2020 Winter Issue, Color and Material Religion - Editorial

Color swatches to help identify pipes laid underground. Spotted during a walk in Brooklyn. 2020. Photo by Urmila Mohan.

Color does not exist independently from the bodies and materials we encounter daily. It represents, refracts, reflects and redirects so that we perceive and make our world in a new light. In many cases, color helps us categorize and structure our world. Our tangible and intangible experiences are embodied in the ideas, aesthetic qualities and properties of colorful matter. And recognizing the contextual uses of color (whether as embodied or representational, real or imaginary) is vital to understanding its influence. Color in both religious and non-religious spaces could be considered as moving and spreading through things, including “objects, images, and bodies, [that] can be understood as part of everyday practice, cultivated through embodied and situated ways of learning, making, and doing” (Mohan 2021: 80).

Evil eye symbol on a mailbox. Istanbul, Turkey, 2013. Photo by Urmila Mohan.

‘Pandemic meal’. Light refracted through polarized glasses, 2020. Photo by Urmila Mohan.

Sometimes, the use of color shows how we yearn for things to be brought to life. For an example, we can look to the proliferation of richly-colored ‘scientific’ images of Covid-19 that have been circulating in the media this year. In reality, the virus is far too small for us to perceive its color: scientists look at it using electrons rather than light, and since light is an essential ingredient in color perception, this means that the virus through the electron microscope exists only in gray-scale monochrome. However, public health campaigns and artistic responses to the virus depict brilliant bursts of color—magenta and orange, velvet blue, deep volcanic red. These colored images are powerful communication tools, but they can also be frightening—or, conversely reassuring. On a more visible level, our pandemic experiences have also given us time to pause and ponder color as we live through periods of quarantines and shutdowns.

The use of color as a representational category wields its own power, affecting how we perceive reality. For instance, the political map of the U.S. is often depicted as red versus blue states whereas the lived reality is that every state is a mixture of these colors, or purple. Representations of electoral results in media, such as screens and print journalism, rely on depicting states and affiliations as either red or blue and this influences the way reporting takes place as well as how U.S. politics is perceived (Rutchick, Smyth and Konrath 2009). Color is also used to divide and categorize bodies, with the habits and preferences of past artists/cultures shaping our own contemporary perceptions of the world around us. Much has been written recently about the neoclassical preferences for white marble sculptures, which suppressed the real, colorful eclecticism of ancient sculpture – with damaging consequences. When the material of media becomes part of the discussion, for instance, stone as a representation of stereotypical bodies in Neoclassical sculpture, canonical ideas and assumptions are further destabilized (Nelson 2007).

Dahlias growing in Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, U.K. Enjoyed on an August walk during lockdown. Photo by Jessica Hughes.

Color has always played a central role in material religion, and indeed it already permeates much of the writing and work that has been published in The Jugaad Project. To highlight a few examples: our first collaborator, John McGraw, showed how color was central to Mayan spirituality and cosmology, expressed today through the use of multicolored candles. More recently, Leah Comeau has explored how flower garlands used to decorate Hindu statues in India combine color with fragrance and shine to create ‘sensational forms' for human and divine enjoyment. Other essays have shown how color can connect modern European art and votive practice, how the changing color of Our Lady of Fatima becomes evidence of her authenticity and uniqueness, and how the color schemes used in modern Indonesian images of the Buraq provide a space of innovation within ancient Islamic representational traditions.

The examples in the current issue are varied and explore how colored bodies and materials effect their vibrant power through affective and aesthetic means.

The first piece in this issue is a photo essay by Tulasi Srinivas, “Kiwi Fruit and Kewpie Dolls: Transformative Alankara and Modernity in Bangalore”. This essay explores the daily aesthetic ornamentation of the deity in a temple ritual known as alaṅkāra. Speaking to new practices of alaṅkāra in temples in Bangalore through the usage of novel materials, such as Kiwi fruit and Kewpie dolls, the author suggests a new understanding of modernity and Hindu aesthetics, through devotees’ feelings of adbhutha or wonder. She argues that the modern recrafting of alaṅkāra allows us to rethink what it is and does as an aesthetic practice as well as what it says about Hindu notions of humanity and divinity. 

