On the Morality of Rocks
Sebastian Trainor
“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” So observed Hamlet in 1604. He excepts nothing; everything in heaven and on Earth is included. Not only Denmark and ghosts, but pirates, textured rocks, hats, and anything else. Even ideational or experiential things — colors and emotions, for instance. If it can be thought about, it can be sorted. Good or bad, the perspective is all.
HAMLET: Denmark’s a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ: We think not so, my lord.
HAMLET: Why, then, ‘tis none to you.
Keeping this quality of “thinking” in mind, leap two centuries ahead to an opportune point from which to do some thinking on colors, textures, and rocks. Arrive at 1810. This year brought the German poet/playwright/scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Colors into the world.
Goethe asserted that colors have a direct unmediated effect on the feelings of the observer. (They bypass “thinking” and go straight for emotion). The notion found fertile philosophical ground in nineteenth-century Europe . . . and after some decades of people thinking about the idea, it grew into a major aesthetic debate, leading to a factional goodness and badness associated with line and color in the visual arts.
The champions of line claimed that line is morally superior. Line is stable, precise, law-abiding, and scientific. Line does not change its basic qualities when seen under different lights, nor in proximity to other hues. Line contains the truth of reality. Color, however, is inconstant and corruptible. It transforms its character depending on the light in which it is viewed, on its context, and on the chromatic value of its neighbors. It reflects and changes other colors. It conveys nothing reliable, but only ungovernable emotional content. Worse still: the effect of color is individual — it is not the same for every observer.
Times were evolving, though, and the line/color debate was in flux. By 1900 the moral perfection of line had been significantly eroded by impressionists, post-impressionists, symbolists and a variety of other painterly “ists.” Color, previously demonized, was claiming a more dominant role. Values such as changeability, subjective perception, and inner emotional experience were ascending in the arts. Not just in the arts. New sciences — most notably psychology and psychoanalysis — began focusing inward. Now it was not the outer material world, but the inner individual and emotional world that became paramount in importance.
In Sweden, one hundred years after Goethe, a new generation’s scientific poet-playwright, August Strindberg, articulated the new reality. “The world is a reflection of your interior state,” he wrote in his 1907 Zones of the Spirit: A Book of Thoughts, “and of the interior state of others.” That is to say: the world itself changes its shape and character depending on how one feels about it. (Think of The Scream as painted by Edvard Munch).
Strindberg’s proofs of this are persuasive, but there is no need to recount them here because Grisele’s video with her textured rock has illustrated the point wonderfully. Note that her rock, while remaining the same rock, becomes a different rock in each new context depending on how she feels about it. It evokes childhood and safety. No. It evokes desolation and humidity. No. It evokes warmth and leisure. It remains always itself, with the definite boundaries and finite exactness of line, and, at the same time, it is in a constant state of change, exhibiting all the instability and changeability of color.
It is comforting to think of such rocks as this as a foundation of scenic design. A world built of them is personal, saturated with significance, empathetical, and inviting. Its atmosphere, like colors for Goethe, will necessarily have a direct unmediated effect. And after it has been felt by its visitors, there will be time to analyze it later. For life today, that idea sounds good.
Bio
Grisele Gonzalez-Ledezma is from Tijuana, Mexico. She obtained a Bachelor of Science at the University of California San Diego. After graduating she began to work in the theatre field at La Jolla Playhouse, Olney Theatre Center, and the Contemporary American Theatre Festival as a prop artist, scenic artist, or overhire/intern. Grisele is currently a candidate at The Pennsylvania State University where she is working in obtaining a Masters of Fine Arts in Scenic Design.
Sebastian Trainor is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park. As a scholar he investigates charismatic-but-suspicious theatre-historical anecdotes, with an eye toward re-narrating them in more truthful contexts. His essays have appeared in Text & Presentation, Theatre Symposium, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and various edited collections.