Reflecting on Chromophobia, David Batchelor reverberates the mysteriousness of color in culture and art in his 2014 book The Luminous and the Grey.
"... I was impatient to tell a story about colour that I believed was worth telling: a story of the systematic marginalization of color..."
So he looks back on the previous work, but this time with a tenure revival on the way he and others can experience color. He understands how the words which shape our understanding of color are not always accurate ways to show a colorful world;. He says color remains outside our linguistic selves because the experience of colors "precedes our entry into language." (13)
Because we have difficulty in articulating or describing colors, Batchelor questions whether our relationship with color becomes ambiguous; alluring and intimidating in its extremes.
Vandyke Brown Print 239, 2016. Vandyke brown photograph.
Chapter 1
There is a stark contrast between colorful and colorless, but as he explains while illustrating with the film The Wizard and Oz, Batchelor describes them less as opposites and more as competing ideas. To watch a monochrome film does not encourage dull-ness, until compared to the carnivale of colors such as in the later scenes after Dorothy is hurled into Technicolor Oz. There becomes a missing quality to the monochrome, but it is not altogether lost, it remains coherent. Color becomes admired as embellishment, as something added and slightly whimsical. He claims that in our general impression today, Color is secondary. (24)
Color has long harassed the visual and literary scholars, it is a difficult and ubiquious element to work with. Scientific method and logical reasoning became more important than the color when explaining and exploring new technologies, or in recording data.
He uses Conrad McCormac's novel The Road in a example on the view of color in our world today, which does a stutteringly good job at embodying the post-apocalyptic Grey of the future, a perspective of our future that acts like a heavy pop-culture cloud above our heads. A color-barren world where there is no value in color, where everything is dull, and everything is Grey. Even the bright and luminous red of Coca-cola is smeared with shade of grey.
When color does ignite, it is distant like a faded memory or dream, yet luminous and can capture attention in the moment. But different is our present, in a world where every color feasible is mapped out and we find ourselves in a world where color seems less remarkable or distinct.
Color is Secondary
He explains how his own art avoided color entirely until a specific turning point in his life. Now he cannot avoid thinking of color, or rather think of colorless-ness in his art. It isn't just the fact that contemporary art is usually conceptual and logical, resides in Plato's world of ideas and with that has no need for colors, but rather that color has no immediate effect on the reality of things. Like many artists, Batchelor also saw little reason in focusing on the color of his work.
Where Batchelor finds the trouble with colors is in their transitory and elusive nature. Too many people don't notice the subtleties of color and find themselves taking for granted what is part of our perceptual experience. (30)
If colors were not already explained to us since kindergarten, would we have a different affinity or experience of colors?
He concludes a questioning of colors with the general view that colors have a useless-ness about them; they are useless but still useable. "Useless but not insignificant", "color finds use beyond necessity. When you combine the indescribable-ness of colors in language and no obvious purpose, color becomes dismissible.
What is powerful about colors is their capacity to enthrall and engage us. In the misunderstandings when trying to describe colors, we can understand the misunderstanding between ours and others differences when seeing our surroundings.
Chapter 2
Revolution of Color
The author then takes us through a field of knowledge and history on colors, starting with the early earth-derived colors and on into the manufactured color age. What he called a revolution of color, in the past man relied on traditional mineral, animal and plant dyes to bring colors into everyday items.
Synthetic colors marked this revolution, where colors could be cataloged, mixed and integrated into many substances at much cheaper prices. Not only were they cheaper, more plentiful and could be mixed with substances like plastics, but the synthetic colors came in such a wide range of colors unfeasible before.
Intrinsic colors, like in a gem stone or stained glass once captivated the imaginations of people, but with coal and oil derivatives, clear plastics could be introduced with color to bring substances with translucent and luminous qualities that are similar to the gem stones and glass.
Batchelor outlines many artists whole incorporated these new paints and colors into their works. But some artists like Dan Flavin, Bruce Nauman and Joseph Kosuth were more engrossed in to luminous qualities of colors, ones that shout beyond the canvas and into the colored light itself. During the Sixties neon signage and color lights became new medium in an attempt to harness the thing-ness of color.
The Luminous
To remember, a luminous color is often from a transparent substance, a color that seems to emit light from the substance itself, and where the color you see seems to have a presence. "Luminous colours... often appear to be a quality of light and space, and consequently less bound to the surface or material." (50)
Luminous colors are transitory, they seem to be constant yet lack permanence. Experienced as an event, color is witnessed. Batchelor then goes into descriptions of color phenomenon, questioning the subjective way we each experience colors, how we judge them differently and most importantly how every color has a quality of how colors are seen differently depending on context and the other colors seen around them.
Luminous colors seem to defy the nature of other colors, instead consuming or drenching them. Like looking through a red lens, a luminous color alters any other color it comes in contact with. Luminous colors tend to overpower any familiar or inherent colors, and are typically accompanied with the Grey or dull. "This colour needs resistance and thrives on opposition." (60)
The revolution of color was in the way we are able to create and manipulate these luminous colors in new ways that help people question and reflect on how they see colors in their day to day.
Chapter 3
The Grey and the Luminous
He returns to the monochrome map of The Road, and to a world of Grey where color and pure white is all but gone. To the young boy raised in this world, he knows no better than the families of The Giver, and colors have no distinction.
Grey becomes the color of loss, of death, of still-ness. David Batchelor explores the quality of the word Grey, and how there is really is no distinct color grey. Grey only reveals its differences when you have grey on grey.
Grey on grey is a very provocative way to make art, the subtle hues of grey can be most difficult to differentiate. There is a whole world of greys that every American has accepted as a reality before; where else but in the Black and White films of the 20th century could you engaging in a colorless world, and after the first 15 minutes the color-less quality seems irrelevant to the story.
David Batchelor questions the dull-ness of grey, asking "Wasn't grey alone able to stand for every other colour in, for example, early films and photography?" (73) How remarkable such a dull color could take the place of all the colors of our world.
He became occupied with films where black and white and technicolor are used together, and how the differences between color and no color affect to story. It is strange to see how colors tend to represent the fantasy side of reality, while Dorothy returns to the familiar grey world at the end. Accordingly, he claims a very large part of art history also dwells in grey and monochrome drawings and prints. (77) It is a mysterious thing to witness a presence of not-color.
Batchelor afterward discusses specific changes in thought on color theory through the years, and how people have attempted to find a functional Color that isn't restricted like colors are to words. Even in the best diagrams of color circles and pyramids had difficulty in representing spectrums of color with qualities of white, black, grey as well as hue and value.
The Munsell solid is a model Batchelor claims close to universal color, but in this overview of color theory he concludes that it is "language and diagrams [that] enable us to navigate the extraordinarily complex terrain of colour and communicate with one another about colour..." successfully. (84)
In a final anecdote, Batchelor ends with an experience with a man painting in the street. During this experience he is compelled to ask about the nature of grey. Why can't we imagine a luminous grey? He finds that there is a balance between the luminous colors and grey that interact with each other, and that it is that very combination of the luminous within grey that brings a bit of energy and mystery to the colors we see.
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Batchlor, David. The Luminous and the Grey. London: Reaktion Books, 2014.