Pink Skies and Green Screens: Readymade Colors and Chroma Keyed Moods in Video Art Since 2010

Abstract

This paper examines the mood enhancing qualities of two chromatic tropes that recur with striking frequency in video art from the present decade: pink skies and green-screens. Featured in works by artists such as Victoria Fu, Petra Cortright, Cecile B. Evans, Ed Atkins, Oliver Laric and Jon Rafman, pink skies and green screens are generally employed as backdrops upon which other materials sampled from digital vernacular culture are grafted. Pushing these backdrops to the fore for aesthetic and affective scrutiny, the paper has two interrelated aims. First, it seeks to situate the chromatic palette of digital video art of in an art historical genealogy of the readymade. Whereas industrially manufactured paint, and thus color, seminally was declared readymades by Marcel Duchamp a century ago, the explosive growth of personal computing and its accompanying need for off-the-shelf software has led to the automation and standardization also of the digital palette, as Carolyn Kane has shown (2014). Exemplified with works by Fu, Cortright, Evans and Rafman, I argue that this standardization provides the material basis for the purposeful employment of color as readymades in current video art. Second, the paper explores the moods evoked by the presence of pink skies and green screens in select works: how exactly are these chromatic tropes employed, and to what effect and affect? Significantly, mood is here understood both as a state internal to the perceiving subject and as an external ambience, a condition that is intensified through the transmissibility of readymade color enforced through the online environment from which these artists cull their material.