Arnheim's discussion of color is highly structural, based on the three painter's primaries - red, yellow and blue - and their various possible relationships. In line with his emphasis on the concentrated artistic message, he explores the way in which complex ideas can be communicated through secondary and tertiary relationships, suggesting unification or separation. Just as art has moved from purity of expression, however, so too syntactic color relationships are not of the greatest contemporary interest. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Carrie Mae Weems, Golden Yella Girl, Blue Black Boy, and Magenta Colored Girl from the Colored People series, 1997
Toned and/or color-stained silver print with text on mat, edition AP 1/2]

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Attention instead has shifted away from the structuring of our visual order to our social order. Thus today color is likely to evoke questions of race and identity. Artists today definitely play with the intersection of such ideas with a standard artistic discourse of formal purity. Carrie Mae Weems for example has juxtaposed photos of African American subjects with colored filters to probe the resonance of "color." The terms signifying hue "golden," "blue" and "magenta" merge with other that are ethnically loaded - "yella" and "colored." 

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​Spencer Finch, Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on that September Morning, 2014, 

Watercolor on paper. Commission for National September 11 Memorial and Museum.​

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In such a case, "primaries" are not supplied by physiology or sensation but rather cultural experience. Similar ideas relating to cultural memory are explored by Spencer Finch. In Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on that September Morning, he asked people to recreate the blue of the sky on September 11th, 2001, in New York when so many eyes were trained upward. The formal exercise of mixing color to be "just right" is a parallel act of memory consolidation, forcing reflection on a terrible experience for New Yorkers. 

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One can see in this case that color serves as a metaphor for the construction of experience, and the same is true for the interaction of color. Supposedly beyond the Modernist moment, Donald Judd responded sensitively to the complex effects of illumination and reflectance he saw in Dan Flavin's works, transferring the vocabulary of Albers' work on painting into three-dimensions. Talking less about, as we might expect, the industrial derivation of Flavin's fluorescent tubes, he instead remarks on the kaleidoscopic effects that Flavin has manipulated. 

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As in the case of the Ganzfeld, the recent observance of color has often been directed to issues of meta-perception. For example, Gestalt psychologists pioneered the role of spatial organization and boundary conditions on the perception of lightness and color. Kanizsa investigated the way in which an indistinct boundary could change the phenomenology of a color patch, making it spongy and diffuse. These incidental observations, overlooked by Arnheim, now take center stage. The same kind of effect that Mark Rothko explored in the 1960s is carried on by Wolfgang Laib today. 

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[left: Mark Rothko, No. 14, 1960, 1960, oil on canvas, 114 1/2 in. x 105 5/8 in. (290.83 cm x 268.29 cm) https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/97.524; right: Wolfgang Laib, Pollen From Hazelnut, 2013, pollen, 18 x 21 feet]

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Laib has an ecological and performative element to his work, collecting the pollen that he displays and then distributing it in the gallery space. The already brilliant yellow color is enhanced by the indeterminate border, which helps strengthen the impression that the pollen is a kind of source of illumination. In such a work we see a typical postmodern marriage of an intense perceptual affect indexing its materials and organic origins.  

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