THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS IN COLOUR RESEARCH AND TEACHING.

GENERAL AND SPECIFIC AIMS FOR A SUITABLE PROPOSAL

IN THE TEACHING OF COLOUR AT UNIVERSITY LEVEL
Elda Cerrato
Departamento de Artes. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Universidad de Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires (Argentina)
Corresponding author: E. Cerrato (cerratozubillaga@netizen.com.ar)

ABSTRACT
The purpose of this work is to reflect on certain theoretical and methodological aspects of colour research and teaching by suggesting some critical concepts about practices currently applied, to avoid the instauration of
methodologies arisen from anachronism or technical knowledge only.
The proposal focus directly on the way the teaching of perception, meaning and manipulation of colour conditions our repertoire and at the same time is conditioned by the theoretical approaches –existing or not– on the topic. And why, in
colour teaching, we need to keep in mind that all proposals should be provisional and relative.
The contents of a system of meaning depends on our cultural organization of the world into categories1. A given culture organizes the world according to given practices and considers as pertinent different aspects of that
world2.

1. INTRODUCTION
There is no convincing “definition” of colour. If one uses the term “colour” to mean the pigmentation of substances in the environment, one has not said anything about our chromatic perception. Colour is not an exclusive technical or theoretical
universe, but a place of crossing, interferences, contaminations. The distinctions of colour are naturally based, although those natural distinctions are constituted culturally. Then I will tried to disclose splits of the
mechanism of the relations between names of colours and the related chromatic impression. Discrimination and categorization of the colour. The visible thing and its enunciability. It is important at this stage, to pay special attention to syntax
colour language. Languages impose tags. The anchoring of the enunciable may have a slighter ambiguity than the visible, reducing its own extension and palming part of its poetic. Reduce not, without residues valued and conscious, the
visible thing to it enunciable3.

2. METHOD
Stage 1. The interest of current theories in the analysis of cultural and artistic objects, colour in our case, is focused on perception and visual processes. There are social basis for the perception process in the human being
which rules our appropriation and significance of a complex and multiple reality4. Such social basis constitutes our personal and collective intersubjectivity, upon which our perceptive coherence, the basic instrument for the
construction of a theory of visual and artistic meaning, rests.
Stage 2. I intend to produce a repertoire of different aspects on colour formalization: throughout the possible disciplines intervening, as colour does not belong to an only one theoretical object5, as well as a revision through the
aspects that are used to considering theoretical and/or technical elements in the studies of the theme, clarifying its current validity.
Stage 3. Inclusion in the levels and environments forecasted, aspects of the extensive spectrum generated in the previous stages. I will refer exclusively to the selection of contents –the different topics according to disciplines intervening, each
one of them with its own language: physiology, psychology, social sciences, physics, aesthetic, materials, technology, and more so on…, as colour does not belong to an only unique theoretical object not detailing methodological specifications
as design of activities, which are fundamental, even if they imply a meticulous development that is not possible here and that I carried out separately.

