Beating a Dead Light

A number of years ago I wrote a short text on how Dutch artist Barbara Collé employs a misconstrued notion of the physio-chemical effects on colour appearance to make an argument that the 'industrialisation of colour degrades our colour experience'.

I have now worked for a few months as a colour technologist for a major paint company, and I can only say that she was even further from the mark than I already understood at the time. In particular I'd like to further elaborate on a specific paragraph from her text:
'Any classical painter knows that you can get dark yellow to lean towards olive green by mixing it with some blue and red, or brown and green. But you can achieve this quicker by adding some black to it. This last option doesn't necessarily mean that you are killing the yellow pigment, but this is the case if you use Carbon Black. The yellow pigment that first reflected the morning light differently from the evening light, has become stable, or lifeless, in a single blow.'

The first thing I have to say about this is that 'the industry' makes olive green by mixing oxide yellow with oxide red and ultramarine. This is never done by mixing a yellow with carbon black. The reason for this is that the former is the cheapest and most reliable option.
Carbon black is markedly different from nearly every other pigment because at ~0,01–0,1 µm, its particle size is much smaller than nearly every other pigment, which particle sizes tend to range from ~0,1 to 10 µm. Carbon black is also completely apolar, and these factors make it difficult and expensive to predictably disperse the pigment evenly throughout a paint mixture, which is especially true for water-based paints. Time and money are leading factors in industry, so the industry uses the far more cheap and forgiving inorganic pigments whenever possible.
Ironically, these 'natural' inorganic pigments, unlike Carbon Black, are known for dulling, or 'dirtying', colours in mixtures. Their exact hue depends on difficult to control factors of crystal structure and dispersity, resulting in pigments that have a somewhat broad band of variable properties. The broader these bands are, the less intense a colour will appear.
At least in the case of olive greens, the dullness of the colour that Collé is advocating against is thus caused precisely by the use of the kind of pigments she would prefer.

The other remark I'm concerned with is the last sentence of Colle's paragraph. The play of light she describes has been extensively studied and is called metamerism in the scientific literature. Metamerism describes the different appearance of a colour depending on aspects like the viewing angle of the observer and differences in the primary light source.
In the paint industry, reducing metamerism is nearly always a concern, for obvious reasons. If you are in a shop choosing a colour for your kitchen, then you're not going to be thrilled when that colour appears very different than you expected once its on your walls. Metameric effects are even more pronounced between different kinds of paints, so it's also more than likely that your doors wont match your walls if you pay no attention to metamerism.
As reducing metamerism is vital when matching  colours to a sample or between paints, it therefore shouldn't be seen as a negative in any paint applications that aren't artistic in nature. 

The development Collé opposes to thus isn't driven by the evil corporations who are out to sap the world of fun, but rather by shifting consumer demand and expectations. It is not them, but us, who want the world to be controllable and predictable, and that predictable world is grey. 

To have a genuine, unprejudiced, interest

Empathic thinking is a very important skill that engaging with art can teach you. It does this through the active effort involved in understanding the motives of the artist. It's not through immediate communication that art is able to solicit feelings of social understanding and empathy, but it happens rather when the audience actively engages with the work. The audience then ponders why another person, the artist, would make the work and why it could possibly be important to them.
It is only through a viewer who curiously engages with the unfamiliar other, that art is able to train us to view the world from somebody else's perspective and thus broaden our world-view.

In many ways I feel like this is emphatic ability is best represented by the work of On Kawara. This is the case even if his work is most often seen as hardcore conceptualism, focussed on the essentials of language with a minimalist aesthetic, and thereby stripped of any emotional connection to the human condition.
I believe the work of On Kawara only appears this way if a spectator has no empathy and no ability to understand what others do with their life when they are not around.

