PRIMARY AFFECT: PRIMARY DEFECT
Registering shocks of attraction and repulsion in red, yellow and blue with affect theory


By Suah Lim / Issue 1 / November 14, 2024

PRIMARY MATTERS FIRST

At their simplest, both affect and art are reactions: an affect needs to first originate from a cause. Affects are like impulses—"feelings are sensory states produced by thought, while interruptive thoughts are produced by affects. Feelings are thoughtful, and affects are thoughtless".¹ In the same way, art needs a creative genesis. The production of an artwork is the process of the artist's response to an affective state, and this response itself is one that seeks to solicit a second response from the viewer by causing in them a secondary affect. Art and affect can thus be understood as two components in a continuously productive chain of reaction. It is this linearity that defines the logic to the production of affects—the process is causal, temporally continuative, cerebral and therefore irritable.

This essay will explore 'affect' precisely in terms of its capacity for the 'blindness' forewarned by Tomkins in the passionate and often visceral responses to modern art, illustrated in the cases of vandalism of Barnett Newman's Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III (1967) and IV (1969-1970) in 1986 and 1982 respectively, as well as that of Raoul Dufy's Port du Havre (1906) and Piet Mondrian's Composition in White, Black and Red (1936) by Jubal Brown in 1996, the acts of vandalism themselves part of his unfinished performance art trilogy titled Responding to Art. There is a striking resonance in the relationship between the violence of the passions directed at or involved in the production of modern art and the uncomplicated intensity of combinations of red, yellow and blue, the 'primaries' which we preconceive as being capable of "picturing the absolute, the essence of painting".² In the 19th century Thomas Young was the first colour theorist to seek an explanation for the existence of primary colours not in the physics of light, but in the biological make-up of the human body. He wrote, "each sensitive filament of the nerve may consist of three portions, one for each principal colour".³ This suggestion was very quickly disproven and had no basis in scientific reality, but the metaphysical and empirical implications of this premise remain—could the trichrome of red, yellow and blue encapsulate the entire spectrum of artistic experience, or inspire in us some grand revelation about the human condition? Or is there nothing more to art and knowledge—is red, yellow and blue precisely it?

I'M NOT AFRAID, BUT MY BODY IS

Newman described the Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue series as his attempt to break "free of the ancient paraphernalia [of plastic, neoclassical beauty], to come closer to the sources of the tragic emotion".⁴ The urgency of this negative affect is stressed by both the spatial and tonal dominance of red in all four canvases, owing to Newman's affinity for Cadmium Red Light oil paint, painted stroke by stroke to produce the subtle tonal effect of "metaphysical radiance".⁵ He wrote,

“I was now confronting the dogma that color must be reduced to the primaries, red, yellow, and blue. Just as I had confronted other dogmatic positions of the purists, neo-plasticists and other formalists, I was now in confrontation with their dogma, which had reduced red, yellow and blue into an idea-didact, or at best, had made them picturesque.
Why give in to these purists who have put a mortgage on red, yellow and blue, transforming these colors into an idea that destroys them as colors?”⁶

Newman appropriated the dogmatic "mortgage" of red, yellow and blue by interrogating the assumption that the qualitative properties of each hue should be equal in a quantitative system that encouraged the standardised distribution and optimal interchangeability of colour, well-established by the eternal equilibrium of Mondrian or Ellsworth Kelly's compositions in the primaries. Newman's sparse implementations of yellow and blue mean his compositions depend on asymmetry—even in Who's Afraid IV where the form is symmetrical in terms of left-right balance with the vertical blue "zip" (a term he preferred over 'stripe') down the centre between red and yellow, the spatial effects of colour make it appear more 'off-balance' than the other Who's Afraid paintings. For the first time in the series the projection of yellow is not offset by a wider blue area as "ballast",⁷ leaving the viewer suspended on one end of a monumentally sized canvas, as if stood with one foot disproportionately off a cliff's edge.

The painting inspires a sort of primordial uneasiness. Perhaps it is fitting that Who's Afraid IV was vandalised by Josef Nikolaus Kleer in 1982 after he experienced "a very strange feeling" that he defined as fear upon standing before the painting, even calling it a "physio-psychological masterpiece" after his deed.⁸ After entering the Nationalgalerie in Berlin during non-operational hours and into the unlit room where Who's Afraid IV was on display, Kleer violently struck the canvas with a plastic bar (broken off from the exhibition barrier around the painting), then his fists and his feet, before finally spitting at its middle.

