Color Belongs to the Past, 2005

Color Belongs to the Past, no. 1, 2005, gouache, ink and graphite on paper, 30 x 22 inches (76,2 x 55,9 cm)

Color Belongs to the Past, no. 2 2005, gouache, ink and graphite on paper, 30 x 22 inches (76,2 x 55,9 cm)

Color Belongs to the Past, no. 3, 2005, gouache, ink and graphite on paper, 30 x 22 inches (76,2 x 55,9 cm)

Color Belongs to the Past, no. 4, 2005, gouache, ink and graphite on paper, 30 x 22 inches (76,2 x 55,9 cm)

Color Belongs to the Past, no. 5, 2005, gouache, ink and graphite on paper, 30 x 22 inches (76,2 x 55,9 cm)

Color Belongs to the Past, no. 6, 2005, gouache, ink and graphite on paper, 30 x 22 inches (76,2 x 55,9 cm)

Color Belongs to the Past, no. 7, 2005, gouache, ink and graphite on paper, 30 x 22 inches (76,2 x 55,9 cm)

Color Belongs to the Past, no. 8, 2005, gouache, ink and graphite on paper, 30 x 22 inches (76,2 x 55,9 cm)

Color Belongs to the Past, no. 9, 2005, gouache, ink and graphite on paper, 30 x 22 inches (76,2 x 55,9 cm)

Color Belongs to the Past, no. 10, 2005, gouache, ink and graphite on paper, 30 x 22 inches (76,2 x 55,9 cm)

Color Belongs to the Past, no. 11, 2005, gouache, ink and graphite on paper, 30 x 22 inches (76,2 x 55,9 cm)

All Ideas Must Undertake…., 2005, gouache, ink and graphite on paper, 30 x 22 inches (76,2 x 55,9 cm)

The Annihilation in the Immediate Present…, 2005, gouache, ink and graphite on paper, 15 x 11 inches (38 x 27,9 cm)

The Landscape Hides its History, 2005, gouache, ink and graphite on paper, 15 x 11 inches (38 x 27,9 cm)

A void running through the landscape that April afternoon suggested the local economy had collapsed. From the interstate, what had been, just miles earlier, an onslaught of cheap slogans now passed before me as miles of vacant, weathered, white panels, held aloft and illuminated, proud in their disgrace. These white beacons signaled interruptions in the economic system, in the communication system.

A calculated, commercial understanding of our drifting gaze, the billboard is the focal point of our speed-anesthetized vision. Without information, the interstate pointed to nothing but itself, it became a center with no edge, a passage to nowhere.

Here was iconoclasm on a vast scale. Monochromes, fifty feet in the air harkened back to the rhetoric of Malevich, who wrote, “I envisioned the revolution having no color. Color belongs to the past.”

Bright nothing. The futility of revolutionary and capitalist utopias. A profound, repeating void.

—Tim Clifford, 2006 (edited 2023)

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