Indigo Trotzt Der Vermessung, Wie Das Gleichförmige Schwarz-Blau Des Pazifiks, 2020
2020
Digital posters
5 of 7 from
die chromatika/the chromatika
1080 x 1920px jpeg
RGB colour as black and white
July 2020
Zurich and Basel, Switzerland
The artist writes:
I once came across an idiosyncratic little book called
The Blue of Capricorn.
The cover was very lovely to my mind and, unusually, the top of each page was tinted a blue-black indigo colour. It was published for a book club called The Readers Union by Victor Gollancz Ltd in London in 1963, the year I was born.
The Blue of Capricorn
was written by the American author Eugene Burdick who lived in the Pacific with his wife and children on the island of Moorea, just seven miles from the more famous island of Tahiti.
NOTE
Eugene Leonard Burdick (1918-1965) was an American novelist, and non-fiction writer, a renowned public intellectual and a highly respected political scientist. His career was cut short when he died tragically of a heart attack at the age of 46.
His first novel,
The Ninth Wave
(1956) follows a political campaign exploring the implications of the then cutting-edge innovations of opinion polling, computers and the use of campaign consultants.
The 480
(1964) refers to the number of groups (by party affiliation, socioeconomic status, location, origin, etc.) used by a computer simulation to classify the American electorate. The novel is based on analysis carried out for John F Kennedy’s 1960 Presidential election campaign by the Simulmatics Corporation.
Burdick’s text is an unusual amalgam of Pacific history, geography and sociology interspersed with short fictional anecdotes. Burdick wrote, ‘The Pacific is enormous, plural, contradictory. One aches for limitations, for boundaries that reduce the sensation of awe.’
In The Blue of Capricorn Eugene Burdick describes the immense waters of the Pacific's Kuroshio Current as 'a deep uniform indigo, almost black, colour.'
Blue-black/Schwarz-Blau
double-page spread from the artist's book
Die Chromatika/The Chromatika,
2021.
To me this captures indigo's true nature - the colour of the unthinkable depths of the sea, the colour of profound measurelessness.
Ich habe einmal ein seltsames kleines Buch namens The Blue of Capricorn in einem Antiquariat gefunden. Es beschrieb die Farbe des weiten Kuroshio-Stroms im Pazifik als 'ein tiefes, einheitliches Indigo, fast schwarz'.
Für mich fängt dies die wahre Natur von Indigo ein - die Farbe der unvorstellbaren Tiefen des Meeres, die Farbe der tiefen Unermesslichkeit.
