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Book Review The colour of meaning and the meanings of colour

A tightrope between the profound and the profane sense of the colour, writes ROX MIDDLETON

The World According to Colour: A Cultural History
by James Fox
Allen Lane, £25

THERE’S a famous thought experiment called Mary’s room in which a woman locked in a black and white room learns everything there is to know about colour, without ever seeing it herself.

Eventually she is released, and the thought experiment wonders whether she has learnt anything new through the experiencing the colour first hand.

The experiment was devised in the 1980s by an Australian philosopher. In its essence, it allows us to contemplate the mysterious and inexpressible experience of “qualia,” that is, something beyond verbal description or knowledge that can be transferred except through experience.

James Fox points out that the linguistic evolution of terms for colour occur only in languages in societies in which colours have become in one way or another commodified.

Where colours leave their natural role as environmental conditions and become controlled in the form of pigment, or picked and chosen in the form of food or possessions, the words for colours germinate and spread to become useful currency.

It is the tightrope between the profound and the profane sense of the colour words that the cultural history of colour must walk.

The book is divided into chapters themed by colour, each colour leading us on a wild ride crossing continents and era of human history to try and glean a sense of the colour’s resonance to human society.

It’s an ambitious project, and the mix of the unutterably sacred quality of colour experience with the mundane commerce of real-world pigment development is not so much explored as stretched across the frame of the book to provide its canvas.
 
The attempt to whittle the cultural phenomenon of art right down to the core constituents of art is striking.

Taking individual colour components allows Fox to explore the materiality of the art within the societies it is produced.

Art follows colour in its existence on planes of both transcendent beauty and humanity, and its real world properties as status symbols, signs of technological innovation and global commerce.

For those of us interested in the materiality of visual culture, it is a delight. The structure is scaffolded on just a list of colours — eschewing the rainbow spectrum, for an attempt at a narrative of symbolic progression.

The symbolic progression seems to be a compromise with the composition of a more traditional narrative than the abstraction of colours.

Fox needn’t have worried about this. Despite the simplistic ideas of pure colour, whether in terms of sensation or of commodification, the deep infiltration of colour in almost every aspect of culture and meaning-making is a deep well of ideas.

In the end, the book on the global and pan-historical significance of colour can’t do much more than scratch the surface, but it’s a good bit of scratching nevertheless.

Rox Middleton is a postdoctoral researcher on the production of colour (especially blue) in nature.

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