Interfaces.

Image-Texte-Langage

Unpacking the Monochrome: Some Reflections on Muteness in Art

Kenneth G. Hay

Résumé
L'auteur suit le développement du monochrome en art depuis les prises de position anti-esthétiques des formalistes russes
jusqu'à l'emploi esthétique puis critique qu'en ont fait les artistes occidentaux. Il analyse successivement les œuvres de Yves
Klein et celles de Manzoni, puis le minimalisme de Reinhart et Agnès Martin et celui d'artistes comme Günther Fôrg, Alan
Charlton ou Andreas Christen.

Citer ce document / Cite this document :

Hay Kenneth G. Unpacking the Monochrome: Some Reflections on Muteness in Art. In: Interfaces. Image-Texte-Langage 9,
1996. La Couleur parle (1) pp. 31-44;

doi : https://doi.org/10.3406/inter.1996.1043

https://www.persee.fr/doc/inter_1164-6225_1996_num_9_1_1043

Fichier pdf généré le 14/03/2023

 UNPACKING THE MONOCHROME: SOME REFLECTIONS ON
MUTENESS IN ART

Introduction

'Since the theme of our colloquium is the theme of colour in the

arts, I have chosen to examine the phenomenon in its most absolute
form — as either total colour, or the total refusal of colour as
represented in the enigmatic figure of the monochrome, or the single
coloured painting, a form which first appeared in the early art of the
present century, was widespread in the 1960's, and has been developed
subsequently in a variety of guises.1 Of course, "muteness" is usually
defined as the inability to speak, sometimes, as with the absolute truths
of religion, in the "blank scrolls" of Carolingian manuscripts,2 or the
inductive enlightenment of Zen, to allude to truths which 'passeth our
understanding', but at other times muteness is more wilful, even
mischievous, amounting to a denial of communication, and emerging
out of a sullen refusal to cooperate in the 'discourse of others'.3 Again,
muteness of expression is not to be confused with absence of
expression, and the empirical evidence of uniformly painted

321 Parle”,
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32 Interfaces 9 ( 1996)

monochrome objects such as the paintings which concern me here is

not to be simplistically rendered as univocal. It is precisely my thesis,
which I hope to illustrate below that two apparently identical objects,
uniformly coloured, without further embellishment, can and do give rise
to wide polysémie variety, even to the extent of being ideologically
opposite in intent and effect.
In the early part of the century in the fledgling Soviet Union, the
artists Rodchenko and Malevich experimented with a reductivist
aesthetic which effected simultaneously the exclusion of all previous
"anecdotal" or 'extraneous' narrative subject matter and the 'opening up'
of the minimal surface of the pictorial object to a script which was yet
to be written; both an abjection and an objectification of art/history. In
works like Malevich's "The Black Suprematist Square" (1914-15) the
totalising black pigment serves both to negate all previous
painting/history, and to herald a new 'suprematist' age of resolution,
summation, celebration. Similarly Rodchenko's "The dissolving of the
surface" (1920) signals the passing of traditional aesthetics, with
perhaps less confident assertiveness of the future.
Characteristically, in a foretaste of the dialectical echoing of
cultural projects which was to epitomise the Cold War, it was in
America that the monochrome thematic was developed, albeit with
completely different aspirations. Marsden Hartley, writing in the 1930's
remarked that,

Real color is in a condition of neglect at the present time because

monochrome has been the fashion for the last 15 or 20 years —
even the superb colorist Matisse was for a time affected by it.
Cubism is largely responsible for this because it is primarily
derived from sculptural concepts and found little need for color
itself.4

4 Marsden
June 1928,
Hartley,
in H. B.Chipp,
"Art and Theories
the personal
of Modern
life", 1928,
Art, inBerkley,
"Creative
L. A,
Art"1968,
(Newp.York)
528. II, 6
Kenneth Hay: Unpacking the Monochrome 33

