Accessing Blue in Maggie Nelson's Bluets

ACCESSING BLUE IN MAGGIE NELSON’S BLUETS CAPACIOUS 2021 | Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry 2 (3) Margaryta Golovchenko YORK UNIVERSITY How can one simultaneously desire and fear a color? Moreover, how can this color function as an affect in a text that is completely devoid of images? These questions are central to Maggie Nelson’s 2009 hybrid book Bluets, which focuses on tracing her relationship with and search for the color blue both physically and emotionally. Blue’s function as an affect in Bluets proves just as ambivalent as the role it plays in Nelson’s life, its significance two-fold: for Nelson herself, as well as for its ability to entice the reader, who experiences the entirety of blue’s multifaceted nature second-hand through Nelson’s autotheoretical narrative. Bluets is thus a visually non-visual text, one that, perhaps problematically, decenters the idea that we need to physically see something in order to be affected by it. Nelson takes on the challenge of transmitting the affect of blue using words instead of images, a challenge that she does not quite live up to. This is due, in part, to the potential familiarity that readers may have with the few works of art that Nelson references, and even if that is not the case, the temptation to look them up online to correlate text and image looms over the text of Bluets. By relying only on vague descriptions of blue objects, spaces, and artworks, Nelson’s text reveals that blue is not merely an attribute of a physical object. Rather, blue also exists as a dematerialized entity, capable of invoking adoration and repulsion in equal measure. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) 55 Accessing Blue in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets While Nelson broadly classifies her relationship with blue as a form of love, her usage of the term subverts the conventionally positive connotation we attach to the word. For Nelson, ‘love’ encapsulates the two seemingly contradictory states of yearning and dread that blue invokes and marks an attempt at beginning to understand the consequences of the sensations that blue evokes in us. By identifying not only the struggle to accurately name these sensations but also to navigate them, Nelson’s blue functions as a form of Lauren Berlant’s (2018) “genre flailing,” as an instance “when one’s defenses are made manifestly insecure by an uncontrollable disturbance in the object’s stability” (157). Nelson situates a moment that can be read as the embodiment of “genre flailing” at the beginning of the text. Here Nelson describes standing “in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and [feeling] a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it?” (2009, 3). The reader is already shown the limits of language in moments of overwhelming bodily experience. For Nelson, blue cannot be flattened into a single reading. It is a color that demands to be “read with” (Berlant 2018), that we trace the evolution in how we respond to blue, Figure 1. Pablo, P. (1901). The Blue Room. [Oil on Canvas]. Washington, DC: The Phillips Collection. CAPACIOUS Margaryta Golovchenko 56 acknowledging each shift from a positive to a negative response. We can perhaps best come to understand and even appreciate blue’s function in a broader social and cultural context after reflecting on how blue functions as an affect for us. To “read with” blue means to acknowledge that it is more than merely a color, that our conventional perception of blue—as a primarily visual “entity” located within a range of shades we have come to accept as blue—can be expanded to include an ethereal “blueness,” meaning experiences or moments in time that can be codified as “blue.” Such an approach implies that blue has its own life force, “as if blue not only had a heart, but also a mind” (Nelson 2009, 42). It is therefore worth dwelling on a section from Bluets in which Nelson recalls how, in the years when she worked in an orange restaurant, she would dream of her dining room tinted a pale blue (2009, 43), for which Pablo Picasso’s 1901 painting “The Blue Room” (Figure 1) forms a fitting visual counterpart. It is tempting, especially in the case of Picasso’s painting, to see blue only as a physical characteristic of the room, yet such a literal reading refuses to acknowledge that both Nelson’s and Picasso’s rooms are “a part of the world […] but at the same time […] apart from [it]” (O’Sullivan 2001, 125). In an enclosed, predominantly blue space, the color functions differently than it does when it is small and contained, serving as the object of adoration and desire (as, above, when marvelling at a pile of ultramarine pigment). The blue of Nelson’s and Picasso’s rooms expands outwards and takes over the space. In these two rooms, blue’s affective function can become overbearing and even parasitic. In doing so, the colour infects the space with a variety of connotations that vary depending on the viewer’s own relationship with the colour. Thus, the blue of The Blue Room may come across as depressing and claustrophobic or cluttered, as sexual, or as spiritual. If read in tandem with the contorted female body that stands in its centre, with its yellow and green pigments that recall a bruise in the process of healing, Picasso’s blue can even invoke the blueness of death seen in a corpse. When we engage with blue as an ethereal “blueness,” we are no longer simply seeing blue but rather looking past it, allowing it to “ruin our stable sense of ourselves, cutting under the complacent surface of what we know and starting to chafe against what we feel” (Elkins 2001, 168). Only when we have successfully freed blue from the constraints of form can we acknowledge its ability to, at times quite literally, tint certain memories or associations with itself, to dominate over its own materiality as well as over ourselves. 