David Batchelor: 'The Luminous And The Grey'

In a recent post, I mentioned I was planning to read David Batchelor’s Book, ‘The Luminous And The Grey’ [1.].  It’s a pretty slim volume, which, in the event, I polished off pretty quickly, (over a couple of long baths, in fact).

David Batchelor.  Photo: Croydon Advertiser.

The book is Batchelor’s meditation on the relationship between colour and grey, or ‘not colour’ as he initially designates it.  I generally enjoy this kind of thing, in which an artist engages with a theoretical or philosophical subject in the spirit of personal/artistic discovery, rather than as merely an academic exercise.  ‘The Luminous And The Grey’, is no exception, being both thought-provoking and clearly connected with Batchelor’s own art, and left me keen to read his earlier book, ‘Chromopohobia’ [2.].  The text is split into three thematic sections, so I’ll use this post to highlight certain passages from each that particularly caught my attention.

Nice Typo Design, - Shame About The Hard Sell.

In his first chapter, ‘The Beginning And The End Of Colour’, Batchelor discusses differing interpretations of how colour might have arrived in the world/human mind, before contemplating the appalling implications of a descent back into an achromatic state.  His most terrifying example of this is Cormac McCarthy’s deeply affecting post-apocalyptic novel ‘The Road’ [3.].  McCarthy’s all too plausible vision follows a father and son’s futile trudge through the hostile environment of a world sunk in a nuclear winter, or some other brand of societal/environmental collapse.  As the subsequent film adaptation [4.] emphasises, it is the denuding of the world of nearly all colour that proves one of the most persistent reminders of their hopeless state.

Both Images:  Stills From, John Hillcoat (Dir.), USA,  Dimension Films/2929 Productions/
Nick Weschler Productions, 2010

‘Very occasionally some colour does punctuate this all-enveloping grey-black darkness. For the most part, it comes in the form of a remnant of plasticized tarpaulin or another fragment of the petrochemical past. Or it is the muted orange of the fires that either erupt spontaneously in the dying landscape or are carefully cultivated out of scraps of wood and tiny amounts of leftover fuel.  In each case these moments of colour serve as brutal reminders of something almost beyond memory … The colour is an unbearable trace of a world that is shrinking and dying by the day: “The names of things following those things into oblivion. Colours. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one once believed to be true”[5.]’ [6.].

Birmingham, January 2014.  (Camera Operator: David Weight).

Batchelor’s second chapter is where much of the meat of the book, (with which it shares its title), really lies.  The author is informative on the chemistry, physics and perceptual psychology of colour, without becoming overly dry or theoretical.  The scientific breakthroughs of the global chemical industry, dating from the nineteenth century, have a very clear bearing on how we mostly experience colour today and indeed, could be seen as a watershed in the history of humanity’s chromatic relationship.  There is an obvious connection here with the materials he chooses to work with himself, as with the whole subject of coloured illumination which he goes on to discuss.

Birmingham, January 2014.  (Camera Operator: David Weight).

It’s hardly rocket science to point out how artificially illuminated colour only reaches its full potential after dark, but Batchelor is right to identify just how profoundly this shifts our perception and emotional responses to colour away from the original experience of natural pigments seen under daylight with which we evolved.  It also highlights just how interdependently connected are light, colour and darkness, (grey).  All of this lies at the very heart of our apprehension of urban environments, and is something that immediately chimed with my own city-dwelling fixations.

Thus, it’s not surprising that Batchelor should conclude his chapter with reference to Walter Benjamin – the archetypal philosopher of modern city life.  In ‘One Way Street’ [7.], Benjamin asks,

‘What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism? ... Not what the red neon sign says - but the fiery pool reflecting in the asphalt’ [8.].

Batchelor himself comments,

‘The fiery pool is not glimpsed in isolation: it is seen against the hard horizontal plane of the road. And this is the point. In the colour life of the city, vivid colour almost always coexists with a degree of darkness.  By day or at night colour is usually accompanied by the less than colourful. It is supported by the contingencies of the street: it is literally bolted onto the sides of buildings, propped up on ledges and secured to roofs, and its reflections form in the potholes and gutters on the ground. These less-to-be-looked-at elements are none the less essential to the experience of colour in the city. This colour needs resistance and thrives on opposition. In the city the luminous is always accompanied by the grey: they cohabit and sustain each other in an often unacknowledged relationship of interdependence’ [9.].

He concludes,

‘The city is at the intersection of the luminous and the grey, or is itself that intersection. And this is not just a fact of the colour space of the city, but one of its defining qualities’ [10.].

Sneinton Market, Nottingham, April 2014

The book closes with a chapter primarily focused on the idea of grey itself, and maintains the urban theme with an anecdote from Batchelor’s own experience.  He accounts the story of an elderly man (Robert), who regularly set up an easel outside Batchelor’s home, in order to make the same apparently abstract drawing without reference to the scene before him.  Only after observing the man for some time did he realise that Robert was actually drawing the manhole cover immediately beneath his easel, (redefining the drawing as not really ‘abstract’ at all, I note).  Delighting in his initial misunderstanding, of the situation, and that of other passers-by, Batchelor sets himself the task of carefully observing all those generally overlooked features of his immediate surroundings in which grey resides in all its surprising complexity.

Sneinton Market, Nottingham, April 2014

‘The dark grey tarmac on the road was flecked with at least three or four different hues and had a maroonish-grey cast, at least where it wasn’t interrupted by all the other asphalt greys where the road had been repaired over the years. A patch of original nineteenth-century cobbles had a worn, steely-blue-to violet-grey sheen, offset by some lazily mismatched pale yellowish-grey cement infilling. The old brown-grey paving stones on one side of the road were also mottled but in a different way to the tarmac, whilst their newer replacement slabs had a lighter, smoother and more consistent industrial cement-grey finish. The dark blue-grey granite kerbstones were also worn smooth and shiny, as was the tarnished brown-grey iron manhole cover. The small off-circles of flattened chewing gum on the pavements were for some reason either very white-grey or nearly black-grey, but nothing in between. I have no idea why. Looking up a little from the embedded horizontal forms to the rising vertical elements of the street, the grey of a weathered aluminium pole in the pavement is obviously quite different from the several greys that make up a weathered galvanized steel railing next to it, and lead grey flashing on the corner of a building has entirely its own weathered grey personality. This slightly elevated realm is also where the more durable colours that are intrinsic to materials begin to give way to applied and generally less durable surface colours.  Here the row of painted steel bollards are a consistent but again entirely different surface grey from the recently redecorated matt green-grey of the shop on the corner’ [11].

Sneinton Market, Nottingham, April 2014

I apologise for quoting at such length, but that last passage seems to me a perfect example of urban observation, and how the greatest visual poetry can be found in supposedly objective recording of the least regarded features of the city’s very fabric.  It justifies the impressions gained between the shoes of every flâneur down the years, and Indeed, over the handlebars of my own bike as I hop another kerb.

All Images:  Cornwall, February 2014

[1.][6.][9.][10.][11.]:  David Batchelor, 'The Luminous And The Grey', London, Reaktion Books, 2014.

[2.]:  David Batchelor, 'Chromophobia', London, Reaktion Books, 2000.

[3.][5.]:  Cormac McCarthy, 'The Road', New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

[4.]:  John Hillcoat (Dir.), USA,  Dimension Films/2929 Productions/Nick Weschler Productions, 2010

[7.][8.]:  Walter Benjamin, 'One Way Street & Other Writings', London, Penguin Modern Classics, 2009