: in some cases colour is applied, in others it is intrinsic to the material; in the case of Flavin, and in some works by Judd in which he employs transparent acrylic sheet, colour is a quality of light emitted from, and reflected in, the surfaces of the work. But what all this work has in common is a fascination with the colours and surfaces of modernity; and it is from these sources – from the slick and brash and vulgar world of industry and commerce, rather than the more refined and repressed taste of high culture – that these artists, like their contemporary Warhol, find the most vivid material.

This work is alike also in that it is usually assembled or arranged from pre-existing parts. Except in the case of Chamberlain, the materials are not manipulated in the studio so much as ordered-up from the stockists or fabricators. In most cases the materials are also flat unmodulated planes rather than solids (Andre being the partial exception here); and this has consequences for the experience of colour in the work. Built rather than crafted, joined together rather than whole, literal rather than pictorial, planar rather than solid, synthetic rather than organic, regular rather than irregular: the characteristics of this art are also characteristics of our modernity. And the colours of modernity are inseparable from these other aspects: its surfaces, its shapes, its structures and its arrangements.

It may be the case that the most important and experimental use of colour occurs outside the world of high art. This offers the interested artist a vast resource of readymades and references, from the developments of the automobile industry and commercial paint manufacturers, to the patterns on toys, ornaments, packaging and departure-lounge kitsch. If the New York artists of the 1960s tended to draw on a range of industrial commodities for their work, several American and European artists over the last decade have exploited the ubiquitous world of consumer commodities. Mike Kelley and Sylvie Fleury have both made direct use of such material, and even if their work is not ostensibly about colour, the point is that once this commodity-world is invoked, colour invariably comes with it and makes itself present. Some of the early work of Tony Cragg may have been made in recognition of this. Plastic Palette II (1989), is, like all his work of the time, made from the detritus of commerce and industry, the found shards of brightly coloured plastic which insert themselves into the corners of our cities. In this instance the shards’ colours become the organising point for the work’s imagery – a silhouette of the traditional painter’s palette – and this, in turn, becomes an acknowledgement of the ambiguous position – between painting and sculpture – which is characteristic of much recent colour-based work, and Judd’s and Flavin’s in particular.

Colour as a market of mass-culture or of kitsch is also represented in the work of artists such as Jenny Holzer and Jeff Koons. In Holzer’s case the use of light-emitting materials is transformed from the simple and static geometry of a Flavin to a hyperactive spectacle of sound-bites and non-sequiturs. Koons’ carved and painted flower arrangements (and his animals and figures) make a positive, if ironic, value of much which aesthetics has suppressed: the ornamental, the decorative, the domestic, the trivial, the childlike. Note, however, that it is not only through intense colour that Koons invokes the kitsch: he has also succeeded in hijacking white, the last colour in the fortresses of refinement, in works which invoke nothing more elevated than domestic cleanliness or neo-classical sentimentality.

None of the above constitutes anything like a school or a movement. If there is a preoccupation in the work mentioned so far with some or other aspect of mass-culture, the particular reasons for this preoccupation will be quite different for each artist. And not all sculptors who thematise colour have done so by this route. Anish Kapoor and Georg Baselitz both make work in a relatively traditional way (as does Koons, sometimes), by carving or otherwise cutting into lumps of wood or stone; and this immediately distinguishes their work from the work discussed so far. In Kapoor’s and Baselitz’s case, the worked material is then either partially or entirely covered with pigment. And in each case the relationship of the colour to the material is crucial, seeming to dissolve it into a perceptual vapour (Kapoor) or organise it into a loosely conceived figure (Baselitz). In neither case is there anything in the finished work which readily links it with the world of commerce and industry. Rather the opposite: both sculptors seem to be involved in a turn away from modernity; but in making this turn, coincidentally, they arrive at a point not that remote from some of the other work mentioned so far. In the rhetoric of chromophobia, the vulgar and the kitsch are in the same domain as the primitive and the exotic – the critical and self-conscious reference-points of Baselitz and Kapoor respectively.

The problems for an artist working with colour are not only the chromophobic prejudices, whereby colour is positioned, in one way or another, as Other to the higher values of Culture; but also the handed-down baggage of traditional colour-theory, within which colour is marshalled, disciplined, subordinated, and subject to entirely arbitrary divisions and codes of conduct. In some respects, chromophobia is preferable to the systemisation of colour: at least chromophobes recognise and value, in a perverse back-to-front way, colour’s potency and indiscipline. Only relatively few artists actively thematise colour these days; and those who do (a fuller list would include painters, photographers and installation artists of various types), do so in an informal and highly idiosyncratic way. To talk of colour in recent art is to speak of instances and highly localised interests; not of systems, models and movements. This is the point: colour is infinitely more complex than the means we have to describe it; and in that space between seeing and knowing there may be occasional moments of freedom.

Published by the Centre for the Study of Sculpture to accompany ‘The Colour of Sculpture’ at The Henry Moore Institute, 12 December 1996 – 6 April 1997 and ‘Polymonochromes’, an exhibition of works by David Batchelor in the Study Galleries of Leeds City Art Gallery, 17 January – 6 April 1997.


ISBN 1900081261

© 1997
The Henry Moore Institute and the author

The Centre for the Study of Sculpture
The Henry Moore Institute
74 The Headrow
Leeds
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