As strongly claimed by cultural visual studies, it does not suffice to study what colors “are”; one also has to ask what they “do”. How and why we define, classify, and thus use colors has a perhaps invisible but powerful impact on individuals as well as societies. Colors have agency that both limits and enables those who work with or are exposed to them. The book by Timon Beyes is an excellent representative of that fundamental shift, which should not be taken as the “new” answer to “old” approaches of color. The tension between a predominantly objective stance toward color and a more open and subjective, also interactive, take on it was already present at the beginning of modern times, as shown by the opposition between the hard empiricism of Isaac Newton and his clearcut distinctions of the color spectrum of the rainbow and the “tender empiricism” (his words) of Goethe in his Theory of Colours (Zur Farbenlehre, 1810, first English translation in 1840), a book longtime discarded as pathetically non- or even anti-scientific, for Goethe does less insist on taxonomic issues, one of Newton’s main concerns, than on the interaction between the experiencing subject and the permanently changing chromatic features of equally mobile objects. Yet Goethe’s pioneering work is nowadays vividly revisited and appreciated in light of the rise of visual studies, often summarized by WJT Mitchell’s question turned into manifesto: what do pictures want? Beyes approach is in full sympathy with the line of thinking of Goethe, yet not in a polemical or anti-empiricist way.

What colors want, what colors can do, and what we can do with colors are studied in this book from several points of view. Yet the core of Timon Beyes’s argument has to do with the social, political, and ideological consequences of the ways in which colors are perceived as well as made and the ways in which the relationships between colors are structured. The perceiving, making, and structuring of the chromatic field is not a natural but a human-made process, and it directly influences the way in which we shape our community as it influences the society that equally shapes us. Color, indeed, is torn between two extremes. On the one hand, there is always the desire to bring order in the chaos and to master the overwhelming diversity of endlessly overlapping chromatic elements and objects. On the other hand, there is also the acknowledgement of a certain disorder as well as the opportunities of a personal and permanently open interaction with the complete color field. Moreover, the study and use of color can also be seen as either a neutral given (in that case colors “are”, regardless of what we can do with them) or as an agent of individual and social change (in that view we “become” through our responses to color).

For Timon Beyes, color is a medium, and we all know the tight relationship between medium and message. This link, which supposes the shift from what media “are” to what media “do”, is framed in this book with the help of Walter Benjamin, whose reflections on the history of photography and the reproducibility of artworks made a sharp distinction between the technical infrastructure of a medium (the apparatus, all that is subject to a technical description) and the cultural environment or “atmosphere” that allows for the actual use of the medium. Organizing Color examines this tension case study wise, close-reading nine key moments in the history of color management, moving back and forth between tendencies and movements that aim at controlling color and opposite tendencies to let it go, more exactly to embrace the capacity of color to challenge fixed structures and identities.

The nine case studies are chronologically ordered. The books starts in 1800, with Goethe cooking chocolate, in profound admiration of the changing colors he observes, and ends with the 2012 video installation by Hito Steyerl documenting two art conservators scraping away paint and plaster from the walls of Adorno’s old lecture hall in order to recover the initial gray color chosen to aid the students’ concentration on their work (in practice of course this meant concentration on the philosopher’s words). In between, one finds a wide range of examples from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, although the author always rightly underscores the increasing globalization of the colonial and postcolonial world, with a strong emphasis on issues of synthetic color production as well as the impossibility to separate color and society. For color means control (as for instance in the case of the color-based evaluation system of workers in the “Institute for the Formation of Character” in the Scottish industrial village of New Lanark, still a key example of the achievements of the social reform initiatives of the early 19th Century). Yet color can also symbolize something totally different: not control but the desire to overthrow control in name of some kind of revolution (as studied here with Jean-Luc Godard’s 19167 La Chinoise, a “red” movie that Beyes does not investigates as a prophesy of May 68 but more surprisingly as a critical reflection on the hegemonic and thus disempowering forces of stark color organizations). Besides, color also means ways of distributing the sensible, to paraphrase Jacques Rancière’s sentence, today as popular as WJT Mitchell’s mantralike formula. Thus color also means the ways in which the structure of the color spectrum contaminates all social spheres, certainly in its ever more digitized formats, here convincingly shown by the transformations of the Pantone color chart, a classification systems that at first sight opens endless possibilities but that at the same time individualizes and thus imprisons colors by dissolving the progressive chromatic overlaps as traditionally highlighted in the rainbow color circle. Color finally spills over to all aspects of society, as powerfully studied by Beyes in the case of IG Farben, the German chemical consortium whose work on the invention of new colors, exemplified by the synthetic production of what was longtime one of the colonial jewels of the British empire: indigo, rapidly and efficiently contributed to the “total war” effort of Nazi Germany. While carefully scrutinizing the hard empirical approach of the use of color, Beyes simultaneously foregrounds the impossibility or even active refusal to draw sharp lines between colors and the acceptation of a creative and peaceful mix of all colors. A good example of this in Beyes’s history, is shown by his stimulating analysis of the 1971 The De Luxe Show in Houston, an art exhibition aiming at dismantling the racialized color stereotypes by its joyful insistence on the multiplicity and indeterminacy of color.

Organizing Color is a must-read, and a very pleasant read as well, deprived of jargon, soberly but very smartly illustrated, and with a keen eye for historical detail and cultural background. It has a superb mix of well known and nearly forgotten examples as well as a profound knowledge in the literature in various languages. The book is of great interest for all readers interested in cultural history but also for those working in aesthetics, sociology, critical theory, and last but not least, although more generally, for all readers working in issues of class, race, and gender.