An important first step in an empathetic engagement with art is that you trust that the artist has presented something for you that is worthy not only of their, but also your, time and consideration. This is unfortunately not always the case, but as a viewer you must nevertheless trust that it is so.
At first glance the works of On Kawara may not appear as worthy of any attention. After all, they are simple facts presented in simple forms; telegrams with the text 'I am still alive', paintings of a date in white letters on a coloured background, a book that lists one million years. Without actively thinking about the context of the work and the person who made it, these objects may appear as straightforward statements of no importance whatsoever.

Yet, if we understand more about how the work came into being, the more we see that it's a complex work of many considerations, all of which undoubtedly were of some importance to the artist.
Let's consider the date paintings of the 'Today' series. These paintings have a few simple rules; each painting displays the date on which it was made. If the painting isn't finished in a single day, it is destroyed. The date is always centered and written in white, sanserif, lettering on a coloured background. The language of the date is adjusted to the language of the country where the painting is made. And if the country does not use the Latin alphabet, Esperanto is the language of choice. After completion, the painting is placed in a box with a clipping from a newspaper of that day, from the locality the painting was made in.

At first glance, these rules seem like a straightforward method to create a formalistic language and develop an artistic style. Upon closer inspection, essentially all of these choices are significant within the context in which these choices were made.
At the beginning of any artwork there are the technical means by which it was created. For the Today series, this is Liquitex acrylic paint on canvasses of various size. This seems insignificant, because who cares what paint the artist used for such simple declarative statements, right? Yet as we have seen, Kawara must finish each painting in a single day. As these paintings are necessarily made up of multiple layers of paint, one needs a paint that dries fast enough in order to achieve this. Liquitex was the first water based acrylic paint and only came to market in 1956, ten years before started his Today series. Only this kind of water based acrylic paint dries fast enough to reasonably finish such a painting in single day. Therefore it was essentially impossible to make these paintings under these conditions only ten years earlier.

The paintings are also displays of a reasonable amount of technical skill on behalf of the artist. It took a number of years for Kawara to obtain a degree of mastery over the process, which can clearly be seen when early paintings of similar sizes are compared to later ones:

It's therefore easy to see that the works, although simple in their appearance, are interesting from a mere technical viewpoint, even without any 'conceptual' interpretation.
The method Kawara employs, where the same technique is repeated over and over until one has achieved mastery of their craft, is also a distinctively Japanese persuasion. In the West much emphasis is placed on the new and the novel, especially in art, while in Japan constant refinement of techniques over years or decades has been, and still is, valued in many aspects of society. An obvious and almost clichéd example are the many rock gardens that require precise maintenance by literal monks.
Furthermore, there is a genuine risk of failure in these paintings. Any other painting, can, at least in theory, be reworked, remodelled or repurposed to become something of value. Yet Kawara's self-imposed rule that any painting must be executed in a single day provides a framework whereby the artist realistically only gets one attempt at creating a particular painting. In this sense it's akin to calligraphy, where an artist has only one chance to make a mark on a particular piece of paper.

Looking beyond the technical aspects, the written content of the paintings is of course not unimportant.
The subject of the work is consistently a single date that is formatted per the customs of the country where the painting was made, but always in the Gregorian calendar and Latin alphabet. This use of the Gregorian calendar gives the work an international outlook during a time when Japan was still very much recovering and re-defining its international relationships after the catastrophic end of the second world war. In the years after the second world war, the relationship between Japan and the West, largely embodied by the USA, was far from simple and many aspects of Japanese culture and government had changed under Western occupation in the two decades prior to the start of the Today series. For a Japanese artist to embrace the Gregorian calendar as the works only exponent is therefore anything but the evident and neutral course of action it is sometimes perceived to be.
In addition, there is something to be said about the differences in a historical conception of time between Japan and the West, or rather between Christian and Buddhist traditions. In Christianity, the time one spends on earth is linear and ends in an 'eternal' afterlife, while for a Buddhist your presence on earth is a cycle of rebirth, which may one day cumulate in Nirvana as a state without time. The implications of this difference are too large to fully explore here, but it does make one think about how the two traditions could ascribe different values to a painting of a date.

