Image Bank | Colour Bar

Image Bank

Colour Bar

Los Angeles, USA: New Documents, 2020

4.13 × 1.91 × 17.46 cm.

Open edition

Two years after founding Image Bank in 1969, Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov began their Colour Bar Research project, one of the duo's most celebrated works. An exercise in endless painting, Colour Bar Research involved sculpture, performance, film, magazine interventions1 and conceptual projects. 

A thousand wooden colour bars were hand-painted at "Babyland" - their newly acquired rural property near Roberts Creek - in 1971, and another thousand the year after, at the New Era Social Club, in Vancouver.

These bars were used as modules in temporary outdoor works of art, an attempt to "make art from a community of collaboration". The two thousand colour bars were filmed, videotaped and photographed in a landscape populated with naked performers, as a kind of infinitely variable, floating conceptual painting. By using the objects as props to be documented, the duo emphasized play and process over finished product.  

In the spirit of the open edition of the original works, Los Angeles-based publisher New Documents - who had previously produced a volume of Trasov's Mr Peanut Drawings - last year released a continuation of the work. While ostensibly an unlimited edition, their website lists fifty copies, with only five remaining. 

Colour Bar is available for $40.00 US from the New Documents site, here. 

"Concurrent with their artistic explorations of the busily social, urban environment, Image Bank also initiated artistic activities in the context of the idyllic, natural environment. These were conducted at a place called Babyland — a piece of property purchased by Morris and Trasov at Roberts Creek on B.C.'s Sunshine Coast, two hours from Vancouver by car ferry. Utilizing the natural environment somewhat in the way they had utilized the urban environment during the Mr. Peanut for Mayor campaign, Babyland became 'a place to act out fantasies, to set up the props and pursue a culture / nature debate'.

With precedents such as the Monte Verita community in Switzerland at the beginning of the 20th century, Babyland became a meeting-place for artistic production and conviviality within a natural setting. Visitors to Babyland during the early 1970s included artists, film writers, poets, art critics, and crafts people from Canada and abroad. 

One fascinating project conducted at Babyland was Colour Bar Research (1972-74), which consisted of the arrangement of an 'endless painting' composed of a thousand wood blocks painted in colour spectrums. These colour bars were arranged and rearranged in a variety of ways — as ziggurat patterns on fields, let loose in streams, and floated on a lake. Accompanied by nude or costumed visitors 'on the set' at Babyland and Lake Yogo, this endless painting was documented on film, slides, and photographs — in images suggestive of a youthful paradise where the physics of light and ever-changing colour combinations merges in a utopian vision of interpersonal playfulness and refracted possibilities for bodies and selves."

- Luis Jacob, Golden Streams

1. A 1973 "Special Double Issue" of FILE Megazine featured one of eight offset "colour bar" cards inserted into each copy of the publication. Mr Peanut also featured on the cover of the inaugural issue of FILE, a year prior.