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 enunciable 3.

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 reality 4.
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 object 5, 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 aims 10.
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

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.