The full-body experience of destructive impulse cannot simply be described as an "affective 'manic-depressive' psychosis"⁹—Kleer's attack had an economic origin, in that he was a near-starved veterinary student on a small scholarly grant who believed Who's Afraid IV was "a symbol for the whole dance around money, which prevents people from living naturally or living their own decisions…embodiment of this whole chaos".¹⁰ The work had just been purchased from Newman's widow by the Nationalgalerie at an enormous sum of 2.7 million marks. It is difficult that there exists such an intense dissonance between Newman's intentions to refuse aesthetic expectations handed down by classical European traditions in resistance to assimilation within art history, and the public perception of his work as representative of bourgeois elitism and complicity with institutions and museums. In terms of affective achievement however he was praised for his ability to provoke repressed primeval anxieties, and that the evocation of fear was essential to the aesthetic experience of the 'sublime' that Newman had explicitly aimed at creating.¹¹ Tomkins suggests affects and objects have a "reciprocal interdependency", where if an imputed characteristic of an object is capable of evoking a particular affect, the evocation of that affect is also capable of producing a subjective restructuring of the object.¹² As Teresa Brennan observes, "the transmission of affect, if only for an instant, alters the biochemistry and neurology of the subject. The 'atmosphere' or the environment literally gets into the individual".¹³ The "tragic" affect imbued by Newman into Who's Afraid IV at the time of its production saw continued existence through the atmosphere of the painting, transferring emotion tenfold onto Kleer in the form of fear, which for Tomkins is of "life-and-death-significance".¹⁴ Kleer's physio-psychological and mutilative experience of Who's Afraid IV led to a particularly degrading and debasing case of vandalism, subjecting Newman's work to stabbing, punching, kicking and spitting. To complicate the body politic of violence further Kleer commented on his state of mind at the time of vandalising, "In that state it is no problem at all, as one says, to tear open some women",¹⁵ suggesting the affect of terror is designed to punish rather than to interrupt.¹⁶


Barnett Newman, Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III, 1967. 2.24m x 5.44m.


Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III after van Bladeren's attack.

In 1986 Who's Afraid III would also be violently vandalised, this time in Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum by Gerard Jan van Bladeren. He stated that he was seeking revenge against abstract art, the act of vandalism itself an ode to Carel Willink's anti-modernist book Painting in a Critical Phase (1950), which laments the sacrifice of traditional European art as a "bastion" that was unceremoniously surrendered by its caretakers to the forces of anarchy, and that the art in museums like the Stedelijk could induce physical illness.¹⁷ On slashing the entire length of the 5.44 metre-long canvas three separate times, Van Bladeren wrote,

“When I destroyed [Who's Afraid III] I was nature, reacting against vicious ideologies, and when it was destroyed and I began to destroy myself (my own abstract canvases), nature was involved again…Appearances are deceiving. If you have a sensitive nature, you can recognize the vibrations of Jews and Japanese who in their little flats are scheming about world hegemony and who for all anyone knows, perhaps without realizing it themselves, are preparing a new Holocaust.”¹⁸

