Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
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The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Perspecta
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Sylvia Lavin What Color is it Now?
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Lavin-What Color is it Now? I 00
of "minty
Fig. z Karim Rashid, freshness" does not rise to Home
MethodTM the occasion of a
meaning, and
Dish Soap, 2003: Mint, Bush's palette of fear barely compensates,
Cucumber,
Mandarin and Lavender
with a surprising lack of irony, for the fact that real
information about terrorism is the one thing that nobo
has. Although more present today than in the past, colo
can no longer be invoked in its historical role as a perfe
and universal semiological system, as it was by heraldry
traffic lights, and the Pompidou center.
m
Yet if the meaning of color is less significant today
than in the past, its effects have become more significan
than ever. And one of the effects produced by color is
the effect of today. Color is a key producer of what
Baudelaire described as presentness, of what I have cal
contemporaneity, todayness, or the now.2 For Baudelaire
the key indicators of presentness were the mannerisms
of everyday life and fashion in particular. The more
extreme the expression of these qualities-and both the
"War on Terror" chromometer and Rashid's soaps are
extreme uses of color in their way-the more presentness
was invoked. Thus, for Baudelaire, the prostitute was
Fig. 3 u.s. Department of Homeland
an exceptionally contemporary figure because she was
Security, Homeland Security Advisory
System, 200o1
exaggeratedly mannered and overdressed. Now, color
has taken on the valence of the present. Color, for
example, was the first indication that even The New Yor
Times was to devote more and more attention to
capturing "today:" soon to follow the introduction of
color images was a proliferation of sections including
"Circuits," "House and Home," and "Sunday Styles"-all
devoted to versions of Baudelaire's idea of presentness.
Bold type announcing the day's breaking news no longer
suffices in the quest for presentness, not even in daily
TrPRoRI.-T ATTACK-. newspapers, which, with their early editions and late
HMjI RISK O" editions and extra editions, once were the timekeepers
of currency. Now, today is as much a color as it is
4rI[GNsflTANT R1K 0I-
TLP41O-IMST AT TACKJt$ anything else.
Modernity is full of blueness: from the primary blue
of De Stijl to International Klein Blue to the Beatles and
the Blue Meanies. My concern here is not a history of
Lawmr was color or its genealogy or even the overdetermined
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Lavin-What Color is it Now? 1 02
4 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and 8 On the history of polychrome in aSsociation with modernity, technology and atmospher-
Architecture: The Growth of a New architecture, see David Van Zanten, ics, iS a critical factor in these effects.6 But on the othe
Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Architectural Polychromy of the i83o's
University Press, I967), 252. (New York: Garland, 1977). For an hand, these effects are not reducible to the color blue
5 This aspect of the Crystal Palace analysis of modernity's repression of since any hue (although some would do it better than
has generally been discussed in the color in architecture, see Wigley, White
context of the technological sublime. Walls. Others) could theoretically be made to coagulate multiple
6 On the particular identification of 9 For an extensive bibliography on materials and surfaces. A contemporary reading of color
blue with modernity, see Michel color in art, see John Gage, Color and
Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Culture: Practice and Meaning from must emphasize this combination of associative and
Color (Princeton: Princeton University Antiquity to Abstraction (London: affective operations and must resist the pull toward
Press, 2oo0I). Thames and Hudson, 1993).
7 On the concept of cunning, see Io For a brilliant analysis of this
making an updated color code, since all such codes have
Jeffrey Kipnis, "The Cunning of debate, see Jacqueline Lichtenstein, been different versions of the same quest for true color.
Cosmetics," in El Croquis, 84 (1997), Couleur bloquente: Rhitorique et
22-9. peinture a l'age classique (Paris:
Architecture can no longer be true blue, nor can it invoke
Flammarion, 1989). the sparkle producing fairies that were said to be the
II I first developed aspects of this
argument for a conference on drawing: cause Of the Crystal Palace's effects during the 19th
"Ways of World Making," organized century. Instead, color must be reframed as a material
by Jeffrey Kipnis at the Wexner Center
inStrument of effects.
for the Arts in January zoo2i.
