19.3.11

Monochrome and Liminality

All blank space is potentially baffling. The monochrome, or blank space put forward 'as' art, however, seems just plain tricky. Monochromes make no attempt to tell stories. They contain nothing that is (visually) recongnisable from daily life. They confound western academic notions of chronology as they appear almost randomly through arts history - and, like all blank spaces, they confound interpretation itself. Perhaps more importantly, the confound pre-existing western notions of figure/ground relationships. Monochrome introduces chaos into the system it inhabits primarily by foregrounding the blankness that is usually understood to signify background...'
Morrison, A. 2006, 'Autobiography of an (ex)coloured surface: monochrome and liminality' in Discrepant Abstraction, MIT Press, London

Through a series of monochrome paintings in the early 20th C Russian artist Kasimir Malevich attempted to reconfigure painting. Black Square, above, 'was essentially a meta-painting, a painting about painting... As far as Malevich was concerned, representation and its confines only served to further the divisibility of the world, and artistic 'truth' could only be communicated in the form of a paradox - or even a lie.'
Morrison, A. 2006, 'Autobiography of an (ex)coloured surface: monochrome and liminality' in Discrepant Abstraction, MIT Press, London


Robert Fludd Primordial Darkness - 1617

This not a new thing. Fludd in 1617 attempted to convey the greatest mysteries of life through this painting. Infinity, life and death.


Alphonse Allais The first communion of anaemic young girls in the snow - 1883


Alphonse Allais, in the late 19th C as part of the French movement, les incoherents, did a series of comic works including the above and a musical composition entitled Funeral March for the Last Rights of a Deaf Man. 


This was later repeated by Erwin Schulhoff’s “In Futurum” (1919) and John Cage in his famous 4'33"





'I have nothing to say and I am saying it'. John Cage

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