Chromophobia

The required reading for my Notes on Color class includes a portion of a book (depicted above) by British artist David Batchelor. He attempts to explore what he calls "chromophobia" in contemporary art and architecture and I found certain things he had to say very interesting.

Batchelor's work with color evolved from a sculpture series exploring the contrast between the front and the back of a piece. In contrasting the shiny, polished, colored front side with the dirty, boring, ugly back side of a sculpture his work evolved into experimenting with color specifically...



So that's pretty awesome, but what else? In Chromophobia he writes that his color sculptures were more or less inspired by the realization that there is a conspicuous lack of color in contemporary art. I agree, there is.

Examples: Richard Sera ONLY published photographs of his sculptures in black and white. Richard Meier constructed whiter than white buildings. I guess we don't really know why, but Richard Sera's publicist suggested it was because color would add unnecessary contrast to his sculptures (which were usually in industrial metals, reds and metallic greys).

Batchelor points out the "otherness" of color in the Western mindset. But it's also much more than that. Color is many things. It is something temporary, cosmetic, inessential (to form), subordinate (to form), fluid, inconsistent, deceitful, feminine. Of all the things that color is, more importantly, it is NOT masculine, it is not rigorous, and it is not philosophical. Which is something I think contemporary art strives to be.

Once again, I am overwhelmed with thematic overlap. In this case, women's studies with Notes on Color. I hadn't thought about color in this way before and I must say it's a little bit weird.

Consequently, I will never look at the Wizard of Oz the same again.


--Katie