rushthatspeaks (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks) wrote2011-04-04 02:46 am
rushthatspeaks) wrote2011-04-04 02:46 am
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Chroma, Derek Jarman (365 Books, Day 217)
As those of you who have been reading this blog for more than five minutes may have had cause to notice, I am going through something of a Derek Jarman phase at the moment, but seriously, this man's brain. I spent parts of my adolescence reading about the philosophy of art, as one does as a teenager trying to sort out the world, and Jarman is the only artist I've seen applying some of the things that struck me the most from those days. (This is where I leave out an entire tangent on the Situationists and Guy Debord.)
So this is his last book, his book about color.
If there were a genre this fit into, I would almost call it a commonplace book, a collection of quotations and relevant anecdotes tied together through stream-of-consciousness interludes, but while very quote-heavy it is more organized than I am accustomed to commonplace books being. It is whatever genre is typified by Pascal's Pensées.
He intersperses chapters about specific colors with chapters about theories of color, and the history of the way color has been thought about in the Western painting tradition. He also detours into alchemy. His erudition is wide and free-floating; I have no idea who half the people he quotes are, but the quotes are consistently interesting.
This is not a book to read if you are looking for narrative, or for a thesis statement, or any kind of actual argument. It is a book that is a jumping-off place for thinking. Jarman asks: why is it that color theorists don't seem to write about brown? What is brown, anyway, and what is its relationship to yellow? How is it that violet is the only color named, in English, after a flower? And then he'll be off on an anecdote about soap-bubbles or road-mending or Leonardo da Vinci, or descriptions of the paintings he's seen that are the most blue, the most gold, the most beige while still working as paintings. He riffs on and lists historical and emotional associations of the colors, spins paragraphs about unlikely interactions of different objects of the same color, goes into (not half-bad) poetry on occasion.
It is an idiosyncratic book. Pink and purple are in the same chapter, for some reason. Orange gets less than a page. I disagree totally with everything he says about grey, everything, including his spelling of the word-- well, maybe he's right about gray, but I know what I think about grey. He thinks of gray as a nothing-color, a color of defeat and loss and totalitarianism and awfulness, and he loves beige, and for me those two are precisely reversed. He is not wrong about silver the same way, but he doesn't say enough about it, it has about a paragraph. Iridescence gets a chapter, so does translucence; I was happy to see that, as they are, of course, colors, but many books would not have.
I don't know whether he wrote the chapter about blue before or after the script for his film Blue, but for him blue is the color of the infinite, of death and timelessness and resurrection, and so it is the chapter where he talks about dying, which he was actively engaged in at the time of writing (it was a long process), and the blue writings are understated and burning and accepting but never resigned.
I have no way of knowing whether to recommend this to anybody. I enjoyed it. It's the kind of book that I am always marginally amazed to see published, because it feels so different from what people usually think of as a book. Things in it are actively in dialogue with other things I've been reading and with the contents of my head in general, and if you don't have that set of mental circumstances, it would probably be neither enjoyable nor intelligible, and that is dependent on luck as much as anything (resonating with what I've been reading lately is definitely luck). If you're interested in painting, or in the ways that color can be used to provoke emotion in the viewer, you could find this useful. If you're a person who reads the Pensées or the Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon for pleasure, you could find this friendly. But it is all so context-dependent that I cannot say whether any given person, or the aggregate of people in general, would find it worthwhile: I can only say that I did.
So this is his last book, his book about color.
If there were a genre this fit into, I would almost call it a commonplace book, a collection of quotations and relevant anecdotes tied together through stream-of-consciousness interludes, but while very quote-heavy it is more organized than I am accustomed to commonplace books being. It is whatever genre is typified by Pascal's Pensées.
He intersperses chapters about specific colors with chapters about theories of color, and the history of the way color has been thought about in the Western painting tradition. He also detours into alchemy. His erudition is wide and free-floating; I have no idea who half the people he quotes are, but the quotes are consistently interesting.
This is not a book to read if you are looking for narrative, or for a thesis statement, or any kind of actual argument. It is a book that is a jumping-off place for thinking. Jarman asks: why is it that color theorists don't seem to write about brown? What is brown, anyway, and what is its relationship to yellow? How is it that violet is the only color named, in English, after a flower? And then he'll be off on an anecdote about soap-bubbles or road-mending or Leonardo da Vinci, or descriptions of the paintings he's seen that are the most blue, the most gold, the most beige while still working as paintings. He riffs on and lists historical and emotional associations of the colors, spins paragraphs about unlikely interactions of different objects of the same color, goes into (not half-bad) poetry on occasion.
It is an idiosyncratic book. Pink and purple are in the same chapter, for some reason. Orange gets less than a page. I disagree totally with everything he says about grey, everything, including his spelling of the word-- well, maybe he's right about gray, but I know what I think about grey. He thinks of gray as a nothing-color, a color of defeat and loss and totalitarianism and awfulness, and he loves beige, and for me those two are precisely reversed. He is not wrong about silver the same way, but he doesn't say enough about it, it has about a paragraph. Iridescence gets a chapter, so does translucence; I was happy to see that, as they are, of course, colors, but many books would not have.
I don't know whether he wrote the chapter about blue before or after the script for his film Blue, but for him blue is the color of the infinite, of death and timelessness and resurrection, and so it is the chapter where he talks about dying, which he was actively engaged in at the time of writing (it was a long process), and the blue writings are understated and burning and accepting but never resigned.
I have no way of knowing whether to recommend this to anybody. I enjoyed it. It's the kind of book that I am always marginally amazed to see published, because it feels so different from what people usually think of as a book. Things in it are actively in dialogue with other things I've been reading and with the contents of my head in general, and if you don't have that set of mental circumstances, it would probably be neither enjoyable nor intelligible, and that is dependent on luck as much as anything (resonating with what I've been reading lately is definitely luck). If you're interested in painting, or in the ways that color can be used to provoke emotion in the viewer, you could find this useful. If you're a person who reads the Pensées or the Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon for pleasure, you could find this friendly. But it is all so context-dependent that I cannot say whether any given person, or the aggregate of people in general, would find it worthwhile: I can only say that I did.
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Huh: I thought pink was too.
I'm tempted to count rose too: although it's not one of English's core colours (it would generally get classed as "a kind of pink"; but then, like many uninfluenced by Isaac Newton's numerology, I tend to class violet as "a kind of purple") but you can say "I'm painting it rose" in the way that you can't say "*I'm painting it daffodil."
Of course you could also say "I'm painting it lavender" and "I'm painting it lilac" and maybe "I'm painting it fuchsia". ...What was his definition of a colour for this purpose?
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---L.
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It's emotionally neutral about particular colors -- gray is a cool color so muted as to be hard to identify and brown is a warm color so muted as to be hard to identify.
The excitement is in seeing colors accurately-- people normally have a lot of contextual illusion about color.
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(You should put it back in for the published review.)
I disagree totally with everything he says about grey, everything, including his spelling of the word-- well, maybe he's right about gray, but I know what I think about grey.
He didn't pay enough attention to Wittgenstein.
(I still want the book.)
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What about pink?
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(Anonymous) 2013-11-10 01:52 am (UTC)(link)http://bookviewcafe.com/blog/2011/04/22/beige/