White Gaze Walking

Mexico City • color theory • formalism • Luis Barragán • settler tourism

Who are the great colorists of poetry? This question has been on my mind while I have spent the last week in Mexico City. Here for the first time. Overwhelmed by the dazzling graphicality of the city. Think Miami fused with Tokyo. CDMX is the most beautiful city when it comes to color I’ve ever been to. What is color? Is a real thing or symbolic construct, finally? Seeing two houses designed by Luis Barragán and the Frida Kahlo Museum did something to my brain this week.

I had to go fetch some Wallace Stevens from a used bookstore here and sit inside his love of green for a while. De Kooning’s special demonic pink. Disney movies always did memorable things with dry lipstick red, for some reason. Sleeping Beauty and there’s Beauty and the Beast (which is probably more blue, it’s true) have carved permanent trenches of association in my brain for how rose petals or a pair of lips should look in eternity.

Sappho has violet. Basquiat has construction orange and canary yellow. Warhol has neon pastel airbrush. Kara Walker will forever be black and white, lantern patterns. Just as Vija Celmins demands gray. Plath gets her volcanic poppies. Dickinson, Vallejo, Donne all seem bathed in funereal black. Rimbaud is technicolor. Dylan that thin wild mercury sound. Eileen Myles is a kind of dirty green. Maggie Nelson and William Gass wrestle over blue’s blue. Her blue, tellingly, is Joan Mitchell’s; his, Fra Angelico’s. Josef Albers is orange-yellow without a doubt. Rothko is caught between red and black. Kerry James Marshall is black-black, richer than midnight. Just as Arthur Jafa is purple-black. In this incredible 2013 talk here you can hear him speak about the tensions of how Black skin have typically appeared on film, and how he has long sought to subvert red-pink tones for blue-purple ones.

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Color has been on my mind this week in two immediate ways. First, the architecture everywhere here is a dance of unusually vivid primary colors. Second, the incredible array of signs, logos, graphic text all scream color. I think of James Schuyler’s line about the poets of his generation being scrambled in the surf of New York School painters. I feel that here. Don’t get me wrong. I love New York City eternally. It’s my home city. But it is a gray city. Paris is also made of stones and rain, perhaps even more monochromatic. That’s the feeling of it for me, at least. A perfect stone triangle. OK, with splashes of gold-yellow also in my mind for some reason.

Here, the visual patterns feel like a Pedro Almodóvar film. A live action James Turrell exhibit. But even as I have been entranced and seduced by CDMX’s incredible colorism, I’ve also caught myself lost in a familiar trance. The trance of the poet, of the dandy, of the aesthete. I mean a white person, too. It’s obvious we have to question/challenge the objectification of people, no matter how flattering this or that assessment. Especially when it comes to say their body’s size, their gender presentation or embodiment. Skin color? Forget it. There’s no innocent way to “enjoy” pigmentation. Nor should there be. We know this. A troubling example…