Tuesday, June 12, 2012

The Color of Culture


                If you grew up in the United States, or in any spot on earth where traditional Western culture has leaned hard against local custom, there's a good chance that the Spartan, the smooth and white have come to define the aesthetics of sophistication.
                Any student of art history knows this trend reaches back to the classic era, the sort of supposed heyday of clear-thinking and pure reason. It was supposed to be a time of perfecting form across the realms of art, architecture and philosophy. Dredged up centuries later by expeditions and pseudo-archaeologists, Western powers viewed the smooth white marble forms of antiquity as spectral saints, that transcended their low heathen roots through a sharpness of structure.  

Roman Statue of Apollo
(photo: Stuart Yeates)

                What they missed either through choice or ignorance is that the plain, white surfaces of the temples and statues were rarely plain and seldom white. Rather, the artisans and civic planners of Mediterranean antiquity favored the polychromatic, with bold colors and metallic embellishments clinging to columns and corbels.  When it comes to aesthetic and political history, Western powers have tended to prefer the fantasy to the facts, with neoclassical architecture displaying gleaming whiteness, untouched by the 'low' primitive use of bright colors.  Systems of government that offer an aura of self-evident perfection rooted in the classical past, turn out to be far from it, requiring revision after revision to approach arriving at a society that is truly democratic.
                This retroactive editing of history allowed architects, governments the opportunity to privilege their methods and mandates, linking them to some partly imagined epic past which validated their ideology.
                The attraction to this strict, dogmatic ordering of forms and colorless geometries has had uncomfortable and unfortunate results throughout history as it was picked up and remixed to suit by various authoritarian figures in the West and East. From the formal systems of Fascist Architecture that borrowed heavily (and falsely) from antiquity, to the over-reaching community policing that forbids certain paint colors or embellishments, too often the aesthetic 'lessons' of ancient Greece and Rome were thin disguises for restrictive and fiercely hierarchical standards.
                 The elite self-selecting powers sought to dictate aesthetics (among other things) to the masses, lest they be tempted into bold colors, embellished surfaces, and other base impulses visual or otherwise. Thankfully the disruptive philosophies of post-modernism, greater cross-pollination in a truly global world, coupled with the decline or downfall of certain Western powers has chipped away at these false tropes of design and restored some of the incredible and intense color that was really there all along. 

No comments: