It’s the colour of light and warmth, bananas and cowardice. Now yellow has a show all of its own
Yellow is a colour with diverse and often contradictory meanings. It is often associated with warmth and happiness, but in English, “yellow” can be used as slang for cowardice. In Chinese culture, yellow represents royalty (commoners were forbidden from wearing yellow until modern times), while in Arab culture it can mean insincerity. In South Korea it is associated with jealousy, in Christianity with greed and in 19th-century Europe with mental illness.
Van Gogh frequently used yellow in his paintings, which some believe was a result of his suffering from xanthopsia, a condition that causes the sufferer to see everything as if through a yellow filter. Xanthopsia was a side effect of digitalis, which was used to treat epilepsy. Gauguin also used a great deal of yellow in his paintings, particularly in Tahiti, which perhaps reflected the heat. Graham Sutherland was another artist notably fond of the colour. Yellow, specifically pantone colour 137c, is also the colour of the label on the Veuve Clicquot bottle. The colour was registered in Rheims 130 years ago and, to mark this anniversary, the champagne-maker has asked Jules Wright, the director of the East London art space the Wapping Project, to put together an exhibition linked to this colour. It’s another example of the way that corporate brands are bandwagoning the arts. It would make John Berger wince, but in this case the somewhat corporate intent has produced genuinely interesting results.
Wright has commissioned several artists – a sculptor, an art student, a film-maker, an architect and a choreographer – to create something in response to the yellow. The delight of the show comes not only from the zest of the idea, but from the energy and intellectual curiosity of Wright. Driving the concept is her itch to see how these diverse artists will work together.
“It’s going to be a delicious mél-ange,” Wright says. “The ideas are very simple. I’ve left it to each artist to come up with anything at all that inspires them from the colour. Sam Spenser, for example, is a rising star from Goldsmiths College in London, and he is working on an installation on the tree outside the building. The choreographer Maresa Von Stockert is doing some lovely work with dancers, and we have a great piece of work by Shed 54, which will go outside. All the artists have responded in their own ways, and the results will be fun and stimulating.”
Last week, I watched the deep, absorbed pleasure of Spenser installing his take on the yellow colour in a beautiful plane tree – open yellow umbrellas hang from the ends of the branches like flowers.
Spenser was also working on fine-tuning the sound installation that will play beneath the tree. “Colour has frequency, and so I used the 137c colour to inspire a piece of music, too,” he says.
Spenser’s dramatic, large-scale work will dominate the entrance, but visitors will see more yellow placed by Shed 54, the architects who converted the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station into the art space. They have put Stairways and Reflections, a structural piece using neon light strips, inside the accumulator tower. Bars of yellow light leading upwards inside the tower are reflected into a pool of water, giving 137 steps above and below the ground.
The third outdoor work will be Martin Scanlan’s short film, In Search of 137c. His award-winning work has been seen at international film festivals and he has made a number of works for the Wapping Project . In Search of 137c is a five-minute thriller that will be projected on a screen outside the building.
“Yellow is a colour you don’t often notice during the day,” Scanlan says. “It’s supposed to inspire positive and happy feelings, but at night in urban areas I think it has more sinister overtones, to do with the yellows of lights, street signage, yellow lines, that sort of thing. I wouldn’t normally write a script with a colour as the starting point, but the brief was so broad that I found it very liberating.”
As they step into the building, visitors will be given a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, in plain 137c yellow, and labelled only with a number on the back. This is another of Spenser’s ideas. Inside the building the puzzle will take shape, with only the numbers to help, forcing a fresh mélange of people, interacting with each other to find their puzzle neighbours. On leaving, everyone will be given a piece of another jigsaw puzzle, and a mystery event involving this puzzle will follow in February.
Anarchy keeps breaking out in this show, which is, I suspect, just as Wright and Maison Wapping were hoping. One can only wonder how the top brass at Maison Clicquot will respond.
The sculptor Richard Wilson will make a small intervention in the Engine Room. Wilson first gained public recognition for his installation 20:50, a sea of reflective sump oil, which is now part of the Saatchi Collection. Four years ago, he created his iconic Butterfly in the Boiler House of the Wapping Project, a time-lapse film showing a battered light plane being unfurled and patched up to resemble something of its former self. This time, he will dismantle one part of the heavy machinery still in the Engine Room, a hunk of obsolete metal, and hoist it slowly and repeatedly up to the ceiling and down to the ground. Somewhere on this contraption will be an element in the champagne yellow – a dab of paint, a dyed piece of rope, nobody yet knows.
Von Stockert, who was named Choreographer of the Year 2006 for her Wapping Project commission Grimm Desires, uncovers the windows of the Boiler House to make one of her gravity-defying works with four dancers. This will be performed regularly throughout the show. At the opening event “Bottle Man”, a very tall male dancer, will perform, tumbling and leaping around the turbine hall, bottle in hand.
Wright herself has come up with a yellow piece, too, named Forest. A small grove of silver birch trees will sit amid a dense drift of yellow autumn leaves. In among the trees will be placed a traditional British telephone box painted in 137c yellow. From time to time the telephone will ring. “If someone answers it, there will be a message,” says Wright. “The messages will be fairly polite on the first night, but they may stray a little as the show progresses.”
It all sounds a bit mad. But it is also highly inventive and playful. Wright and her artists are clearly having fun with this project and, because every work is simple, the combined result could be fabulous: a haze of champagne yielding gently to art.
Yellow Since 1877, Wapping Project, London E1 (www.thewappingproject.com020-7680 2080), from Wed
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