1. 1
Poetics of Black
A Dissertation Submitted to the
Division of Media and Communications
of The European Graduate School
in Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
By Kathryn Simon
October 2013

2. 2
Attributions
I wish to thank the many professors, teachers, and friends who supported me through this
dissertation. Were it not for them I couldn’t have made it all the way through.
The greatest thanks to Doctor Professor Wolfgang Schirmacher to whom I have the deepest
gratitude for accepting me into the program when I was still stuttering, and for encouraging me
to undertake this productive challenge of completing my doctorate at European Graduate School
with so challenging an examination. And I want to express my most profound respect for
creating European Graduate School, whose bold vision provides loamy ground for the greatest
philosophical and artistic minds shaping the cultural terrain to come together and spar, in effect
lighting a welcoming space for possibility, bold thinking and radical examinations. I have only
the deepest gratitude and respect for Dr. Schirmacher’s courageous vision in creating and
sustaining this school in the face of the times we live in, putting thinkers and creative thinking
first. I am very deeply honored that he chose to be Chair of my committee. Greatest thanks to
Victor Vitanza for advising me; for his magnanimous insights and generosity (and time) in
discussing my work, and which deepened the examination—and for his deep affirmation of me
as a thinker and artist in productive ways during this process. (As well as for hijacking me into
his class on the first day). Early conversations with Fred Ulfers that helped germinate my initial
thoughts—and were helpful in clarifying the examination. My great thanks to the
professors/scholars/artists I shared conversations and meals, and did seminars with at European
Graduate School who opened me to thinking—deeper, clearer, bolder, to confront my own
unknowing and chaos—most particularly to Peter Greenaway whose strength of visual creative
vision fuels and inspires my own. Judith Butler whose remarkable writing and seminars were
examples of thinking, and how a really brilliant writer handles their reader and the material
through intense material. Victor Vitanza whose magnanimous and protective spirit cared for me,
and added new words to my vocabulary. Antony Gormley, whose workshop was remarkable in
returning art to practice, and whose argument with me about affect was ultimately woven into
this dissertation.
In addition to professors at European Graduate School several individuals were critical to this
examination that I wish to thank personally for their time and great consideration for me.
Deepest thanks to Dr. Joe Loizzo, M.D., PhD, Director, Nalanda Institute for Contemplative
Science, Weill Cornell Center for Integrative Medicine Columbia University Center for
Buddhist Studies, for the many productive conversations that led to my being able to complete
this study, and his careful reading and supervision of all the Buddhist materials in this
examination—in essence for functioning as my unofficial advisor for all the Buddhist parts of this
dissertation. Great thanks to Dr. Mark Blum for his generosity in thinking black with me, and
entertaining thoughts that relied on his great knowledge and yet were out of the box for him.

3. 3
Many great thanks to the artists who shared their luminous thoughts with me regarding their
work, and relationship to blackness—in particular to--Karen Gunderson, for her inspiring black
paintings, that offer refuge, for embracing her vision, and for the allowing me to bring together
Chinese, fashion and Buddhist philosophers and artists for the “Night of the Black Paintings”
and for productive conversations in the beginning of this study. Greatest thanks to artist Max
Gimblett for his generous large spirit, brilliance, and motivating energy. I am grateful for his
deep affirmation of me, and this project, even in the darkest moments which inspired me to keep
going, and for the countless rich conversations we had in his studio accompanied with his art—
which continually moved me back into the work, and whose work is a powerful affirmation of
vibrant matter. Thank you for the kindness of Aldo Tambellini for welcoming me, allowing me
to come close, to know his work, and for sharing his encounters with black(ness) over many
conversation’s and through his art—and for his spontaneous calls expressing his delight and
surprise with me, welcoming me as kin in our shared understanding of black(ness). I am deeply
grateful to James Lawrence for our productive conversations that helped me get a better handle
on language in his clear articulation of Fred Sandback’s work and on art around things that are
often difficult or inaccessible, in a visceral language. Great thanks to Amy Baker Sandback for
opening to me, allowing me to interview her, for loading me down with books, making me
acknowledge that Fred was not a Buddhist, and yet being willing and interested in my
dissertation. Thank you for confirming me and for permission to write on her late husbands
work. David Zwirner Galleries for recognizing my work and introducing me to Amy Baker
Sandback and to James Lawrence, which in many ways became a productive opening for the
work to get on the road. For Valerie Steele for her time and generosity in sharing her brilliance
with me. To Barbara Vinken for allowing me to interview her and think black with me as I was
just beginning. Thank you to Stephen Batchelor for taking me into his animated world that
brought ancient history (and connections in understanding) to light. The greatest thanks to Jane
Bennett for showing me ‘vibrant matter’ as the way out of the darkness, and her theories that put
ground under interdependence, revisioning all life as animate. For friends and unofficial advisors
who kept me honest and in the game—believing I could get there, especially to Arjun Appaduri
and Bruce Alshulter. The librarians: who taught me how to locate any book/essay anywhere in
the world, who found and/or ordered books for me, faxed me essays, and listened to the
triumphs and dead ends with encouragement: Jemima McDonald, UTS, Sydney, Rachel
Cassimer, Parsons, Gimbel Library, Tom McNulty, NYU, Bobst, Carmen Hendershott, New
School, Fogelman.
Phelgye Kelden who made sure I went to every teaching for years. To Susan Gamba, my dear
friend, and John Toth who were tireless, supportive, affirming readers, never allowing for the
possibility of my turning back and encouraging me to keep going. And to Anne van Leeuween
for her help with final reading and comments. Great thanks to my dearest friends for being there
in some rough waters throughout this lengthy process. And to Nisi Berryman, Nanni Froehlich,
and Whitney Donati who let me talk!

4. 4
Thanks to my teachers, without whose spiritual sustenance, and teachings I could not have
completed this. Profound thanks to His Holiness, The Dalai Lama whose teachings and
empowerments opened me—gave me the strength and vision to undertake such a study. For
Roshi, her great wisdom and The Village Zendo, whose sangha community was a refuge. Thank
you to Venerable Lama Norlha whose nuns and center was always a breathing space and
touchstone for me.
My deepest thanks goes to Jean Dunbabin without whose support in so many ways this would
not have been possible.

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Table of Contents
Introduction
I. Overview
I.I Trajectory of Study
I.II Synopsis of Chapter
Chapter 1
1. Biography of Black
1.1 Overview
1.2 (Pre)conception of Black
1.3 Birth of Black
1.4 Black in Antiquity
1.5 The Psychology of Black: The Nigredo
1.6 Black in Fashion
1.6.1 The History of Black in Fashion
1.6.2 Innovations in Black
1.7 Conclusion
Chapter 2
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Interview with Mark Blum, Ph.D.
2.2.1 Language
2.2.2 Resonance of Black(ness)
2.2.3 Aesthetics
Chapter 3
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Buddhism, Language and the Connection
3.3 Three Concepts of Buddhist Thought
3.3.1 The Concept of Interdependence
3.3.2 The Concept of Emptiness
3.3.3 Formless Self
3.3.4 Emptiness and Non-Duality
3.4 The Concept of Emptiness: Koans
3.5 Zen Art and Aesthetics
3.5.1 What is Art?
3.6 Philosophical Training: The Scholarly Roots Under Buddhism
Chapter 4
4.1 Introduction
4.2 The Performative in Art: Missing a Language of Affects
4.3 Emptiness/Blackness/Agency
4.4 Vibrancy
4.5 Response-ability
4.6 Space/Time or the Aesthetics of Affect

6. 6
4.7 Conclusion
Appendices
A. Interview with Valerie Steele
B. Black Symposium
C. Interview with Stephen Batchelor
D. Scat Singing Black
E. Sample page for Buddhist fugue
Bibliography

7. 7
नासदा सी ंनॊसदासीत्तदानीं
नासीद्रजॊ
नॊ
व्यॊमापरॊ
यत्
।
िकमावरीव:
कुहकस्यशमर्न्नभ:
िकमासीद्गहनं
गभीरम्
॥१॥
Then even nothingness was not, nor existence,
There was no air then, nor the heavens beyond it.
What covered it? Where was it? In whose keeping
Was there then cosmic water, in depths unfathomed?
न
मृत्युरासीदमृतं
न
तिर्ह
न
रात्र्या।आन्ह।आसीत्
प्रकॆत:
।
आनीदवातं
स्वधया
तदॆकं
तस्माद्धान्यन्नपर:
िकं चनास
॥२॥
Then there was neither death nor immortality
nor was there then the torch of night and day.
The One breathed windlessly and self-sustaining.
There was that One then, and there was no other.
तम।आअसीत्तमसा
गूह्ळमग्रॆ
प्रकॆतं
सिललं
सवर्मा।इदम्
।
तुच्छॆनाभ्विपिहतं
यदासीत्तपसस्तन्मिहना
जायतैकम्
॥३॥
At first there was only darkness wrapped in darkness.
All this was only unillumined water.
That One which came to be, enclosed in nothing,
arose at last, born of the power of heat.
कामस्तदग्रॆ
समवतर्तािध
मनसॊ
रॆत:
प्रथमं
यदासीत्
।
सतॊबन्धुमसित
िनरिवन्दन्हृि द
प्रतीष्या
कवयॊ
मनीषा
॥४॥
In the beginning desire descended on it -
that was the primal seed, born of the mind.
The sages who have searched their hearts with wisdom
know that which is is kin to that which is not.
ितरश्चीनॊ
िवततॊ
रश्मीरॆषामध:
िस्वदासी
३
दुपिरिस्वदासीत्
।
रॆतॊधा।आसन्मिहमान्
।आसन्त्स्वधा
।आवस्तात्
प्रयित:
परस्तात्
॥५॥
And they have stretched their cord across the void,
and know what was above, and what below.
Seminal powers made fertile mighty forces.
Below was strength, and over it was impulse.