What Hartley was referring to, however, is less the phenomena

of 'one-colour' paintings which form the focus of the current paper, as
the preponderance of Cubist grisaille.
If we take paintings by artists as different as Ad Reinhardt, Piero
Manzoni, and Ian Wallace, (I could equally say Alan Charlton, Brice
Marden and Gunther Fbrg), the central problematics of the monochrome
become apparent. How are we to interpret a blank featureless canvas,
stretching out unmodulated on either side of our bemused gaze? What
differences of interpretation can we determine between the blank expanse
of one artist's canvas, as against another's? Is expression an issue, or
even possible here, or is the monochrome a refusal to speak on the part
Does
of the it
artist
makeor asense
reluctance
to talk
to engage
in terms
in dialogue
of the with
'inflection'
the spectator?
of the

monochrome, so that an apparently identical form can be seen to

embody multiple contradictory meanings?
here. These and other questions will form the basis of my discussion

In what follows, appreciative of the limitations of space, I have

chosen to analyse three aspects or phases of the monochrome: firstly,
the monochrome as abnegation and anti-art; second, the monochrome as
aesthetic (subdivided into an aesthetics of celebration and an aesthetics
of asceticism), and thirdly disaffirmative or critical monochrome in the
work of Ian Wallace, Gerhard Richter and others — the monochrome as
refusal to participate and as mute witness to history, which latter
direction is where my own sympathies and practical work lies.5

PHASE ONE: HOFMANN AND THE "RULES" —

MONOCHROME AS ABNEGATION

For Hans Hofmann, (taken here as a spokesperson for "Canonical

Modernism") colour was conceived in terms of the "perception of plastic

5 Hereterms
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and with
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34 Interfaces 9 (1996)

and psychological differences in the quality of light... These differences

are conceived as color intervals which are similar to tensions, the
expression of related forces between two or more solid forms."6
Hence the monochrome would appear to Hofmann as a reduction
of these colour intervals, and thus an avoidance or 'closing down' of
'tensions' and consequently of the possibility of expression.
This reductive view of the monochrome is undoubtedly one
aspect of its possible usages in art, albeit like its source, inextricably
'formalist'. A dialectical appraisal of Hofmann's definition would see the
adoption of a monochrome (artistic) strategy in terms of the positing of
a new (perhaps higher) tension between mute form and the rejection of
Hofmann's formalist aesthetic. For Hofmann defines the very essence of
art in terms of the formal tensions between colours. In reply, the critical
monochrome responds with the refusal of this tension by reducing its
colours to one, thereby establishing a new non-formal tension between
expected and denied expressions of formal difference: the monochrome
seems 'mute' — it seems to resist interpretation and deny expression.
For Hofmann, it was only through the artist's and then the
viewer's perceptions of these formal differences — differences of shape
and colour, position and relative dimension, that the work of art took on
'expressive' qualities. The artist/spectator must "empathise" with the
"thing" experienced through, "the imaginative projection of one's own
consciousness into another being, or thing".7
Empathy, in art was, "the intuitive faculty to sense qualities of
formal and spatial relations, or tensions, and to discover the plastic and
psychological qualities of form and colour".8
At the heart of Hofmann's aesthetic lies the concept of the
"interval". An interval is a dialectic between two colours or shapes, but
also between expression and medium.
The perception of intervals, "leads necessarily to the concept of
an "interval" art. An interval results from relationship."9

9876 Ibid.,
Hanstransi.,
Jr.,
65-78.
Hofmann,
Hofmann,
p. 541.
538.
inGlenn
H.B.Search
Wessels,
Chipp,forTheories
Andover,
the RealofMass.,
and
Modem
other
Addison
Art,
Essays
Berkley,
Gallery
, ed. S.T.
of
1968,
American
Weks,
p. 537.
andArt
B. 1948,
H. Hayes
pp.
Kenneth Hay: Unpacking the Monochrome 35

This dialectic produces a third or higher synthesis, which he

terms "spiritual":

A relation requires at least two material carriers to produce a

superimposed higher "surreal" as the meaning of the relation.10

A color interval is comparable to the tension created by a form

relation. What a tension signifies in regard to form, an interval
signifies in regard to color ; it is a tension between colors that
make color a plastic means.11

Consequently, the absence of such a colour tension would, for

Hofmann, render the painting irretrievably "non-plastic" — or formless.
It is this critical rejection of the monochrome as an artistic abnegation,
which flavours the critical reception of the monochrome as non-art
when it first appeared in the 1940's with Ad Reinhardt, Piero Manzoni
and Yves Klein, and which by an Aufhebung, typical of Modernism,
gave rise to the Minimalist embrace of the monochrome as pure form
with Don Judd, Agnes Martin and others in the 1950's. For Hofmann
however, art remains perceptible only through intuition and is thus
metaphysical:

