It should be noted that there is a significant difference between the symbolic associations of white and the phenomenological reality of white light as perceived in a person’s eyes.

Different cultures associate white with very different things.

In the West, white is associated with purity, goodness, innocence and peace – a bride’s white wedding dress and white doves for example. In Eastern and Asian cultures white is associated with death, unhappiness and bad luck – white is commonly worn at funerals and ghosts are believed to emit white light. In the Middle East white symbolizes both purity and mourning.

In phenomenological terms white picks up and reflects available light in the immediate environment better than any other colour. One clear example would be the use of white screens in photo studios to reflect light from photo lamps onto a subject. White lines down the middle of the road or the ubiquitous white van would be others.

Given that in modern and contemporary art an artist’s subjectivity is venerated, it would be unwise to categorically affix a symbolic universal meaning to the colour white.

Nevertheless, within certain contexts, times, individuals and movements, the colour white can facilitate legible expression and meaning. The meaning isn’t necessarily symbolic though, it may be phenomenological.

PHENOMENOLOGY & WHITE

Kazimir Malevich : Suprematist Composition: White on White,1918.

Malevich was a Ukrainian/Russian avant-garde painter and theoretician who in 1918 painted ‘White on White’*1. It is an oil on canvas painting measuring 31 x 31 inches made of two clearly differentiated whites, one cooler than the other. The cooler white square set at an angle within a warmer white square canvas seems to defy gravity. The paint is quite thickly applied so that the marks left by the paint brush are bold and emphatic. This is made possible because the all white surface picks up the ambient light in the room. This in turn creates a shadow under each painted brush stroke and highlights the individual marks. By minimising the palette to white(s) and emphasising his painterly process, Malevich is creating a painting ‘about’ painting itself. In this Suprematist work, Malevich radically shifts the focus of visual art away from objectivity and the observable world, towards non objectivity and the act of painting itself. In Malevich’s own words, he achieves ‘the supremacy of pure feeling’.

One might describe this as being analogous to the condition of recorded music in as much as the canvas in a kind of record of a performance.*2

Malevich considered Suprematism to be a radical new art language for a radical new world order. White on White was painted one year after the Russian Revolution of October 1917.

However, in 1930 Malevich was forced to abandon non objective abstraction by Joseph Stalin who decreed that Socialist Realism was the only legitimate art for the Soviet State. Abstraction was in Stalin’s mind a form of dissent and a decadent art-form.

The reductive approach pioneered by Malevich was resurrected 30 years later in the USA. Of particular note are two artists – Agnes Martin*3 and Robert Ryman*4. They both explore and experiment with white or nuanced white to create ‘self referential’ paintings and drawings which are not limited (in their way of thinking) by narrative, symbolism, storyline or political message. Many of their works are ‘untitled’ to reinforce the idea that their works are about the here and now and the light in the room. They are not windows onto an illusionistic scene as was the tradition of European art until Malevich. Martin’s and Ryman’s paintings and drawings are predominantly square so as to avoid being redolent of the landscape or portrait traditions. This canvas proportion continues Malevich’s pioneering aesthetic.

SYMBOLISM & WHITE

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Union City Drive-In, 1993

Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948, 3 years after the end of World WarII. After studying politics and sociology at Tokyo University he moved to California to study art. After graduating he moved to New York City in 1974.

His photograph, Union City Drive-In 1993*5 is part of an extensive portfolio of long exposure analogue photographs. They are made using a large format camera with a negative measuring 8”x10”. They are HI definition and black and white.

Technically, Union City Drive-In is a recording of all the light from a feature length film – 120minutes of light cast onto the surrounding environment. Sugimoto recalls of his first in the series ‘’As soon as the movie started, I fixed the shutter at a wide open aperture. When the movie finished two hours later, I clicked the shutter closed.’’

These photographs can by definition only exist because the light emanating from the movie is what lights the scene. In the case of Union City Drive-In, the image of the hoarding, parking metres, fences, bushes, trees and earth can only be seen because the movie illuminates the world around it. White lines in the sky over the drive-in movie indicate passing aeroplane wing and tail lights. The photograph’s exposure time is so long that the movie itself is overexposed and burnt out.

The movie screen becomes a pure white rectangle of light in the finished exhibited print. The prints can be all enveloping measuring 4ft x 5 ft. The particular movie, script and story line are obliterated. Beginning, middle and end become one.

Like Malevich, Ryman and Martin, Sugimoto has achieved a kind of purity beyond the narrative of the film in the white rectangle of the screen.

Another series of film projection photographs are set in movie theaters (US sp.) built in the 1920’s and 30’s but abandoned years ago and now in ruins.*6
In the ‘Abandoned Theater’ series however, although the movie is again transformed into pure white light, the titles of each photograph identify the particular film ( Franklin Park Theater, ‘’Rashomon’’, 1950/ 2015, Palace Theater ‘’Snow White’’, 1937/ 2015 and Everett Square Theater ‘’Mujo’’, 1970/ 2015). Titling the photographs in this way acts as a catalyst to visual memory (to anyone who’s seen the films).

In an interview Sugimoto reveals that one of the films he had projected and photographed in the abandoned theater series was the 1954 film version of Godzilla. He goes on to say of that film ‘’it’s a symbol of the end of civilisation’’. He comments that like today as we look back at the ruins of ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman civilisations, so in the future in thousands of years, people will look back at the ruins of our ‘modern’ civilisation. He says, quote, ‘’I’m thinking of beauty after it’s been ruined’’. He also wonders if humanity will survive to be able to look back at it.

His photographs exhibit a highly poetic meditation on the passing of time. He is as interested in minutes as millennia. In his series of seascapes*7 he is attempting to produce a view that early Homo sapiens (our ancestors) must have looked at.

As such, his works link to the European Vanitas still life tradition and the Romantic Movement*8.

Both are reminders to the viewer of the transience and uncertainty of all things.

*1 moma.org/collection/works/80385
*2 The Non Objective World. The Manifesto of Suprematism. Kasimir Malevich.
Published by Dover Publications inc. 2003 Mineola, NY. ISBN 0-486-4297-1
*3 www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/martin-untitled-5-t13717
*4 www.art21.org/read/robert-ryman-color-surface-seeing/
*5 www.sugimotohiroshi.com/drivein-theatre/
*6 www.sugimotohiroshi.com/abandoned-theatre/
*7 www.sugimotohiroshi.com/seascapes-1/
*8 alte nationalgalerie + abbey in the oak woods.