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A conversation about the political, economic and aesthetic implications of color
Slought and the Graduate Humanities Forum of the Penn Humanities Forum are pleased to announce "Values of Color," a symposium on Friday, February 20, 2015 from 10am-5pm. The event is an opportunity to prompt conversations among artists and scholars across multiple disciplines on the history of political, economic and aesthetic values attached to color. Value with respect to color can mean the relative lightness or darkness of a hue, but can also mean aesthetic merit, political importance, moral acceptability, or material worth. The question of color's values is also fundamentally a question of sensory perception, constructed at the level of the individual synapse as well as the cultural collective. We want to consider the descriptive language of color—how we evoke color with and/or through value-laden words or actions, how we assign qualities or quantities to different colors, how color is experienced through taste or touch as well as sight.
In this symposium, four distinguished artists and scholars - Nicole Fleetwood, Richard Doyle, Torkwase Dyson, and Mohan Matthen - will explore the values of color from a variety of perspectives. How and why do we classify and assign values (moral, economic, social, epistemic) to particular colors, even 'people of color,' or material gradations, from light to dark? How does color function in a modern economy? What is its role in making subjectivity legible through its performance? How does color function as nonverbal communication that is affectively felt? To what degree is color a 'natural' or physical property and in what ways is it a rhetorical or cultural construction? How do institutions assign value to color?
Indigo blue. Saffron yellow. Mummy brown. "Flesh" pink.
Name any color (or color combination), and the associations proliferate: we not only see in color, we speak, hear, and narrate with it. We feel green, we sing the blues, we argue in black and white. But while color seems to be everywhere in our polychrome world, we often take for granted the kinds of scientific discoveries, economic forces, and aesthetic theories that shape our ways of seeing. The history of colors is one of visual cognition and artistic experimentation, to be sure, but it is also one of global trade and often unsavory quests for new pigments. In the early modern period, Europeans discovered and exploited Mexican techniques of extracting a brilliant red for textile dyes from the bodies of the cochineal insect. In the nineteenth century, Pre-Raphaelite painters made their signature hue a rich brown called mummia, made by grinding up Egyptian mummies as part of a centuries-long trade in embalmed corpses.
Indeed, considering color, in all its diversity, means considering both its material properties and the politics of perception. How can we study visual surfaces alongside the things and people that they often define? What are the social and symbolic constructions of color? In the West, color theory generally suggests a philosophical tradition extending from Enlightenment thinkers like Isaac Newton or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to the aesthetics of abstraction in twentieth-century art. Rarely do we see any connection between the color field of Mark Rothko and the color line of W.E.B. Du Bois. But aesthetics and politics have much to say to one another. The same Enlightenment thinkers who pondered the innate properties of colored surfaces were also investigating the diverse shades of human complexion; they participated in and shaped the expanding colonial regimes of collecting, classifying, and hierarchizing humans alongside plant and animal life. In short, color has long been a productive and contested aspect not just of art but of society as well.
-- Chi-ming Yang and James English
Penn Humanities Forum