3. RESULTS
1st Stage. Every approach of the visual properties, among which colour is included, implies to initiate it with the study of the mechanisms of historically constructed perception as configuration, organization and instauration of general or private
worlds. Perception is erected, thus, as the mediator, between the image in general and the artistic one, mainly since the production and since the reception.
Paraphrasing Merleau-Ponty: “One must not ask if we truly perceive color, one must say: color is what we perceive”6. Colour would be a construct that we devise from certain data that arrives at us and we incorporate
into our intersubjectivity. If the presuppositions of that intersubjectivity were altered and were established variants, the perceptive coherence of the world just as we knew it would vary and would be weakened, and new cognitive possibilities
of the same one, would appear.
While this coherence perceptive intersubjectivily shared is installed, it would be less than impossible to implement the basic premise of phenomenology, invoked at present, by the majority of the authors, in all the areas: I refer to the suspension
of judgment, the phenomenological reduction, “to look at the world with perplexity”, as expressed Eugene Fink, Husserl’s assistant, “and not as already given”.
We observe the world through imposed categories almost all the time, even if we recognize that, “for some times, for some reason, the categories are suspended. When they are, we have an experience of the “supersensible”, a perspective
that is not confined to a personal standpoint”7. Brennan differentiates the symbolic, ethereal look, from the physical look, that is passive, historically constructed, organizer of the normal intersubjectivity, which, since the habit, the custom,
mandate is done.
2nd Stage. Formalization of the repertoire of the different foci on colour.
With the intention to insert some reflections on the teaching of colour at universities and institutes of tertiary level, I believe it convenient to consider a possible enumeration of frameworks of reference. This proposal of code is not only an
enumeration of themes; not yet I dare, like I declared it in previous works, to call them “universes of the discourse”, although they would pretend to run parallels and resultant of a segmentation of all the body of colour. I actually believe that
those “universes of the discourse” used to present common points and, from multiple crossing, they keep constructing themselves with the contribute of the other. Calabrese in his proposal, refers that the processing of colours from Aristotle to
Runge and Itten, was considered as belonging to the same object, perhaps polymorphous (divergent by functions and aim), by the aesthetic and scientific criticism. Nevertheless it is possible to verify all the contrary by very numerous trials:
the existence of sense universes variety caused by the variety of the universes of the discourses in which they are inserted8. I propose to organize the dispersion of the multiple themes related to colours in three large domains even though they
do not result of a defined pertinence about the practices that occupy them, the different aspects allocated by the investigations about colour may become more significant, making up a universe more or less coherent.
2nd Stage. A. Perception of colours.
This area contains different aspects, since the theoretical physics, physiology, cultural anthropology, psychology and systematic ones. Here I include the different theories that explain the mechanisms of the perception in general and of the
perception of colors particularly. This aspect is fundamental and be biased or incomplete or careless at times.
A1. Physical. The light. Optics. Colorimetric.
A2. The eye and the brain. Anatomy. Normal physiology/abnormal.
A3. Differentiation among passive historically constructed vision and receptive vision. Its history. Relativities in the perception of colours; optic illusions.
A4. Experimental psychology. Thresholds. Discrimination and categorization. Tint and other variables. Perceptively fundamental colours.
A5. Relation with other visual properties: form (figure), texture, brilliance. Kinesthesia. This module is related to A3.
A6. Order Systems. Organization according to the variables. Models. They derive from A1, A2, A3, A4 and A5. They are ideological; they imply a prior combinatorial, with previously imposed rules through coordinates, variables, intervals.
Syntactic markers, power markers.
2nd Stage. B. Colour referring. Production of the colour (as stimulus). Materials and media. Productive and technical aspects.
B1. Pigments, vehicles, etc. B2. Colored Light. B3. Electronic. B4. Mix media.
2nd Stage. C. Uses and meanings of the colour in different practices:
The problem is how to move from a legal system of colour to an artistic one.
Historical, philosophical, symbolic, aesthetic meanings of colour repertoires and combinatorial.
Meanings and the cultural boundaries. Recommendations. Harmonies. Expression and effects of sense: “… the deep meaning of a sign, cannot be the idea of a sign, since the last meaning of any sign consists or well in an idea predominantly
of feeling or well in an idea predominantly of action or of passion9.
Ascertain whether the previous items:
Practices on different contexts in which the colour acquires more specific meanings:
The different artistic traditional genus. Present artistic genus.
Designs. Colour codes and techniques of reproduction.
The practice in other contexts and its relation with colours: Medicine. Psychotherapies. Music.
Consequent and obviously, a certain number of disciplines intervene in the research and teaching of colour and here we indicate what we believe are two foci of confusion:
First focus of confusion: Concepts whose reach or meaning have been taken for granted, without defining their respective referring frameworks, have been too much utilized, in a flagrant lack of theoretical sobriety.
The utilization of colour criteria recognition and meaning, nomenclatures, assignment of variables, prescription of repertoires and combinatorial, are absolutely contingent, significant and actually decisions for the alone cultural unit that has
established them.
We find innumerable examples, since the famous dictionaries of terms of the Visual Arts that propose immovable definitions and with universalistic character of concepts, without taking account of the context in which they function, to the
frivolous attitude in art history to extend with a cloak of homogeneity facts which are not adapted to the standard of the dominant centers. What is different should appear as comfortable and acceptable if it turns familiar: the historicism acts
of historicism to diminish differences.
Second focus of confusion: The semiotic strategy constituted, in certain moment a hit more or less present and the panacea of many researcher; in our field —and also in other ones—, it presents some problems of not easy solution. We have
detected a central impediment working with semiotic methodologies: the character of continuum of our visual field and so of the colour field. The involvement in the studies about perception/meaning seems
inevitable if we pretend to avoid all triflingness. Therefore they should erect a presemiotic phase equivalent perhaps to the linguistic segmentation – or an efficient substitute of the same one.
Perception occupies an uneasy ( Eco says “puzzling” ) position, somewhere midway between semiotic categorization and discrimination based upon mere sensory processes. This it is another dominion where the investigation is fundamental,
in order to build a microsemiotic of the visual, decisive for an adequate semiotic of painting (or of colours in its utilization) whithout transposing to these domains the operations of the double linguistic articulation.
The semiotic strategy may be justified with a certain precision as:
It recovers methodological principles of empirical sciences for its analysis purposes.
By definition, it considers its objects as cultural objects, resultant from men practices and, therefore, always significant, avoiding at the same time an ingenuous pseudoscientific materialism (technical standpoint) or an spiritualism (Newton) ó
an individualistic spiritualism (aestheticism).
3rd Stage. As I said at the beginning of this work, I will not detail now methodological specifications as design of activities that are fundamental, but that imply a meticulous development that is not possible here and that I carried on
separately.
As much in the tertiary specialized level, as much as in the university level, two situations are presented:
1. Careers whose objective is the study in which the management of the concrete materials is privileged on top the theoretical reflection: art objects production, crafts, design. The technical/productive process.
2. Careers whose objective is the production of theoreticians.
In the first situation, it is important to cover for the teaching of colour the three named domains: A-B-C, standing up obviously the B as it is the technical/productive process, referring to the materials and media production of colours works.
In the second situation, although at times the domain B is totally excluded, would be advisable some incursions on it.

