Color of Crisis, Crisis of Color

Text by Nikolaj Schultz

Welcome to our New Climatic Regime, an epoch in history where several long-held assumptions about the world we live in are vanishing with the same pace as the Earth’s habitability is. A cosmological and political crisis¹ , as Bruno Latour taught us, where the planet we thought of as stable is reacting fiercely to our collective actions (Latour, 2015), and where the ‘nature’ we thought of as beyond our societies has turned into a fierce political battlefield (Latour, 2017). An existential crisis, as I have written about myself (Schultz, 2023a), in which the freedom we all believed in has turned out to be at the expense of our own species-Being’s long-term survival chances, and where disturbing affects and moral scruples emerge in the wake of our realization hereof. And finally – but somewhat less discussed – a cultural crisis, in which our cultural imagination also appears to be reconfiguring. A historical moment, where our shared images, symbols, and aesthetic representations and their significance are metamorphosing, and confusingly so.

Let me give a few examples illustrating the plausibility of such an unfolding cultural climatic crisis. As a cultural image, ‘the coast’ (or ‘the beach’) used to represent a place of freedom and ultimate leisure, a place embodying the very idea of ‘dreaming oneself away’. However, today, coasts or beaches have become some of the first places disappearing due to climate change, now symbolizing the loss of a world that used to be just as much as a place we used to dream ourselves away to (Schultz, 2023b). In a similar manner, airports used to culturally symbolize a global outlook, discovery, and curiosity. In (late-)modernity, walking through an airport encapsulated gazing at the open horizon – it meant adding perspectives to the world. Today, however, one can ponder if not airports have become churches of bad faith, equally representing moral perplexity – as architectures of destruction, they have turned into places that literally make the world shrink rather than making it bigger, and hence a cultural image of earthly hubris rather than progress.

And as a final curious example, bringing us closer to the thematic of this exhibition, try to pose yourself the following question: On a boiling hot planet, does or could the cultural significance of the Sun itself perhaps be somehow transforming? And if there is a grain of truth to that hypothesis, then what happens to the color of yellow? In a time where the sun not only means life, warmth, and vitality, but also heatwaves wildfires and drought, could the color of the sun perhaps also be in the midst of undergoing a change of meaning? Could this color which for Goethe as well as Van Gogh represented happiness, joy, hope and optimism today or tomorrow be attaining a more ambiguous not to say dark or anxious meaning (Schultz, 2024)?

This is just a thought experiment, but I hold that it is one worth entertaining – especially, as I mentioned above, in the context of Frederik Erfurt’s intriguing exhibition. In order to understand why we need to pause for a second and take a step back in time, with those who do so professionally. Now, as French historian Michel Pastoureau has taught us, in his awe-inspiring and convincing studies of the history of colors, then no colors are static, carved in stone, or fixed. Instead, we must understand that all colors are historically and culturally constructed and negotiated – their meanings have continued to change again and again over millennia (Pastoureau, 2018)².

Colors have many cultural nuances, so to speak, they are social phenomena rather than natural phenomenon, and the way we perceive them and their significance transform together with the societies that imbue them their meanings³.

One of Pastoureau’s important theoretical conclusions is that not only do we fail to understand colors themselves but also cultural and social history if we assume that colors are static and if misunderstand them as always having carried the same meaning as they do today. But from his argument, we can furthermore deduce something else: With major historical ruptures, social upheavals or cultural transformations, then sometimes – with time – we can see different meanings or significances of colors emerge. At this point the reader probably already figured what I am aiming at here, because as already indicated above, then major social and cultural transformations are certainly what (continue to) emerge in the wake of the Anthropocene epoch.

And hence, the question at crux of it all: Isn’t it possible that not only the nuance of only yellow, but the whole palette of colors today could see their meanings potentially redefined or re-configurated – either right now, or in a near-coming future? I at least believe this is a hypothesis worth pursuing. And if one does so, another question worth posing naturally emerges: Within the framework of the cultural crisis, I spoke of above, could it also be that we are today living in a crisis of color⁴?

All of these curiosities do appear to me as relevant to investigate for social or human scientists as they do for artists – and hence the importance of Erfurt’s exhibition, carrying a similar name. Because even if I am neither an art scholar nor an art critic – and therefore not in any position to judge the aesthetic value of these work – it nonetheless does strike me that this is precisely the topics at stake here. In a moment of crisis, what happens with the colors of the world? How do colors appear to us today, and how are they perceived? Is their significance transforming today? Do their nuances mean the same as they used to, do the evoke the same, or is something changing? Or again, might we be living in a crisis of color? And perhaps, most importantly: What might be the color of a crisis?

Of course, it goes without saying that the Crisis of Color exhibition does not offer any answers to these questions – only indications, clues, and intuitions on how to continue the investigations and ponderings upon them. But precisely by doing so, it does operate in the projective sense great art sometimes does – that is, it borrows from the present, but it is indebted to the questions of the future. In bleak times where all nuances seem to be fading, and where we are indeed all navigating in the dark, one can rarely ask for more of any exhibition, let alone any young artist.

1 The term ‘crisis’ here ought to be understood in the way as the existentialist tradition’s way of understanding it – that is, as a rupture of meaning.
2 See especially the introduction chapter.
3 The color yellow, to use the same example, went from being the of honey in the Neolithic period, the color of sun and gold in Ancient Europe, the color of lying in the late Middle Ages and forward. See Michel Pasteoureau (2019).
4 Again, remember here that the term ‘crisis’ means a rupture of meaning.

Bibliography
Latour, Bruno (2015) Facing Gaia, Oxford, UK: Polity Books.
Latour, Bruno (2017) Down to Earth, Oxford, UK: Polity Books.
Schultz, Nikolaj (2023a) Land Sickness, Oxford, UK: Polity Books.
Schultz, Nikolaj (2023b) “Epilogue: Dreams”, in: Pierrot, Tropisms. Bali, IN: Equator Books.
Schultz, Nikolaj (2024) “Another Metamorphosis of Yellow? Van Gogh in the Anthropocene and ‘New Existentialism’, in Curiger, Brice (ed.) La Haute Note Jaune, Arles: Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles.
Michel Pastoureau (2018) Blue: The History of a Color, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Pasteoureau, Michel (2019) Yellow: The History of a Color, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Nikolaj Schultz (DK), Sociologist, PhD, and Assistant Professor at Aarhus School of Architecture. One of his generation's leading figures in contemporary social theory and ecological thought. His work explores the intersection of sociology, politics, and the climate crisis.