These simple remarks are thus a strong indication of the social implications of Kawara's work and his own keen sense of them. More direct evidence of Kawara's own dedication to the social implications of his work can be seen in a project Kawara called 'Pure Consciousness'. For this project, Kawara placed seven date paintings, comprising a full week in the Gregorian calendar, inside classrooms of various elementary schools throughout the world.
This places the date paintings in a direct relationship with a place of learning, during a period when the children are familiarised with the concepts that the day paintings exemplify, which in turn highlights the artificial construction of their subject. Although a calender is based on some natural phenomena from the relative positions of celestial objects, like a day and a year, the subdivision of a year into seven days is arbitrary to an extent. Yet this arbitrary subdivision guides much of our lives with the idea of a work week and so on. Children are taught these arbitrary rules, but without the ability to reflect on them, these children become adults for whom these ideas are so ingrained they are fundamental to how they perceive the world.
Through placing the date paintings in an environment where learning is done by open minds without reference, Kawara shows that to him the date paintings are not a straightforward affirmation of a simple fact, but rather a way to reflect on a complex social construct that has many hidden implications.

Throughout Kawara's career he also went through great lengths to obfuscate any information about himself as a person. No biographical information is made available, other than what is known from works such as 'I am still alive' and no photographs of the artist have ever been officially published. Yet unlikely artists like stanley brouwn, Ian Wilson, or more recently Tino Seghal, who extended such tactics to the work itself, making it paradoxically covetable and mysterious, Kawara has always allowed extensive and generous publishing of the work itself. He therefore simply acknowledges the importance of the work over the artist as an individual. 
While in Western modernity a lot of emphasis is placed on the individual, best exemplified in the shape of the artistic genius, Japanese tradition places greater emphasis on one's place within a greater society. Kawara's self-removal from the works image thus can once again be seen as a keen awareness of differences in social constructions that are present in the world and what is often described as a claim to 'objectivity' in art-historical texts, is therefore just as much a simple demonstration of how one can be sensitive to the experience of others.

Therefore I'd like to conclude with the statement that if one wishes to learn about the complex understanding of others one can glean from art, then you need to look no further than the of On Kawara. In all its superficial simplicity, his work explicates many aspects about Kawara's own philosophical attitude towards the world, as well as more general aspects of Japanese culture and its changing relationship towards the west during the 20th century.
It can both be read as a personal accounting, as well as an description of the universal. It is both steeped in traditional Japanese values, as well as a comprehensible expression of globalisation after the second world war.
And perhaps most important is the fact that the only way to see and appreciate the breath of his work is to look beyond one's own limitations and have a genuine, unprejudiced, interest in what may have motivated the artist to record such obvious and self-evident facts with a high degree of discipline.

Building a Spectrophotometer

In the autumn of 2025 I attempted to build a spectrophotometer by myself.

A spectrophotometer is a scientific instrument that measures the amount of electromagnetic radiation, or light as it is commonly known, that is absorbed by a sample. As different molecular bonds absorb light at different wavelengths, the absorption of light says something about your molecular composition. The most practical use for this is the determination of the quantity of a known substance in a sample.

In order to measure the absorption accurately, the light that passes through a sample is ideally only comprised of a single wavelength. This is a major difficulty in the design of the instrument, which can be overcome by something called a monochromator, of which the Czerny-Turner monochromator is the most common design.
In a Czerny-Turner monochromator, light from a white light source is aimed a concave mirror, which sends the light towards a movable grating that diffracts the light and breaks it up into individual wavelengths. These are then focussed by another concave mirror and aimed at a narrow slit, which in theory only lets one wavelength of light through. This light then passes through the sample and the reduction in intensity of the light is measured:

So while the principle of a spectrophotometer is simple, manufacturing its parts to analytical standards requires high precision, and therefore these machines are expensive. Brand new instruments are several thousand euro's and even decades-old equipment can still fetch prices of several hundred euro's. For example, this beauty from the 1970's is listed for 500 euro's today:

Because its principles are relatively straightforward and can be observed with the naked eye, the spectrophotometer is often an early introduction to scientific equipment within an educational context. Indeed, many teaching kits are commercially available, to make it possible to see the inner workings of the instrument and freely manipulate the individual components around. However, such teaching kits still aspire to the same level of quality as the commercial equipment and so the prices are still high, often exceeding a thousand euros for a basic model.