Each expressive medium has a life of its own, regulated by

certain laws it can be mastered only by intuition during the act of
creating. It is in the nature of the laws which govern every
expression-medium that two separate entities, related through
empathy, always produce a higher third of a purely spiritual
nature. an
carries The
emotional
Spiritual
content...12
third manifests itself as quality which

This higher synthesis, which Hofmann defines as essentially

spiritual and mystical, ultimately determines the nature of the final
plastic expression. It lies, literally beyond the physical world of

Ibid., p. 541.
1 1
10
12 Ibid., p. 543.
Ibid., p. 541.
36 Interfaces 9 ( 1996)

material cause and effect. Now J.B. Priestly remarked elsewhere, that
mysticism, "Starts in mist, centres on "I", and ends in schism", and I
agree
not do.with him, that in philosophy as in aesthetic theory, it simply will

PHASE TWO: THE "AESTHETIC MONOCHROME"

An Aesthetics of celebration : Yves Klein's

totalising vision

In Klein, the monochrome takes on metaphysical and Romantic

overtones. In 1948, Klein had come across a book by Max Heindel
entitled, "La cosmogonie des Rose-Croix", which laid out the principles
of the Rosicrucians. For Heindel, the world was approaching the end of
the "Age of Matter", where Spirit was trapped and encumbered, and
would soon be commencing the new "Age of Space", which would set
the Spirit free.13 For Heindel, the colour blue was the physical
embodiment of this new age. For Klein, this book was a revelation.
When he reached Paris in 1955, he was already styling himself as the
self-appointed "messenger of the Blue void" , and set about creating the
famous series of Blue works which attempted to "free" art from the
limitations of line and form — only colour, as the pure embodiment of
the universal spirit would remain; as he declared:

I espouse the cause of Pure Colour.. ..I will defend colour, and I
will deliver it, and I will lead it to final triumph14

It is clear that for Klein, the monochrome took on an absolute

symbolism, which was at the same time, and absolute idealism. A
single expanse of pure pigment, applied to a surface, embodied:

13
14 Cf Klein,
1962:
York,
Y. Thomas
Abrams,
A Retrospective,
in McEvilley,
McEvilley,
Î 982. p.
"Yves
Houston,
42. Klein: Institute
: Conquistador
for the of
Arts,
the Rice
void",University;
in Yves Klein
publ. 1928-
New
Kenneth Hay: Unpacking the Monochrome 37

The diffusion of energy in space, its stabilising by pure colour15

and was intended to focus what he believed to be the cosmic energies

emanating from space. As with Manzoni the extremism of his project
was extended to encompass the physical being of the artist in that Klein
declared himself to be "Yves the monochrome". Again, where Manzoni
worked systematically and logically through the possibilities
inaugurated by his aesthetic strategy, Klein's aesthetic tended to the
mystical — the materials he used purported to be "pure" and "elemental"
(fire, pure powdered pigments, water, gold leaf, and, like Manzoni, the
naked female body), and the colours he chose derived not from artistic
necessity, but from the mystical Rosicrucian trilogy of pink, blue and
gold. Klein pushed this identification of content with pure elemental
matter further into mysticism with the declaration, in January 1957, of
the "Epoca blu" in the Galleria Apollinaire, Milan, which was to
irrevocably alter the career of the Italian artist Piero Manzoni.
Klein extended his conception of the monochrome as celebrative
expanse of pure colour to encompass the notion of 'pure space' — "Le
vide", first captured at the Galerie Iris Clert, in Paris in 1958 at which a
crowd of nearly 3000 visitors attended. Klein had arranged for two
Republican Guards in full dress uniform to guard the entrance and
appeared himself in tuxedo to usher in small groups of spectators to the
totally empty and whitewashed gallery, whilst outside glasses of blue
drink were handed to those waiting. The blue drink contained a dye
which ensured that anyone drinking it would have blue urine for a
week.The "Monotone Symphony" which accompanied the "living Brush
performance in the galerie Internationale d'Art Contemporain took the
notion of radical simplicity into the musical field, comprising as it did
one single note repeated for 20 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of
silence, in an intellectual manoeuvre which preceded the "silences" of
John Cage ("4 minutes") and Gyorgy Ligeti (Volumina 1967).
For Klein, then, the monochrome was an absolute statement of
an absolute value; Yves Klein Blue was the summation of a cosmic