However puzzling, one thing is clear. Van Bladeren's insistence on categorising his visceral reaction as a force of "nature" means that the generation of affect by Who's Afraid III was potent enough to compulse in him a Freudian death drive (he stresses the suicidal stakes of self-destructing "abstract canvases" of himself). This suggests affects, via hormones and other means of projection, are "carried in the blood, and with them is carried the presence of the Other and the social in the system".¹⁹ As evident in the degree to which Van Bladeren's reaction was motivated by fascist ideology, "the subject-centered ego has to project negative affects on or into the Other in order to maintain its identity", as "judgements internalized with the anger that propelled them".²⁰ The magnitude of the three knife slashes reflect the violence of his sensation, where their horizontal and diagonal "zips" starkly refuse the vertical philosophy of Newman's own blue and yellow zips. Van Bladeren's reaction to and refusal to cooperate with the canvas thus becomes a prophetic response to the question posed by the painting's title—as the "dispossessed inheritor"²¹ of the European myth, he is afraid of red, yellow and blue as they signal the end of the illusion of linear history and progress based on Enlightenment rationality.
Brennan remarks that affective bodily changes in rage and pain are indissolubly tied to those in hunger²²—certainly, the gaping horizontal slits in the canvas amplify the uncanny sense that Who's Afraid III harbours consumptive desire for its viewer in its simulation of the sublime, evoking Edmund Burke's account of the sublime as "delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror; which, as it belongs to self-preservation, is one of the strongest of all the passions".²³ When confronted with Newman's Cadmium Red void, the viewer is subjected to a Lacanian gaze that seeks a response, a consciousness not only of seeing but of being seen²⁴ by the void itself. If the threatening, predatory aura of Who's Afraid III was not already signified by its expanse of redness, hovering like a wall of smooth, meaty flesh, the vaginal pattern sliced into the canvas further animates the painting with a quality of abjection and anthropomorphic sexual anguish. Its emptiness is given a 'mouth' by Van Bladeren, only to exacerbate the quiet; the sense of grief and stillness made swollen by the uselessness of the lips. The canvas is slashed open; the curtains are pulled back to reveal the abject hunger of the painting: behind the void lies another. There is nothing there. Like the transmission of affect from the forever altered Who's Afraid III to the viewer, "the level of reciprocity between the gaze and the gazed at is, for the subject, more open than any other alibi",²⁵ producing uncanny affects of anxiety, revulsion and guilt that promise the hollowed appetite of the painting may swallow its witness whole. Like Van Bladeren, it too seeks revenge.

BORED, SICK, FULL, OF NOTHING IN PARTICULAR
Piet Mondrian, Composition in White, Black, and Red, 1936.


Jubal Brown, Responding to Art, 1996. Composition in White, Black, and Red with blue vomit.

Of a different destructive spirit was Jubal Brown's vandalism of Dufy's Port du Havre and Mondrian's Composition in White, Black and Red. In May of 1996, Brown, then a student at Ontario College of Art and Design, visited the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto after eating various red-coloured foods including pickled beets, red gelatin and red cake icing. Looking for a victim, he selected Dufy's impressionist painting on a whim because it "was just so boring it needed some color",²⁶ and proceeded to projectile vomit the red-coloured contents of his stomach directly onto it. At the time the Gallery believed it had merely been an accident of the body, and Brown was able to evade charges. In November of the same year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he was "briefly tempted by a Picasso before awarding the Mondrian his special prize",²⁷ this time projectile vomiting a mixture of blue cake icing, blue Jell-O and blueberry yogurt onto Composition in White, Black and Red. His aim was to make an artistic statement about the kind of "oppressively trite and painfully banal" art sanctified by the museum structure, through means repelled by the MoMA as "vile and repugnant".²⁸ A yellow attack was planned to complete the performance art trilogy aptly titled Responding to Art, but Brown would never carry this out—the heightened surveillance and media fame, he said, "made the third part unnecessary, or irrelevant".²⁹

What lends Responding to Art its ironic humour is not the peculiarity of medium but instead the jarring, unexpectedly 'dry' disconnect between the violent, painfully viscous act of regurgitation and Brown's utter disinterest in directing a more targeted, personal indictment of the vandalised artworks themselves. Similarly to how he just so happened to target Port du Havre for its plainness, he briskly said of his vandalism of Composition in White, Black, and Red, "I don't hate Mondrian, I picked him because he's such a pristine symbol of Modernism".³⁰ Even in the process of vomiting he required no inducement, claiming he was able to throw up on command. "The pictures alone are enough…It's very simple and direct".³¹

It should be emphasised that the act of vomiting itself, despite being violently convulsive and taxing on the body, is usually performed with a lack of control and intent. It is involuntary expulsion, affectively formless and uninvested in emotion. Brown responds to the banality he sees in the bourgeois 'classics' of modern art with more banality of his own—there is no affection in his reaction, not anger, not disgust, not hatred—certainly he is not afraid of red, yellow and blue the way Kleer and Van Bladeren were. His performance is physical procedure, impermanent gut reaction and nothing more. Along with the short duration it takes for one to vomit, the impassivity and complete absence of affect involved in Responding to Art reveals the impotence of its targeted artworks in soliciting substantial reaction in viewers—in fact Brown suggests they are enjoyed precisely for their inability to produce any emotional affect in the viewer altogether.