8. 8
कॊ
।आद्धा
वॆद
क।इह
प्रवॊचत्
कुत
।आअजाता
कुत
।इयं
िवसृिष्ट:
।
अवार्ग्दॆवा
।आस्य
िवसजर्नॆनाथाकॊ
वॆद
यत
।आबभूव
॥६॥
But, after all, who knows, and who can say
Whence it all came, and how creation happened?
the gods themselves are later than creation,
so who knows truly whence it has arisen?
इयं
िवसृिष्टयर्त
।आबभूव
यिद
वा
दधॆ
यिद
वा
न
।
यॊ
।आस्याध्यक्ष:
परमॆ
व्यॊमन्त्सॊ
आंग
वॆद
यिद
वा
न
वॆद
॥७॥
Whence all creation had its origin,
he, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,
he, who surveys it all from highest heaven,
he knows - or maybe even he does not know.
—Nasadiya Sutra1
I. Introduction
“Poetics of Black” is a close examination of black(ness) as a phenomenological encounter,
rendering it a philosophic texture. In Deleuzian terms, this examination fosters the creative
process of “productive interference” between philosophy and art, rather than an illustrative one2
.
1
“The Nasadiya Sutra,” http://sanskritdocuments.org/all_pdf/naasadiiya.pdf; http://sanskritdocuments.org/
SAMHITA. This document is a version of the RV edition made by B. van Nooten and G.Holland. See B. van
Nooten and G. Holland, ed. and trans., “Aufrecht, [The Rigveda]”
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/onlineRV.htm, accessed August 4, 2013.
The reference was found in the exhibition catalogue Anish Kapoor: Memory. See Anish Kapoor, Anish Kapoor:
Memory, Nov 30, 2008-Feb 1, 2009, (Deutsche Guggenheim: 2009). However, the translation of the Nasadiya Sutra
cited above is different then the one in the catalogue—the reference is a quote from the catalogue. “This is the 129th
hymn of the 10th
mandala or book of Rgveda (Rigveda), a hymn of origination that provokes ontological inquiry and
is considered the nucleus of Vedanic thought, one of the branches of Indian metaphysics . The hymns non advocacy
for any conclusive cosmology is not nihilistic, instead its complex use of negations (neither this, nor that) sets up
multiple propositions” (Ibid.) This English translation of the Sanskrit text comes from Jagdish Lal Shasri and Ralph
T.H. Griffith, ed., Hymns of Rgveda (Dehli: Motilal Barnarsidass,1973), 63-34.
2
By including art or including Buddhist ideas or philosophy in fact, is productively interfering with two disciplines
what otherwise might be (too) “smooth” a read to grasp the texture of black(ness). “Three types of interference
between disciplines fuel conceptual progress. . . The most extreme interference is shared by functions (science),
sensations (art) and concepts (philosophy). . . Despite the irreducibility of planes. Deleuze and Guattari welcome,
and themselves consistently practise productive interference. . . . This type of interference is determined by the
negative. . . as well as the boarder range of chaos each plane must confront the distinctive challenges of the other
disciplines. . hence philosophy needs ‘a non-philosophy’ that comprehends it, it needs a non philosophical comprehension

9. 9
It makes the leap from the idea of black as a surface attribute or color to black as an activity. In a
few words, I’ll do my best to take you into this study, which offers some fresh ground for
thinking black.
Historically, debates on the classification of black concerned its status as a color. Because
of the way these debates conveniently locate black, namely as a secondary affect belonging first to
a “surface” as color, further investigation is halted. Yet, this is perplexing in that black is not in
the rainbow nor is it a prismatic color, which so defines color theory. While black is
conventionally referred to as a color, in fact it lacks hue or chroma. Further, black is the color
that reflects no light and emits the lowest frequency on a light spectrum.3
These accumulated
singularities suggest that black exceeds or falls outside of conventional definitions of color,
eluding this (easy) inclusion in color theory. When considered with white, which is part of the
prismatic range and the light that contains all colors (as in a rainbow) it is easily understood how
black could have come to represent anything “other,” at least in the West.
What I found in color studies affirmed the existence of a very tightly held Western bias
towards black that referred, more often than not, to surfaces (where black appears) and revealed a
clear uncertainty about and even a historical discomfort with color itself.4
With the exception of
Goethe, no one seemed willing or able to get that close. In fact, the study revealed a kind of
chromaphobia—to use a term David Batchelor adopted in his book of the same name that
discusses this general uneasiness with color.5
The majority of more contemporary studies on color
just as art needs nonart and science needs nonscience” (Anna Powell, Deleuze Altered States and Film [Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2012]), 183.
3
“The purity of a color, or its freedom from what or gray…are the qualia that designate color” (“Chroma,” Free
dictionary, http://www.thefreedictionary.com/chroma).
4
A full list of books researched on color theory is included in the bibliography, including ancient, modern and
contemporary theories.
5
David Batchelor, Chromaphobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2000)

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adopt an interdisciplinary approach, but rather than deepening into some rich loamy soil, they
often reveal that investigating color remains problematic6
and very often the authors evaded the
issue altogether, instead focusing on the science of color.
Consequently, although my research began with color studies, ancient through
contemporary, it became clear that a substantive study of black was located somewhere else and
in fundamentally different terms. Already, Goethe’s investigation into color opened onto a
phenomenological experience that transforms color into the vibrancy that happens in the
interaction between light and darkness. Goethe looked into how color is, rather than what color
is. Newton looked at what color does, which yielded no more insight into color itself, though his
theories made it useful—useful in exploring scientific ideas, useless in revealing the nature of
color, which is the concern of most color theorists.
For Goethe darkness is not the completely powerless absence of light. It is
something active. It confronts the light and enters with it into a mutual
interaction. Modern natural science sees darkness as a complete nothingness.
According to this view, the light which streams into a dark space has no resistance
from the darkness to overcome. Goethe pictures to himself that light and darkness
relate to each other like the North and South pole of a magnet7
. . . Goethean
6
“[Jacqueline ]Lichtenstein shows in her brilliant study of painting and rhetoric, The Eloquence of Color, evidence of
chromaphobia in the West can be found as far back as Aristotle, for whom the suppression of colour was the price to
be paid for bailing art out from a more general Platonic iconophobia. For Aristotle the repository of thought in art
was line. The rest was ornament, or worse. In his Poetics, he wrote …a random distribution of the most attractive
colours would never yield as much pleasure as a definite image without colour” (Ibid.,13). See also Jacqueline
Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color in the French Classical Age, trans. E. McVarish (Berkeley: Berkeley University
Press). “It is from here that we inherited an a hierarchical ordering within painting which in its polished form
describes a descent from ‘invention’ through ‘design’ to ‘chiaroscuro’ and finally to ‘colour’. But hang on a minute,
Science when was ‘random’ associated with colour and ‘definite’ withdrawing? Since when did drawing and colour
become ciphered for order and chaos? Perhaps it doesn’t matter the prejudice is in place” (Batchelor 2000, 59).
So even in this debate on color, black is seen as a special case, though not explicitly stated. Maybe a better way to
put this would be to say that black or the line (which are often conflated) were often privileged, in that one did not
have to deal with or manage colour and could focus on the serious rather than what was called “sensuous.” As
Batchelor points out: “To this day, there remains a belief, often unspoken but perhaps equally often unquestioned,
that seriousness in art and culture is a black-and-white issue, that depth is measured only in shades of grey” (Ibid.,
30-31).
7
Rudolf Steiner worked for the Goethe Archive in Weimar (1888-1896), edited several volumes of essays, in
addition to writing The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World-Conception (1886) and Goethe’s Worldview
(1897), where Steiner developed an interpretation of Goethe’s phenomenological approach to the study of nature.
Steiner continued to build upon Goethe’s ideas within Anthroposophy, impressed with what he understood as
Goethe’s insight into color as coming directly out of his experience of nature. Following along this track, picturing

11. 11
color theory differs from that of Newton and of those physicists who construct
their views upon Newton's mental pictures, because Goethe takes his start from a
world view different from that of these physicists8
. . .Were the darkness an
absolute nothingness, then no perception at all would arise when the human being
looks out into the dark.9
If these two men had been working in more contemporary times, it is very likely that they would
find themselves collaborating on an interdisciplinary examination instead of on opposing ends.
The lack of contemporary scholarship on this topic is perplexing.10
Several books have
appeared recently that focus on black but none delve into the depths of the subject nor are these
studies open to what they may find.11
Rather, they catalogue the appearance of black, noting that
it is a peculiarity and adding that many share an attraction to black despite it remaining an
unknown.12
According to David L. Morgan Ph.D. (Director Innovation Lab @Ross): "96% of the
universe is dark matter. Only 4% is of the universe has light matter, which are mostly photons.
color in Newtonian terms is unimaginable for Goethe, since it arises in an entirely different way, and conversely the
same for Newton, whose conception of color comes solely through physics. Goethe, Goethe's World View (Goethe's
Weltanshauung), 1897, trans. William Lindeman (London: Mercury Press, 1992), 138.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.
10
Aldo Tambellini (1930-), painter, filmmaker, sculptor, works solely in black to this day. He was a participant on
the symposium, Black, 1967, with Ad Reinhardt, Cecil Taylor, Michael, Snow and others, a collaborative hookup
between Toronto and New York, made possible by C.B.C. and Bell Telephone. This symposium offers a glimpse
into the vastness and awesome nature of black(ness) in his art. He refers to black as the beginning, and his work as
“black events.” He understands black(ness) to be so vast, way outside the ‘frame’ of art, or architecture or any ‘thing.’
That man is pushing against this blackness to create anything and again is faced with this blackness. His relationship
to black would probably come closest to the ways in which I am attempting to present it here. See Aldo Tambellini,
“Symposium BLACK,” Arts/Canada magazine 113 (October 1967), 3-19. See also Appendix B.
11
Michel Pastoureau, Black, A history of a color (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). See also Stephanie
Rosenthal, ed., Black Paintings: Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella (Hatje Cantz, 2007);
Viet Gorner and Frank-Thorston Moll, ed., Back to Black: Black in Current Painting (Kehrer Verlag, 2009);
Mariuccia Casadio, Pasquale Leccese, Francesca Havens, ed. A Noir (Paris; New York: Assouline; St. Martins,
1998).
12
This is same curiosity persists in the many books written on Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings—that do the same;
they state the obvious, that Reinhardt painted only black paintings for the last ten years of his life, but none discuss
the black(ness) of his these black paintings.

