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"Trickle-down" is an Orange-Colored Phrase: Providence poster art's fight for Olneyville
In the 4 th century BCE, Aristotle noticed a correspondence between the harmony of sound and the harmony of color. In 1689, a man confused the color scarlet with the blast of a trumpet. In 1871, Arthur Rimbaud wrote that “E” was white and “O” was blue. In 1900, Miss M.F. McClure saw diaphanous clouds of pink and green while listening to musical notes. In 1911, subject “S” revealed a preference for “lavender tastes.” In 1923, Leon Ginsberg smelled camphor and soda as the color yellow-green. In the second half of the century, Sean Day ate “blue” steak, Carol Crane felt the strums of a guitar tickling her ankles, and a woman named Jeanne changed her name to Alexandra because of the brilliant reds of the “a” sound. The rest of us tasted the rainbow, listened to bright sound, and smelled red. Two years ago, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington , D.C. put together an exhibition that would appeal to psychiatrists, poets, and members of the videogame generation alike. Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900 explored the relationship between the senses of sight and sound, featuring over 90 works ranging from abstract painting to experimental cinema to “color organs.” Belying its title, the curators did not derive their inspiration for the exhibition from case studies of those who actually experienced the psychological phenomenon of synaesthesia, a condition that involves the coupling and confusion of the senses due to cross-wiring of sensory regions of the brain. Indeed, a quick look at the biographies of the featured artists suggests no such scientific basis. Georgia O'Keefe did not actually see pink and blue when she heard C-major and A-minor chords. It is also doubtful that the muted shades and grid-like patterns of Paul Klee's “Variations” literally translated what he experienced while listening to a piano concerto. While some debate still exists as to whether or not Wassily Kandinsky was actually a clinical synaesthete, the harmonic swirls of “Painting with White Border” most likely mimicked scientific images of sound waves rather than vibrations he observed fluttering in the air. No, the starting point for Visual Music was not a phenomenon that affects about one in 2,000 people. It was instead the psych-rock light shows of the Who and Frank Zappa (safe to assume no cross-wiring to the visual cortical area there—just lots upon lots of LSD). The curators found popular appeal in the green laser swirls that flashed to the rhythm of the cash registers of Pink Floyd's “Dark Side of the Moon.” In this they saw true infiltration of avant-garde activity into mass culture—according to the exhibition catalogue. The neurological aspect almost seemed to be an afterthought. In “Visual Music,” the term synaesthesia was used in its predominantly aesthetic sense. The curators did, however, attempt to use this afterthought to ground the exhibition, to legitimate it, and to give it scientific relevance. Neurologist Richard E. Cytowic, MD, largely credited with reviving research on clinical synaesthesia, spoke to a rapt crowd while standing in front of the Kandinsky painting. He provided a sort of layman's briefing on the neurological condition, dropping cocktail party trivia interspersed with talk of graphemes and phonemes. Cytowic certainly spent a decent amount of time explaining why hearing the word “village” or “college” might trigger the taste of sausage for certain types of synaesthetes and how seeing the word “love” written in pink could upset a synaesthete who sees the word in teal. However, musings about the general population, like how red-dyed chardonnay actually smells like merlot to almost everyone, seemed closer to Cytowic's central point. While his subject was slightly esoteric, Cytowic's closing message was rather populist. “All of us are synaesthetic,” he said with extreme emphasis. There was something intensely relieving about hearing that. It almost seemed unfair that such a small fraction of the population should be able to experience life as if they were on a never-ending tour of Willy Wonka's factory. While some of the visitors may have come to the exhibition because of an interest in the neurological condition or out of an utmost appreciation for Klee, the true motivation of many seemed to be simply that the ability to experience color as music and music as color is utterly and enviably cool. When all of our other senses have been maxed out by flashing televisions, fusion cuisine, and dance club beats that make your heart vibrate, an alternative to becoming bored and anesthetized to this sensory overload is to heighten it further, to have everything mixed and combined.
There did not always seem to be such a great popular craving for such sensorial hedonism. Isaac Newton did suggest a correlation between light and sound, mathematically arranging the color spectrum along the circle of fifths. However, this point largely remained a footnote in his light theory. Attempts at producing real color music were largely written off by all save a few scientists and philosophers—the idea had not quite entered into the imaginations of those in the spheres of arts and entertainment. Priest-cum-mathematician Louis Bertrand Castel's repeated tries at producing a color harpsichord were perceived as so fantastically idealistic in the 18 th century that he earned the nickname “Don Quixote of Mathematics,” courtesy Voltaire. Castel did not battle windmills in the name of aesthetics: he had hardly any musical training and could never be called an artist. Rather, just as Quixote believed in the designated order of chivalry, Castel believed in the order of a perfectly organized universe. If Castel could have stuck around until 1915, he might have been able to sit in the front row of a concert hall, bathe in bright white light as Aleksandr Scriabin's visual symphony “Prometheus” reached its finale, and appreciate the wonderful novelty of a color organ that actually sort of worked. Decadence and cries of “ É pater le bourgeois! Shock the middle classes!”—the new zeitgeist saw synaesthesia become the fixation of the artists rather than scientists. Through the haze of foggy absinthe in reservoir glasses, a revolution against the so-called conventional, natural, and real emerged. Truth could be revealed by singing “the ecstasies of the mind and senses,” suggested Charles Baudelaire's “Correspondances.” Through synaesthetic metaphor, French Symbolist poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud were able to elevate the symbol relative to the symbolized. The device was inherently subversive: unlike most metaphor, it could not be reduced to a simple comparative framework. “Her wails are lemons” can be equated to “her wails are like lemons,” but “she gave a tart wail” can only be simplified to “she gave a wail similar to the tartness of...” The disconnect between the sense and the sensory descriptor unsteadies the meaning, leaving the reader to define what “tart” actually means and to what “tartness” corresponds. Biting, and pungent to the sense of taste? Of pain, punishment, suffering, and discipline? Sharp, severe, grievous? Keen as a weapon? Acidic as the aforementioned lemon? Or bitter as the aforementioned glass of absinthe? The Oxford English Dictionary says all of that goes. The Symbolists adopted an attitude toward synaesthetic metaphor that seemed to anticipate the next century's Deconstructionst attitude toward language in general. For the Symbolists, the synaesthetic metaphor was able to operate outside of the norms of syntax, escape rules imposed by ordinary reality, and enter into a sumptuous experience that better captured the truth of life. This certainly did not correspond to the physicists' fantasy of an orderly universe.
Having even less to do with that perfectly tidy universe than the Symbolists' literary synaesthesia were these poets' attempts at artificial synaesthesia. At the Hôtel des Etrangers, members of the Cercle des poètes Zutiques , such as Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, would sweetly play piano while surrounded by sweeter opium clouds. Intellectual debate was interrupted by the playing of pranks fit for the outtakes of the American Pie unrated special edition DVD (“Pale ale,” anyone?). From these sessions of chemical intermingling of the senses came Rimbaud's “ Les Voyelles ,” the sonnet that helped further popularize synaesthesia in the aesthetic realm and capture the imaginations of those outside of it: “ A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu . ” “A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue,” the poem begins. On the most basic level, some find this mixing of letters and colors puzzling because of the instability of it all: is it a true manifestation of synaesthesia? is it strictly metaphor? was Rimbaud on hallucinogenic drugs? laments one Norwegian artist who is fascinated by the first question. Beyond merely placing synaesthesia in the realm of the aesthetic, the sonnet's magical undertones and mention of alchemy seem to fully remove it from the realm of the scientific. As the modern world was becoming increasingly rationalized, the mystical and almost mythical irrationality of synaesthesia increasingly appealed to the aesthetes at the fringes. While it received attention from the medical world around the fin-de-siècle due to psychology's rise in prominence, synaesthesia progressively became considered in terms of the aesthetic rather than scientific. While synaesthesia had not yet attracted general curiosity at that point, there were already hints that mass culture would find synaesthesia seductive, as something pleasurable, diversionary, and even escapist. In his 1892 work Degenaration , Max Nordau attacked the debased art of the Symbolists and Decadents with the fervor and moral disdain of Tipper Gore railing against porn rock. The reactionary social critic argued that, at best, synaesthesia in art was a cheap novelty trick and, at worst, a confession of debauched behavior or mental instability. Colored vowels? Please, what merry pranksters Rimbaud & Co. were! A few could argue that Nordau's polemics on the art of the avant-garde reflected the voice of the masses, a rejection of a peripheral subculture that the general populace viewed as utterly disdainful. Fringe activity that stays at the fringes, however, never provokes such an impassioned response.
