When we emotionally think about colour, a culturally embedded object often shapes our response, the black of the executioner’s hood is different to the black of the blackboard, even if the wavelength we see is the same. The red, white and blue of the Union Jack flag, combining the older flags of England and Scotland with St Patrick’s saltire of a red cross on a white background for Ireland, is very different to the red, white and blue used in the flag of the United States of America. The citizens of the USA are told that white signifies purity and innocence; red, hardiness & valour, and blue vigilance, perseverance and justice.” In France “Bleu, Blanc et Rouge” is the linguistic order, being the colours of the French flag read left to right. The short sound-bite, “The red, white and blue” encompassing patriotism, valour and tribal belonging in an easily repeatable form, but meaning different things to different people. For Alberto Burri who used to be an army ambulance driver and medic, red and white were always the colours of blood and bandages.
Colour often comes with an accompanying text. Even colour charts have their messages, words linked to colours so that you will form an association between the two.
This colour range is designed to be upwardly mobile. A latte drinking, chic gourmet that sleeps in Egyptian cotton, and likes a touch of the exotic.
The 'arty' range, Italian style
In this range we have associations with 'nature'. Minerals, 'limestone, obsidian' or forests and jungles, food or drink or places, each colour suggestive of a certain lifestyle, probably of a traveller, who eats good food, loves wild nature and sees themselves as having strong connections or affinities with the wild.
If you can control the meaning of things, there will always be groups of people that will want to take that control or even "take back control".
The union flag headed flyer above was found discarded on the streets of Durham recently. After seeing that strange language, ‘British the Israel of God’, I was reminded of something I read over 25 years ago. There was an idea making its way around that a computer virus could ‘infect’ people just as it could infect your computer. It was based on how languages work at a deep level, and was derived from Chomsky’s work on universal language structures. The zeros and ones of machine code were seen as a ‘deep language’ and as such even though we could not recognise them, viruses were able to subliminally affect those that were coders because coders had already shaped their own brains by writing computer code on a daily basis. All languages in effect shaping brain structures as they are learnt. The ‘gibberish’ that resulted from being infected by a virus was seen as a sort of glossolalia when read by a coder or when a non-computer expert was affected as a type of xenolalia. This is a very old condition and relates to the fact that all languages are prone to infection, (something the French are always worried about). The Bible for instance tells of people infected by devils speaking in languages known to others but not to the speakers. In Greece this speaking of gibberish was associated with prophecy, as Dale Martin, in his study of the Corinthian body puts it, they "emit words which are not understood by those that utter them; for they pronounce them, as it is said, with an insane mouth”. The Sumerians were the first culture to recognise how a certain set of sounds could infect a whole language and they had a name for it, a ‘nam-shub’.
The way that people spoke when being interviewed on Brexit night made me think that these people were also speaking in tongues, they had in effect been possessed by a ‘nam-shub’. A nam-shub triggers six basic symptoms: loss of rational control; dominance of emotion, leading to hysteria; absence of thought or will; automatic functioning of the speech organs; amnesia and occasional sporadic physical manifestations such as jerking or twitching. In pre-biblical Sumeria a nam-shub was regarded as similar to an infection, or as we would now think of it, a virus attack. Common in many cultures under different names, it is essentially a string of words designed to eliminate rational thought and to replace it with mindless acceptance. In essence, a nam-shub is speech with magical force. Initially a Sumerian word and concept deriving from their agglutinative tongue that collected and grouped syllables together to form words. Magical phrases similar to the one we know as 'ab-ra-cad-ab-ra', were used to control whole populations. Language was understood as magical and was used by the ruling powers to shape minds by enforced repetition of key syllables, such as ‘take-back-con-trol’ or ‘get-bex-it-done’. This repetition was understood as a key element of classical rhetoric and it was well understood that when working with witches language was distorted to enable alternative truths to be woven into the fabric of what was reality, or as Shakespere would put it, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair”. I suspect Dominic Cummings having a classical education and being well versed in computer coding languages was very aware of this condition, he may even have read Neal Stephenson’s ‘Snow Crash’ back in the 1990s when these ideas were themselves viral and he was perhaps not adverse to concocting a language virus himself and trying it out. As it is, it is hard to cure once infected. In particular if you have ever had to write for the Sun newspaper, one of their style guides ensures that you never use polysyllabic words, they have developed a language consisting of ‘simple’ short words and phrases that is then very easy to shape into a nam-shub.