12. 12
Photons have no mass, they can move as waves or particles.13
According to Richard Panek, we
live in, and only see 4% of the “stuff of creation.”14
Dark matter is not necessarily black; though it
is so completely unknown it is called “dark” or “black.” Scientists speculate that we may not even
have the framework or vocabulary to understand the explanation. It may simply be beyond our
current framework of knowledge.15
Since my area of knowledge is not science, this is the only
time to which it is referred. It falls outside the scope of this reading. However, what is
remarkable is that we live in a predominantly black universe and yet know so little about it.
This study begins with a biography of black, through (mostly) Western concepts,
suggesting that, even as a color, black exceeds conventional definitions and conceptual schemas. In
this examination, several approaches are undertaken through philosophy, visual art and fashion
to demonstrate the exceptional activity of black(ness). The way this examination is constructed
the reader could ideally enter this dissertation through chapter 1, 3 or 4, rather then beginning
with the first, where the examination began, and reading sequentially. Each entry point would of
course color the reading through that lens, however the study is truly an assemblage – each
chapter functions as one strand and the project as whole takes on a sculptural form only when all
of the sections are understood together. Reading the dissertation linearly, however, allows the
reader to follow the path of the writer’s research and study.
Because each element of this assemblage is integral to the whole, working out how to
undertake this study and how to present it was continually a challenge. Each piece (or section)
contributes an essential part to the integrity of the sculpture. This issue was raised, for instance,
when some early readers suggested that I should first discuss Buddhist concepts since they seem
13
The following excerpt is taken from a review of Richard Panek’s book, The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark
Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, that appeared in a New York Times. See New York Times, 2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/magazine/11dark.t.html?pagewanted=all-NY Times March 2007
14
Ibid.
15
Ibid.

13. 13
to be the foundation or underpinning of what is being discussed. Yet, I felt obligated to begin in
a more predictable and familiar place, as I had myself, and exhaust all the ways in which I
initially considered black. My subsequent encounter with Buddhist philosophy opened up a space
for thinking blackness in the face of this theoretical exhaustion.
A constellation of resonances accumulated around my study worthy of consideration.
They have returned to me through side doors and the periphery just as I was hoping to edit them
out, like the resonance that black has with writing, only to make a powerful return with
correspondences that confirmed their importance and centrality laying in wait to be discovered. I
looked at occasions when black accumulated in intensity, as in Zen Buddhism and in calligraphy
where the intensities or gradients of the ink make the gesture. I draw upon resonances with “the
word” or logos, in the Judeo-Christian Book of Genesis in which darkness prevailed and the
“Word was the light.” Linking black with the words used in Japanese and Chinese for culture
and civilization, I looked at the co-ordinances, which revealed a genealogy that lay in wait. The
thing that kept me away from the work was the same that pulled me towards it, these
associations lurked, they haunted; as much as I hoped to walk away from Zen and from
Buddhism, the more it presented itself. I had to leave the main road to follow hunches instead of
logic, and go in search of resonances. When I found them, I went with them. Those possibilities
and many close examinations became by degrees the basis for this expansive discourse.
I.I Trajectory of Study
This study is therefore not a work of comparative philosophy but rather one that seeks to unfold
a web of affinities that traverse and ultimately confound the dichotomous opposition: East and
West. Rather than two separate traditions, we find points of convergence, overlap and mutual
influence. Indeed, these histories are inextricably enmeshed like a möbius strip. The confluence

14. 14
of these traditions can be traced to a shared idea of philosophy as practice (praxis). For the
Greeks, philosophy was not an academic discipline but a way of life. Moreover, for Hellenistics
(especially Epicureans and Stoics), the activity of philosophy aims at untroubledness (ataraxia),
which has profound resonances with Buddhist philosophies. The goal of this study, however, is
not primarily to provide philosological evidence of this affinity but rather to deconstruct the
opposition of these traditions that would from the outset foreclose a productive, creative and
poetic exploration of these concatenations.16
Through this approach, my intention is to elicit a parallel with an experience the
performative in art. The same difficulty, however, presents itself in both cases. We often seem to
lack adequate ways of discussing the performative, process, and the often-uncanny experiences
we have in art from the experience itself—in other words, we lack a visceral language. For two
years, I was stuck with the problem of black—as a word, it didn't move. As much as I wanted to
speak about and get to the activity, the things I had to say were not working with this word
“black.” It was not until I replaced black with black(ness) as a placeholder that things began to
happen. I have attempted to stay close to the encounter of black in order to allow for resonance
and cadence. Despite the difficulty of this task, this work attempts to render an encounter with
black through a visceral language—the task, then, is not to represent black but to unfold its
16
Some of this is traced in the conversation with Stephen Batchelor for this dissertation, included in the Appendix.

15. 15
poetics.17
As such, it is not study on or about blackness but rather an investigation into what is
happening in black and blackness.18
Aldo Tambellini, painter, filmmaker and sculptor, works solely in black to this day. His
participation in the Symposium: Black, 196719
(with Ad Reinhardt) offers a glimpse into the
vastness and awesome nature of black(ness) in his art.20
He refers to black as the beginning and
his work as “black events.” He understands black(ness) to be vast, far outside the “frame” of art,
architecture or any “thing.” Tambellini understands that man pushes against this blackness to
create anything, and again is faced with this blackness. His relationship to black would probably
come closest to the ways in which I am attempting to present aspects of pure experience or
absolute black here.
This investigation proceeds as a philosophical rendering of black through Buddhist texts,
and the work of Jacques Derrida, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, which, often
indirectly and implicitly, forms the ground of this argument. Through Derrida and Taoist texts I
found a way of deconstructing notions of black, finally arriving at black(ness). This meant
increasingly freeing the associations I held and opening these associations to a wider range of
possibilities in order to see what was hidden within their construction, and ultimately to reveal
what black(ness) is. In other words, I had to allow freeplay and to make room for black(ness) to
17
I wanted to eliminate the word ‘about’. If all I could summon was to talk “about” something, I was suspicious of
myself, and wondered whether or not I really understood this thing at all. So if you find that this word is in short
supply, it is intentional. The hope was to speak to something, to address an issue, or an idea not to run around it.
The word “aboutness” reeks in some way, suggesting some possible certainty/fixity instead of inviting that healthy
productive aliveness with natural mercurial tendencies.
18
This project demands much of the reader. A demand is placed upon the reader to hazard extending their
boundaries and potential core belief systems to entertain, at least for the time of this reading, an alternative way of
envisioning being in the world. To come close to darkness is always a hellish proposition.
19
Symposium is included in the Appendix
20
Aldo Tambellini (1930-) was a participant on the symposium, Black, 1967, with Ad Reinhardt, Cecil Taylor,
Michael, Snow and others, which a collaborative hookup between Toronto and New York, made possible by C.B.C.
and Bell Telephone. Aldo Tambellini, Arts/Canada magazine 113 (1967): 3-19. See Appendix B.

16. 16
deconstruct itself in order to see the construction.
Through phenomenological and deconstructive frameworks, a distinct parallel between
blackness and Buddhist concepts of absolute and relative realities can be made.21
In a relative
sense, black is actually a nuanced shade of darkness that can never exist as a pure color. In an
absolute sense, black(ness) or pure black is both an activity and primordial material —a vast,
undifferentiated, engaged potential. In contrast to traditional theories that position black as an
absolute, absence, evil, or negative, this thesis argues that there are two blacks: relative and
absolute black. The latter is here considered as an activity of black(ness), a texture, with unique
characteristics of sheltering or hiding, indeterminacy, the infinite, fullness, and the ground of all
things. In this context, black(ness) is rendered as a state of engaged, vast potential, harboring
both white and light, as well as all colors, day and night, before all things.
I.II Synopsis of the Chapters
This investigation is transdisciplinary. Beginning with the Newton-Goethe argument, a thread is
traced through Jungian psychology through Edward Edinger, James Hillman, and Stanton
Marlon, the fashion of Yohji Yamamoto, Junya Watanabe, and Rei Kawabubo, and the black
paintings of Ad Reinhardt, and string sculptures of Fred Sandback.
Chapter 1-What I encountered was the sensual appearance of and reference to black in a
much wider range of areas than I anticipated—Jungian analysis understands this darkness that
will either kill you (poison you) or force you into a dark night of the soul, as a productive
darkness, biologically blackness is the experience of the womb, the place of gestation, and of
darkened rooms, whose restorative power we chose for sleep nightly. Through this and readings
21
Absolute reality describes a state where one experiences a total view with no attachment to any position, one sees
the whole view; the relative is our usual perception, that is always a partial view, with a particular point of view. See
Chapter 3 for more in depth explanations.

17. 17
that extended beyond Western literature into Asian sources I began to see there are in fact two
blacks. One which is the superficial black, or adjective we use which in fact is more like a
nuanced black, not quite black at all but a very, very dark color or density created by the lack of
light, and the another, far deeper, heavier and awesome, a “pure black” that most only experience
as an idea—as the dark sun or luminous blackness of enlightenment, or the terror of nightmares,
that I am positioning as analogous to Buddhist ideas of emptiness, which in fact is the ground of
all things. This black(ness) is an activity, and within it light/dark, white/black, day/night, all
things exist including the mystery, both negative and positive. Certain qualities familiar in
Buddhist ideas suggested deconstructing notions of permanence replacing them with the
vibrancy of being, in a sensual and alive universe where both lightness and darkness form the
remarkable experience of aliveness—in an odd coincidence somewhat like Goethe’s description
of color as “the deeds and sufferings of light.”22
Chapter 2—Is a candid interview with Dr. Mark Blum, a Buddhist scholar, translator,
and practitioner, who accepted my invitation to think “black” out loud. In this dialogue, he
connected black(ness) to the words for civilization and therefore to culture in Chinese and
Japanese languages, and then to the very deep implications of literacy and civilization that these
notions carry in these cultures from a historical perspective. This chapter makes playful leaps into
and out of Buddhist concepts, language, design, performance, painting, and history revealing
interconnections and uncanny relationships to black.
Chapter 3—Is dedicated to parsing the three fundamental concepts shared throughout all
Buddhist linages: emptiness, interdependence and the theory of the two realities. This is
22
Steiner 2013.

