What Color Is the Sacred? by Michael Taussig

Author:Michael Taussig
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2009-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

20

OPIATION OF THE VISUAL FIELD

Color is a colonial subject. Let us put aside for the moment the Great Colors such as the deep, deep blue of indigo from India and from the slave plantations of the New World, or the fiery scarlet of cochineal, its name derived from the Aztec word nochezli, “blood of the prickly pear,” extracted from those millions upon millions of female insects crawling over Mexican cacti. Let us for the moment focus instead upon a minute fraction of the foot soldiers of color, that multitude of colored varnishes and their fantastic names that you can read about in today’s textbooks for artists:

Gamboge, a resin from trees in Thailand, which is a clear, bright, transparent yellow

Dragon’s blood, from the fruit of an Asiatic tree from Singapore and Batavia, which gives to varnishes a ruby red and dates from Roman times

Gum accroides, also known as black-boy gum or Botany Bay gum, which comes from Australia in a golden-yellow color as well as ruby red

Shellac, from twigs of trees in India, where it is deposited by insects that feed on the sap

Elemi, which is white, the best coming from the island of Luzon, and is called Manila Elemi to distinguish it from inferior varieties found in Brazil, Mexico, and the Yucatan

Leaping from the page in a sighing and a soaring of sound, these names take you into the living interstices of the third world and beyond, to where saps run and insects dig their way in. Together with Burroughs’s aromatic inks laced with hashish, blood, and opium, the provenience, properties, and names of these varnishes suggest how much we diminish our sense of the world if we do not recognize that like spices and furs, gold and silver, lapis lazuli, slaves, and feathers, the most desired colors came from places outside of Europe, exotic places, we call them, meaning colored places.

Thanks to varnishes from the colonial world, light could be trapped and bent through transparent or semitransparent layers that dilute, fix, and change color. In cherishing the art of our Van Eycks and Vermeers on account of their layer after layer of varnishes trapping light such that, like the skins of the islanders studied by Malinowski, color glows from within, might we not therefore reserve some portion of our regard, no matter how small, for the layered history of Western expansion into the lands of colored people, home to all manner of bright colors and wondrous varnishes?

This love of light splayed and diffused through trapping and layering was not restricted to artists like Van Eyck, hard at work in their studios changing the way we see. It also came to change the way we are seen—as with the European craze for Indian fabrik, one generic type of which came to be known in English as chintz and which has been described by an early twentieth-century British scholar, Maciver Percival, in terms reminiscent of Vermeer’s varnishes, not to mention Marcel Proust, who claimed with much passion that his writing style was inspired by Vermeer’s layered use of varnishes.

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