Thoughts on Whiteness
 
  Is white a colour at all? Isn't it rather the medium that draws
colour out of the colours? In his great novel of the white whale,
Moby Dick (1851), Herman Melville writes that "whiteness is not so
much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time
the concrete of all colors".
Is modern art, in its monochrome aspect, nothing but a visible
absence? Goethe describes it in more metaphysical terms in his
Theory of Colours. When totally empty space is filled up by the first
matter, there is a gradual condensation towards increasing opacity.
From this intensified cloudiness - die Trübe - comes whiteness. " Per-
fect cloudiness is whiteness, the most indifferent, brightest, first
opaque content of space."
This whiteness has many peculiarities. Take Goethe's opacity. Is
it really true that there is no depth in whiteness, that the white
colour knows no transparency? (In the sense that greenness can
appear as green paper or a green bottle). Goethe quotes the
Romantic painter Runge, who said that white and black are opaque,
physical colours. White water for example is inconceivable.
Wittgenstein continues this discussion in his Notes on Colours,
but atthe same time gives the contextbound concepts a key role.
He writes: "One says 'deep' black but not 'deep' white." But is he
right? Can't one say "deep white"? Melville, for example, speaks in
his novel of "the white depths of the milky way". When Malevich
comments on his paintings it is never a matter of three, but of four
dimensions. Does he think that colour itself has its own dimension,
a depth? Whatever the case, is it not such that certain fluids, and
certain types of material which are transparent or semitransparent,
are called white? I am thinking of things like saliva, sperm, alabaster
or wax.
There are practical ways of investigating this state of affairs. If
one makes a casting in paraffin wax one discovers a deepening
white! The white colour does not cover, it alters greatly when the
light shines through the semipermeable material. Undoubtedly this
can lead in a work of art to a dissolution of whiteness as a symbol
of absence. Whiteness becomes more organic and spatial, and one
can claim that it takes on more meanings and loses its - in the
Goethean sense - serene indifference. Not even if one claims with
Goethe and Wittgenstein that there is no clearly translucent white
are things clear. Why in that case do we talk about white wine?
All the same there is probably no painted white that is clear and
transparent. Painted white is at the same time the cloudiest and the
purest colour.
The white monochrome of the dawn of modernism at the
beginning of thetwentieth century is about this duality, a cloudi-
ness that covers and a pureness that generates something new. The
white monochrome is about blindness and abstraction, the will to
be rid of all objects. But to understand this phenomenon one must
abandon the domain of colour theory in the strict sense. We are
dealing with a symbolic register which exhibits strange displace-
ments in the traditional value system of the colours. One can com-
pare it to the sublimity of whiteness in the medieval Christian-feudal
world picture, to the white Unicorn with its chastity, incorruptibility
and redeeming power, or the knight on the white horse who wil-
lingly confronts his dark evil opponent. In primitive or classical
western symbolism black and white are a pair of twins, opposites
within one and the same structure. In Tibet there were early rites
where the face of the victim was painted in two colours, one half
white, the other half black. In the seventh trump of the Tarot pack
there are two sphinxes, one black and the other white. In the nigredo
of alchemy black is associated with generative night and raw matter.
In the albedo of alchemy white is linked with the sun and lustration.
Black is female, white is male. But all this is within one and the same
cyclical scheme.
In modernity the opposition has partly been cancelled out. The
poles exist on the same apparently contradictory plane of meaning.
In reality they can alternate and change places. It has been claimed
that the black sun is the sovereign emblem of modernism. Melan-
choly shades a landscape that mourns the ruin of solar metaphysics.
But whiteness can be filled with another power when it no longer
symbolizes the absolutely supreme. Blackness, as the region of
death and terror, was always one with the incomprehensible. Now
whiteness can stand for the ungraspable in a forward-driving
motion. It seems to have assumed the same status as the fallen God
and has been given the same powerful and enigmatic attributes. It
symbolizes not only fear, like the Old Testament God, but nameless
terror. Whiteness has become the bearer of something ghostly and
monstrous.
One can witness this at the end of Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative
of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), when the travellers are
moving quickly down into the hot cataract of the South Pole. They
are suddenly faced by a huge terrifying white curtain that rises over
the precipice along the whole southern horizon. The curtain comes
between the travellers and destruction. Horror, holiness, sublime
inconceivability, and within or behind the curtain there is
Nothingness. The veil turns out to be the white ashen rain of the
cataract itself. But just as the shipwrecked travellers are about to be
swallowed up by the chasm something equally strange "arose in
their pathway": as the story says, "a shrouded human figure, very far
larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue
of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow".
Farther than this we do not get in the tale, which ends all tales.
Whiteness is the end of fiction, followed by points, the marked
absence of words. But after the end, in the epilogue, traces are still
found of twocarvings, interpreted by the publisher as Ethiopian and
Arabic characters. One means "to be shady", the other means "to
be white". But this is only a hypothesis in the domain of the inde-
cipherable, where all signs are genuinely illegible. We can only assu-
me that the extremes touch, side by side among the rocks of
destruction.
For Poe whiteness has a fatal power, and points to horror, but
also to the divine in a perverted form. As we know, the terror of the
sublime has taken on a brand new content in modernity. When
Longinus, just after the birth of Christ, wrote his classic treatise on
the sublime, it was associated with an unlimited experience of
light, beyond all human measure. For Edmund Burke during the
Pre-Romantic period in the 1700s the sublime was on the contrary
associated with fear and darkness. With Poe there is again an inver-
sion. The horror now emanates from the light and the white, some-
thing unthinkable for Burke.