The rise of the Nazis in Germany during the 1930s was a time when the shaping of language into a state weapon was honed to a sort of perfection. A whole population's minds washed into believing they were fulfilling their destiny. But not everyone was convinced; Expressionist Art and Dada pushed back at a set of memes designed to cover up what lay beneath. The Nazi hierarchy perhaps saw more clearly than most, how artists' work operated in relation to the society that produced it. The work of these artists often exposed the dehumanising truths of 1930s German society, psychologically uncovering the iniquities perpetrated by the Nazis, exposing horror hidden behind the classical draperies of their favoured traditional art. The “degenerate” artefacts that they railed against, were in fact images of the unhinged reality that they had bought into being.
Otto Dix: Match seller
Otto Dix was one of many artists labelled as degenerate by the Nazis. He had been in the first world war and saw how horrible both the war and its aftermath were and so it could be argued that his work was in fact a sort of realism. When the works were shown in the 'degenerate art' exhibition it is interesting to see that they had to be labelled as degenerate using large wall texts to ensure the audience knew how to read the works the 'correct' way.
If you read what the artists who were singled out for derision by the Nazis had to say about their work, they were often seeking to tap into the deep unconscious roots of humanity. Either by looking for spiritual underpinnings, such as Kandinsky's interest in theosophical doctrines, or by developing a more 'primitive' or 'unconscious' side to their work. As part of his personal research into these issues, Kandinsky developed a circular colour chart whereby he stated; “As in a great circle, a serpent biting its own tail (the symbol of eternity, of something without end) the six colours appear that make up the three main antitheses.”
One again colour charts are central to an understanding of these issues.
This colour chart is taken from 'Thought-Forms' by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater a text that was first printed in 1901, and was pivotal to the thinking of many artists at the time. The fact that you could have a colour related to 'religious feelings tinged with fear' or 'low type of intellect' is both fascinating and worrying at the same time.
It could be argued that what was again being looked for was the ‘nam-shub’, some sort of colour object that is like a song stuck in your head, an idea that might go 'viral'. "It's the real thing" we were once told. The advertising industry was central to the development of these ideas as the twentieth century unfolded.
The colours of sweets
When you walk down the aisles of a supermarket you will find changes in colour coding as you pass different areas, sweets and biscuits have a different colour range to pharmaceutical products or cleaning materials. Again, colour and text are combined, we see the word 'Crunchie' or 'Maltesers' as a typeface, sound and colour all at once and it embeds itself into our thoughts.
So can art be like that? The Nazis obviously thought so, or they wouldn't have gone to the trouble to ban it. If you are looking at how to use colour to effect people it will be the world of marketing and advertising that is most confident in how to do it. Typically companies will demonstrate that they know how to do it. Colour psychology in marketing is seen as a key tool.
I personally also think it is to do with the surface quality of the colour. Those sweet wrappers are printed on shiny surfaces, which are a combination of plastic and aluminium also known as metallised plastic. This is a very seductive surface, it would not feel the same at all if the sweet wrappers were made of painted linen in exactly the same colours. Is this why we are so seduced by Jeff Koons? Is this why we find certain paintings so dull when we see them in reality? Film stock can shape and change reality in the same way. This is what the Kodak people have to say about Kodak Gold film stock: "Gold has a slightly nostalgic look to it. It brings out the reds and yellows particularly, which are the warm tones Kodak is known for." So if you want your work to look slightly nostalgic you know what to do.
Jeff Koons: Balloon dog
See also:
Just Paint An excellent resource for the painters amongst you. Everything from colour mixing to colour theory. The blog posts developed by a pool of bloggers really understand painter's needs, even down to the adjustments needed if you need to pour your paint.
If you want to mix colour accurately, try this short video as a starting point