18. 18
unpacked principally through Keiji Nishitani,23
Daisetsu Suzuki (D.T. Suzuki), and through the
scholarship of Joan Stambaugh.24
Thinking through Goethe’s idea of black and darkness, one can
tease out contemporary ideas that are certainly resonant with Deleuze’s idea of intensity more
easily than preserving a theory of absolute certainty. Even in an “ultimate” or absolute reality
black, the experience, is subject to flux. This will be more thoroughly fleshed out through the
readings by Nishitani and Stambaugh. In configuring darkness in this way, black can be
understood as productive, both positively and negatively.
Chapter 4—These Western and Eastern philosophical strands of this study of black are
put into conversation with agency in the performative in art, which is where the motivation for
this study began. My interest was in affect: why does some art move us in surprising ways—to an
experience of our own being? I turn to the work of Fred Sandback and Ad Reinhardt in these
terms.25
The qualities that make both Reinhardt’s black paintings and Fred Sandback’s string
sculptures so compelling share an affinity with the theories of “vibrant matter” in the work Jane
Bennett and Bruno Latour. Jane Bennett’s rich work, Vibrant Matter, A political economy of things,
transforms the world into a lively and expanding universe of vibrant matter in which ideal (ideas,
meaning, language—i.e. sense) and the material (i.e. the sensory) are indissolubly intertwined.26
This affective encounter is what makes a Sandback sculpture “happen.” In turn, these artworks
function as an opening that returns us to the (fleshy) world of affect, of the lived moment, and of
the performative. This is where this conversation or study concludes—looking at the effect that
23
Kitaro Nishida is a Japanese philosopher who founded the Kyoto School of philosophy, and whose ideas brought a
deepened understanding of Zen through Western philosophy.
24
Stambaugh, of course, is perhaps most well known as the translator of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, but is also the
author of a number of texts and essays on both Buddhism and Heidegger.
25
My discussion is not meant as a critical or art historical analysis of their work. Instead, by including their work
here, I attempt to bring together art and philosophy; object as experience.
26
This idea of vibrant matter has resonances with Deleuze’s idea of “becoming,” Merleau-Ponty’s idea of
interpenetration of forces, Nishitani’s idea of the “home ground,” Buddhist concepts of co-arising or
interdependence and even Heidegger’s idea of the “worlding of the world” insofar as each of these thinkers are
interested the dynamics of immanent becoming.

19. 19
missing or marginalizing a language of affect or the performative produces. Through this
proximity between art and philosophy we experience a world that is both alive and responsive,
one where we can take action and be effective—response-able. The dissertation thus ends with a
call to act in a vibrant world.
Toutes les histoires anciennes, le disait un de nos beaux espirits, ne
sont que des fables convenues.
—Voltaire27
Chapter 1 Biography of Black
We no longer consider the biography of a philosopher as a set of
empirical accidents that leaves one with a name that would then
itself be offered up to philosophical reading, the only kind of
reading held to be philosophically legitimate. Neither readings of
philosophical systems nor external empirical readings have ever in
27
As cited by Stephen Batchelor: “All ancient histories, as one of our fine spirits put it, are nothing but convenient
fictions” (Stephen Batchelor, The Awakening of the West: The encounter of Buddhism and Western culture,” trans.
Stephen Batchelor [California: Parallax Press, 1994]).

20. 20
themselves questioned the dynamics of that borderline between the
work and the life, between the system and the subject of the
system. This borderline is neither active nor passive; it's neither
outside nor inside. It is most especially not a thin line, an invisible
or indivisible trait that lies between the philosophy on the one
hand, and the life of an author on the other.
—Jacques Derrida28
I first encountered the idea of the black sun when I painted what would become my last textile design in
1980. It was the final output of a year immersed in the study of Chartres Cathedral, whose catacombs
house the Black Madonna. After weeks of working feverishly, there it was, the image of the sun rising
(coming up) in the midnight sky over the horizon of the deep blue/green sea with the fullness of all the
constellations, neon stars twinkled, forming the mythology of the heavens. Now, many years later
writing this thesis, I get flashbacks of this time, and only recently put together the uncanny coincidence of
this moment and the current study of color and blackness. If that design marked the end of my color work,
this thesis is part of a return. Oddly enough I am under contract (Bloomsbury, UK 2014) for my book,
“Color in Fashion” which will be the first text that focuses on the subject.
In 2001, I interviewed Bruce Mau for FLAUNT magazine.29
In this interview, we discussed the issue
of creative process and his work in new media. Our conversation ended with his declaration: “. . . it isn’t
me that has the ideas, it’s the ideas that have me.”30
I feel similarly and I ask that you read this knowing
that my first understanding will always be tacit, built from practice, intuition and experimentation,
and only much more recently (institutionalized) in the academy. The narratives I know best are the
mute ones of gesture, of color and of form-in the context of dance, color and design. Overall, it is the
performative and relational that interests me, not the representational. This unites all of my work and is
the focus to which I return throughout this examination. The rest has been an uncertain and tenuous
journey into the written word.
28
Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other, ed. Christie McDonald and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Nebraska: Nebraska
University Press, 1989).
29
Kathryn Simon, “Bruce Mau,” BOMB, Spring 2005, http://bombsite.com/issues/91/articles/2732
30
Bruce Mau’s remark, of course, recalls the famous reference to Andre Marchand’s allusion to Paul Klee that
Merleau-Ponty cites in “Eye and Mind:” “In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the
forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me... I was there, listening... I think that
the painter must be penetrated by the universe and not want to penetrate it... I expect to be inwardly submerged,
buried. Perhaps I paint to break out” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader,
ed. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007], 358).

21. 21
Color is constructed by a social and cultural history.
—Michel Pastoureau31
1.1 Overview
My examination begins in this chapter with a phenomenological rendering of black and a
biography of black. Conventional definitions position black as representing the dark, as the polar
opposite or absence, of white, or light. In the West, all that is white and light has been valorized
over what is dark. Our ideas of black and darkness come largely from what we are taught in
school and very rarely out of a practice (e.g., painting or active reflection or memory work). Yet
what we know tacitly functions as part of our experience of living in the world (Dasein)—it is not
possible to know the world apart from it.32
The world can vary greatly from what has been issued
forth or learned through the academy. All authority and, therefore, knowledge is constructed and
regulated through the dominant power structures at a given time within a culture.33
In Black: The History of a Color, Michel Pastoureau considers where black appears by
unpacking the mainly social construction around our understandings, focusing on Western
culture. Pastoureau’s investigation is different from the one that I undertake here. Yet the
conclusion that he returns to throughout his study is that the definition of black is, in fact, a
socially-constructed one. Schopenhauer came to a similar conclusion regarding color in general,
namely, that it transverses philosophy, science and culture, and cannot be contained in any single
one of these disciplines alone. I take the insights of Pastoureau and Schopenhauer even further to
suggest that the construction of black is of an order of complexity that needs to be considered
31
Michel Pastoureau, Black: The History of a Color (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 15.
32
Michael Polanyi coined the phrase “tacit” knowledge. Tacit knowledge refers to what we know on the basis of
living in the world. He says that all knowing is at first incarnate and remains as such. Consequently, much of our
knowledge of the world cannot be articulated. His ideas were informed by his life as a doctor and scientific inventor.
33
See Michel Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Vintage, 1982); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things
(New York: Vintage, 1994).

22. 22
through a number of lenses, many of which I discuss here without any definitive rendering of
black.
Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the
manifestations.
Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding
—Lao-tzu34
1.2 (Pre)conception of Black
There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign,
of freeplay. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or
an origin, which is free from freeplay and from the order of the sign, and
lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation. The other, which is no
longer turned toward the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond
man and humanism, the name man being the name of that being who,
throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology—in other
words, through the history of all of his history—has dreamed of full
presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the
game…
— Jacques Derrida35
This section offers a phenomenological and deconstructive rendering of black beyond the
boundaries of representation. As such, it seeks to find a language that would be adequate to the
phenomenological encounter with an experience of black. In the following remarks, I will suggest
that such a language would be a language of affect, a language that evinces, as Merleau-Ponty
puts it, the “indivision of the sensing and sensed.”36
A language of affect, in other words, admits
34
Lao-tzu, “Verse 1, ”Tao Te Ching, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 1989).
35
Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Writing and Difference,
trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). This paper, “La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le
discours des sciences humaines, ” was originally delivered as a lecture at Johns Hopkins University on October 21st
,
1966.
36
Merleau-Ponty 2007, 356.

23. 23
of no division of the sensible, no dichotomy between affect and meaning. Moreover, by breaking
with the structure of representation, it is also a language in which black, as a signifier, functions
metonymically rather than metaphorically. My use of black unfolds and explores the
metonymical, poetic movement and the play of this signifier in relation to darkness, emptiness
and nothingness.
As James Hillman, Brian Rotman37
and many others have suggested before me, there are
fundamental problems in language that we routinely jump over or, worse, forget entirely. This
dissertation has at its center something that is not doable in words and yet is “always already”
present. As such, the texture of these chapters provides a kind of passageway into this place, the
representation of which is not the experience itself. In Hillman’s terms,38
I am asking you to de-
literalize the words. Rather than seeking their meaning, the reader is asked to remain instead in
the world of resonances, poetry and cadence. This is a difficult task since the structure of
language itself forces us to substantiate, to affirm essence and stability or permanence over that
which does not abide and is not fixed. Language becomes functional and instrumental—we
forget that most understanding arises from a cadence of words and positioning, sort of like form
and color. Too often, language is striped of this cadence and over-used for its transactional
purposes. It is adopted depending upon its functional apparatus in a rather rough way, never
really taking note of the sacrifice of its essentially poetic dimension. The word resonant comes up
often throughout this study as way to reawaken this sedimented and obfuscated metonymical
37
Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (Standford: Standford University Press, 1993).
38
According to Hillman, “we are caught in the literalism of our own language” (James Hillman, Alchemical Psychology
[Connecticut: Spring Publications, 2009], 12).

