The following ChromOrgasm Blog Series will house approximately twenty short color "sortie" excerpts from my two recent papers entitled, ChromOrgasm: ChRomancing w/Hues: Color & Its Interlocutors, and ChromOrgasm: Chromancing the Color Moshpit/Toward a Definition of ChromOrgasm, given at the 2004 MACAA Interplay Conference and 2006 SECAA Conference respectively. The writing in the ChromOrgasm Blog Series will be in my "speaking short version" from the conferences, and is further combined with excerpted roughs from my forthcoming self-published book entitled, ChromOrgasm. pd 2/2011.
Color Sortie #1: Colors Individuality/Chromatic Independence
Image: Structural Color/Sapphirina
In order to resist the dominant homophobic culture and preserve her innate color individuality, Starina, played by the actor Nathan Lane during his cross dressing episode in the recent movie The Birdcage, explains to his partner Armand that... “one does want a hint of color.” Should not pink socks with a black pinstripe suit be acceptable? Just how can a decentralized, feminine, holistic and nonlinear notion of color subvert the dominant paradigms often controlled by governments, corporations, pigment manufacturers, and color associations?
In nature, the biology of the animal kingdom has mating colors such as the chemical flush of the human body or the structural bioluminescence of the Sapphirina (figure). Humans and nearly every species engage in a color dance to attract and sustain species. Often the dance occurs at a collective space where couples meet, such as the 70’s discotheque, or the 80’s workout gym.
Today, transgressive self mutilation and body piercing are colorful means to decorate or alter our identity and gain access to social coupling. This has been furthered by performance artist Orlan whose series of documented plastic surgeries questions the physicality of the body as an art medium, each surgery an identifier of the past, present and future state of the body and its shape-shifting capacities (figure).
Works Cited(Presentation Order)
Birdcage. (video)
List of Illustrations(Presentation Order)
1. Structural color: (a)Sapphirina; (b) comb plates on a lobate ctenophore. (From Lamb, Trevor, Colour, Art, & Science. Cambridge UP, 1997, p.164)
2. Orlan. Baiser de l’Artiste, 1976-7. B/W Performance Still. (College of Visual Arts slide library)(Original slide)
2.A Orlan. Website. http://www.orlan.net/
Stay tuned for the next ChromOrgasm Blog Series color sortie!
With a chromatically adaptive smile,
pete
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pete
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