The title is drawn from three of the qualities that respondents to the online color survey Colorcom.com most often associated with the color black: mourning, high quality, and bad luck. The survey, running since 1997, matches colors to traits and sells the results to advertisers. The exhibition had three parts. Farbenlehre, after Goethe’s canonical treatise in which color is understood as perceptual rather than physical, is a grid of forty-four 25-centimeter monochrome panels carrying text from the survey, with a forty-fifth panel marked “none.” Die Aesthetische Erziehung, after Schiller’s equally foundational text, pairs a framed drawing traced from a page of Die Psychologische Raumgestaltung und Farbdynamik (H. Frieling, 1954), a manual prescribing the psychologically “correct” colors for different architectural and institutional settings, with a small flea-market school chair on a pedestal painted the green the manual recommends for exhibition spaces. The third part is a group of paintings on paper reworking five Malevich compositions and one by Rodchenko at one-to-one scale, each painted on the same green ground and retitled by translating its colors through the survey’s vocabulary.
Mourning High Quality Bad Luck
