Telephone Book (In Colours), detail of woad blue wall with canvases representing all the people with colour names in Erfurt, paint on wall and canvas', The Ironic Turn exhibition, Kunsthalle Erfurt, Erfurt, Germany, 2003. Photo: Kunsthalle Erfurt
Telephone Book (In Colours), detail of woad blue wall with canvases representing all the people with colour names in Erfurt, paint on wall and canvas', The Ironic Turn exhibition, Kunsthalle Erfurt, Erfurt, Germany, 2003. Photo: Kunsthalle Erfurt
Telephone Book (In Colours), detail of woad blue wall with canvases representing all the people with colour names in Erfurt, paint on wall and canvas', The Ironic Turn exhibition, Kunsthalle Erfurt, Erfurt, Germany, 2003. Photo: Kunsthalle Erfurt
Kennedy installing Telephone Book (In Colours), detail of red oxide wall with canvases representing all the people with colour names in Shawnee, paint on wall and canvas', The Ironic Turn exhibition, Kunsthalle Erfurt, Erfurt, Germany, 2003. Photo: Kunsthalle Erfurt
Kennedy installing Telephone Book (In Colours), detail of red oxide wall with canvases representing all the people with colour names in Shawnee, paint on wall and canvas', The Ironic Turn exhibition, Kunsthalle Erfurt, Erfurt, Germany, 2003. Photo: Kunsthalle Erfurt
Kennedy installing Telephone Book (In Colours), paint on wall and canvas', The Ironic Turn exhibition, Kunsthalle Erfurt, Erfurt, Germany, 2003. Photo: Kunsthalle Erfurt
Telephone Book (In Colours), detail of woad blue wall with canvases representing all the people with colour names in Erfurt, paint on wall and canvas', permanent installation, Erfurt Library, Erfurt, Germany, 2004.
Telephone Book (In Colours) (2003)
Telephone Book (In Colours) (2003) is one of four site-specific installations Kennedy created for The Ironic Turn travelling exhibition. For this work, installed in the Kunsthalle Erfurt (Erfurt, Germany), Kennedy made a series of 65 canvases which proportionally represent the number of people who share a name with a colour who lived in both Erfurt and it's Sister City Shawnee, Kansas. Following the exhibition, Kennedy donated this work to Erfurt Library where is it permanently installed.
The installation was accompanied by a folder which lists the telephone book entries for the individuals from each city, organized by their name's colour. Kennedy speaks about project in detail in the folder:
"In the early stages of developing this work for the Kunsthalle Erfurt I was intrigued by the fact that Erfurt owed much of its earlier prosperity to the colour blue. More specifically to the blue derived from the cultivation of the woad plant (Isatis tinctoria) that upon certain pressing and fermenting procedures was transformed into the most sought after blue dye in the Middle Ages (It was also used in deep, deep history as a body paint). This proved to be even more intriguing to me when I learned that Erfurt was a Sister City to Shawnee, Kansas, USA—for one doesn't have to leap too far to connect the word Shawnee to the colour red given to the Native American by the white man. Also, there is evidence that the Shawnee tribe in ancient history did indeed use the earth-based colour red-oxide in decorating their bodies and homes. Hollywood used it as a make-up pigment for cowboy and Indian movies. Ironically, a much brighter appropriation, shawnee Red, pops up in Detroit as a trim colour for a 1941 Pontiac limousine.
So, to extend these colourful connections between the Sister Cities, I have revised the Erfurt and Shawnee telephone books to show only persons' names that are the same as the names of colours or "colour names". And to bring the work back into the realm of painting (for I am a painter), I have made paintings of these colours on square canvases the size of which are proportional to the numbers of the colour names as they appear in their respective telephone listings.
For the presentation of this work I divided the foyer of the Kunsthalle Erfurt into two halves—by painting one half with the colour woad blue and the other with red-oxide. All the paintings (39) of people with colour names from Erfurt hang on the blue side and all the paintings (26) of colour names from Shawnee hang on the red side. The largest painting of Erfurt colour names is 164 cm. It represents Braun (There are 115 persons with the name Braun in the Erfurt directory). The largest painting of Shawnee colour names is 152 cm. It represents Brown and there are 100 Browns listed in the Shawnee telephone book. There are several colour names that appear only once in both books. They are represented with fifteen 15 cm canvases. There are approximately 800 names of colours in Erfurt and 325 in Shawnee. Erfurt has a population of 200,000 and Shawnee 50,000."
— Garry Neill Kennedy, 2003