Vantablack developed by Surrey Nanosystems via Wikimedia Commons
This week news broke that the exclusive rights to the “blackest” of black paint-like surface on the market had been granted to the London-based Indian artist Anish Kapoor.
The pigment was developed by British company, Surrey NanoSystems in 2014 to be used for military equipment, such as stealth jets and satellites.
Vantablack, as it is known, absorbs 99.96 percent of all light to the point that the human eye can not pick up on the shadows that the brains requires to interpret form. For example, a crumpled piece of tin foil will appear like a flat surface under Vantablack (picture top).
Kapoor – an artist who has built a reputation for using pigments and form to create optical illusions – became aware of Vantablack in 2014, however, it was only this week on the occasion of a interview with BBC Radio 4 about a new exhibition of his work at the Science Museum in London, that other artists became curious in the material.
When Surrey NanoSystems confirmed that ‘only Sir Anish can use the paint’ this led to a social media storm.
The company has not revealed details of its deal with Kapoor, and Kapoor as yet has not made a public statement.
Why the hype about Vantablack?
Kapoor told the BBC: ‘It’s blacker than anything you can imagine. It’s effectively like a paint, but it’s so black you almost can’t see it.’
He continued: ‘It has a kind of unreal quality to it and I’ve always been drawn to rather exotic materials because of what they make you feel.’
Vantablack is composed of microscopic vertical tubes that have been described as ‘ten-thousandth of the width of a human hair’.
‘We grow the tubes like a field of carbon grass,’ Surrey NanoSystem’s chief technical officer Ben Jensen told The Guardian at the time of its discovery. ‘When a light particle hits the material, it gets between the tubes and bounces around, is absorbed and converted to heat. Light goes in, but it can’t get back out.’
English painter Christian Furr sparred the commentary against the exclusive rights deal.
‘We should be able to use it – it isn’t right that it belongs to one man,’ he told British press.
Shaune Lakin, Senior Curator Photography National Gallery of Australia, said that while he could not comment on this week’s news, as curator of the gallery’s current exhibition titled Black, he said: ‘More than any other colour, black is a material property – it can absorb light to the extent that we can pay attention to its material presence in a way that can be difficult otherwise.’
Black draws together artists from the collection who have repeated turned to black as it ‘allows for a concentration on mark making without the risk of distraction faced by other pigments’, explained Lakin.
‘Each of the works in the exhibition Black has been selected on the basis that black is an integral part of the intention of the work. So whether black is evident in the form of pigment, ink or silver, it forms a vital component of each work in the exhibition. However, for a number of artists in Black, the pigment itself held or holds particular power or significance,’ he continued.
The gallery’s website explained: ‘Most fundamentally, black can represent the end of something and a new start.’
In the context of Kapoor’s Vantablack, this prophecy may be less about surface and more about power and money.
Why exclusive?
For centuries artists have sort the purest pigments. We need only think of Renaissance artists who paid handsome prices for lapis lazuli.
Why should one artist be given exclusive rights, is the question circulating.
This is not the first time an artist has claimed exclusive ownership of a colour. French artist Yves Klein patented a deep shade of a matt blue in 1960, subsequently named International Klein Blue (IKB).
And as for Vantablack, it is not unique in its partnership either. Last year it embraced men’s toiletries in a partnership with Lynx. As is revealed in this promotional video posted by The Daily Mail: ‘To wrap a consumer product like this has never been done before…Watch this space and see what comes next.’
Is Kapoor just the next consumer product?
This week’s revelations also made public that scientists at NASA (USA) have created their own version of Vantablack, but have not been able to mass-produce it and commercialise it like the Brits.
Kapoor told the BBC: ‘Imagine a space that’s so dark that as you walk in you lose all sense of who you are and what you are, and also all sense of time. Something happens to your emotional self and in disorientation you have to reach inside yourself for something else.’
Artists have long reached inside their emotions through the colour black.
Lakin told ArtsHub: ‘This is by no means the first exhibition to examine the place and the significance of black to art history, and I think recent exhibitions and publications on the subject reflect a more general interest in the place and function of materiality in a period in which our experience of the world has become increasingly dematerialised.’
He continued: ‘The attitudes we bring to black are very ambiguous. Black can be understood as a puritanical colour, representing goodness, virtue and obedience; at the same time, it can suggest wisdom, creativity and wealth. In other contexts, black carries entirely negative associations: it suggests evil and disease, totalitarianism and anarchy, mourning and melancholy.
‘But I also think the contemporary interest in blackness might reflect the colour’s potential to provoke. While black can certainly be an alienating property, it can also generate or activate a wide range of responses. It is hard to remain passive in the face of a black object,’ he told ArtsHub.
Indeed, no other colour or tone quite so readily evokes such divergent feelings as dread, mystery, awe or power as does black.
Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic 1958; Collection of the National Gallery of Australia
The exhibition Black shows side-by-side the work of artists such as Lee Krasner, Franz Klein and Phillip Guston, as well as Pierre Soulages and Robert Motherwell, moving between photography, painting and sculpture.
‘These include Pierre Soulages, for whom the use of black is closely tied to the colour’s primordial associations. He remains committed to the proposition that the colour black returns art to its essential origins, both formally and metaphorically. He talks about black as the colour of “the origin of painting”, and by that he means the first recorded moments of human mark-making – lines and areas of tone inscribed on cave walls, using black pigment derived from burnt organic matter.
‘Robert Motherwell is similarly interested in the “prehistoric” associations of the pigment – that it is a colour which up until recently was made from charred or burnt organic material, just as it had been for humanity’s first mark makers. As with Soulages, for Motherwell there is a kind of “essentialness” to black, it can’t be mixed.’
To view works in the exhibition.
Black is showing at the National Gallery of Australia until 13 June.
Visitors to the Science Museum in London can see Kapoor’s Vantablack artworks in an exhibition on display until June 2016.
