Colour as pronoun: Josef Albers’s colour deixis

Abstract

This article excavates Indigenous perspectivism as a subterranean influence on the innovative visual art and colour pedagogy of Josef Albers (1888-1976). Extending earlier studies of Albers’s engagement with Indigenous arts of the Americas, the relational dynamics of perspectivism are explored as an underlying conceptual framework for the Mesoamerican architectural and design forms mined by Albers. Radical anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s theorisation of perspectivism as the differential reciprocity of gazes exchanged by hunter and prey illuminates the situational character of Albers’s approach to colour. The resulting “shifter”-like character of Albers’s deployments of colour is further contextualised in relation to the pioneering semiotic research of Karl Bühler (1879-1963) on deixis: the indexicality of human—and animal—sign systems. Bühler belonged to the Vienna Circle of thinkers whose impact on the pedagogy of the Bauhaus, where Albers taught prior to immigrating to the United States in 1933, has been previously documented by Peter Galison, among others. Bühler’s formulation of pronouns as context-dependent modes of reference, in particular, reveals a striking correspondence with the relationality of Indigenous perspectivism as a function of trans-species personhood, suggesting that these frameworks were complementary and mutually reinforcing for Albers.