One sees it not only in Poe, but even more so in Melville's Moby Dick.
What is whiteness in this novel? Very explicitly, in a chapter
devoted to the whiteness of the whale, the sublime content of the
colour is wrenched towards horror and the ghostly. Whiteness is "at
once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, the very veil of
the Christian Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent
in things the most appalling to mankind." Whiteness in this form
diminishes and paralyses mankind, as only a disappointed expec-
tation of the presence of God can.
The white whale is not a god but a demon. The giant evil crea-
ture with the white brow is a late descendant of Leviathan, the sea
monster of the Apocalypse. Moby Dick is a white patch for our own
projections, and ultimately it is this struggle with the ungraspable
that the novel is about.
In Moby Dick whiteness is a screen that is filled and emptied...
Later art would emanate from this white screen as its material found-
ation. But also as its peculiarly objectless object: the artist no
longer goes to attack against whiteness but produces it in a violent,
innovative act. The whiteness is inseparable from the violent action
that separates it out.
For Malevich whiteness does not represent the end - as it does
for Poe and Melville - but an absolute beginning. When modernism
had its breakthrough at the beginning of the twentieth century,
whiteness was given a tone of self-conscious innocence, which
Mallarmé had already grasped. Whiteness was incorporated in the
cult of the new, an iconoclastic attitude which the Futurists in par-
ticular were to articulate. The monochrome in Malevich must be
understood as such an act, defining an absolute boundary in time
and space.
Malevich's white screen establishes a zero point, a state before
and after all chronology; a revolutionary act, undoubtedly, but at the
same time a blinding rain of ash over the cataract of the revolution
- heaven or hell. The white demon appears, as in Poe, in the mist of
annihilation. The revolutionary certainty conceals the tale of horror
that lurks beneath the surface. This iconoclastic whiteness always
conceals. In the era of nihilism, renewal is a destruction. The white-
ness smudges out and undermines the perceptible. White and
black monochromes are not complementary - they easily swap place
and function.
One may think that the iconoclasm of Malevich is a far cry from
French modernism with its sensualist focus. It is probably only
possible in the radical fusion of avant-gardism and a deeper spiri-
tual tradition that one can find in Malevich, Kandinsky or Mondrian,
and which is later consummated in American painting by Newman,
Rothko and Ryman. It needs an obsession - emotional and intellec-
tual - to exist.
But even if the white monochrome is not typical of the central
French line of development, it is a limiting value to which all modern-
ism relates. For Mallarmé whiteness is the ground of writing, the
sheet of paper a stage for the dance of characters. Writing and paint-
ing - there is no difference in the spatial sense. The page of a book
is now also a screen, the white underlay which does not only make
the sign legible. It has become part of the author's practice. The
modernist must begin from the zero point of language, the origin
of all differences. As if the death of God had left language in a state
of absurd old age. To write and to paint is to proceed from an
absence of God, represented by the white non-colour which Melville
called "a colorless, all-color of atheism".
The artists of the modern age are in Malevich's "desert", in an
exile as much forced as voluntary from the worn-down agreed con-
ventionality of the sign. Today we have a hard time understanding
that abstraction and the non-objective were for Malevich an experi-
ence, a supreme form of emotion. To paint whiteness is not only to
paint a new beginning, an extreme negation of all that has been
painted before. It is also to be this beginning.
The American poet Wallace Stevens has tellingly rung whiteness
into modernism as a limit value that is as necessary as it is extreme,
a question of supreme abstraction. But precisely as for Malevich, the
work of art is an example of concepts that are not logical
universals but are strictly individual. They are examples only of
themselves. The white monochrome makes this clear through its
dynamic and its way of underscoring its own genesis. It has a place
of its own, and its whiteness is pointed to and physically tangible in
the space. But the really challenging thing in Stevens' vision lies in
the opposite: that visibility requires whiteness. In The Auroras
of Autumn he writes: "Here, being visible is being white, is being
of the solid of white, the accomplishment of an extremist in an
exercise..."
Being visible is being white, and being white is producing white.
Whiteness is always this white, produced by an extreme will to
renew. Perhaps Stevens can formulate this situation so clearly
because in this long autumn poem he at the same time bids fare-
well to its guiding idea (of whiteness or abstraction). The season
changes and the white fades from the walls of the house. Time is
inscribed in the course of the poem, and like all absolutes white-
ness, as sovereign fiction, finds temporality hard to bear.
Is it an epoch - the era of the white monochrome - that is ending?
In a sense, yes (white as bloody extremism). In another sense, hard-
ly. Epochs are constantly changing constructions. A way of seeing -
a way of reading. And works of art - white or not - are never confined
to an epoch. It is rather the works that make the epochal possible.
But the stillness of this white - what does it have to do with icono-
clasm?
Is there no mercy in whiteness, light years from the screens of
horro rand violence?
Like falling snow over the death camps, the snow of oblivion
that makes it possible for us to remember at all...
When the exterior has been emptied of objects, have not all the
ghosts then been exorcised from the interior?
Whiteness is always about this whiteness.

Anders Olsson