15 Laurence
"Klein to King,
Pierre London,
Restany, 1995,
in Jonathan
p. 222. Fineberg", Art since 1940: Strategies of Being,
38 Interfaces 9 (1996)

energy which united painter and audience, individual and cosmos in a

highly personal restatement of the quasi religious 'un-stateable'; as with
Hofmann, understanding rests on belief.

An Aesthetics of Irony: Manzoni

With Manzoni's work, the monochrome takes on a new ironic

slant. Unlike Klein, for whom pure pigment became a symbol or
embodiment of absolute space, Manzoni used his "Achromes" —
various surfaces painted over with white glue primer — more as neo-
dada anti-objects, revealing their mute facticity as results of a decision
making process. For Manzoni, the simplicity and apparent
pointlessness of such deliberate blankness ironicised the heavy
seriousness of traditional artistic expression. Manzoni rejected the idea
of art as a mere surface for the existential outpourings of the artist.
Instead, art became a space for "Absolute images that have no value as
representations, descriptions, or expressions, but only as what they
are: simply being."16
The "Achromes" of 1957 were mute surfaces, a piece of canvas
covered in white emulsion, a basic elementary sign which eliminated
autobiography, and made of the canvas an artistic value in itself. It said
nothing and explained nothing: as he said:

A picture has a value in that it exists: there's no need to say

anything; being is all that matters: two colours in harmony or
two shades of the same colour, already represent a relationship
which is extraneous to the meaning of the unique, limitless,
absolutely dynamic surface.17

The problem became one of producing "a totally white — or

rather, totally colourless surface — removed from all pictorial
phenomena... a white which is in no sense a polar landscape, an

1176 Piero
P.
Body:
Century,
Manzoni,
Manzoni,
Lucio
Prestel,
Fontana
quoted
in Munich
"Libera
and
in and
G.Piero
Dimensione",
Celant,
London
Manzoni",
"From
1989,
Azimuth,
in
p.the
E.
297.n°Braun,
Open2 Jan,Wound
ed.,
1960.
Italian
to the
Art Resurrected
of the 20th
Kenneth Hay: Unpacking the Monochrome 39

evocative or even merely beautiful material, a sensation or a symbol, or

anything else (a colourless surface which is a colourless surface) and
indeed, better still, a surface which is, and nothing else: being."18
different
With
reasons
both was
Kleinused
and in
Manzoni
a reductive
then,and
the aesthetic
monochrome,
manner.
albeit
Other
for

Italians for whom the monochrome had similar implications were

Enrico Castellani, and later, Giulio Paolini, giving rise within an
Italian context, to what Germano Celant has termed a "white
mysticism", which was to reappear in 1963 with Luciano Fabbro's
glass and mirror pieces.

An Aesthetics of asceticism (then & now) —

Reinhardt, Agnes Martin and Minimalism

In the 1950's, Ad Reinhardt developed a kind of severe reductivist

painting of a rigorous geometry based on a fairly literal reading of
Mondrian. A contemporary of Pollock and Motherwell, Reinhardt, in
contradiction to them chose the monochrome as the path of least
subjective expression. Like Greenberg, Reinhardt came to symbolise the
"intransigent" position that a "return to figuration" was technically, but
not morally possible after the advances made by abstract art. Greenberg
openly declared that "Any painter today, not working abstractly is
working in a minor mode"19 By 1960, Reinhardt's work had moved
towards a formal reductionism so radical that his paintings consisted of
a black rectangle inscribed with almost imperceptible vertical and
horizontal near-black trisections. Reinhardt saw these works, exhibited
at the Pace Gallery in New York in 1960, as a definite 'solution' to the
problem of painting such that any ulterior developments were
thenceforward impossible. Like Josef Albers, Reinhardt's work
proclaims that all subjectivism with its Romantic overtones, is dead.