24. 24
dimension. The issues being discussed here reach beyond language as representation, unfolding a
reading of black is both subtle and embodied and opening onto a call to act in a vibrant world.
In relation to the poetics of black that I seek to articulate, Derrida’s concept of freeplay
facilitates an expanded reading of black beyond the usual determinations and fixed boundaries,
and outside of the structure of representation. When black and darkness are not moralized or
foreclosed in advance of the encounter, an expanded textu(r)al experience becomes possible, open
to be explored and to move into and out of both absolute and indeterminate spaces and meanings
in response to the event or encounter.39
In other words, black is opened onto freeplay in the
absence of an organizing principle structuring or haunting the situation and to which the sign
would refer for its meaning. An example of this is experienced in the case of shadows that vary
from slight to a great intensity of darkness, or in the comfort of darkened rooms for rest, or the
terror of nightmares. Black has been shown to be both comforting and terrifying, absolute and
indeterminate, generative and fixed.
This deconstruction of black reveals that there are in fact two blacks, absolute, pure or
achromatic black, on one hand, and relative or chromatic black, on the other hand. The latter is that
black to which we refer ordinarily when we say something is “black”—i.e., that it appears to be
colored black. In the introduction, these two blacks were introduced. Chromatic or relative black
39
There is, for Derrida, an ethical dimension of deconstruction. In the passage cited in the epigraph above, Derrida
refers to two possibilities for interpreting the relationship between structure, sign and play. One interpretation seeks
to halt the freeplay of the sign by inscribing it within the purview of a (signifying) structure (i.e., the structure of
language, la langue, as a signifying system); the other interpretation would show that the sign breaks open the
structure of signification (la langue), exposing it to the infinite play of the signifier and thereby interrupting the
production of meaning. The crucial point, for Derrida, is that we can decide between these two interpretations only by fiat.
In other words, whichever interpretation we choose is itself fundamentally groundless. To the extent Saussure
chooses in favor of structure as signifying, he does so in order to retain the possibility of determinate meaning or
sense. Derrida’s point, then, is that this interpretation or decision is first and foremost an ethical one—in the sense
that it is a choice that expresses and constitutes a value. In choosing, we decide to either affirm the value of structure
over play or vice versa. This ethical choice is moralistic, moreover, precisely insofar as this decision seeks to arrest the
freeplay of the sign by installing meaning as its normative ground.

25. 25
is actually a very dark shade with a hue (or color) that is no longer discernible. Relative black, in
other words, simply refers to a perceptual experience in which light and color are no longer
visible. Black, in this sense, is relative to light, signifying the absence of light and thus the
impossibility of vision along with its articulating, discursive function. In contrast, achromatic,
pure or ultimate black admits of no division of the sensible, and no dualistic opposition between
the diaphanous purity of meaning and the darkness of obscurity.40
The idea of ultimate black thus does not simply invert the predominant value system of
Platonic metaphysics in which black, as relative, is synonymous with what is other (to light and
visibility) and thus systematically devalued. Platonic metaphysics establishes a positive valuation
of “light” as the force that overcomes the negativity of “darkness.” In the West this has resulted
in conceptualizing a reality that is split into an either/or binary against the idea of a “unity” that
is neither black nor white. In response to these conceptualizations, absolute black refigures
blackness, not in opposition to white, and thus not as a simple inversion of this system of values,
but rather as encompassing the phenomena and what we speak of when we think of both black
and white, light and dark. Within this thesis, chromatic or relative black, what we ordinarily call
black, is rejoined with white and light, restoring it, making it whole. The idea of absolute black is
thus based on the insight that the dualism of black in opposition to white, which has pervaded
Western culture—since the Biblical pronouncement “Let there be light!” and that “the light was
good” and which is reinscribed in the history of Western philosophy in Plato’s myth of the
40
As Merleau-Ponty puts it, “vision is caught or is made in the middle of things, where something visible
undertakes to see, becomes visible for itself and through the vision of all things, where the indivision of the sensing
and sensed persists” (Merleau-Ponty 2007, 354). What Merleau-Ponty calls “profane vision” or ordinary perception
coincides with what I call relative black, while what he describes as “enigmatic vision,” the vision that belongs to the
indivision of the sensible, corresponds to the phenomenological encounter with absolute, pure or achromatic black.

26. 26
shadowy cave—this opposition must be dispelled by turning from the relative reality of these
shadows to face the luminosity of black.41
Absolute or pure black is the name for that unity of a “third” that precedes the dualism of
white in opposition to black and the attendant hierarchy of this opposition, that is, the
privileging of white over black. Black is not a the negation of “white” (light), or something that
has “fallen” from the original purity of “white,” but rather transgresses the traditional dichotomy
of white and black, constituting a kind of “third” prior to any dichotomy of the either/or. This
notion of black thus recalls Derrida’s notion of a unity that allows us to see any dualistic poles,
such as black and white, as a complex unity that maintains difference and thus defies the
principle of non-contradiction, which is the very foundation of logic. This examination situates
black as equal to white, as ++ to the + of white.42
The idea of ultimate black thus breaks with a teleological viewpoint that is traditionally
framed in terms of the victory of light over darkness, white over black, and the absolute,
disembodied transparency and diaphanous clarity of perception and knowledge over the obscurity
of darkness. Absolute black institutes a shift in which we experience ourselves and the objective
world as part of a pervasive process of universal impermanence and becoming, reminiscent of
Heraclitus' vision of all life and things as existing in constant flux. In Buddhist terms, as we will
see in the third chapter, this would be called impermanence, dependent origination or the
interdependence of all things. Complete enlightenment or a radical awakening would result in
41
Ad Reinhardt understood the inward bound journey against the seduction of the shadow play, the outward
expression of which was to make black paintings. Parodying Picasso who said, “My painting represents the victory of
the forces of light and peace over the powers of darkness and evil,” he says, “[m]y painting represents the victory of
the forces of darkness and peace over the powers of light and evil” (Michael Corris, Ad Reinhardt [London:
Reakton, 2008]).
42
Thanks to Fred Ulfers for contributing raw material that I wove into these first paragraphs of what became
Chapter 1 as I discussed my theory for this dissertation with in him in early germinating stages. I am indebted to
Fred Ulfers for elements of this passage.

27. 27
experiencing oneself as part of, rather than separated from the processes of becoming and the
constant flux of phenomena. Buddhism speaks of this as the experience of the arising and the
passing away, or the interplay of forces. This phenomenon is expressed also in the Taoist symbol
of yin/yang, which represents the same (interplay of forces). It is also recalls what Deleuze refers
to as “becoming” and what Merleau-Ponty rendered as an “intertwining” in “chiasmatic unity.”43
Merleau-Ponty takes his meaning of the chiasm from a term that is derived from the Greek for
the letter x, namely “chi,” whose “criss-crossing”11
implies both togetherness and separation.14
Within ultimate black there is light. This darkness or blackness possesses qualities of
luminosity that do not come from an outside source, but are rather internal and immanent. This
will be explored in greater terms in the third chapter through the idea of “black light” or
“luminous black,”44
which is a known stage just before complete enlightenment. Stanton Marlon,
a Jungian analyst, suggests that Derrida has also unpacked darkness with a similar project in
mind, namely one of restoring its fullness and complexity, which has become all but obscured,
marginalized and restricted, especially in Western philosophy. Derrida’s reading of solar
mythology is more complex. He agrees with Jung that light should not be simply equated with
the light of the sun but also linked to the light of enlightenment. Marlon shows that Derrida also
alludes to a metaphorical Sun that is associated with alternatives to the light of empiricist and
other spectacular conceptions. Derrida speaks of a light that is a
night light [which is a] supplement to daylight. On his commentary on Derrida,
Martin Jay notes, ‘The sun is also a star after all, like all the other stars that appear
only at night and are invisible during the day. As such it suggests a source of truth
or properness that was not available to the eye, at least at certain times. Derrida
43
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining—the Chiasm,” The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969).
44
Several authors offer formulations of the idea of “luminous black.” See Jan Slavik Goteborg, Dance of Colour: Basic
Patterns of Colour Symbolism in Mahayana Buddhism (Sweden: Ethnografiska Museet, 1994), 149; Lati Rinpoche,
Jeffery Hopkins and H.H. the Dalai Lama, Death, Intermediate State, and Rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism (London:
Snow Lion Publications, 1979); Dr. Joe Loizzo, Interview, March, 2011.

28. 28
was aware that there were two suns, the literal sun and the Platonic sun
representing the Good. Derrida notes that, for Plato, the Good was a nocturnal
source of all light—‘the light of light beyond light.’ Following Bachelard and
intimating a philosophical awareness of Sol niger, Derrida also states that the heart
of light is black. Plato’s Sun ‘not only enlighten(s), it engenders. The good is the
father of the visible sun which provides living beings with creation, growth and
nourishment.’45
The immanent luminosity of absolute black thus breaks with the dichotomy between the
diaphanous transparency of light correlated with ultimate knowledge and pure perception, on the
one hand, and obscurity and ignorance correlated with darkness, on the other hand.
In this excerpt from the Tao, something similar is happening:
Know the white,
yet keep to the black:
be a pattern for the world.
If you are a pattern for the world,
the Tao will be strong inside you
and there will be nothing you can't do.46
While light is what makes objects and seeing things in the world possible; we are called upon to
remain whole, to live with, in fact to embrace the unknowable, which is the “black.” For within
this is the entire world, the world pattern, as it were, and within this is endless strength (to meet
the things/conditions/events that are present to you, presumably). These thoughts will be further
discussed and elaborated on throughout chapter on Buddhism.
My research develops an expanded reading of black that (re)moves it from one pole of a
dualistic opposition and places it into a state of fullness and becoming. The following three
sections identify, historically and culturally, the places where notions of relative and absolute
black are present, notions that are invisible outside of a trans-disciplinary inquiry and in the
separation and specialization of disciplines/professions. The effect of this sundering is an
45
Stanton Marlon, “Lumen Naturae,” The Black Sun: the Alchemy and The Art of Darkness (USA: Texas A & M
University Press, 2005), 101.
46
Lao-tzu, “Verse 28,” Tao Te Ching, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Harper Perennial, 1989).

