Last spring I went to an MFA exhibition at Carnegie Mellon. In many ways it was typical of university art–there was the work that commented on war media, the work that commented on sustainability via interactive installation, the work that involved some infinitely looping single-shot film on a small TV, the work by the artist who is good at materials construction but bad at making it mean something. I shouldn’t whine, it was a great space and the art was quite sophisticated. 2-D mediums are so vanilla that utilizing it in an impressive way is no mean feat, but the piece that stood out to me the most happened to be a work on paper that was matted, framed, and glazed in the most common living-room-decor way. I should clarify that by “paper” I mean specifically paint chips from a hardware store. Everyone knows the format of these as vividly as they know the format of a Dollar Value Menu at any drive-thru: opaque wash of color in a frame, color code bottom right corner, color name bottom left corner. Stacked three or four on top of each other like strips of photobooth pictures–all frames resembling each other but slightly different in their own ways.
Long story short, Allison dragged me to Wal-Mart and we bitched about how weird it is that you can buy a (shitty) “Hannah Montana + Max Azaria for Wal-Mart” mini skirt two aisles away from where you can buy a (shitty) camouflage padded carrying case for your assault rifle two aisles away from where you can buy so many cans of so much paint. Walls and walls of infinitesimally divergent shades and hues. How many of these have never been used before, and are just there for the sake of the spectrum? Which is the most used? Probably some relative of taupe because that seems like what would most please the average do-it-yourselfer who consults Wal-Mart for their interior design needs. Will clash with neither NASCAR memorabilia nor Titans football decorative tortilla chip bowl with matching salsa+guac dish. It lets the walls be present without announcing themselves; it is and is not. I picked up a few paint chips from the gray-blue scale as we ambled away. Walking through a big-box with Allison is like being in a Richard Linklater film.
The framed paint chips in the MFA exhibition were arranged in the form of a haiku: words were associated and the colors signified by their names accompanied them as a function of the poetic arrangement. So the color patterns were incidental, and a sort of meta-poetry was created, in which it became unclear whether the words or colors were the original poem, and which dictated which. Raised and answered many questions about language and beauty. Does our idea of beauty stem from how we express beauty, just as how in this work the formal arrangement of color apparently depends on an arbitrary arrangement of syllables–haiku–a structure which itself is considered to reflect some sort of essential beauty that exists in the fundamental cycles of nature. In the artwork, the words themselves construct little narratives, tidy images. Your attention is, at some point, drawn to the fact that the cycle of meaning began with the color, and the word on the paint chip from the need to describe that color, then juxtaposed with other words to form new ideas, the colors described by each word respectively thrown together as a result of those new ideas, and, finally, those colors themselves forming a sort of aesthetic patchwork which both asserts its own meaning–as pure formal color often does–and influences the meaning of the verbal haiku. Or rather, its ambience.
Staring at these blue-to-gray paint chips by themselves, sifting through them one by one like someone counting a stack of dollar bills as Allison and I walk through the sliding doors that open for us automatically, I observe that the wells of meaning associated with just the words themselves are used to pin an associated aesthetic–more specifically, an almost nostalgic, imagined experience–to the color. So when you choose a color from a paint chip, you are not choosing that color, you are choosing an experience suggested by marketers via the color’s assigned name. For example. The blue strip I chose has a gradient of four different shades, all attached to nautical imagery. From lightest to darkest: “Cruiser,” “Blue Wave,” “Portal Blue,” “Aegean.” The words themselves, read vertically, imply their own, self-contained oceanic narrative. Meanwhile, the colors in the white-gray scale all have to do with snow and coldness. Top to bottom: “Winter Wind,” “Stillwater,” “Silver Streak.” And another: “Blue Dust,” “Aerial View,” “December Eve.” Looking at these paint chips is like gazing out a frosty window during a blizzard as the sky slowly darkens.
The irony of the haikus, of course, is that here the paint-chips are the impetus for visual beauty both real and imagined, rather than merely acting in their intended roles as guides for buying paint, which is a volume of something to coat an entire space in whatever aesthetic experience you choose after sifting through any number of meticulously labeled strips. Paint is that which manipulates light and creates visual contrasts, the most basic vector of beauty and character to a room besides the architecture itself. On canvas, paint is that which traditionally gives form to ideas and stories and images.
Is it possible to separate one’s physical experiences, as well as both emotional and intellectual responses, from that which surrounds them on all sides? The room in which I currently sit (and generally exist) is creamy-colored, like whipped cream made by hand with a teaspoon of vanilla extract mixed in. Its texture is that of an egg’s shell. How many times have I wanted these walls to feel like stucco, not so uniform and pat, when I run my hand across them? How many times have I wanted these walls optic white, or chocolate brown? Perhaps the only way to break free of the tyranny of your surroundings, to lift the veil that covers every surrounding wall, to rupture that wash of uniform opacity, is to close your eyes to it. Clarity via blindness. Creation via destruction.
Gertrude Stein demonstrated the tenets of Cubism as manifested verbally in the sentence, “A rose is a rose is a rose.” Cubism as this obsessive intellectual exercise in examining a single thing from various, possibly infinite perspectives. Where does the experiment end? Perfect forms do not exist; there can only be infinitesimally miniscule facets to a prism which appear, from a certain distance, smooth. I suspect Cubism is less about solving those forms than it is about revealing their facets. Perhaps also Cubism was eerily prophetic in describing the world as we would come to know it. As someone who at times both consciously and unconsciously avoids major media outlets, I realize it is nevertheless impossible to avoid that which is prolific and relevant in whatever capacity. Today, awareness is a commodity infinitely propagated and proliferated, a Hydra of consciousness if you will (it’s okay if you won’t), and ignoring collective consciousness is less feasible even than ignoring one’s own. And everything you see and hear and think and do and say is influenced by an exponent of actions and equal-but-opposite reactions and the eternal flutters of a trillion butterflies’ wings, by everything that has ever been seen and heard and thought and done and said in the history of the universe. And maybe that is beautiful, that inescapable interconnectedness, that infinite intricacy, but maybe it is also grotesque. Maybe to understand that is to look into the gorgon’s face and be paralyzed from performing any action ever again.
Maybe that is why Stein, living in Paris during the war, decided not to observe her very neighbors get pulled from their apartments to be persecuted at whatever remote location for whatever reason, and cancelled the delivery of her newspapers, and read only works of fiction, and ceased to communicate with the world outside her habitat or even venture from that habitat except to prune and care for her rose bushes. Maybe she was a coward for choosing that blindness, for looking only at roses when there was death all around, or maybe she understood everything more clearly because of it. Who’s to say, really? A rose is a rose is a rose.