Chromophobia (FOCI) (Focus on Contemporary Issues (Reaktion Books))

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Chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge colour from culture, to devalue colour, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity. More specifically: this purging of colour is usually accomplished 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 merely as a secondary quality of experience, and thus unworthy of serious consideration. Colour is dangerous, or it is trivial, or it is both. (It is typical of prejudices to conflate the sinister and the superficial.) Either way, colour is routinely excluded from the higher concerns of the Mind. It is other to the higher values of Western culture. Or perhaps culture is other to the higher values of colour. Or colour is the corruption of culture. [...] Dejarse llevar por el color y que este sea el aspecto central de la obra, sólo hará de esta pieza algo vulgar, hortera, simple, nada elevado ni profundo. Pero también esta asociación está presente en la vestimenta y en el maquillaje. Usar mucho color es hortera, está mal visto, no es elegante. Ad esempio, la parte sulla cosmetica in ottica di cromofobia (intesa quest’ultima come genere culturale e non come patologia) alla fine si risolve in: il make up viene visto come contro/anti natura. Chromophobia ultimately is a consciousness-raiser disguised as an art theory book. As silly as it might sound -- and silliness can be a property of color -- it made me think about the fuchsia jeans I almost bought at Helmut Lang. Then about the latent spirituality in Banana Republic ads on the subway, with more color in them than anything else around me.

I will not question the equivalence between “wild” and “savage” though “savage” carries a derogatory meaning in its Latin root. I will question the couple “uneducated – of refinement” for the German couple “ungebildete Menschen – gebildete Menschen.” The concept of “refinement” carries a positive meaning that rejects “uneducated” into some derogatory meaning. The German couple is more objective about one single concept, the first word negative and the second word positive. I insist it is the same concept, “unconstructed – constructed” or “uneducated – educated” or “unelaborate – elaborate,” the idea that on one side some process of complexification did not take place and on the other side it did take place. Maybe education leads to refinement, but refinement is a positive behavioral term whereas educated is the positive side of the negative side of the same concept, that of education. But the main objection to this translation comes from “lebhaft.” Though “vivid” is connected to the Latin root for “life,” it is not directly connected to the standard English concept of “life,” and the German version uses the word twice and its root is “Leben,” the verb or the noun. The translation uses a word that refers to the flashy brightness of the colors, not the fact that they are directly connected with life as is implied in German where the adjectival suffix “-haft” means “endowed with,” in this case “endowed with life.” Goethe was often using his words with great care. When in the concluding verses of the Second Faust he says the future of man is woman, he uses for “woman” the old neuter root “das Weib” instead of the more modern feminine root “die Frau” and in this case again in the form of the adjective “weiblich,” amplified as the fourth rhyming “-liche” line ending. These four rhymes are the echo of the final stage of Faust’s soul’s salvation by four women, Mater Gloriosa presiding over three “Büsserinnen” (penitent women): Magna Peccatrix, Mulier Samaritana, and Maria Aegyptiaca.

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And that's what I tried to do," Stella said. "I tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can." That's a very chewy problem for painters. This richly thoughtful book deserves to be read by lots of painters and anyone else with more than a passing interest in visual culture. In a study, hatchling Loggerhead sea turtles were found to have an aversion to lights in the yellow wave spectrum which is thought to be a characteristic that helps orient themselves toward the ocean. [10] [11] The Mediterranean sand smelt, Atherina hepsetus, has shown an aversion to red objects placed next to a tank while it will investigate objects of other colors. [12] In other experiments, geese have been conditioned to have adverse reactions to foods of a particular color, although the reaction was not observed in reaction to colored water. [13] I was surprised by the fact that the note attached to section 135 of Zur Farbenlehre is not given by David Batchelor, though this note from the 19th-century translator clearly implies Goethe did not like this conclusion and at the time, developments, in science particularly, were more circumspect. The Barthes quotes, as one might expect, are delightful: "Color ... is a kind of bliss ( jouissance) ... like a closing eyelid, a tiny fainting spell" and "if I were a painter, I should paint only colors: this field seems to me freed of both the Law ... and Nature (for after all don't the colors of nature come from the painters?)"

Just as engrossing as the images in Concretos are Batchelor's essays, one of which examines the French concept of the flâneur, the urban sophisticate praised by the poet Charles Baudelaire that wanders the city's streets observing society. Walking is an important source of inspiration for Batchelor too, not only for the broken glass that inspired his concretos. The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse – a fear of corruption or contamination through colour – lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought. This is apparent in the many and varied attempts to purge colour, either by making it the property of some ‘foreign body’– the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological – or by relegating it to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential, or the cosmetic.

The importance of texture

David Batchelor's work is concerned above all things with colour, a sheer delight in the myriad brilliant hues of the urban environment and underlined by a critical concern with how we see and respond to colour in this advanced technological age. Adding colour to woodwork can be a good place to start Paul Massey Introducing second, third (and fourth and fifth!) colours Witherington, Blair E; Bjorndal, Karen A (1991). "Influences of wavelength and intensity on hatchling sea turtle phototaxis: implications for sea-finding behavior". Copeia. American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists. 1991 (4): 1060–1069. doi: 10.2307/1446101. JSTOR 1446101. Batchelor concludes with ruminations on the color of the 1960s. Manufactured color had by then had essentially overtaken painting, leading to a dilemma. Batchelor quotes Frank Stella, who said that a "wise guy" he knew didn't like the Abstract Expressionists, because none of them could keep the paint as good as it looked in the can. Cromofobia è la negazione/non uso/repulsione verso il colore (inteso come cromie altre dal bianco/nero), mi aspettavo qualcosa di più solido in termini storico-argomentativi, e invece …. mah.