4.�CONCLUSIONS
The globalization as universalism reinforces the uniformity of the collective intersubjectivity. The so-called countercultures are opposed to the uniformity as their national or particularistic aims10.
The scientific approximation to the complex of practices and theories which today are culturally included under the concept of colour is a necessity that can only be satisfied clarifying the convenient conditions and requisites for the foundation
of one or more theories.
The concept of theory has nothing to do with the same term so frequently used to name a collection of basically composed texts by judgments of values, opinions, prescriptions, manifestoes, cosmo
visions, advising and systematizations or technical codes.
Briefly, there are other aims in the pedagogical process I will point out from now:
It is commendable to attain some homogenization of a common language on referring to basic aspects on the visual property of colour and their variables.
To clarify the validity or not of the current theoretical underpinning propositions that are used to handle in this area.
To indicate the complexity and the relativity of some concepts retained obvious.
Criticisms to some methodologies at present in use in tertiary institutes and universities, as much in the investigations as in the study program and bibliographies:
The practice of teaching and of researching insofar it exists in certain institutions, discloses two sides traveled by study modules, by the respective teachers and what can derive from them, obviously extended to pedagogical processing of
colour.
To preserve a single synchronic focus attitude and the practice of time and space universalism as I previously said are accompanied by a surprising mediocrity of information.
The apparently opposite attitude is often represented by a proposal which at first sight is up to date, liberating and trespassing. In most cases it shares with the previous the absence of a seriously researching attitude, and the
necessary information, and it takes advantage of the fear of criticism and the dictatorship of fashion. The bibliographies of programs and institutions are frequently deplorable.
Suggestions. To put into practice, even if occasionally, the receptive sight, the old extramission, light from the eyes, to neutralize at least partially the passive vision, historically built and originated into the concept
of the camera obscura of the 17th century, organizer of the normal intersubjectivity, which from habit and custom, became a mandate.
Each language has an internal pragmatism: it has their own procedure of variation, its crazy production of velocities and intervals. The rules, the systems, the codes are power markers more than syntactical markers, like a
cuirass; we are prisoners of syntax.

Notes and references

(Endnotes)
1
U. Eco. A theory of semiotics (bompiani, milano, 1976).
2
L. Prieto. Pertinence et pratique. Essai de sèmiologie (minuit, paris, 1975).
3
G. Deleuze, f. Guattari. Mil plateaux (capitalisme e schizophrenie) (minuit, paris, 1980).
4
P. Berger, th. Luckmann. 1961. The social construction of reality.(New york, 1993), p. 40.
5
O. Calabrese. “El problema del color en los tratados de arte del cinquecento: un capítulo de historia semiótica”, in estética, 8, 1991, p. 47.
6
M. Merleau-ponty. Phénoménologie de la perception.(Gallimard, paris, 1945).
7
T. Brennan. “‘The context of vision’ from a specific standpoint”, in vision in context, t. Brennan, m. Jay, eds. (New york: routledge, 1996), p. 223.
8
O. Calabrese. Op. Cit., P. 47.
9
Ch. S. Peirce. Lectures on pragmatism. 1903.
10
I. Wallerstein. “The national and the universal”, in culture, globalization and the world-system, a. D. King, ed. (Minneapolis, 1997) pp. 92-94.