57 Accessing Blue in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets Figure 2. Komar, V. and Melamid, A. (c. 1995-1997). China: Most Wanted Painting. [Medium unknown]. Beacon, NY: Dia Art Foundation. From filing away a personal memory in a frame of a hazy shade of blue to the increasing popularity of describing one’s feelings as “blue” in a variety of languages, blue toes the line between personal and collective. Blue’s complex history of meaning—blue went from being associated with evil and the Antichrist to being imbued with holiness as the color of Mary—rivals its ambivalent affective power. This fluid transition across a spectrum of meanings plays into Eric Shouse’s (2005) observation that, while “feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal”(n.p.). It is the ease with which affects can be transmitted that makes them “such a powerful social force” (Shouse 2005, n.p.). Blue’s consistent presence is perhaps best exemplified by the “Most Wanted Painting” series, created by artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid. After conducting a survey in fourteen countries—eleven in Europe plus China, Kenya, and the United States—as well as a separate survey for the web, Komar and Melamid found that, based on questions asked, “most [of the countries surveyed] wanted a blue landscape, with slight variances” (Nelson 2009, 61), such as whether one preferred indoor scenes or not. Then, they painted landscapes based on the survey results. The painting the artist duo created for China (Figure 2) is a stand-out due to how overwhelmingly blue it is, to the point where the familiar boundaries of landscape are overwritten, even erased. Komar and Melamid’s “Most Wanted Painting” series suggests that, by seeking a landscape, individuals also CAPACIOUS Margaryta Golovchenko 58 inevitably seek blue, which is arguably inescapable in this genre. Their project can easily be categorized as feeling, emotion, and affect, with the variation in the details speaking to individual feelings, the genre of the landscape commenting on the social appeal of the genre, while the need for blue draws on its inarguable quality of je ne sais quoi that captivates the collective imagination. Blue becomes overwhelming, like in the China painting, when a personal experience becomes a collective experience: the quality necessary for blue to be transformed into an affect, allowing it to bleed outside the boundaries of the individual and color the surrounding world. The reader’s participation in this “community of blue,” which Nelson similarly fosters, is complicated by the fact that, despite dealing with a visual subject, Bluets purposefully lacks any illustrations. Initially, this may come across as an obstacle in transmitting blue’s network of interwoven affects from Nelson to her reader. However, the decision to omit visuals is in keeping with Teresa Brennan’s assertion that “the concept of the transmission of affect does not sit well with an emphasis on individualism, on sight, and cognition” (2004, 14). Visuals, especially mimetic ones, tempt one to identify what is being depicted, which results in the perception of blue as an extension of the physical form, preventing the viewer from experiencing blue on its own. This is akin to what Gilles Deleuze (1990) identifies as “sense,” the fourth dimension of a proposition which Deleuze argues is “aliquid” because it is “incorporeal, complex, and irreducible” (19) and “inheres [and] subsists” rather than exists (21). Just as green for Deleuze is infinite, both a physical attribute of a tree as well as a way of indirectly conveying, through connotation, the various life processes that keep a tree alive as the “tree greens” (21), so should Nelson’s “community of blue” be seen as an attempt to capture the spectrum of connotations that blue invokes. It is also an opportunity for the reader to abstract themselves—from Nelson’s blues, from the blues of nature and the art world—and embark on a personal journey for an undiscovered blue that is unknown to the self rather than to the world at large. Counter to Brennan, individualism is what facilitates the transmission of affect in some parts of the book, like the dream of a blue living room. As visualization is reflexive, an extension of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) calls “texture perception,” it arguably causes us to think of blue associatively rather than literally, for even a literally blue living room has underlying spatial practices and personal habits at play. We are therefore proceeding in reverse through Brennan’s (2004) definition of the transmission