Since 2016, a very public feud has been playing out between the artists Anish Kapoor and Stuart Semple. In a quest to find, and own, the blackest shade of black, and now the whitest shade of white, the Kapoor-Semple feud is a battle over pigment – but it’s also an assault on colour.
Mae Losasso looks at the cult of cultural chiaroscuro, and asks what the war over black and white really signifies.
Vantablack
The Kapoor-Semple saga began back in 2014, when British company Surrey NanoSystems developed Vantablack, one of the darkest substances known to man, capable of absorbing up to 99.965% of visible light. Surrey NanoSystems invented the substance, comprised of a complex forest of vertical tubes, with an array of applications in mind: Vantablack might be used to see the stars better, by preventing stray light from entering telescopes; or to improve the performance of infrared cameras in space; or to increase the absorption of heat in solar technology; or for thermal camouflage in military operations. With its emissivity and scalability, Vantablack could be used in all sorts of contexts – but what didn’t occur to Surrey NanoSystems, was that it would be dynamite in the art world. Enter Anish Kapoor.
British-Indian sculptor Kapoor has enjoyed a career of spiralling success, ever since he represented Britain at the XLIV Venice Biennale in 1990. The following year he received the Turner Prize, and in 2002 he was awarded the Unilever Commission for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern.
Cloud Gate, Anish Kapoor
He’s known for his huge, abstract, and seemingly space-bending sculptures, which are often works of public art, like Cloud Gate (2006) in Chicago’s Millennium Park, Sky Mirror (2006) at the Rockefeller Center in New York City (and later in London’s Kensington Gardens), or ArcelorMittal Orbit (2011), his permanent sculpture that sits in London’s olympic park, straddling the Stratford skyline like an insane helter-skelter.
But, then, sometime in 2014, Kapoor got wind of Surrey NanoSystems’ new development. If his public art projects had suggested an ‘art for all’ sensibility, then his application to own the exclusive artistic rights to Vantablack indicated otherwise. Surrey NanoSystems assented to the request, and Kapoor became the only artist in the world who could aesthetically wield the light-sucking substance. Enter Stuart Semple.
A Vantablack BMW
You are not Anish Kapoor
Kapoor’s ownership of Vantablack – or, rather, his ownership of the use of Vantablack – sparked controversy across the art world, not least in the figure of multidisciplinary British artist, Stuart Semple. The younger artist was enraged by what he considered Kapoor’s theft, and set about creating a spate of superlative pigments, including the pinkest shade of pink, the greenest green, and the world’s most glittery glitter. “We all remember kids at school who wouldn’t share their colouring pencils,” Semple quipped, “but then they ended up on their own with no friends. It’s cool, Anish can have his black. But the rest of us will be playing with the rainbow!”
Yet, for all his talk of the rainbow, Semple revealed his true colours when he released Black 3.0, a structural pigment that rivalled Vantablack, but which was made available to all.
Except, that is, to Kapoor.
Photo: Filipe Braga/Serralves
Every purchase of the paint had to be accompanied by the signing of a legally bound declaration, confirming that: “you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor, you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor. To the best of your knowledge, information and belief this paint will not make its way into the hands of Anish Kapoor.”
By spring 2021, Semple had set his eyes on a new prize. After various instances of public paint-slinging, the artist tested out a new military strategy, locking himself away in a secret underground bunker (aka, his home), where he worked furiously to create White 2.0 – the whitest white paint imaginable. Lockdown 1.0 had thrown the ultimate spanner in the works for the colour scientists, and Semple was desperate to capitalise on the closure of labs and research centres to get his formula finished first. “If you thought the black thing was bad,” he cautioned, in a Youtube video from April last year, “what’s about to happen with white is even worse. This is beyond any art war we’ve ever seen.”
A whiter shade of white
In the end, Semple’s bid to beat the scientists was in vain: last month, researchers at Purdue University claimed to have developed a new “ultra-white” paint, said to be “whiter than the whitest paint currently available,” capable of reflecting more than 98% of sunlight. This new paint, they claim, might prove a crucial energy-saving tool in the battle against climate change, and the researchers are already working with a manufacturing company to get the whitest white out to the public.
But here’s the thing: the grey elephant in this black and white room is that this isn’t a fight over colour, it’s a battle over the void, a frantic clamour to obliterate colour at all costs. Because, for all of his ‘playing the rainbow’ rhetoric, Semple, it turns out, was riding the blackest-black and the whitest-white trains all along; pink and glitter were only ever footnotes, mere martial distractions, in the art-war over black and white.
Don’t get me wrong, I admire Semple’s absolute commitment to democratising paint and pigment, and his battle against the so-called ‘colour-criminals’. It isn’t right that T-Mobile is suing small businesses for using magenta, and it’s not OK that tech consultant Walter Liew was imprisoned for stealing Dupont’s blueprints for their secret titanium white. It’s as absurd as Willy Wonka and the everlasting gobstopper – and Semple is right to challenge it. But in all the furore, what exactly has happened to colour? And what does the march towards monochrome really tell us about our social values?
The Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, known as the Square Colosseum
Chromophobia
In 2000, the artist David Batchelor coined the term “chromophobia” to describe the pathological hatred of colour that had prevailed in the modernist and minimalist aesthetics of the twentieth century. This syndrome, Batchelor explains, manifests itself in “the many and varied attempts to purge colour from culture, to devalue colour, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity.” Why? Because for the chromophobe, colour is either “made out to be the property of some ‘foreign’ body – usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological” or else it is “relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic.” Colour, in short, is “dangerous, or it is trivial, or it is both.”
In other words, the push towards sleeker, cleaner, crisper palettes is loaded with latent prejudice – especially when the substitution shade is white. One need only glance at the fascistic whiteness of 1930s architecture, built on the memory of Greco-Roman culture in a bid to concretise the aryan myth, to get a sense of this. (Ironic, really, because it turns out that Greek statuary and architecture were almost certainly painted with bright and vibrant colours). The promise of purity – moral, racial – made white the shade du jour of the twentieth century, and it’s hard to shake off such associations in the contemporary quest for the whitest shade of white.
Yves Klein’s IKB (International Klein Blue)
And especially now, at a moment when racial tensions are reaching a rolling broil. It’s hard to read both ‘blackest black’ and ‘whitest white’ without hearing the whispers of a racial subtext, and without feeling as though this cultural chiaroscuro mirrors a widening social rift. I don’t mean that either Kapoor, or Semple, or any of the other figures caught up in this colour war are trying to convey a covert message – I just wonder if this is a battle that the art-world really wants to wage.
Because, for all its tongue-in-cheek frivolity, the Kapoor-Semple saga does raise some cultural questions, like: why have artists become so distracted by purity? Why so caught up with ownership and exclusivity? And when did materials stop being the means to an aesthetic end? We seem to have forgotten that art is made to be looked at and enjoyed, not just made for the sake of being made. And though I’m all for black and white – and I can’t wait to see what Kapoor does with his mythic Vantablack – I think the art world could do with a good shot of colour, if not in the way it looks, at least in the way it thinks.