Newman and other abstract expressionists preferred non-prismatic hues as they believed such colours typified an authentic connection to the world supposedly enjoyed by "primitive" civilizations. Earthy browns commemorated excrement and other categories of the "dirty" unassimilated by bourgeois society, derived from nonindustrial civilizations that associated colours directly with the materials (earth and stone and body) that produced them.³² If (as the abstract expressionists believed) the distillation of the whole spectrum of colour into red, yellow and blue seemed like sterilisation—a means of eradicating the most basic, and even base, attributes of hue,³³ Brown repossesses the sterilised primaries and recontaminates them through the disgusting processes of the body, rejecting the notion that red, yellow and blue have intrinsic use and exchange value by churning them out of the digestive body as hydrochloric-acidic waste. As he replaces the non-prismatic hues of natural body fluid with the primaries of bourgeois dogma by physically stuffing them in his insides only to quickly eject them, Responding to Art suggests the rejection of red, yellow and blue is a biological process, and that its forced consumption under capitalism is unnatural; non-human—Jell-O.

On this note the artificiality of the food 'paint' Brown chose to ingest is significant: like Newman, he appropriated the dogmatic combination of red, yellow and blue, rejecting the intellectual dignity with which their use in classic modern art was often paraded with to instead play on the primary colours' associations with infantile development. Inorganic, one-dimensional flavour profiles of sweetness and oddly smooth textures of foods such as gelatin and icing are also suited to infantile tastes, emphasising the reproducibility and synthetism of goods under capitalist modes of production, in which participation via inevitable consumption automatically indicts the consumer with indulgence in excess. By physically expulsing red, yellow and blue from his body, he rejects altogether the codes with which the European tradition sought to simplify vision and perception to crystallise qualities of simplicity, order, exact definition of parts, balance, linear structure, and an insistence on the flatness of the picture plane.³⁴ Brown's vomit on Mondrian's painting perhaps completes it, filling in its white gaps with blue to produce yet another classic configuration, interchangeable with the rest of his compositions.

For Erik Anderson-Reece, the Who's Afraid series' "affirmation of a sublime presence through abstract painting was simultaneously a rejection of the European devotion to plasticity, neoclassical notions of beauty, the representation of objects, and the "moral" belief that the mastery of materials signalled a kind of ethical superiority".³⁵ He goes on to describe Newman as a "good terrorist" who attempted to dismantle the walls of the museum from the inside.³⁶ However inflationary, Anderson-Reece's belief in Newman is relevant for our understanding of Brown's performances: instead of attempting to dismantle the institution of the museum, he terrorises the frame of the painting from the inside—that is to say, the literal insides of the gut, which he abuses as the source of his paint. Against the established conception of engagement with paintings as cerebral or emotional, reactions strictly reserved for the mind and heart, he lowers and degrades the artwork down to the affairs of the digestive core. In other words he responds to the emotionality of affect with the physiology of affect, reducing affect into that which is physically involuntary, exposing the humiliating interior content typically hidden from public view by the service of the ego "which has censored what it sees and hears as it seeks reasons to agree with social opinion".³⁷

I'M MADE OF RED YELLOW AND BLUE

We return to the question posed at the beginning of this essay: is there nothing more to art and knowledge than red, yellow and blue? Could we even entertain the idea that the primaries are all we have? Certainly there is something there about our immediate knowledge, our immediate body—the truth we cannot unlearn—red for our blood and flesh, yellow for the cloying bubbles of our fat, blue for the veins that bulge above and beneath. We are made of this stuff; the contents of the inside have been vivisected and surgically displayed on a canvas. Kleer responded viscerally, Van Bladeren with scathing disgust, and Brown with relative apathy, indicating the relation between art and affect can be located in the pulse between attraction and repulsion.

