Colour Is by David Batchelor

About

The single sentence texts have been collected by Batchelor over several years, and in his words, they explore ideas about colour: ‘what colour is, where it belongs, when it occurs, what it does and whether it matters’1. Through the words of artists, critics and art historians, the reflections of philosophers, scientists, anthropologists, psychologists, novelists, filmmakers, architects, designers, poets and musicians, they reveal the ambivalent attitudes we have towards colours, as well as colour’s complex relationships with modernity.

The installation is deliberately set up to be experienced - visually and viscerally. Colour seeps into the architecture and refuses to be defined by any shape or form. ‘The visual experience of colour cannot be verified by the other senses. We cannot touch colour, even though it constantly surrounds us and we are in some ways touched by it.’2

Colour’s autonomy of expression also defies the limits of language: ‘it is almost impossible to put the experience of colour into words in anything but the most bland and general ways: of the several million different hues the average human eye is able to discern, most languages have less than a dozen basic colour terms, and several languages have no term for colour at all.’3

--

David Batchelor’s work is principally concerned with colour as it is experienced in the modern city, and takes the form of three-dimensional work, drawings, photographs and animations. Apart from being a prolific artist, David is also a provocative and compelling writer whose published books explore the West's cultural discrimination of colour. His published works includes ‘Chromophobia’, ‘The Luminous and the Grey’, and in ‘Colour’ he has edited an anthology of writings on COLOUR from 1850 to the present, published by Whitechapel.