Due to the accessible nature of the machine's workings, there have also been many published instances of spectrophotometers built out of simple(r) materials and on a small(er) budget. Examples include Peiera, et al. (2019), Kovarik, et al. (2020), Shin, et al. (2022), Osterheider, et al., (2022), and Poh, et al. (2021).
However I noticed a pattern in these suggestions. They tend to be either limited in functionality, restricted to light of a single wavelength, or are only applicable to a small number of known analytes.
The more general purpose designs I've encountered on the other hand tend to incorporate at least one 'cheap' component that is nevertheless a considerable expense, such as a professional grade grating mirror, access to a 3d-printer, or a smartphone equipped with a camera. While such items are somewhat commonplace, if one has to purchase one specifically for the project, it quickly drives up the cost to 100+ euro's. 

With this in mind I went to make a spectrophotometer of my own design, based on the Czerny-Turner monochromator. My first goal was to make a functional general purpose spectrophotometer and the second goal was simply to spend as little money as possible.

In order to achieve this I aimed my attention at the cheapest materials I could think of that could perform the required function in my design.
For the monochromator I therefore used a rechargeable LED-flashlight as the light source. The price of the flashlight was seven euro's. Its light was reflected by two plastic make-up mirrors and broken up with a cd, for a total cost of another seven euro's. The whole thing was made of recycled wood, with the slit being a cut in a thin piece of veneer, attached by some tape. The wood consisted of scrap material from other projects, but let's value it at a generous five euro's.
The detector consists of an Arduino board with a € 0,40 phototransistor and a two-line lcd-screen. Together with a breadboard and some other bits and pieces this came in at a total of € 15,05.

The total cost of my spectrophotometer, if one had to build it from scratch, thus came in at 34 euro's and five cents. For this money you get a design that is compatible with standard (disposable) cuvettes that are used throughout the industry:

And an overhead view of the instrument in operation:

Of course the instrument I built is not plug and play and there are a few things I learned about its limitations.
The light yield is low due to the low quality of the mirrors that lack a uniform focal point. Therefore the amount of diffusion is high towards both ends of the visible spectrum, making the instrument the most effective in the green to orange colour range.
I also found out that a phototransistor was much more sensitive in this case than a photoresistor, and the transistor also had a more consistent output throughout the whole spectrum, while the sensitivity of the photoresistor I tried was greatly reduced above ~600nm.
Also the slit in the veneer is still somewhat broad, even if it was cut with a sharp scalpel. Therefore one can only measure the absorption in a broad-ish range of about 50 nm instead instead of a single wavelength.

In terms of its practical use, the calibration calculations have to be performed by hand. First the maximum absorption of the sample is determined, before a blank and a series of standards are measured against that point of maximum absorption.
As there is no (reliable) way to record this specific maximum, repeatability of experiments is a possible issue, as the measurement cannot be repeated exactly with known wavelengths.

Nevertheless, I found the instrument to be accurate and reliable with solute concentrations as low as 1 mg/mL. This is much less sensitive than commercial models, which can often reliably detect concentrations of 1 mg/L or even lower, but it's perfectly useable for my personal applications.

By not attempting to adhere to modern analytical standards, I have thus been able to build a functional general purpose spectrophotometer compatible with standard single-use cuvettes for about the same price as a single package of these cuvettes.

