Vol. 29 No. 2 · 25 January 2007
pages 26-27 | 3111 words
Because it’s pink
Stephen Mulhall
- BuyThe Objective Eye: Colour, Form and Reality in the Theory of Art by John Hyman
Chicago, 286 pp, £20.00, June 2006, ISBN 0 226 36553 0
Although this is a work of art theory, its primary concern is not with beauty, or aesthetic value more generally, but rather with the nature of pictorial representation. After all, before we can judge whether a representational painting achieves aesthetic excellence in the way it depicts something, we must first perceive what it depicts. And John Hyman is interested in how depiction is even possible. This question has fascinated philosophers for a long time, but it can very quickly get a grip on any reflective person. However familiar we are with the business of linguistic communication, for example, it doesn’t equip us with any obvious answers when we stand back and ask ourselves how mere marks on paper or sounds in the air can embody and convey meaning. A similar difficulty arises if we ask how a configuration of lines and colours on a plane surface can possibly succeed in depicting a man or a battle, a forest or a god. Indeed, once we are struck by the sheer mysteriousness of pictorial representation, worries about what makes one picture more aesthetically valuable than another may come to seem secondary in comparison.
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Letters
Vol. 29 No. 4 · 22 February 2007
From George Hornby
Stephen Mulhall asserts that ‘an object’s colour cannot affect what happens in the world except as a consequence of its being seen’ (LRB, 25 January). That isn’t true. For example, when irradiated by the sun a dark-coloured object will get warmer than an identically shaped light-coloured object; indeed, such a dark object might melt and flow away while the light object retains its shape and form. Moreover, photosynthesis depends on the ability of plants to absorb particular wavelengths of the sun’s light – that is to say, it depends on the plant’s colour.
George Hornby
Bournemouth
From Jeremy Harte
Many years ago, when they were fashionable as ornaments, I bought a glass bulb that contained, in its vacuum interior, a little cross-shaped vane mounted on a pivot. Each of the vane’s four arms ended in a square sheet of metal, and each sheet was painted white on the front and black on the back. When you put your ornament on the window, the arms twirled round merrily until a cloud passed before the sun or (as eventually happened) the vacuum leaked enough to allow some air resistance. It was the difference in colours that made it happen.
Jeremy Harte
Ewell, Surrey
Vol. 29 No. 5 · 8 March 2007
From John Hyman
George Hornby and Jeremy Harte describe cases in which colours seem to have immediate physical effects, contrary to the claim I defend in my book The Objective Eye: namely, that an object’s colour (unlike its shape) can affect what happens only as a consequence of being seen (Letters, 22 February). In this respect, I argue, colour is like beauty. Beauty can change the course of history but only as a result of being perceived.
Hornby mentions dark objects heating up more in the sun than pale ones, and photosynthesis, which he says ‘depends on the plant’s colour’. And Harte mentions a miniature vane in a glass bulb which is turned by sunlight (a Crookes radiometer). None of these examples proves the point. The first relies on the assumption that it is the darker colour of an object that causes it to heat up more, whereas in fact the colour and the change in temperature both have the same cause: the absorption of light. The second example relies on the assumption that an object’s colour is the same property as its ability to absorb and reflect light. But this cannot be right, because abilities are not visible in the way that colours are – any more than probabilities, possibilities or necessities are. The third example is similar to the first.
These cases are interesting – I discuss similar ones in the book – because they show how difficult it is to understand colours. Vision is inconceivable without them, but it is hard to explain exactly how they are related to our perceptions and to the objects we perceive.
John Hyman
Oxford
