Minimalist color fields can provoke visceral perceptual activity in the viewer
Evidence
Recently this sort of encounter actually stopped me in my tracks. Killing time before a meeting with someone at SFMOMA, I was wandering through the different floors and ended up in the exhibition Approaching American Abstraction. At some point I turned a corner and saw Ellsworth Kelly’s Blue Green Black Red, which is exactly what it sounds like: four separate panels of one color each, about the size of myself. At first, I wrote this off as quickly as anyone might, not thinking it was “about” anything other than abstraction (whatever that might mean). But when I got closer to the first panel, I was completely caught off guard by a physical sensation. Although the covering was consistent and flat, the color blue was not stable: it vibrated and seemed to push and pull my vision in different directions. For lack of a better description, the painting seemed active. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 385
Categorization
- QUESTION: The claim that flat blue ‘vibrates’ perceptually is striking — is this a documented perceptual phenomenon for others, or idiosyncratic to Odell? Worth verifying.
- XREF: connects to: An inserted black body makes invisible whiteness and its amnesiac temporality visible — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 519; Conventions set the perceptual frames by which we experience time, color, and music — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 134; Eccentric visual composition can emphasize the direct art of seeing — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 387 (+3 more)
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: An inserted black body makes invisible whiteness and its amnesiac temporality visible — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 519; Conventions set the perceptual frames by which we experience time, color, and music — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 134; Eccentric visual composition can emphasize the direct art of seeing — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 387 (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- Perceptual unity arises from purposive traversal rather than passive observation
#complicates(0.76) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1359