Gutenburg Galaxy: Chromophobia
Chromophobia, David Batchelor, Reaktion Books, 128 pp, $32.95.
A museum curator was recently explaining to me the difficulties he was having with some of his trustees over acquisitions. They could understand textual irony, he said, but they couldnt grasp what he called visual irony. Whenever I tell this story to my artist friends, we concur in grim acknowledgement: visual literacythat is to say, a genuine ability to respond to phenomena for what they are without a verbal glossseems to be disappearing. But the current situation does have its compensations, however equivocal. Every experiential loss for art is an explanatory gain for art history. The non-verbal, the simply formal and even, for that matter, the non-conceptual all return again in the literature, where they fascinate us by indicating the enormous possibilities that yet remain in practices that seem to be ever more rapidly vanishing.
The British writer and artist David Batchelors newest book, Chromophobia, could be placed in this context. It has plenty of persuasive arguments about the ineffability of colourits crux might be found in the statement that To fall into colour is to run out of wordsbut that doesnt explain its interest. The real merit of the book, in my opinion, is that it is a concealed polemic on behalf of Batchelors own art, which makes it a significant intervention in an important current discussion about art writing and writing by artists.
The giveaway is in the last chapter:
The analogical flow of mixed colours decreases the intensity of any particular hue; but the intensity of hue provided by the digital colour also tends to localize that colour. Our awareness of its containment increases. Shiny begins to delocalize colour; it picks up other colours and redistributes its own. Translucent allows one colour to spill onto and overlap another and to glow a little. Fluorescent tubes and incandescent lights project light and colour indiscriminately onto every other surface within range. In these ways, the isolation of local colours is countered and put into reverse. Colour begins to regain its excessiveness.
This could be a description of the development of Batchelors work over the last few yearsit has moved from shiny industrial colour to projected light. But its also a description of what that work hopes to accomplish, or of what Batchelor has discovered that it does. So, then, his book is a record of creative discovery in a reflective form that is a mimicry of criticism.
The first four chapters are a historical account of colours cultural framethe boundaries that define colour, in the West, as a privileged zone of non-conceptual experience. Batchelor draws on a variety of authors from literature, art history, film and architecture, with perhaps more emphasis on the first. But the last chapter is about the uses of colour in recent art, and naturally it cant help but reflect the authors own involvement.
The book is based on research, but is not confined, like so much art history, to scoring small pointsit is imaginative, polemical and speculative throughout. That means that it is also aesthetics, but it is thoroughly grounded in the sensuous, with no abstract notions not developed from concrete example. It is also criticism, but free from the usual social constraints that determine who gets written about and when. Batchelor clearly wanted to write the book and did it for his own reasons; so it does belong to the genre of artists writing, however that might be defined, but its clear, elegant prose and persuasive argumentation give it an authority usually allowed only to the more academic modes. We have something that refuses to sit comfortably within any single genre of art writing, and that makes it very interesting indeed.
Batchelors style is witty, agile and lucid; the only possible criticism might be that he doesnt take enough risks with his writinghe seems too reasonable by half. But then that is his method. The book does have a form; its not meant to be read flatly for the content. The purple bits are restricted to the numerous quotations from figures ranging from Jacqueline Lichtenstein to Le Corbusier to Aldous Huxley to J.-K. Huysmans to Robert Smithson. His framing narrative works exactly as thata frame to set off the brightness of the pictures he shows us.
The most overtly personal moment comes at the very beginning of the book, in a description of the cold white desert of some collectors house. This invocation of whiteness at the beginning sets up a background for the colourism to come, but the most painfully moving passage of the book is the following:
To be called colourful is to be flattered and insulted at the same time. To be colourful is to be distinctive and, equally, to be dismissed. The main consolation is the colourlessness of the culture from which the colourful are exempted, the greyness of those for whom colour is a mark of exception. In the colourless Flatland of Parliament, colour only ever seems to engulf the colourful. They burn brightly, and then they die. The colourful illuminate their surroundings, but they consume themselves in the process. That is perhaps why people rush to write such fond and smiling obituaries. Such testaments are brimming with jolly anecdotes and amusing memories, and then garnished with appropriate notes of sadness. But their unspoken moral is surely that the embryo of their death was also in their colour. Such peoples obituaries are smiling with the knowledge that the colourful do not survive. (We knew they wouldnt.) They pay the price of their colour. (We knew they would.) And in knowing that, we know that for all our own greyness we will at least have the last word.
There is a lot of England in this and, for that matter, a lot of perspective on art history and criticism. It also says much about Batchelor the artist. And it demonstrates the excellent taste that takes the sensitively crafted modesty of a work of cultural history as the proper form for a meditation on deeper things, things absolutely germane to any artists life. Restraint enables expression, at least for those who have something to say.
In the last chapter, Batchelor confronts the ordinariness of colour. His arguments about the specialness of colour, its status beyond or beneath language, finally acknowledge that bright colour is everywhere in contemporary life, and he must face up to the withering of those non-conceptual experiences that he has documented so thoroughly and with so much partiality. Batchelor is an artist, and so his approach is concretehe welcomes the vulgar, he welcomes the modern and he focuses on use, on what can be done with contemporary materials. In the end, the specialness of colour must be a property of the viewers perception, and therefore always available. This makes a good place to end with lines from Young Törless, by the Austrian writer Robert Musil:
...what in one moment we experience indivisibly, and without question, becomes unintelligible and confused as soon as we try to link it with chains of thought to the permanent store of what we know. And what looks grand and remote so long as our words are still reaching out towards it from a long way off, later, once it has entered the sphere of our everyday activities, becomes quite simple and loses all its disturbing quality.So it must be for all of us. When the artwork arrives from that remote place it also seems smaller, dryer, more flatly and disconcertingly factual than we had perhaps hoped. But precisely in that low materiality an abundance of experience lies waiting. I think this is what my curator friend meant by irony.
Winter 2002
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