Flash forward to the 1960s. The Beatles are singing about “listening to the color of your dreams.” Around 500,000 people show up at Woodstock; not an insignificant number of them end up high on LSD. “Psychedelia” is a household term, and acid rock is mainstream. Light show concerts sell out on a regular basis. Jim Morrison's even calling himself “Rimbaud with a leather jacket,” all while topping the billboard charts and playing on the Ed Sullivan Show. This new counterculture that placed so much value on sensory experience had moved from the fringes to front and center. Of the artists featured in the “Visual Music” exhibition, Klee and Kandinsky had died, and O'Keefe by this point had moved on to specialize in cloudscapes. While artists that followed would, of course, produce works with synaesthetic features, synaesthesia ceased to be something truly avant-garde in the latter half of the 20 th century. Even the painter David Hockney, a true clinical synaesthete, does not directly connect his work to his condition. Meanwhile, scientific research on synaesthesia had nearly come to a halt, thanks to the rise of behaviorism in psychology and possibly to a need to outdo the Russians with military technology. While a resurgence in research on the subject would occur after the Cold War, the general public was long familiar with synaesthesia by this point. And so the progression continued, from the physicists to the avant-garde to mass culture. As synaesthesia became fascinating to even the average record-collecting teens of Middle America, it also developed a mythic quality. To say in hushed tones, “I hear he's a synaesthete,” was to say not just that a musician was a genius, but that the musician experienced a type of elevated existence to which the poor listener could never even aspire. Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett and Jimi Hendrix were not viewed simply as rock gods; they were seen as being capable of experiencing music in a way that was inaccessible and eminently desirable to their legions of fans. The impenetrable aura of the synaesthetic seems, if anything, to become more encapsulated by legend as time progresses. Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, is a case in point. So many stories of impossible origins surround the album Trout Mask Replica . One often hears a piece of college radio lore, passed down to each new generation of deejays: “Don Van Vliet had a condition called synesthesia, allowing him to see sounds and hear colors. He sat in a meadow for fifteen hours, composed these songs, then instructed his band how to play them. Myth or fact? Doesn't matter. Explanations of this music usually fall short.” The double-album is full of jagged guitars, smoky bits of harmonica, and bluesy wails that issue straight from the bottom of Van Vliet's diaphragm. The collision of the clarinet's melody and the bass line, the juxtaposition of the syncopated drums with the ever-bleeding saxophone, lyrics like “high yellow high red high blue she blew” — this was all an experiment in “maximalist synaesthesia,” according to Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Secret History of Maximalism by Michel Deville and Andrew Norris. The track “Ant Man Bee” seemed to be such a mess of sensory experiences for Austrian musician and artist Walt Michelson that he created a “synaesthesia-musicbox,” a brightly colored and highly textured bit of assemblage, just for the song. Trout Mask Replica never quite topped the charts but ended up becoming an iconic work as the years progressed. About a decade after it came out, rock critic Lester Bangs wrote that the album shattered his skull and realigned his synapses and that it was his mission to “turn the rest of the world on to this amazing thing.” Sometime later, this sensory jumble ended up finding its way into the top 100 section of Rolling Stone's list of greatest albums of all time. The cultural penetration of this synaesthetic composition continues today in the most commercial of ways: just this past summer, a photograph of Paris Hilton, the triumph of marketing absent talent, holding up a copy of Trout Mask Replica popped up on Gawker with the tag “inexplicable cultural juxtapositions.”
