Color and Illusion 
Color is associated with illusion whenever it is encountered as the 
property of a thing. The sky is blue, but it is also not a thing, and the 
weightlessness of the sky matches exactly the weightlessness of its 
color. Weight, gravity - actual, symbolic, and institutional - and 
hardness and softness have to be present before color is experienced as 
an illusion. A concrete block painted sky blue will give the illusion of 
being lighter in weight than it really is - robbed of some of its thingness 
by the color which has been added to it - just as a block of plastic foam 
will appear heavier than it is if one paints it the color of oak. In terms of 
ordinary perception and cognition the sky is what appears to be, but 
things are not. There is always a speculative gap between them and 
their coloration, because one could imagine them colored differently, 
and what is more as the sky changes color so do they: as things they 
remain constant, but their surface takes its cue from the realm of the 
not-thing, and to that extent eludes the control of the object to which it 
is attached. 
Philosophy has always disapproved of color. Plato tried to convince 
himself that it did not exist, excepting as an illusion. He wanted color to 
be an accidental effect of the weather, or, elsewhere, of squinting, so 
concerned was he that truth should be colorless, an affair of form alone. 
Art at its most Classical and academic - Leonardo, Le Brun, Conceptual 
Art - has followed philosophy in always seeking to avoid color's uncon- 
trollability by trying instead to keep meaning locked in the colorless 
language of drawing - or its close relative, writing - as far as possible. 
Jacqueline Lichtenstein has shown that what troubled Plato about color 
was that it makes things exciting, and I think this is the sense in which 
the question of color and illusion lead to that beauty. 1 The people who 
are suspicious of the one also suspect the other, in both cases because 
they fear being seduced from the path of the real: color is almost never 
mentioned in Contemporary art criticism without having the adjective 
merely attached to it, which keeps it under the symbolic control of a 
larger truth. 2 Statements that apply to color often seem interchangible 
with ones about beauty, and vice-versa. 
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe 
Santayana's famous maxim that beauty is pleasure considered as the 
property of an object, for example, is both parallel and precedent for my 
Suggestion here that color is illusion considered as a property of an 
object. 
What color adds to objects is a skin - always a zone of association, 
projection, and other fertile grounds for illusion - which brings it the 
idea of the inside and the outside, and weightlessness and movement. 
Color is always not only that which bears it, because it is always at once 
substance and phenomena. As a colored substance it proposes a surfa 
ce off or away from which it may, as phenomenon, float, or which it may 
inflect in such a way as to detach itself as both surface and phenome 
non from that of which it is the skin, or its own independence of gravity 
may render weightless that which it colors, providing it with the mobility 
in exchange for its physicality, which recognition and the rule of the real 
will then strain to restore. Color allows art to preserve its necessary 
engagement with indeterminacy. If you don't have indeterminacy you 
can't have pleasure,which is to say you can't have play and you can't 
have seduction, but, more important for the ethically minded, you can't 
have immediacy either: there's nothing conceptually certain about 
immediacy, except that it's our fundamental connection to the truth of 
the real. 
1 Jacqueline Lichtenstein, "On Platonic Cosmetics«, in: Uncontrollable Beauty, 
Bill Beckley with David Shapiro (eds), New York, Allworth Press, 1998, pp.83-100. 
2 Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Das Schöne und Erhabene von heute, aus dem Englischen von 
Almuth Carstens, Berlin, Merve, 1996 
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