Artist Reveals Assn.’s True Colors : David Bunn Tells Listeners at Lecture That Marketing Group’s Mission Prompts His Own

David Bunn first heard about the Color Assn. of America in a real estate column called Design Solutions. Every year, the Madison Avenue marketing group issues a roster of colors it predicts will be snapped up by the designers of homes, clothing, cars and other goods, and coveted by consumers.

The 41-year-old North Carolina-born artist, who retains a gentle drawl, told listeners Tuesday at a gallery lecture at Newport Harbor Art Museum that such information is exactly the sort of thing that fuels his art. He was intrigued that “the colors we’re interested in are not just a matter of chance” and that an organization with such a “governmental, official” name is, in fact, a marketing group.

One of eight California artists asked to make an installation for the exhibit, “Mapping Histories: Third Newport Biennial,” Bunn devised “Of Color,” a piece that consists of different-sized rectangles in 69 colors painted on the lobby walls. These colors match up with a set of color chips installed along a circular wooden railing surrounding a platform in the center of the room.

The color chips, issued by the Color Assn. for 1991-92, nearly all have fashionable or would-be exotic geographic names (“Taos Brown,” “Madras Mauve”) except for a few named after dead artists from Spain or Mexico (“Velasquez White,” “Tamayo Red”).

“I decided to take (the association) at their word and decorate the hall,” Bunn said, noting that even the time period of the installation (through Jan. 5, 1992) coincides with the proposed period of popularity of the fashion colors.

He made a tissue overlay on top of the Hammond World Atlas, placing each color over its designated geographic area, and arbitrarily turning each land mass into a proportionally sized horizontal rectangle. (For color names based on cities, he used smaller vertical rectangles, basing their sizes on population density.)

Then, “like someone painting a chapel, an artist-journeyman,” he plotted out each rectangle where it would fall if a world map were stretched out over the lobby. So the far North of “Arctic Blue” and “Tundra Green” were painted high up on the walls while “Peru Red” makes an appearance closer to the floor. The net effect, Bunn said, is “a physical representation of a collision between the Hammond Map of the World, the Color Assn. and the Newport Harbor Art Museum.”

What intrigued him, he said--at a time when “multiculturalism” is such a buzzword--was the way these colors “collapse the notion of fashion with global awareness . . . as though there is some opening up of understanding” simply by invoking the names of distant places.

The interesting thing about reducing a country to a color or a place to a shape, Bunn said, is that it’s “a shortcut, a Cliff’s Notes” approach to the complicated problem of understanding another culture--a shortcut akin to the ones we tend to take in our own minds.

Of course, many geographical areas in the world were not deemed sufficiently chic to have colors named after them, and some of the names that were devised sound “a little over the edge,” Bunn remarked, referring to the racist tinge of “Africa Brown” and “Hokkeido White,” which actually is a shade of yellow. But the point is not simply to heap blame on the Color Assn. “We are them,” Bunn said. “We all buy these colors and wear them and decorate with them.”

The wooden stand with the color chips in the center of the room intentionally gives the viewer a “privileged” position, he noted. It is “a place where you can make the piece play--a stage as well as viewing platform.” In view of these and other references Bunn invoked--a courtroom witness stand, a piece of furniture, a store display--the piece suggests the intersection of several ideas having to do with responsibility, control, consumerism and the essential limitation of any single vantage point.

The painted rectangles have numerous references--from the shapes of the Color Assn.’s paint chips to the rectangular slab on nearby Jamboree Road that says “Fashion Island.” (Upon inspection, Bunn discovered it was painted in “Belgrade Rose.”)

A more specialized reference is what Bunn called “the seriousness of abstraction in the history of art.” The rectangles look similar to the color patterns in the paintings of Piet Mondrian and other members of the De Stijl group, which flourished in the Netherlands in the late ‘teens and ‘20s.

But as Bunn remarked, for those highly theoretical artists, universal harmony could only be represented by primary colors (plus black, white and gray); mixed colors were considered “too emotional.” For the Color Assn., globally attuned marketing obviously takes on a different coloration.

From the audience, a young man in jeans, boots and a T-shirt with the sleeves ripped out asked whether the piece said anything about Bunn himself, as a person.

“I’m interested in process, in issues,” Bunn replied. “My work is not autobiographical. I did spend a great deal of time in the ‘70s traveling outside of my own culture. It’s very difficult to see clearly one culture from the perspective of another.

“My background is working in photography, which is about looking rather than making. You excerpt and frame your surroundings. You (tend to) look out more than in. The images within photographs also take on different meanings depending on the way they are juxtaposed with other images and the way they are captioned.” In his present work, Bunn said, he looks for “something that already exists that I can bring together and make literal, physical.”

Someone asked if he was cynical about the work of the marketing group.

“I find it really ludicrous,” he replied. “But I don’t see (the piece) as nihilistic. . . . Hopefully, it is something that’s playful, too.”

A few moments later, a woman in an elaborate pink suit sauntered through the lobby and passed through the glass door to the museum’s patio cafe.

“I want to point out something,” Bunn said, smiling. Heads turned and people laughed. “Is that ‘Kashmir Purple’? ‘Belgrade Rose’?” he asked. The woman was a model sent by a Fashion Island department store to show off her costume to the luncheon crowd, proving that no one could possibly predict all the possible intersections of fashion, color, marketing and the art museum.