of affect as the process by which “[t]he ‘atmosphere’ or the environment literally gets into the individual” (1), since we are not creating a physical environment so much as we are creating a charged space, 59 Accessing Blue in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets the affective power of which depends more on our own relationship with blue and whether such a space would delight or horrify us than on our preferences for what to include in it. In other words, the example given by Brennan is akin to (affectively) “reading” the room by allowing the atmosphere to harmonize one’s biographical affects with their surroundings. In Nelson’s Bluets, the lack of visuals means that the affects Nelson conveys verbally to the reader are only a starting point, rather than a definitive verdict on how one should engage with a particular blue object or space. The omission of images also means Nelson avoids the kind of obstacles that researcher David Katz ran into when asking test subjects to match a blue from memory, as described by Brian Massumi (2002) in his essay “Too-Blue: Color-Patch for an Expanded Empiricism.” The problem in Katz experiment, according to Massumi - also revealed in Bluets - is the assumption that “[l]anguage […is] a medium of commonality in two senses” (208) while also overlooking the fact that the “remembering of a color is not effectively a reproduction of a perception, but a transformation or becoming of it” (210). As Massumi (2002) points out, the mind will conjure things differently regardless of how familiar it is with the object in question, since an accurate recreation of blue is out of the question due to the resulting “exaggeration” (210); the reader is freed from the burden of memory for the purposes of recreation and is instead given the opportunity to consider the process of creation that the color blue, in this case, facilitates, primarily in the form of associations and affects. Nelson’s decision to omit visuals also changes how we engage with the three works of art discussed in Bluets: Yves Klein’s 1961 “Blue Monochrome,” Joan Mitchell’s 1973 “Les Bluets,” and Komar and Melamid’s “Most Wanted Painting” series (which, for the purpose of this paper, shall count as one). All three are likely known to readers who have a background in art history, or at least a keen interest in the subject. Even then, the fact that these works are experienced through Nelson’s personal and informative recollections of them, rather than through iconographic descriptions, means that readers do not experience the blueness of these artworks first-hand. The technique of “reading with” veers dangerously into the territory of feelings. This proves especially problematic considering that it is this sort of engagement with art—an overwhelming sensorial, even bodily, encounter that “switch[es] our intensive register [and] reconnect[s] us with the world”—that Simon O’Sullivan (2001) argues we should seek, albeit not actively (128). In other words, CAPACIOUS Margaryta Golovchenko 60 it would be paradoxical to deliberately go looking for a specific affect, since we can predict neither what might elicit a strong response from us nor what kind of affect(s) those will be. After all, O’Sullivan (2001) argues, “you cannot read affects, you can only experience them” (126). That is not to say that Nelson renders Berlant’s technique of “reading-with” into a lateral and passive experience. Bluets does not provide readers with a script for how to feel about the artwork Nelson discusses, nor does the book discourage its reader from seeking out the art and experiencing it for themselves. Rather, there is a limit to Nelson’s “reading-with” that results from the fact that Bluets is a recording of the author’s own affective journey and relationship with blue, a limit that is compounded by the limitations of language. Providing her reader with a spectrum of responses to specific kinds of blue, Nelson denies the reader the closure that would come from simply seeing the image on the page and taking it for granted as proof of Nelson’s affective experience. It is by seeking out the image for oneself that one steps onto the same trail of anticipation that Nelson has already walked and documented in Bluets. There is certainly an element of the personal to experiencing art, especially when it comes to the ‘love it/hate it’ verdict at the end. Yet we will never know if we might have a strong sensorial, maybe even Stendhal-like, experience with a work of art unless we not only “[t]hrow [ourselves] into looking […] ready to accept whatever [we] see” ( James Elkins 2001, 173) but are also provided with the opportunity to look. The experience of turning a corner in a gallery to then be confounded by a work hanging on the opposite wall is more similar to the experience of turning the page in a book and being captivated by an image than it may initially appear. Both experiences are characterized by this very element of surprise that comes as much from seeing something one was not expecting as it does from seeing something for the first time. Unless you have already been to that gallery and know the layout of the institution, as well as which artworks are hung in which rooms, by heart, or unless you have already flipped through