WORDS Gabija Purlyte
Yellowism: it’s a hashtag word of 2012. It came into the mediascape with a bang after 7th October, when the self-proclaimed co-founder and leader of the Yellowism movement, Vladimir Umanets, marked in black paint the corner of a Rothko mural with the inscription “Vladimir Umanets ’12 a potential piece of Yellowism.” The court refused to see this action as anything else than an act of vandalism, and sentenced Umanets to two years in prison.
To put the seriousness of Mr Umanets’ “intervention” into perspective, the tagged 1958 painting Black on Maroon belongs to one of Mark Rothko’s most famous series, the Seagram murals, which were hung last year in Tate Modern’s newly opened Rothko Room. It is estimated that restoration of the painting could cost around £200,000 and take about eighteen months. Another work by Rothko, titled Orange, Red, Yellow, was auctioned last May for £53.8 million, making it the most expensive piece of contemporary art ever sold at an auction. Needless to say, Yellowism has become a highly controversial topic, and has attracted reactions ranging from enthusiastic approval to “You should rot in hell.” There is also quite a bit more to it than just reckless damaging of property, which makes the matter at once more problematic and more interesting.
So what is it, exactly? Well, it is the brainchild of Russian-born Umanets and his partner Marcin Łodyga. According to the authors, “On 15th Nov 2010 in Cairo, in the Natalia Vodianova Yellowistic Chamber was opened the first exhibition of Yellowism called ‘Flattened To Yellow’, on which, for the first time, the Manifesto of Yellowism was presented . . . The opening date of this exhibition is considered as the beginning of Yellowism.” The movement now has an official website, thisisyellowism.com, a Facebook page, a YouTube channel and a Twitter account, and has recently held its third exhibition.
Here is the philosophy: Yellowism is neither art nor anti-art, but “an autonomous phenomenon in contemporary visual culture”. Its characteristic feature is the lack of a creative element. Pieces of Yellowism can only be presented in a yellowistic chamber, which is an enclosed space whose walls are painted violet and which is not an art gallery. Any object placed in a yellowistic chamber becomes an expression of yellow, literally “a colour like that of egg yolk, ripe lemons etc.”, in the process losing any other meaning or interpretation.
Why single out the Rothko mural as a “potential piece of Yellowism”? With Umanets currently in jail, I interviewed his collaborator Łodyga. He explains: “Rothko expressed his emotions so well – Rothko wanted to express not only his personal emotions but also universal human emotions. Vladimir chose the Rothko painting because all the emotions ‘closed’ in the Rothko painting can be flattened to yellow, ironed, in the context of Yellowism.”
The authors clarify that pieces of Yellowism are not necessarily yellow (indeed, they usually are not). “Yellow is the intellectual matter (meaning, interpretation),” says Marcin. “Violet walls stress the fact that we don’t talk about visual yellow, we talk about meanings. Walls are violet to show that we are not interested in the visual aspects of yellow. Pieces of Yellowism are about yellow. We actually don’t like yellow colour (visual yellow).” They call the reduction of all possible interpretations to this single one “flatstruction”: “Yellowism is permanent, boring, inert, homogenous, flat, ‘dead’ mass. Always was and always will be. Like in the forest where all the trees (meanings) ‘look’ the same – wherever you go you are in the same place anyway. A thousand kilometres left, two meters right or backwards – you are always in the same place.”
The sphere of Yellowism exists autonomously and completely separate from the spheres of ordinary reality and art. In fact, as Marcin tells us, “These two contexts need the third context: Yellowism. Yellowism can be a flat mirror for art and for reality. The culture needs the new mirror. Art used to be a mirror for reality, but is not anymore. Now not only reality but also art needs a mirror.”
Yellowism is neither art nor anti-art, but “an autonomous phenomenon in contemporary visual culture
To a sceptical eye, all that Umanets and Łodyga are doing has been done before, if in a slightly different form. Manifestos are quite a standard feature of modern art groups since the Futurists in 1909. Transcending the boundaries of art was in the agenda of Dada, Situationists, Fluxus and others. The authors acknowledge outright that their movement derived from contemporary art, as a reaction to it and a move away, a resignation from it. In a milieu of post-modern sensibilities – which deny all hierarchies of interpretations and where any form of “correct”, fixed meanings are impossible – Umanents and Łodyga go much further back than Roland Barthes’s announcement of “The Death of the Author”, beyond even the Renaissance cult of the individual creative genius.
They propose a situation similar to that of the Middle Ages, when the artist always remained simply an anonymous craftsman, whose role was to express an unquestionable ideology divinely handed down from above. Yellowism offers a kind of ontological security, a simple and stable truth, a “totalitarian freedom”, as they call it. It seems to have many aspects of a religion, though Marcin stresses that Yellowism is not a religion and certainly not a manifestation of God. Still, the ritual of contemplating yellow in designated “places of worship” could, in a way, fulfil the perennial human need for collective faiths.
The philosophy of the movement is surprisingly sophisticated in its simplicity. And yet, it has some essential caveats which could undermine the endeavour. Most importantly, the authors may claim as much as they want that it is wrong to see Yellowism in its entirety as a work of art. However, the invention of Yellowism as an idea has all the features of a conceptual artwork – and a very good one at that. Dada, the great revolt against art, was later happily incorporated as just another chapter in the history of art. The problem is that art, which has been inseparable from human existence since the very beginning of humankind, has proven immune to an exclusive definition, subsuming an ever-diversifying range of practices under its guise. At the same time, everyone seems to have their own individual idea of what is and is not art – a great deal of people today refuse to accept post-modern art, which has been around for more than 50 years now, as being art at all. How many people then are likely to recognise Yellowism as something of interest to them, let alone a separate sphere of visual culture altogether?
Another problem is that while Yellowism seems to offer an almost Marxist levelling of both the practitioners – the yellowists – and the audience, its content appearing deceptively simple and accessible to everyone, yet, as Łodyga says himself, “the yellow mass is not for the masses”. There would be no Yellowism without contemporary art, and the promised escape is only an illusion. There is no way to understand where yellowists are coming from without a rather deep awareness of today’s art scene in all its complexity and theoretical underpinnings, and there is certainly nothing anti-elitist about that.
Moreover, as Julia Halperin of artinfo.com notes, an awful lot of Yellowism seems to be about beautiful women in scant clothing. Keeping in mind the advances that feminism has made in both art and art history, a suspicion arises that Yellowism may just be a convenient excuse for the men to display and enjoy images of objectified and sexualised women which perpetuate the patriarchal structures of society. All accusations can be denied by claiming that such interpretations are impossible in Yellowism: you are supposed to think about nothing but yellow in a yellowistic chamber. Nothing new under the sun: nudes in art are never about themselves, otherwise they would be called pornography – outrageous!
Umanets’ “intervention” in the Rothko mural accomplished exactly what it was meant to: it drew attention to the yellowists’ cause. In December 2012, Harper’s Magazine published five texts by Marcin Łodyga as an introduction to Yellowist philosophy, and in June 2013 Marcin Lodyga will be one of the speakers at Learning Without Frontiers World Summit in London. At the moment, Yellowism sounds to me most like a game we can agree (or disagree) to play. When asked about his thoughts on such a description, Marcin makes a slight rhetorical detour: “Yes, it is a bit like a chess move, Duchamp did one move (the shift from the context of reality to the context of art), we do another move: from art to Yellowism. To do the next radical move you have to define the piece of land where you can move it.” In any case, the exact place that Yellowism will receive in the annals of history remains to be seen.
