People, I present you with the most awful thing in the world, courtesy of captain birthday. Behold:
This is Tauba Auerbach's RGB Colorspace Atlas, and my apologies to the diligent creators of this 8"x8"x8" doorstop of a book, but there is something so unsettling and terrible about it that I can hardly look at it. It is truly an unheimlich object. Now, I have never held this object in my hand, but looking at it, it seems unwieldy and difficult to handle. Unless it is made of that super-light paper that they used to use for those mass-produced and abridged versions of the great books (which would give it a whole different pop sensibility...), it looks like the spine might break under its own weight and flipping through it might be an exercise in confronting one's own clumsiness. The there are the colors. Oh, the colors! Ok, confession: I've always found that Photoshop color wheel absolutely maddening. I can never pick a color to my liking, because you only get a tiny pixel of it, never a good, satisfying expanse of color to examine. Then, there's the idea that every imaginable color can be incapsulated in this thing. I understand that it's supposed to make it seem sublime or whatever, but it just makes me sad, the way that digitization levels everything analog. Thinking about this more, this is the most melancholy object I can imagine and it makes me wish I lived in the good old analog 1960s. Or 1860s. Or hell, the 1460s! A time when mixing rainbow-colored paints was a truly infinite and awe-inspiring activity.
Counterpoint from Captain Birthday:
Ha! Well, while i do like the open-endedness implied in the annunciation rainbow, i have to say that that painting as a whole is really creepy! First, there's the weird facial expressions, which is probably just a historical thing, but that angel is downright sinister, what with his curling sneer and his stick! And poor Mary seems to have a lazy eye. And then there's that typical Christian hand gesture she's making - halfway between "stop!" and throwing up her hands in dismay. The Annunciation has been my least favorite part of scripture for a long time, because really, WTF, God?
anyway, in defense of the color atlas...I see it as not melancholy so much as kind of dorky and earnest - like that other doomed project of completion that nonetheless has a special place in my heart: the encyclopedia. The unwieldiness (unwield?), like the unwieldiness of Funk & Wagnall's, is like the fatness of a gourmand- there's just SO MUCH amazing food in the world, and you want to try all of it! Open up to any page, and learn about something that some random culture-expert thought was important! I do wish the color atlas weren't so slick-looking (meh to the minimalist cube), but it makes me feel more "awww" than "aargh."
But then again, I always loved color wheels of all shapes- paint chips, crayon boxes, and even this:
I just think they're pretty, and never really thought that
grids/catalogs threatened infinity...for me they always suggested
possibility, because there's always an infinite number of colors between
two colors (like the distance between 0 and 1).
This is Tauba Auerbach's RGB Colorspace Atlas, and my apologies to the diligent creators of this 8"x8"x8" doorstop of a book, but there is something so unsettling and terrible about it that I can hardly look at it. It is truly an unheimlich object. Now, I have never held this object in my hand, but looking at it, it seems unwieldy and difficult to handle. Unless it is made of that super-light paper that they used to use for those mass-produced and abridged versions of the great books (which would give it a whole different pop sensibility...), it looks like the spine might break under its own weight and flipping through it might be an exercise in confronting one's own clumsiness. The there are the colors. Oh, the colors! Ok, confession: I've always found that Photoshop color wheel absolutely maddening. I can never pick a color to my liking, because you only get a tiny pixel of it, never a good, satisfying expanse of color to examine. Then, there's the idea that every imaginable color can be incapsulated in this thing. I understand that it's supposed to make it seem sublime or whatever, but it just makes me sad, the way that digitization levels everything analog. Thinking about this more, this is the most melancholy object I can imagine and it makes me wish I lived in the good old analog 1960s. Or 1860s. Or hell, the 1460s! A time when mixing rainbow-colored paints was a truly infinite and awe-inspiring activity.
Jan van Eyck, The Annunciation (detail of Archangel Michael and the Virgin), 1434-6.
Counterpoint from Captain Birthday:
Ha! Well, while i do like the open-endedness implied in the annunciation rainbow, i have to say that that painting as a whole is really creepy! First, there's the weird facial expressions, which is probably just a historical thing, but that angel is downright sinister, what with his curling sneer and his stick! And poor Mary seems to have a lazy eye. And then there's that typical Christian hand gesture she's making - halfway between "stop!" and throwing up her hands in dismay. The Annunciation has been my least favorite part of scripture for a long time, because really, WTF, God?
anyway, in defense of the color atlas...I see it as not melancholy so much as kind of dorky and earnest - like that other doomed project of completion that nonetheless has a special place in my heart: the encyclopedia. The unwieldiness (unwield?), like the unwieldiness of Funk & Wagnall's, is like the fatness of a gourmand- there's just SO MUCH amazing food in the world, and you want to try all of it! Open up to any page, and learn about something that some random culture-expert thought was important! I do wish the color atlas weren't so slick-looking (meh to the minimalist cube), but it makes me feel more "awww" than "aargh."
But then again, I always loved color wheels of all shapes- paint chips, crayon boxes, and even this:
Gerhard Richter, Color Fields. 6 Arrangements of 1260 Colors (Red-Blue-Yellow), 1974.
2 comments:
Mastergote, I believe this calls for a radio hour.
I love those Richter squares and I think they're a perfect example of why the Photoshop actualization of color, and so this Auerbach tome, is less fun. I do like that color has infinite variation (though in many ways this book is making the argument that the range is, though massive and unintelligible, essentially finite), but how am I supposed to appreciate a color fully (as MG says) if it's just a pixel within a range? Part of the joy of a color is its lushness, its wanting-to-be-eatenness, and you just don't get that from a color diaspora. In the Richter painting, he's inventing colors, both individually and by the way the eye contrasts them. This book, on the other hand, (which, in its defense, does look better with pages open) takes the human element out of color and, by claiming infinity, feels far less infinite than Richter's field.
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