Techno Memory 00001 (Yellow Techno)

Bernhard Living - Techno Memory 00001 (Yellow Techno)

In a letter to Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard wrote, ‘You can’t have too much yellow’ - and so there’ll never be enough yellow in Bonnard’s Nu à contre-jour [1], with the yellow-patterned wallpaper and the refection of a yellow chair seen in the mirror. A woman stands washing herself holding a yellow sponge to her breasts and is bathed in soft yellow light coming from the window. It’s an early morning yellow moment frozen in time. There’s the yellow of Joseph Beuys’ multiple sculpture Capri Battery [2], in which there’s a yellow lightbulb ‘plugged’ into a lemon. Is there such a thing as ‘yellow energy’, and what would this really mean? Could this energy bring Beuys back to life and raise him from the dead? In Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Yellow Patch [3] there’s a little oblong of isolated yellow in a bare white canvas with a black grid, and so there’s a colour isolated within a non-colour, white being a mixture of all colours, and black being colour’s absence - but which one is the non-colour, or is it both of them? The yellow patch is right at the edge of the painting, and it looks as if it’s going to fall off at any moment, to disappear forever. A completely different yellow is in Kazimir Malevich’s Yellow Plane in Dissolution [4], a yellow with a blurred edge into nothingness.

It has the

emptiness of a black square, both substantial and ephemeral at the same time, there it is, existence and non-existence. There’s a dynamic intensity to the yellow moon in Paul Klee’s Full Moon and Fire [5]. Klee played the violin, and so what does yellow sound like? Maybe it’s like a sine wave distorted by a bit crusher, with crushed bits of lemon to make lemon juice, the taste of a yellow sound on one’s tongue. If the yellow is too sour, then everything will be out of tune, a sound blur. Yellow is associated with Wednesday, so these are synesthetic thoughts for a Wednesday afternoon.

Notes

[1] Pierre Bonnard Nu à contre-jour 1908 Oil on canvas 124,5 x 109 cm Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts de Belgique http://www.fine-arts-museum.be/fr/la-collection/pierre-bonnard-nu-a-contrejour Accessed: 27.09.2015

[2] Joseph Beuys Capri Battery 1985 Lemon, light bulb, plug socket 8 x 11cm National Galleries of Scotland https://www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/artists-a-z/b/artist/joseph-beuys/ object/capri-battery-gma-4646 Accessed: 27.09.2015

[3] Piet Mondrian Composition with Yellow Patch 1930 Oil on canvas 46 x 46.5 cm Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany http://www.kunstsammlung.de/en/home.html http://www.wikiart.org/en/piet-mondrian/composition-with-yellow-patch-1930 Accessed: 27.09.2015

[4] Kazimir Malevich Yellow Plane in Dissolution 1917 - 1918 Oil on canvas 109 x 73.5 Stedelijk Museum Amsterdamhttp://www.stedelijk.nl/en/press/press-images/ malevich Accessed: 27.09.2015

[5] Paul Klee Full Moon and Fire 1933 Oil 65 x 50 Museum Folkwang, Essen, German http://www.museum-folkwang.de/en/museum-folkwang.html http://www.wikiart.org/en/paul-klee/fire-full-moon-1933 Accessed: 27.09.2015

[6] http://www.bernhard-living.net/techno.memories/techno.memory.00001.html