the book and therefore gotten a quick preview of which images to expect, the encounter with the artwork will be a form of ambushing. Even in art books with a specific topic—for example, Abstract Expressionism—the selection of images as well as their placement still has the chance of catching even the most knowledgeable reader off-guard, who may find themselves introduced to an unusual pairing of artworks that puts a familiar piece in a new light or feel the warm flame of curiosity ignite as they encounter a new work, with the potential that their relationship to the work will transform from delight to deep infatuation over time. While it is certainly possible to simply set the book aside and look up the three artworks, the encounter with the image 61 Accessing Blue in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets Figure 3. Klein, Y. (1961). Blue Monochrome. [Dry pigment in polyvinyl acetate on cotton over plywood]. New York City, NY: Museum of Modern Art. CAPACIOUS Margaryta Golovchenko 62 would lack the intimacy of seeing it revealed with the turn of the page, which is itself similar to turning the corner in a gallery and being unexpectedly caught off-guard by a work of art. It is therefore fitting to end with Nelson’s encounter with Yves Klein’s infamous “Blue Monochrome” (Figure 3), which exemplifies not only blue’s attractive-yet-repulsive power as an affect in both Bluets and the world more broadly, but also the challenge of transmitting affect through words rather than images. Nelson’s observation that Klein’s “blue radiate[d] out so hotly that it seemed to be touching, perhaps even hurting, my eyeballs,” before concluding that the painting was “too much” (30), reaffirms Sedgwick’s argument that “to touch is always already to reach out” (2003, 14). Unlike Nelson, who reaches out to the object directly, the reader is reaching out to the notoriety and air of myth that surrounds the painting, to its “texture,” to use Sedgwick’s term. The decision to omit visuals in Bluets should therefore be read as a way of forcing a separation between the physical and the affective, blue as an attribute and as something ethereal. Perhaps we should use Nelson’s own words as guidance in this situation, for by pointing out that, “if blue is anything on this earth, it is abundant” (90), Nelson signals the need to move away from thinking of blue as something that can be accurately classified using numbers and letters like in a paint store, and towards an ever-changing, even omnipotent, blue. Blue’s function as an affect in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is multifaceted as it proves to be both a source of anxiety and a soothing reassurance: the illness and the cure simultaneously. However, it would be a disservice to the color’s bountiful nature to suggest that it is primarily a source of affect for Nelson and that the reader has merely been given the privilege of insight into this complex network of feelings. In fact, blue functions differently for the reader, invoking the equally valid affects of mystery, awe, and curiosity. Bluets invites us to step into Nelson’s position and experience blue first-hand, whether by looking at the same artworks or seeking out blue in everyday life. While Nelson has shared her own affective journey with us, to stop after reading Bluets without asking oneself, “Does blue have a similar kind of effect on me? If so, which shades of blue or which objects?” and then going out to search for these answers, is to settle for an understanding and appreciation of blue that has already been filtered through a personal narrative, through additional reflections and contemplations that have begun to refine blue from its rough, prepersonal state. It is only through experiencing blue directly—in part by seeing the artwork in Bluets for ourselves, whether in person or simply by looking them up, but also by going about our daily routines in the hopes that, one day, we might experience an event, an object, or a place that we cannot describe in any way other than as blue—that we can understand and appreciate Nelson’s contradictory love affair with the color. 63 Accessing Blue in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets References Berlant, L. (2018). Genre Flailing. Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry 1 (2), pp. 156-162 [online]. Available at: http://capaciousjournal.com/past-issues/vol-1-no-2-2018/ [Accessed: March 9, 2020]. Brennan, T. (2004). The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press. Deleuze, G. (1990). The Logic of Sense. Translated from French by Constantin V. Boundas. London: The Athlone Press. Elkins, J. (2001). Pictures and Tears. London: Routledge. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables of the Virtual. Durham: Duke University Press. Nelson, M. (2009). Bluets. Seattle: Wave Books. O’Sullivan, S. (2001). The Aesthetics of Affect: Thinking Art Beyond Representation. Angelaki: Journal for the Theoretical Humanities, 6 (3), pp. 125-135. Sedgwick, E. Kosofsky. (2003). Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Shouse, E. (2005). Feeling, Emotion, Affect. M/C Journal 8 (6) [online]. Available at: http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php [Accessed: March 9, 2020]. CAPACIOUS