While none of the songs from Trout Mask Replica have yet been used to sell a Volkswagen, synaesthetic turns of phrase have been heavily employed the past couple of decades in advertisements (arguably society's best cultural barometer; Paris Hilton might take a close second, though). All categories of food, it would seem, can be music to or for your mouth. Preschoolers who watched Captain Kangaroo in the early 1980s could sing along to the Nestle Crunch Bar jingle “it's music, sweet music for your mouth” nearly every weekday morning. By the time they graduated from sippy-cups to juice-boxes, Ocean Spray had appropriated the slogan. Around the time they turned 21, Kahlua ran an ad campaign on the phrase. Now, during their lunch breaks from their tech and finance jobs, this bunch can grab a Schlotzsky's sandwich and finish off with Hershey's Symphony Bar if they're in the mood for a truly melodic meal. Max Factor lipstick, Sony sound equipment, MTV programming—all have used synaesthetic metaphor in their advertising headlines. Advertising studies have discovered a number of situations where the synaesthetic better captures the attention than the literal. Amidst the bombardment of already bright and loud television commercials, the brightly loud and loudly bright synaesthetic commercials win the persuasiveness competition for their perceived novelty and for their ability to inspire fantasy. These advertisements may not trigger daydreams about harmonic laws of physics or about evoking higher truth through the symbolic. However, they might cause one person to imagine herself as a rockstar surrounded by bright violet lights or another to imagine himself as the rugged Western hero... who just so happens to smell like burnt sienna. One study even combines ideas on synaesthesia and sound symbolism to create the perfect brand—the ad man's Holy Grail. By combining just the right letters with just the right hues, the utterance of a company's name can evoke the colors of the company's logo, thereby engaging the consumer on more than one sensory plane. Mix a fricative like the letter “s” with the front vowel sounds of “i” and “e,” color them brightly, and you've got a brand that's simultaneously aurally and visually memorable:Skittles, which seems to have the phonosemantic thing down pat. This conglomeration borrows the blue “O the Omega ” of Rimbaud's “Voyelles” and turns it into a green dollar sign using pseudoscience. A dvertising, it seems, is the new alchemy, and mass consumerism is the new decadence.
Before exiting Visual Music , visitors had to pass through Jim Hodges' installation piece “Corridors,” a hallway of compressed vertical color bars matched to fragments of melody. Snatches of pop songs sung by prep school students played as visitors strolled through the narrow space. The painted walls called to mind images of toy xylophones, the packaging of Fruit Stripe gum, and other assorted detritus of childhood's multihued geometry. The strips of color derived their composition from the lyrics of dozens of pop songs that contained explicit references to color. Hodges went through hundreds of pieces of sheet music, took note of the note played when the word “red,” for example, was sung, and used this information to help create this work. The tidy connection between the color blocks and the chosen sounds seems at first to suggest a natural correspondence between the visual and the aural—the same sort of correspondence suggested by likes of Aristotle, Newton, and Castel. The work, however, is not so straightforward. As the catalogue suggests, “Corridors” undermines the idea of an innate connection between what we see and what we hear. Just like Rimbaud's vowels have no scientifically indisputable relationships to their assigned colors, Hodges' link between the colors seen and the notes heard is made upon an arbitrary premise. Ten pop stars could sing the word “green” on an F-sharp, and four rockstars might croon it over a B-flat. However, this information shows nothing more than a coincidental, subjective preference. There's no empirical order to it all—just the stimulus of acid rock light shows and the pop science of advertising. Even clinical synaesthetes—especially clinical synaesthetes—would get the joke: go to one of their conventions, and you'll see that they can't even agree on the color of the alphabet. “Corridors” managed to tap into what Visual Music was tried to be about. Visual Music was a frenetic everything-but-the-kitchen-sink type of exhibition in which all media, regardless of audience or intention, was a go. It tried to use the popular appeal of rock shows to promote abstract art, and then it tried to use science to somehow distract from the general disorder of the show. It was an exercise in the organization of chaos by creating more chaos. “Corridors”'s neatness, by contrast, is really just an attractive presentation of deeper entanglement. Both exhibits are evidence not only of a desire to embrace the confusion of our senses, but also a need to have it all sorted out and explained away. While we're never going to be able to agree on what blue sounds like, we'd like to think we all could.
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