18
19 Ibid
C.
Sculptors
1965,
Greenberg,
, p.26297.
of& the
27,inFifties,
cited
E. DeNY,
inKooning,
Irving
HarperSandler,
"Subject:
& Row, The
196,
What,p.New96.
How,York
or School:The
Who?", Art News,
Painters
April
&
40 Interfaces 9 ( 1996)

The new art must be cool, minimal, mute, and impersonal; as Reinhardt
quipped, "Exit nature, enter art".20
The notion of the monochrome as negative summation of all
possible expressions resurfaces, quite literally, in Rauschenberg's
"White Paintings" of 1951. Influenced by William Burrough's "Naked
Lunch", Rauschenberg began a series of "white paintings" which aimed
to maintain an unfocussed openness to external events. Instead of
offering a subjective vision for the spectator to reflect upon, the blank
canvas became quite literally a neutral backdrop over which reflections
of light and shade could play.
As he said, "I want my paintings to be reflections of life... your
self-visualisation is a reflection of your surroundings."21
Rauschenberg's vision of a de-centered self, openly reflective of
surrounding circumstances and essentially 'impersonal" and anti-
subjective directly opposes Abstract Expressionism's concern for
authenticity and subjective expression, (he declared: "I don't want my
personality to come out through the piece"),22 and prefigures to a
remarkable degree, the debates concerning artistic intention and the
structure of meaning within postmodernism and deconstruction some
thirty years later. In the subsequent, "Black Paintings" of 1952,
Rauschenberg explained, that he "was interested in getting complexity
without revealing much".23
His ultimate gesture in this direction was the "erased De
Kooning Drawing" (1953) which quite literally removes the physical
traces of subjectivity from the aesthetic field of De Kooning's abstract
expressionism. This becomes the absolute statement of the
monochrome's aesthetic of abnegation.
Minimalism took up this self denial and developed it into a
rigorously logical aesthetic. With Judd and Agnes Martin, simplicity of
form becomes not just a rejection of previous aesthetics, but a new cool
aesthetic of geometry, elegance, simplicity and grace. From its early

20
22
23
21 A. Calvin
R.
York,
Ibid.
In
Time",
Reinhardt,
Rauschenberg,
p.E.Garden
72.Avendon
Tomkins,
inCity,
E.inéditions,
De
New
"Of
Barbara
Kooning,
the
York,
1987,
Wall:
Rose,
Doubleday,
op.cit.,
p.Robert
"An
72. p.interview
96.
Rauschenberg
1980, p. with
72. Robert
and theRauschenberg",
Art World of New
Our
Kenneth Hay : Unpacking the Monochrome 41

critical prise-de-position, Minimalism soon settled down into Art, with

a capital A, and Judd, in Marfa, Texas, filled the whole town with it.

PHASE THREE: CRITICAL (NON-AESTHETIC)

MONOCHROME — THE REFUSAL TO PARTICIPATE

Post minimalism, the monochrome continues as a living

tradition and its forms divide into ideologically opposite camps.
Second generation minimalists like Alan Charlton or Alan
Uglow, continue with the formalisation of minimalism as heir to the
grand abstract tradition. The inflections are subtle and architectonic, but
the genre remains largely unquestioned. This is true in varying degrees
of the work of the Swiss artists Andreas Christen, Adrian Schiess and
Olivier Mossett. With Gerhard Merz and Günther Fôrg in Germany and
A1 MacWilliams and Ian Wallace in Canada, and Terry Atkinson in
England, I would suggest that the critical edge of the monochrome, its
refusal to speak in a discourse in which the cards are stacked against it,
remains alive. With these artists, as with Gerhard Richter, the
monochrome takes on some of Adorno's metaphorical colouring. As
Adomo remarked in 1970:

Radical art is the same as dark art: its background colour is

black.24

Black is the colour of the postmodern soul, whose

materialisation after the Holocaust is often ashen grey.
Benjamin Buchloh, writing on the monochromatic works of
NieleToroni, found in them:

a type of painting which, in order to exist, must confront both

the menace of photography and that of the mechanically produced
object25

25
24 T. Adomo,
B.
Editions
Buchloh,
Daled,
"Black
Neile
1985,
asToroni:
anp. Ideal",
36. l'index
1970.de la peinture, transi, Claude Gintz, Brussels,
42 Interfaces 9 (1996)