29. 29
important one. As science and art moved further from one another, the very tools and encounters
needed to undertake this examination became hidden under layers of narratives that are subject
to history, superstition, as well as separated by disciplines, at least until recently. My inquiry from
the start proposes a trans-disciplinary reading of black—a biography of black—that focuses
instead on the texture and performative aspects of black that traverse disciplinary boundaries.
1.3 The Birth of Black
Everything born is born in darkness. Gestation and birth begin in the dark. Every night we sleep
in darkened rooms and are told of the restorative power of darkness.47
Unlike other colors, black
is immediately associated with night, and with what is hidden. This seems logical, yet what of
the potent generative darkness of the womb, where life stirs and its beginnings are nurtured into
full development with this leap into light from the darkness that makes life possible.
Black or darkness also forms shadows. These zones of intermediacy provide comforting
solace. In Praise of Shadows,48
a book by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, is devoted to these ephemeral yet
“haptic” spaces,49
integral to Japanese aesthetics, where the appearance of a shape or light/shadow
become the very occasion for a sensual encounter through seeing. Haptic, from the Greek, ἅπτω,
“I fasten onto, I touch,”10
is a form of non-verbal communication. In this context, I use the word
“haptic” to refer to a visceral experience that goes beyond sight, invoking the sensation of
physicality.50
47
Lawrence Epstein and Steven Mardon, The Harvard Medical School Guide to a Good Night's Sleep (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 2006).
48
The experiences Tanizaki writes about confuse and delight the senses. They are synaesthetic in the sense that they
involve more than one kind of sensing. See Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (London: Vintage Books,
2001).
49
In this context, the word “haptic” is used to refer to the visceral experience that sight can invoke that goes beyond
seeing, to an experience of physicality. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptics accessed September 17, 2012.
50
The same idea of black as a kind of conceptual medium came up in conversations with other artists I interviewed
who work predominately or exclusively with black, including Karen Gunderson and Aldo Tambellini. Karen
Gunderson’s black water paintings (below), which are entirely painted with only black paint, show this haptic-like

30. 30
The overabundance of light can sometimes completely obliterate sight—both literally and
metaphorically. What happened to the original darkness: “Darkness that was upon the earth,”
that came before the light? Or was equal to night, or the link between form and darkness?51
Or
quality of black(ness) that tends towards a joining of the conceptual and the sculptural. Karen Gunderson’s black
paintings, River Tide, 2006, oil on canvas.
51
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth…And the earth was without form, and void; and
darkness was upon the face of the deep…And God said, Let there be light: and there was light… And God saw the
light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness” (The Holy Bible, accessed December 31, 2009,
http://www.bibleontheweb.com/Bible.asp).

31. 31
the myth of Demeter and Persephone,52
which is also the cycle of the seasons, and the return to
light after a journey in the darkness of the soul, a well-worn path known in psychology.
Western thinking has always valued light over darkness. Lightness is an ascent from the
density or vastness of this absolute black—or can be a descent into matter as this prior wholeness
takes on shape and enters the world of relative black or light. However it is both light and darkness
that create texture in the world and give the world body. Without that fertile beginning in
darkness—of the womb, the darkness that roamed the earth, of the dark night all must pass
through in shedding trauma and old beliefs— there would be no light or life.
1.4 Black in Antiquity
Some say both alchemy and chemistry get their names from the
name of Egypt itself Kamt, or Qempt, meaning the color black, in
reference to the mud of the River Nile. This name was applied to
the black powder resulting from the quicksilver process in
Egyptian metallurgy, powder that was identified with the body of
Osiris, god of the dead.
—Michael Taussig53
Despite the terror of the unknown that seems an oft-quoted association with black, early ideas of
black were connected to and symbolic of fertility, the night and the earth, which were held to be
sacred. Throughout early Greek philosophy, until the thirteenth Century, black was associated
with the primordial and had no negative connotation. One can think of the (pre-Christian)
Black Virgin, housed in the catacombs under the Church at Chartres, one of many black
Madonna’s that can be traced through Western and Eastern Europe from the ninth to the
“And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. . . .And God said, Let there be light in the
firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days,
and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And
God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. . .” (Ibid.).
52
“Persephone, Ishtar and Dumuzi each symbolize the overwhelming redemptive power of passion and darkness. In
this spirit, the Hebrew Song of Songs resonates with St. John of the Cross, who said: ‘Oh darknight, my guide/ Oh
Sweeter than anything sun rise can discover/ Oh night, drawing sideto side/ The lovedand the lover/ The lovedone wholly
ensouling in the lover’” (Marlon 2005, 197).
53
Michael Taussig, What Color is the Sacred? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 26.

32. 32
eleventh century. She is seen as a symbol of fertility in her home, Chartres,54
a church known for
color and the rose windows.55
Another remnant of this symbolism from the Christian Middle Ages is the Heraldic
system of colors, where black is the color representing “earth”—the “fertile, primordial and
sacred ground.”56
The Chinese system, Wu Xing or Five Agents theory, carried an even more
complex system of meanings that were both “philosophical and politically weighty” through the
Heian period in Japan (794-1185), with many examples in the Tales of the Genji. Here the
appearance of black denotes “winter, death, destruction.”57
Since Aristotle, color in the West is understood as arising from light, whereas the
Chinese system under the Five Agent theory understands color as possessing substantive qualities
usually connected to the dyes or materials that produced them. Mary Dusenbury writes, “color
was an active force with an energy of its own.”58
She cites other scholars who figure color at this
time as “essence" and as a "source of power.”59
Throughout the Tales of the Genji, color references
are used skillfully as metaphors in descriptions of the clothing and as literary devices to convey,
54
Chartres remains a mystery even today. It is one of the few if not only churches built upon a relic of the Virgin
Mary. Despite fires that almost destroyed the entire church, the relic is said still to be housed in the Church.
Scholars have written on and continue to remark on the conflux of spirituality and exuberance in (re)building the
cathedral after each of the three fires, largely through volunteer workers, local guilds and donations. It is one of the
finest examples of Gothic architecture. Pagan and pre-Christian influences are clearly visible in the catacombs and
with the black Madonna whose symbolism has been attributed to the Druids. It is one of the few churches where
the spiritual presence of the Madonna, the “Queen of Heaven,” has greater or equal authority than the male Trinity
(Fulcanelli, Fulcanelli: Master Alchemist, trans. Mary Sworder (USA: Brotherhood of Life, 1987).
55
Chartres is considered to have of some finest examples of Medieval stained glass.
56
Pastoreau 2008, 22.
57
Dusenbury, Radiance and Darkness: an examination of color in the Heian court (Ph.D. diss., University of Kansas,
1999), 4.
58
Ibid., 65.
59
Ibid., 4 “As Chinese culture developed and China became a sophisticated and literate society, the idea that certain
colors had numinous power was given a literary and philosophical foundation. These particular colors, called “pure”
or “correct’ colors, were red, blue, yellow, and black. Shrines were erected to these colors and they were worshiped as
di or “powers.” These five correct colors were an integral component in Wu xing or Five Agents theory and played a
major role in state rituals. They were used to indicate status and power relationships” (Ibid., 65). “The ‘di’ of black
could be used to help regulate and balance the five major categories of forces that control the universe” (Ibid., 68).

33. 33
with depth and economy, a person’s station in society, and or a sentiment being expressed.60
This
idea of color imparting substance or material qualities to a thing is not solely attributable to the
Chinese. It is found throughout studies of indigenous peoples and in other cultures.61
Victor
Turner’s writing of his life with the Ndembo people explores this connection between color and
materiality in depth. Throughout early writings from the Classical period, through the Middle
Ages, East and West, with indigenous peoples, black is seen as the first color and the oldest
color.62
Hillman writes of two University of California ethnologists, Berlin and Kay, whose study
of 98 languages revealed that every language has a word for “light and dark, black and white, and
obscure and bright.”63
Hillman and Taussig, in their respective books, discuss their research as
grounds for experiencing color not as a veneer or something added afterwards but as conferring
substantial qualities to the thing or person.
60
An example of this is the use of red persimmon in a poem in which the poet compares the attraction to his
mistress to that of his wife. His mistress wears a bright red robe, indicative of persimmon whose color is exciting and
clear but fades quickly, reducing to tan. In comparison, the dyes from acorn used to make the dark grey of the wife’s
robes endures. The quality of the color and the metaphorical and substantive properties of the dye are connected.
Color thus confers substantive qualities (such as character and other kinds of relation). In this poem, the reds
produced by the persimmons are vibrant and exciting, yet fleeting, since the color would fade quickly, reduced to
tan.
61
Hillman cites studies that place the words used to describe black, white and red (i.e., the primary colors), in a
number of systems. According to Hillman, they are not used as adjectives but rather reflect the actual composition of
the things being discussed. He cites Indian cosmology and sub-Saharan African peoples who claim that these colors
“…enter into the composition of all things“ (Hillman 2009, 83). Taussig records similar studies: “Among the sub-
Saharan African people, the three primary colors—black, white and red (and I am translating more metaphorically
concrete expressions into our abstract color terms)—for the very ruling principles of the cosmos. They are not merely
color words, names of hues” (Taussig 2009, 68). “We find a similar idea in the three gunas in Indian cosmology:
black tamas, red rajas, and white sattva enter into the composition of things” (Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols:
aspects of Ndembu Ritual [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1967], 90). According to Turner, these three colors
“provide a primordial classification of reality. They are the experiences common to all ‘mankind’ like archetypical
‘forces.’ Biologically, psychologically, and logically prior to social classifications, moieties, clans, sex totems, and all
the rest. For Culture, black and white, as well as red, precede and determine the way human life is lived” (Ibid., 83).
Taussig cites the connection between magic, dyes, and medicine for the Ndembu speaking people: “Or listen to
Victor Turner who on the basis of his time among Ndembu speaking people in central Africa, in the 1950’s found
that their three primary colors, white, black and red were ‘conceived as rivers of power flowing from a common
source in God and permeating the whole world of sensory phenomena with their specific qualities.’ And he went on
to say that these colors are ‘thought to tinge the moral and social life of mankind with their peculiar efficacies’”
(Taussig 2009, 68).
62
See Hillman 2010; Taussig 2009; Linda Van Norden, The Black Feet of the Peacock: The Color-Concept ‘Black’ from
the Greeks through the Renaissance (Lanham, MD: University Press of American, 1985).
63
Hillman 2010. See also Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and their Evolution
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 2.