In our second photo essay, Uthara Suvrathan addresses “Color, Graffiti and the Senses: Visitors and Worshipers at Indian Archaeological Sites.” This photo essay examines ancient Buddhist monastic and other archaeological sites, now tourist destinations, and the ways in which peoples’ experiences of and interactions with the past are mediated through material culture. These sites are protected in various ways, including signs banning the performance of rituals. And yet, we find that visitors respond to these sites in unexpected ways, for instance, by placing gold foil on carvings of the Buddha as a form of veneration and worship. The traces of this interaction, both past and present, can be seen in various kinds of graffiti and in the use of architectural form and light.

A study of color interaction by artist Claire Le Pape. Photo by artist.

Alexandra Dalferro writes about “The Prismatics of Silk” in the third offering of this issue. Silk is so famously shimmery because of its prism-like, triangular protein structure that allows it to refract incoming light at different angles and thus to produce different colors. Yet this inherent material brilliance depends on the qualities of the silk threads and environmental conditions, like the amount and type of light. A literal approach to prismatics is expanded metaphorically to encompass the situated and contingent nature of bodily-and-material engagements with colored silks. This photo essay renders the prismatics of the three “mother colors” of silks in Surin, Thailand, reflecting upon how colors are inseparable from sociocultural, economic, political, and historical considerations.

The fourth piece in this issue is a curatorial essay by Jessica Hughes and Urmila Mohan titled “The Color of Memory – Claire Le Pape’s Giottoesques” on a body of work by the French artist, inspired by the frescos of the Italian painter Giotto. This essay (and its Instagram exhibit) places us on a voyage of discovery, to see color as a passionate muse for artists across widely differing centuries, worlds and materials. Through Le Pape’s video testimonials and intricate tapestries woven out of fishing twine we see how color and religion overlap to create spaces of immersive and transcendental experience. Le Pape’s series of weavings called ‘Giottoesques’ showcase the ability of colorful materials to sensorially evoke the numinous as well as reference the artist’s own religiosity or spirituality.

Through these various offerings, we see that color allows us to visualize that which we can see as well as what we cannot see. Here, our perception of color ultimately depends not only on what we are looking but also how we are looking at it - for instance, with which technologies, from what (physical or historical) distance, and against which socio-political background. Ultimately, color itself becomes a collaboration between an object, light, viewer and context.

References

Mohan, U. (2021). ‘Religion and Ritual: The Modern Religio-colorscape,’ In A. Steinvall and S. Street, eds. A Cultural History of Color in the Modern Age, London: Bloomsbury, 79-96.

Nelson, C. (2007). The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Rutchick, A.M., J.M. Smyth and S. Konrath (2009). “Seeing Red (and Blue): Effects of Electoral College Depictions on Political Group Perception”. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2009, 269-282.

Further Readings

Boston MFA, Blue: Cobalt to Cerulean in Art and Culture, 2015.

David Coles, Chromotopia: An Illustrated History of Color, 2018.

Mary M. Dusenbury, ed., Color in Ancient and Medieval East Asia, 2015.

Victoria Finlay, The Brilliant History of Color in Art, 2014.

John Gage, Color in Art, 2006.

Hannelore Hägele, Colour in Sculpture: A Survey from Ancient Mesopotamia to the Present, 2013.

Marcia Hall, The Power of Color: Five Centuries in European Painting, 2019.

Paul Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1912.

Charles Landesman, Color and Consciousness: An Essay in Metaphysics, 1989.

Michel Pastoureau, Yellow: The History of a Color, 2019.

Michel Pastoureau, Red: The History of a Color, 2017.

Stella Paul, Chromophilia: The Story of Color in Art, 2017.