For Buchloh, the monochromatic canvas is the materially arrived

at antithesis of a visual sensibility which has become debased by, or if
you will, overexposed to, photographic and cultural proliferation. As
such, it provides a silent emblem of negation of the dominant logos.
In similar vein, the "Grey Paintings" of Gerhard Richter function
as mute reflections on the despair of painting. The Canadian artist Jeff
Wall, in an important essay on the monochrome, comments thus:

Richter's paintings contemplate their own self-alienation into a

historically evolved form of reproduction, from within whose
space their own image is returned as a kind of disappearance.. ..In
their extreme self-emptying and reduction, they express also the
longing to evolve into a completely new form of art, one
unbounded by poetry or ideology, the pole stars of the bourgeois
imagination.26

Wall is correct, I think, to situate the revival of the

monochrome, post-World War Two, as a "social repetition" of capitalist
culture, its survival without legitimation after the Holocaust, in
particular in the boom period of the 1950's to 1960's, combining as it
does, the twin embers of productivism and mysticism, in the work of
Klein, Fontana, Stella and Ryman.
The monochrome situates itself self-consciously as the "degré
zéro de la peinture", against which history (and its subset, art history) is
contrasted. In Wallace, the use of a blank panel in relation to an image
derives in part from Warhol's diptych format of the "Death and Disaster"
series, (such as "Red Disaster", 1963-85), where the intolerable nature
of the imagery is counterposed to an unremitting blank panel, as if to
"balance it" in some way, as if it could be balanced, as if to suggest, by
its blankness, that the image was unredeemable.27

26
27 J.1990,
A.
of
painting",
1967-82",
Wall,
Warhol,
just
p. painting
LainVancouver,
16. "IThe
mélancolie
Art
loved
idea
Talk:
thethat
ofsame
dethe
1988,
Theblank
lablank
early
painting
rue:
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64.canvas
Idylllike
1980's,
thing;
and
came
edtheMonochrome
J.and
from
Siegel,
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I wish
Ellsworth
Dathat
and
in
Capo
Ithe
Kelly.
never
had
Editions,
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IanNew
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the
another
York,
idea
Kenneth Hay: Unpacking the Monochrome 43

The inclusion of the blank half of the diptych is therefore an

allegorical display of the agent which silences a dissenting

political
As Wallaceexpression.28
himself observes:
The ’melancholic' dialectics of these images is ultimately
pathetic insofar as the viewer wants to fill in the emptiness of
the images and bring some form of redemption to the
interpretation.29
But perhaps there may be no redeeming suture in the political
sphere. What remains then, is a "mute ideal" — a blank surface, which
rather than arraigning itself, expresses the sublime refusal of the
unwinnable struggle, a strategy, which., as Benjamin knew, was
essential for survival. This "symbolism is the sublimation of the
introversion of those who recognise the objectivity of defeat, but not its
permanence".30
It is on this aspect of critical, even sullen, muteness, in the
sense of 'bearing witness' to history that I would conclude by situating
my own work, whose use of the monochrome, in a series of paintings
called collectively, "Backgrounds to History", one of which is illustrated
here, ("Untitled", 1994, Acrylic on Canvas, 4x5 feet), derives in part
from Wallace, in part from the 'neutral' backgrounds of Jacques Louis
David's "History Paintings" such as the "Death of Marat". In David, the
'all over' crosshatching in the background of grey green over rose or
ochre, a standard neo-classic painting technique, enlivens the background
of the painting, creating a 'neutral which is not neutral', against which
the historical action takes place. The works combine references to the
tradition of formalist painting, particularly the monochrome,
interspersed, or in Brechtian terms, "interrupted" by echoes of 20th

J. Wall, ibid, p. 71.

30
29
28 I. Wallace, ibid, p. 72.
J. Wall, ibid, p. 73.
44 Interfaces 9 (1996)

century history, the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, the Leningrad

Campaign, the Gulf War. By focussing on the background alone,
history
the hermeneutic
becomeschain.
the "absent other" which must be evoked to complete

Kenneth G. HAY31
The University of Leeds U.K.

31 Kenneth
of the Fine
Hay,
Art artiste
Programme
et écrivain,
à l'Université
est Senior
de Lecturer
Leeds. in Fine Art et Studio Co-ordinator