Reading Response to Chromophobia and Whitescapes by David Batchelor
These two essays are very well written and interesting investigations into the relationship that exist between white and purity, color and corruption. The different use in color from the upper class to the lower class is something that I have thought about for quite a while. In high school, my sister’s friend wrote an article in the school newspaper about how the richer neighborhood in our town use only white bulbs for their Christmas decorations and the poorer neighborhoods used every color bulb they could purchase. She went on to write about how the richer neighborhoods used no lawn ornamentation and overall fewer decorations than the poorer neighborhoods. This article angered many parents of students at school because I drew a physical line separating poor from rich. This difference in design from rich to poor is something I had notice before when I entered in certain friends home that had a very restrained use of color and entering in my own home in which there was a slight disregard to if the decorations matched furniture or if either matched the drapes.
Around that same time I was looking at a lot of psychedelic influenced art and was deep into reading beat generation writers. So most of what I was looking at and reading was very drug influenced artist and very colorful. When first seeing these artists I was awed and sucked into the intoxicating color usage that lack true form or theme. Many of the images had a spiraling effect of fractals and oscillated in and out in a dizzying way as if you were falling. At some point I had had too much, the colors no longer seem fantastical, but only overwhelming. The imagery seemed dim and to lack whatever it was that had kept me so in awed. For quite a while I had been in love with the impressionist, and with my overdose of only color as art came a slight boredom with the impressionists that I had appreciated for the hypersensitivity to color.
The difference in my, shall I call it, fall into color-based art and the Chromophobia references, is that many of the psychedelic artists actually were not using color but achieved the same falling into psychosis, corruption, and worlds unknown that the colored pieces did. Also the reason that I tired of the impressionist I believe was more related to the forms in the image than the colors. The colors were working overtime for much of this work, and once I tired of the colors the forms could not hold my interest.
I think color gets falsely sucked into the game, when the truer issue is that more ornamentation and chaos is generally associated with corruption and degradation. Like a clean sheet of paper is pure because it contains on it all the possibility of text or image, it is still innocent with no impression. Once the image is placed upon it is has then lost its purity and innocence. The clean paper usually happens to be white but that doesn’t mean that the white was the cause of all the possibilities.
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