Chromophobia
David Batchelor
An appreciation
"Colour is bound up with the fate of Western culture. That sounds odd, and not very likely. But that is what I want to argue..." — from Chromophobia
Outlandish yet persuasive, written with both academic rigor and brilliant poetic style, this is a compulsively readable gem of a book; intellectual candy in the tradition of Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation, Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, and Geoffrey O'Brien's The Phantom Empire.
With wry humor and scalpel blade precision, David Batchelor, Senior Tutor in Critical Theory at the Royal College of Art in London, presents a deliciously discursive musing on the role and interpretation of color in society, from ancient Greece to modern Hollywood. He argues that Western philosophers, artists, art historians and others have "systematically marginalised, reviled, diminished and degraded" color.
Whether individual readers come to agree with Batchelor entirely, to find resonance in elements of his argument, or merely to enjoy the streamlined thrill ride twists and swoops of his prose, all will agree that Chromophobia is a book that transcends its purported topic to present us with a remarkable new writer's voice.
Adding a fascinating dose of theory to the free-ranging pleasures of Alexander Theroux's critically acclaimed and infinitely amusing mid-90s volumes The Primary Colors and The Secondary Colors, Batchelor opens with a thoroughly Theroux-like meditation on White:
"There is a kind of white which is more than white...There is a kind of white that repels everything which is inferior to it and that is almost everything...There is a kind of white which is not made by bleach but which itself is bleach."
Batchelor, in the delightfully interdisciplinary manner that enlivens all of Chromophobia goes on to present elegant interpretations of Melville's Great White Whale and "the deathly obsessive white that insinuated its way into the dark heart of Joseph Conrad's Captain Marlow," and the white of Le Corbusier's buildings (and theories).
Against the "Whitescape" background he first paints, Batchelor presents an array of examples of Western culture's efforts to purge and devalue color, which he argues usually happens in one of two ways:
"In the first, colour is made out to be the property of some 'foreign' body—usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological. In the second, colour is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic. In one, colour is regarded as alien and therefore dangerous; in the other it is perceived as merely a secondary quality of experience, and thus unworthy of serious consideration."
Batchelor points to the more serious consideration given to line than color in our society, from the nursery room to the great philosophers:
- "During my days spent in the art-room at primary school, I was told to take a line for a walk and then color it in."
- In his Poetics, Aristotle wrote: '...a radom distribution of the most attractive colours would never yield as much pleasure as a definite image without colour."
But Batchelor goes on to challenge this primacy of line: "Since when did 'random' have to be associated with colour and 'definite' with drawing? Since when did drawing and colour become ciphers for order and chaos.
Forging onward in a delirious whirl of clever analyses, Batchelor spreads his writerly wings to draw in examples ranging from Aldous Huxley's descriptions of mescaline-induced color visions in The Doors of Perception, to Andy Warhol's purposely misregistered colors in his repetitious celebrity portraits (the color becomes the defining factor of each version, the lines remain the same), to an ingenious comparison of the black and white and colored world in both the book and film versions of The Wizard of Oz.
Dashing from the Parthenon, to the department store make-up counter, to the seducer's boudoir. Batchelor shows us how colour infuses our lives and how discomfort infuses our perspective on colour.
