response - Ad Reinhardt "black as symbol as concept"

Response- Ad Reinhardt Black as Symbol as Concept

            “Shiny black reflects, and it has [an] unstable quality for that reason…  It reflects all the activity that’s going on in a room.  As a matter of fact, it’s not detached from them.”  For me, this quote is very important to this article.  Shiny black is just that; it is shiny and then it is black.  Thus it isn’t an isolated color but a color and a texture.  Just like it is very hard to separate color from object it is even harder to separate color from texture.  The inherent molecular texture of the object holding the color changes the way in which the color is perceived.  Rougher textures are matte and smoother textures are shiny.  Reinhardt continues to state that he finds this an objectionable quality to be forced to perceive the color with the texture, so he was using only matte colors.  This was a slightly odd statement in the article. 

            Reinhardt wavers between wanting black and whites to hold no previous meaning, and wanting to find the meaning and intellectual pull of black.  Which is kind of contradictory to the statement that “artists always come from artists and art forms come from art forms.”  This statement meaning works hold meaning in relation to the works that came previous.  So he states that he wants to separate something from meaning but also that art only holds meaning because of its past meaning.  The article goes back and forth on the importance of meaning. 

            The non-color but still color aspect of black is highly interesting and I wish that he went further in depth.  White can be describe in this way as well, in such that of a highlight or reflection.  A perceived white object, lets say a round ball, has a highlight that is truly white, but when the eye follows it contour, the color changes to gray.  One could state that there is not white color at all, and that white only exists in perfect reflection of light containing the full spectrum.