34. 34
Alchemical writings mention black as giving birth to or having “engendered white and
the hues,”64
a theme also found in the cycle of psychological rebirth referenced by Jungian
analysts Hillman and Edinger. In Zohar, a secret book of alchemy, black is referred to as absolute
purity and absolute chaos, the chaos pointing to the unformed. It is used metaphorically in The
Song of Songs, part of the Old Testament, in which there are descriptions of the “bride who is
black" in comparison "to the whiteness of the bridegroom”—“blackness is unconsummated
mortality; her comeliness, promise of eternal life.”65
“Blessed blackness! Which gives birth to
whiteness of the mind; to light of knowledge; to purity of conscience!” which further expounds
on this idea of this fertile darkness or a great darkness from which white can emerge.66
In
Bergsonism, Deleuze unpacks the “problems of nonbeing, of disorder or of the possible” in
discussing the confusion of terms in “nonexistent problems”—showing that “there is not less but
more in the idea of nonbeing than that of being, in disorder than that of order, in the possible
then in that of the real.” In each, the shaped comes out of the unshaped or potential.67
Van Norden notes that black is both a paradox and a riddle that has been explored
through antiquity from Plato, whom Edinger (1994) also credits,68
to the pre-Socratics who
included black/white on the short list of first opposites from the Pythagorean school. According
64
Van Norden 1985, 197. I relied heavily on Linda Van Norden’s scholarship. Her book presents a remarkable and
thorough assemblage of research focusing this eccentric area of black. It was later published by one of her colleagues
after her death. A recent search shows that it is out of print. For references to mystical alchemy in the middle ages,
see Johann Daniel Myliu, Rosariusm Philosophorum (Theophania, 2012), Kindle edition; William Salmon, The
Golden Treatise of Hermes Trismegistus (London: 1938), 31.
65
Van Norden 1985, 55. She cites The Song of Songs: The “Fathers preserved the theme of divine marriage, with the
bridge groom now Christ or the Logos as Christ. For one school, represented by Hippolytus of Rome and
Methodius, the bride is virginity—either of Mary or of the Word made Flesh. For Methodius, in The Banquet, her
blackness is unconsummated mortality; her comeliness, promise of eternal life. “Blessed blackness! Which gives birth
to whiteness of the mind; to light of knowledge; to purity of conscience!” (Ibid.)
66
“Near the beginning of the Christian era, the Fathers inherited from the Rabbi’s book The Song of Songs as part of
the Old Testament canon and myth... From the first, Christian translated this with a more ‘literary treatment than
the ecstatic response’ of the Jewish commentary” (Ibid.).
67
Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 17.
68
This is discussed earlier in this chapter. See Edward F. Edinger, The Mystery of The Coniunctio: Alchemical Image of
Individuation (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1994). C.G. Jung, Alchemical Studies (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1983), 353.

35. 35
to Edinger, “opposites came into recorded view” with the pre-Socratic philosophers, the
Pythagoreans, who established ten pairs of opposites they considered the “basic ones.” He figures
this as a signpost right at the beginning of the development of Western consciousness and lists
them as follows:
limited/unlimited
odd/even
few/many
right/left
male/female
resting/moving
straight/curved
light/dark
good/bad
square/oblong69
Plato thought black was the most contracted pinpoint. Since the age of Aristotle, color in the
West has been conceived through the opposition between darkness and light.70
Aristotle
associated it with “decay—burned, long dead,” that which we see in rotting things. Lucretius
likened it to receiving “a kind of blow” or “strike.” Van Norden’s book begins by posing nearly
the same questions asked by James Hillman and others, irrespective of their discipline: “What is
the relationship of black to darkness? Is black a primary color? Is black a color?”71
Her work, as
we have seen, finds responses on both sides of this question.
1.5 The Psychology of Black: The Nigredo
Post-Jungian archetypal theory continues to explore alchemical notions of the psyche, the
nigredo (blackening, dissolution of the ego, entering chaos, becoming “black, blacker than
black.”) According to Jung, this stage precedes one of purification and birth into a “fuller 'self-
69
Edinger 1994, 12.
70
Aristotle, Newton, Goethe, Steiner agree on this point.
71
Van Norden 1985, 3

36. 36
universe.'”
Depression is often referred to as a black cloud, and has been written about extensively.
The mystic St. John describe depression as the “dark night of the soul,” a psychological passage
that most will undertake at some point in their life. The invitation is often not a choice and an
unsuccessful passage will result in a kind of “poisoning,”72
which is dangerously close to suicidal
states. Via negativa,73
known throughout Judaic, Christian, Islamic and Upanishadic traditions, is
a form of apologetics for knowing God through what this force is not—this is referred to as “neti,
neti.” In Buddhist philosophy, this is the philosophy of emptiness.74
Neti, neti is the favored
negation that Ad Reinhardt uses in much of his writing throughout his life.75
Both of these
72
Indeed, spending so much time with black in writing this dissertation had its own demand. In the beginning the
heaviness and weight of the subject would come on after only two weeks—it was unavoidable. I would fall into a
depression and not come out for some time. Metaphors about depression being black abound from the bible to
Jung’s work on shadows, and are mentioned throughout psychoanalysis. This is not the melancholia of the blues, but
something much, much heavier. Until I could go through the entire process, there was no possibility of completing
this dissertation.
73
“The via negativa is a form of apologetics, also sometimes called the via negationis. According to the philosophy
behind the via negativa, God is not an object in the universe and, therefore, it is not possible to describe God
through words and concepts which are necessarily limiting. Instead, it is better to talk about God based upon what
God is not. The via negativa is, therefore, a means of coming to know God and what God is through negation.
Although the via negativa is often associated with Christianity because it is one of the three ways which Thomas
Aquinas describes as coming to understand God, it has also appeared in other theistic religions. Names given to it
include neti neti in Hinduism, ein-sof in Judaism and bila faifa in Islam.”
http://atheism.about.com/library/glossary/general/bldef_vianegativa.htm, accessed September 18th
, 2012. Another
explanation is offered here through Zen: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/japanese-zen/#ExpMeaNotTwo, accessed
September 18th
, 2012.
74
“In the Prajnaparamita literature the theory of the two orders of truth [relative and ultimate] makes it possible to
deny the validity of all concepts of relating to Buddhahood, and simultaneously to assert the identity of all buddhas
and list their characteristics. It is claimed that “buddha” and “self” are synonymous, both being non-existent and
non-apprehensible, that is there is nothing that should be fully known by enlightenment, nor does enlightenment
fully know enlightenment, or that the bodies of Buddha, arising from the Dharma body, are inconceivable. To
express—via negativa—this inconceivability, the Samadhirajasutra employs a long chain of colour terms: ‘O
Kumara, it is not easy to comprehend the Body of the Tathagata even thought his marks determine whether it is
blue, blue-coloured, apparently blue, or blue-like; whether is it yellow, yellow-coloured, apparently yellow, or
yellow-like; red, red-coloured, apparently red, or redlike; white, white-coloured. Apparently white or whitelike;
scarlet, scarlet-coloured, apparently scarlet, or scarletlike; crystal-like . . ., flame-like. . . .Brahma-like . . .god-like . . .
.’” (Jan Slavik Goteborg, Dance of Color [Sweden: Ethnografiska Museet, 1994], 71).
75
Ad Reinhard, Art as Art: The Selected Writings, ed. Barbara Rose (California: University of California Press, 1991).

37. 37
connections will be elaborated in subsequent chapters through Buddhism and art. Below is the
T. S. Elliot’s poem, from The Four Quartets: East Coker,76
which is an example of via negativa.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away.77
Life events, joys and sorrows, are formed from the mixing of both light and dark. In
Taoism, the Yin/Yang symbol represents life in perfect balance. The symbol is of a circle divided
by white appearing in black and black appearing in white, referring to the intertwining of both
light and darkness that makes the texture of life. Even the shape between white and black is
curved and embryonic.
James Hillman, writing about black in his book Alchemical Psychology, asks, “What does
black intend to achieve? Why is it an accomplishment?”78
and responds: “First as a non-color,
black extinguishes the perceptual colored world.”79
It blackens or obliterates the world around us
(the colorful world of things, the full spectrum of emotions, etc.) and it is also the color of chaos
because the darkness makes it hard to see, to discern. We must advance as if blind, as it were, in
76
T. S. Elliot, The Four Quartets: East Coker (London: Mariner Books, 1968).
77
Ibid.
78
Hillman 2010, 87.
79
Ibid.

38. 38
the dark. Hillman cites this as a critical and necessary (life) passage, often brought on by
awakening to trauma, delusion, despair, loss, grief, that aging, sickness, death, experiencing or
re-awakening emotional wounds can cause, among others. He adds, “[s]econd, the blackening
negates the 'light,' whether that be the light of knowledge, the attachment to solar consciousness
as far-seeing prediction, or the feeling that phenomena can be understood.”80
This passage in the
darkness dissolves meaning and the hope for meaning. Yet, when traumatized, we can emerge
from the experience with fresh insight and self-knowledge which could only come about as a
result of this journey through the dark. We are thus “benighted,” Sol niger, or we undergo the
experience of the black sun, which radically shifts the meaning of “benightedness.”81
Stanton Marlon’s book The Dark Sun: The Alchemy of Darkness offers us a deep journey
into the psychology of black. Marlon includes this passage from the John Brozostoski’s book
Tantra Art, where Brozostoski deconstructs a passage from Jung’s book Psychology and Alchemy—
showing how poetics permeate meaning. The effect of this repetitive “black” between words, evokes a
kind of blackening, like a mortification in the experience of reading—“like the background drone of
an Indian raga”82
—the mind cannot hold on to the original meaning without the color-feeling
deconstructing it.83
The (black) lapis (black) says (black) in (black) Hermes: (black) ‘Therefore (black)
nothing (black) better (black) or (black) more (black) worthy (black) of (black)
veneration (black) can (black) come (black) to (black) pass (black) in (black) the
(black) world (black) than (black) the (black) union (black) of (black) myself
(black) and (black) my (black) son.’ (black) The (black) Mono- genes (black) is
(black) also (black) called (black) the (black) ‘dark (black) light.’ (black) The (black)
Rosarium (black) quotes (black) a (black) saying (black) of (black) Hermes: (black) ‘I
(black) the (black) lapis (black) beget (black) the (black) light, (black) but (black)
the (black) darkness (black) too (black) is (black) of (black) my (black) nature.’ (black)
80
Ibid.
81
Ibid.
82
Marlon 2005, 220.
83
Ibid.