Ab die ecke und schäm dich

It's physically impossible to see all the exhibitions in today's global art world. Therefore much of the goings-on at exhibition venues are photographically documented and distributed on websites like contemporaryartdaily and contemporaryartlibrary.org, which gives people the impression that they have seen all there is to see and are in the know. I've personally disliked the widespread prevalence of this practice for over a decade now, because the installation views used on these websites tend to give an illusion of an overview, the art equivalent of omniscient narrator, where works are depicted in relations that are impossible for any physical visitor to encounter.
In this method it is forgotten, or ignored, that a visitor to an exhibition space is a physical entity, and one that takes the world in with their eyes. Eyes that are different from a camera lens because they have a wide field of view, but a narrow and continuously shifting focus. The body has ears, it has a nose, it has legs that walk and arms that reach. 
And so a picture hung at a height of 110 cm appears completely different from a picture hung at a height of 155 cm. Navigating through a room that is 4 by 5 meters is very different from navigating a room that is 16 by 20 meters. Yet the prevailing standard of documentation has the camera at the height level of the pictures and depicts the room from corner to corner, making such marked differences appear identical.

A recent example of this that I encountered was the show Day for Night by João Maria Gusmão at Sies+Höke. I had seen installation views of the exhibition on the gallery's website, showing the works neatly arranged in a single line and in a clean space, like one is 'supposed' to hang a proper gallery show:

When I visited the exhibition, however, the installation of the works was strikingly peculiar to me, with all the works being hung very low. The top of works were hung slightly below shoulder height for me, being 186 cm tall. I therefore took the following photo with the camera at my eye level:

This snapshot is much closer to the reality of my experience in the exhibition. The works no longer appear as grand statements like in the gallery's documentation, but rather as small and humane hand-made experiments, full of flaws and imperfections.
And this is just one example of when 'good and proper' documentation leads to a distorted view of what the exhibition factually is. Such practices undermine the intellectual honesty of art, and so debase the entirety of art as a noble pursuit.

At the same time, this practice of showing an, at times physically impossible, overview has influenced on how artists and curators alike install their exhibitions. When photographing exhibitions, the camera is often placed in the corners of the room in order to obtain such an overview. Consequently, I've seen many curators, and artists, 'instinctively' walk to the corners of a space while installing exhibitions.
There is little rhyme or reason to this practice, as I've never seen any visitor to any exhibition voluntarily stand in the corner like a punished child, so what the exhibition looks like from that vantage point should be of little concern.

Yet this is a common occurence to the detriment of all exhibition making. I personally encountered a very clear example of this practice in the 2023 exhibition Channeling at the MMK in Frankfurt am Main.
In one room of this exhibition the very wide spacing of the works made no sense to me as a visitor walking inbetween the works. It was then that I realised that the curators must have only considered the show from the corners of the room. I then proceeded to take photographs from all four corners and indeed the placement of the works appeared to make more sense from there.
I later compared these photographs to the official documenation found on the MMK's website and this confirmed my suspicions. In the following images the official documentation is overlaid on my own documenation from two opposite corners of the room:

As you can see, both of the official documentation photographs are simply two narrow views of what can be seen from the corners of the space. The compression that's especially present in the first photograph also shows that their photographs were taken with a short telephoto lens. Thus the experience the curators were apparently aiming towards in the exhibition was for the visitor to stand in the corner of the space and look at the works with a pair of binoculars...
The wall I was leaning against was also empty in a bad way. This can be clearly seen in a photograph taken from where the security guard was standing in the first photograph:

Instead of a short telephoto lens, the official documentation is now all of a sudden shot with a wide angle lens with a larger field of view than the human eye. It's physically impossible to see both works simultaneously like in the MMK's documentation. Their photograph therefore presents a view of the exhibition that no visitor to the space has factually experienced.
But of course, in todays art world the 'proof' of the documentation is more important than any physical reality, so one of the clearly incompetent curators of the exhibition has since moved on to become the chief curator at the MUMOK in Vienna.

I personally believe that documentation of an exhibition should attempt to capture the experience of walking through the exhibition as accurately as possible.
Unfortunately, few institutions attempt to adhere to reality, prefering the polished and standardised appearance that provides them with greater opportunities founded on ever greater falsehoods.

A good photograph of a table and a chair is a good photograph of a table and a chair.

 Sometimes it's difficult to photograph a table.