Our concurrent interrogation of the primaries too reveals our profound suspicion towards the sublime, at the same time fulfilling our desire for it. Affect theory allows us to rationalise, reason with this conflict, bringing us closer to an understanding of empirical and art historical foundations. If our fascination with the primaries can be characterised by this push-pull fascination with the sublime, we can also characterise it as a fascination with our own natures and the physiological systems that produce life-or-death affection in us. Red, yellow and blue, then, become of permanent life-death significance, of innateness, of base instinct, into the realm of survival.

Notes
  1. Teresa Brennan, "The Education of the Senses." The Transmission of Affect, Cornell University Press, 2004, pp. 116.
  2. Sarah K. Rich, "Bridging the Generation Gaps in Barnett Newman's Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?" American Art, vol. 19, no. 3, 2005, pp. 30.
  3. Thomas Young, quoted in "Young's Theory of Colour Vision." Nature, vol. 128, no. 3220, 1931, pp. 123.
  4. Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews, Alfred A. Knopf Inc, 1990, pp. 145. Quoted in Erik Anderson-Reece, "Who's Afraid of Corporate Culture: The Barnett Newman Controversy." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 51, no. 1, 1993, pp. 49.
  5. Anderson-Reece, Who's Afraid of Corporate Culture, pp. 51.
  6. Barnett Newman, Art Now, New York, 1969. Quoted in Rich, Bridging the Generation Gaps, pp. 23.
  7. Rich, Bridging the Generation Gaps, pp. 36.
  8. Dario Gamboni, "Museums and Pathology." The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution, Reaktion Books, 1997, pp. 158-9.
  9. Gamboni, Museums and Pathology, pp. 158.
  10. Gamboni, Museums and Pathology, pp. 159.
  11. Gamboni, Museums and Pathology, pp. 160.
  12. Silvan Tomkins, "What Are Affects?" Shame and Its Sisters: A Silva Tomkins Reader, eds. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, Duke University Press, 1995, pp. 54-5.
  13. Brennan, "Introduction." The Transmission of Affect, pp. 1.
  14. Tomkins, "Distress-Anguish." Shame and Its Sisters, pp. 111.
  15. Gridley McKim-Smith, "The Rhetoric of Rape, the Language of Vandalism." Woman's Art Journal, vol. 23, no. 1, 2002, pp. 32.
  16. Tomkins, "Fear-Terror." Shame and Its Sisters, pp. 237.
  17. Gary Schwartz, "The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution. Book Reviews." Art in America, Brant Publications, 1998, pp. 2.
  18. Gary Schwartz, "The Destruction of Art."
  19. Brennan, "Interpreting the Flesh." The Transmission of Affect, pp. 139.
  20. Brennan, The Education of the Senses, pp. 130.
  21. Anderson-Reece, Who's Afraid of Corporate Culture, pp. 53.
  22. Brennan, The Education of the Senses, pp. 135.
  23. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. John Boulton, Routledge, 1958, pp. 136. Quoted in Paul Crowther, "Barnett Newman and the Sublime." Oxford Art Journal, vol. 7, no. 2, 1984, pp. 52.
  24. McKim-Smith, The Rhetoric of Rape, pp. 32.
  25. Jacques Lacan, quoted in McKim-Smith, The Rhetoric of Rape, pp. 32.
  26. "Student Says Vomiting on Painting was an Artistic Act." New York Times Company, 1996.
  27. "Protest throws up an art form." The Independent, 1996.
  28. "Student Says Vomiting on Painting was an Artistic Act."
  29. Interview with Jubal Brown in Corinna Nicole, "Artists Who Vandalized Art to Create a New Work of Art," Owlcation, 2023.
  30. "Student Says Vomiting on Painting was an Artistic Act."
  31. "Protest throws up an art form."
  32. Rich, Bridging the Generation Gaps, pp. 30-1.
  33. Rich, Bridging the Generation Gaps, pp. 30.
  34. Edward B. Henning, "A Classic Painting by Piet Mondrian." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 55, no. 8, 1968, pp. 245.
  35. Anderson-Reece, Who's Afraid of Corporate Culture, pp. 53.
  36. Anderson-Reece, Who's Afraid of Corporate Culture, pp. 54.
  37. Brennan, The Education of the Senses, pp. 137.

Barnett Newman, Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV, 1969-1970. 2.74m x 6.03m.