39. 39
Similarly (black) alchemy (black) has (black) the (black) idea (black) of (black) the
(black) sol (black) niger, (black) the (black) black (black) sun.84
According to Edinger, the Jungian analyst and writer, when Jung makes reference to the
alchemical dream, he does so to call our attention to the undifferentiated consciousness of things
that appear as potentialities or fantasies that are “embedded” in our dreams. Edinger compares
the richness that they contain to “bread,” for all their sustenance, and this “bread” as being like
that of the Torah, the Koran and the Gospels, for the Jew, Muslim and Christian respectively,
for their “treasury of archetypes” and as “bread for the psyche.”85
1.6 Black in fashion86
The Appendix includes a conversation with Valerie Steele for this dissertation.87
It contributes
depth to the examination of black(ness) as it is expressed in fashion. Since black in fashion is not
the focus of this dissertation but only a contribution to how we understand black, only a few
correspondences will be sketched out in the hope of further engaging the reader in grasping the
depth, allure and mystery that runs through black across disciplines. This section is included as
further confirmation of the paradoxical attributes already discussed and explored in this poetics.
Opening up black to this kind of investigation means being sensitive to the obvious as well as to
an intuitive hunch. Black is so identified with scenes of death, mourning, and as an abiding
84
Ibid.
85
Edinger 1994, 353.
86
Clothing and fashion are two different concepts. Although these words are often used interchangeably, they carry
very different meanings. As Kawamura writes, “clothing is a material production and fashion is a symbolic one . .
.clothing has a utility function, while fashion is in excess. . .fashion must be ‘situationally’ constructed and culturally
infused” (Yunika Kawamuar, Fashion-ology [New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005]). Put simply, clothing is
utilitarian, its function is foremost and isn’t necessarily bought for the way it looks so much as its performance,
whereas fashion is almost always about desire, and positioning. Its function is strategic as opposed to being one of
utility. An example of this is high heels, which are usually uncomfortable to wear but are a sexual utterance,
announcing presence, and power. All of these points are critically important if one is to cull meaning and
understanding in fashion, and it would be an oversight to accord it less. Fashion is one of the most democratic and
readily accessible means an individual has of distinguishing themselves, and creating identity. At the same time, to
the trained eye it is possible to discern within fashion the traces of historical, philosophical and political
underpinnings.
87
In particular, I am indebted to these productive dialogues with Valerie Steele, Barbara Vinken, Harold Koda and
Kaat Debo. I have included Valerie’s biographical information below and my interview with her in the appendix.

40. 40
absolute that it is at times hard to leap over this darkness of endings (and terror) to other
tendencies that suggest the generative, unformed and indeterminate, which are undeniably part
of its texture. Because of the nature of fashion, whose embrace is the currency of the present, it is
important to allow contemporary voices participating in situating a current reading of fashion to
speak in addition to my own. I am grateful for their participation.
For 20 years I designed and wore only black clothing that became notable under a
signature collection, Kathryn Simon Inc., 1980-1987,88
which received wide recognition in the
small world of fashion. Rarely were other colors offered, and if they were, even less was their
interest to the buyers. The retail environment of the stores who carried the collection were
mostly open white spaces with black clothing. The designs were individual meditations of form,
construction and movement. Working in black became a kind of haptic or textural medium that
conferred a special aura and paradoxical invisibility. It offered an endless variety of itself, never
exhausted, or “black, again.” It was as though every black dress had its own hue, and yet I would
not describe them in terms of color. This may have been a symptom of the time and place: New
York and Paris in the 80’s and 90’s; creating something new was not only possible, it was
necessary, as “we” were breaking dated “codes” in fashion that were constraining, and were now
choking the language/forms/proportions. Deconstruction, along with a plethora of postmodern
concepts, had finally spread into fashion. The world of fashion, despite its international currency,
tends to run rather deep and narrow. It is owned and directed by a select few. Being recognized
in that realm is something like being a member of the British Royal family, a closed game.
Beginning in the mid-70’s, Punk and New Wave aesthetics were infiltrating formerly set ideas to
88
Design work from Kathryn Simon is in the permanent archives of the Costume Institute, The Metropolitan
Museum. http://www.metmuseum.org/collections/search-the-
collections?pg=1&who=Kathryn+Simon,+American&deptids=8|62&what=Belts&ft=*&ao=
on&noqs=true, www.kathrynsimon.net

41. 41
allow for a reexamination of identity and of the body in motion. At this same moment, an
unprecedented intensity of ideas began flooding the culture; fueled by new wealth created by the
dot com explosion and stock market in the United States, equally the rise of the middle classes
from nations new to prosperity, political diasporas, and work tourism—all of which became
contributing factors as the torrent of new narratives, transformed the dominant Euro-centric
outlook into a global one.89
My background in fashion is unique, as most who write on fashion don’t design or work
in the industry. Their relationship to fashion is completely by extension—The medium of
fashion has been a laboratory for me both as a designer and later as an artist/philosopher for
exploring concepts and ideas.
1.6.1 The History of Black Fashion
A constellation of moments became visible in the arts/visual culture (painting, fashion, branding)
that contested any notion that black can only be said to function as surface, as a color. Rather,
one is impressed with the substantive material qualities of black clothing which could never have
held the same degree of intensity or form had they been designed in a “color.” This will be shown
through the design work of Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo, and Junya Wanatabe,90
which rely
on the vocabulary and diversity of black for their collections.
The allure of black has been the preference of many fashion designers including Christian
Dior, Cristobal Balenciaga, and Coco Chanel, who are credited with the birth of modern
89
The wealth of new nations (foreshadowing BRIC) coming from areas formerly viewed as “developing nations”
which had become major sites of production by the late-70’s, hastened the growth of wealth by creating new middle
classes out of the manufacturing elite. In many respects it parallels the same growth that had occurred in the US post
war that had precipitated the huge rise in the middle class in the United States. Andy Warhol’s work uses this as its
subject, i.e., Campbell’s soup cans.
90
Junya Wanatabe is included in the plates and the interview with Valerie Steele. I believe these three designers
highlight the multitude of meanings and the possibility of the great diversity of black in fashion. The traditional
“three Japanese designers” that are cited include Issey Mikaye, whose appearance in the eighties initiated the
intervention. His work is decidedly different than the designers mentioned here, in the next wave and was not
predominantly black.

42. 42
fashion. Coco Chanel’s “little black dress” designed in 1926, to which Vogue dubbed “Chanel’s
‘T’ after Ford’s model,”91
has endured and become a staple in every woman’s wardrobe, earning
its own acronym “LBD” in the dictionary.92
This more recent descent into darkness was not the first time black has dominated
fashion. In fact, Dr. Steele comments, “Every time black goes out [of fashion], it comes right
back in.”93
The fashion exhibition “Zwart,”94
at The Museum de la Mode, Antwerp, 2010, traced
the history of black from the Spanish courts, through the Duke of Burgundy, Elizabethan
England, to the wealthy dyers in Antwerp, who perfected the art of making the finest black
dyestuffs. Emmanuelle Dirix’s essay in the exhibition catalogue states that black appears as “the
color of the counterculture, and is omnipresent in the wardrobe of various subcultures” and
intellectuals.95
She cites the French Existentialists in the 1950’s, the Beat poets, and the Goths
and Punks of the 1970’s.
Beginning in the late-70’s, fashion began evolving a new language. Punk aesthetics
smashed what was left of conventional ideas, many hanging on since the late-50’s, whose power
to signify was now reduced to a nostalgic nod. As the century drew to a close, fashion had
become a personal narrative rather then one dictated by designers and magazine editors. Tattoos,
piercings and other body augmentations are some examples of this personal, more tribal style.
91
Quoting Suzy Menkes, OBE, a British journalist, and head fashion reporter and editor for the International
Herald Tribune since 1988, with a longstanding voice as an important fashion arbiter. In a recent article in the New
York Times she writes: “It was not just Henry Ford who said that a car buyer could have ‘any color that he wants so
long as it is black.’ That choice has long been the mantra for New York closets” (Suzy Menkes, “A Multicolor
Revolution,” New York Times September 12, 2012). See also Amy Hollman Edelman, Little Black Dress (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1997).
92
http://dictionary.reference.com/cite.html?qh=LBD&ia=ahabb
93
See interview in Appendix with Dr. Steele, 2009.
94
Paul Huvenne, Emmanuelle Dirix and Bruno Bland, Black: Masters of Black in Fashion & Costume (Belgium:
Lannoo Publishers, 2010).
95
Ibid.

43. 43
From this period onwards, without pause, fashion existed progressively as fragments, but all of
them were black.
96
Yohji Yamamoto Fall/Winter 2011
96
http://www.fashionencyclopedia.com/images/sjcf_01_img0408.jpg

44. 44
97
Yohji Yamamoto working on a collection
97
Yohji Yamamoto, Talking to Myself (Milano: Carla Sozzani, 2002).

45. 45
98
Yohji Yamamoto ‘Silhouettes’
99
Yohji Yamamoto
98
Ibid.

46. 46
100
Yohji Yamamoto
100
Ibid.

47. 47
101
Rei Kawakubo, Comme Des Garcons 1982
101
http://starsweare.com/2012/02/19/masters-of-deconstruction/

48. 48
Junya Watanabe Fall/Winter 2009-10 102
102
http://agoraphobicfashion.blogspot.com/2010/12/kawakuboyamamoto.html

49. 49
Junya Watanabe Fall/Winter 2009-10103
103
http://agoraphobicfashion.blogspot.com/2010/12/kawakuboyamamoto.html