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Io3
particular color, which is notational and thus arbitrary, This is an oblique piece of evidence but it nevertheless
nor its cultural associations, which are ideological and suggests architecture's deep investment in drawing as
specific, produce contemporaneity. Rather, it is the well as the discipline's basic alignment with the concep-
oscillation itself that effects presentness. Diller & tual apparatus of disegno. Although architectural
Scofidio's Eyebeam vibrates with both the signs and the drawings have always been made--Egyptian and Greek
swagger of Baudelaire's hyper-present and ever-cunning clay tablets depicting temple plans and urban organiza-
prostitute.7 tions exist--drawing did not become a constituent part
Color offers architecture the means to act as the of the discipline until the invention of perspective." In
binder of a sensibility of the now. Ironically, understand- fact, the development of architectural drawing coincides
ing the relation between color and contemporaneity with the birth of perspective in the Renaissance, and ever
requires working through rather old, indeed ultimately since that coincidence, perspective and architectural
antique discourses on color. Despite architecture's long drawing have been seen as inexorably linked and indeed
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Lavin-What Color is it Now? 104Io
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Io5
into perspective was not the only possibility for architec- 19th century a
ture. And for the sake of my argument, let us equate this for example, st
opposition with the limitation of architecture not to representation
black and white but to green-the code color for "in the color is a sign
nature of materials" and thus for reality-and pink-the is concerned w
proverbial rose-colored glasses. In painting, by contrast, rather than wi
the question of drawing was framed quite differently. about the poly
There, drawing, or rather disegno, was not dominated by Athena would
controversies between the real and the ideal but rather by Le Corbusie
was concerned with drawing as a mode of imitation, of nings are relat
which there were many kinds. Disegno was primarily notational syst
differentiated from colore, which was understood as a Modernism in
technique of affect rather than of mimesis. From the both the form
16th century on, as the relative merits of Michelangelo It can therefor
and Titian, Poussin and Reubens, Ingres and Delacroix Corbusier used
were debated, disegno and colore were compared as affective purp
modes of pictorialism. Disegno was linked primarily to a rather than de
representational and narrative-driven paradigm, Because archit
whether hyperrealistic or super-idealized, while colore service of diseg
was associated with the world of affect and sensation. It is, by disciplin
was thus color that was said to make "painting seem tion. Colore can
alive" and that could "commonly ravish our sight with origins of arch
the bewitching pleasure of delightsome and stately loosen the grip
ornaments."''2 While it was precisely the intoxicating specifically, co
quality of color that led theorists to be afraid of its increasingly be
charms, as they feared a seductive temptress, one tural presentne
wonders what might have happened to architecture had lent of the clo
it succumbed to the temptation and allowed its "design" that is itself not codified.14 While the cloud is understood
to engage the antithetical pleasures of depiction not to have made Brunelleschi's perspective contraption
authorized by perspective. appear to capture reality, the cloud also permitted
For its own purposes-entry into the liberal arts, perspective to capture contemporaneity: as the cloud
establishing a base in professionalism, guaranteeing the passed over the mirror, the movement of time was
registered. Through that animation, the image of the
permanent monumentality of its built output--architec-
ture remained largely contained within what we could Baptistery could not belong to the timelessness of art but
call intra-drawing issues, leaving matters of color to the nor, since it was an image, did it return to the simple
side. The theoretical underpinnings of the late 18th and temporariness of the real. Instead, the animate cloud
gave presentness to the Baptistery.
Temporality, and thus the form of presentness that
generally goes by the name "modernity," first became of
concern in relation to color when artists sought to
distinguish historical or visionary events from current
events. Grisaille, a monochrome palette of greys, was
used during the Renaissance to signify the pastness of
antiquity while polychromy was reserved specifically for
the depiction of the present. While grisaille thus used
color to indicate a form of contemporaneity, it did so by
To ... symbolizing modernity not by considering the use of
color in relation to effects, whether of contemporaneity
or of other kinds. On the other hand, time and color,
Fig. 7 The initial products of Le
even monochromy in particular, came together in what
Corbusier's color palette, from the
tion of Arthur was perhaps the first attempt to identify architecture as
Riiegg
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Lavin-What Color is it Now? Io6
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Fig. 9 Dominic Crinson, Jafleur wallpaper pattern, 2003
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Lavin-What Color is it Now? Io8
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Lavin-What Color is it Now? I I0
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III
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