Chromophobia (FOCI) (Focus on Contemporary Issues (Reaktion Books))

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The book opens with an illustrative anecdote. The author visits the home of an art collector in a wealthy district of a northern European city, a home in which the banal facade gives no warning of the disturbing and contradictory décor within. The interior is a minimalist showplace: architecturally austere, purged of homely things, tightly sealed off from the outside, and totally drained of color. Even the art is uniformly gray. The house insists on aesthetic transparency and moral purism with such implacable and manic single-mindedness that it ultimately perverts itself. White, here, is not the color of clarity or elegance. It is not even simply ostentatious. It is, rather, condemnatory, tyrannical, alienating, and inhuman. The collector’s great white interior, Batchelor concludes, is a signifier of an oppressive Western ideology. Adding colour to woodwork can be a good place to start Paul Massey Introducing second, third (and fourth and fifth!) colours The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse – a fear of corruption or contamination through colour – lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought. This is apparent in the many and varied attempts to purge colour, either by making it the property of some foreign body – the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological – or by relegating it to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential, or the cosmetic. Chromophobia has been a cultural phenomenon since ancient Greek times; this book is concerned with the motivations behind chromophobia and with forms of resistance to it. Batchelor considers the work of a wide range of writers and artists and explores diverse imagery including Herman Melville's ‘Great White Whale’, Aldous Huxley's ‘Reflections on Mescaline’, Le Corbusier's Journey to the East and L Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz. Batchelor also discusses the use of colour in Pop, Minimal, and more recent art. Dejarse llevar por el color y que este sea el aspecto central de la obra, sólo hará de esta pieza algo vulgar, hortera, simple, nada elevado ni profundo. Pero también esta asociación está presente en la vestimenta y en el maquillaje. Usar mucho color es hortera, está mal visto, no es elegante. Esto se debe, desde mi punto de vista, a su sesgo de clase y género. No es capaz de ver el potencial de sus propias tesis. Por ejemplo, expone una idea súper potente: la vinculación intrínseca del color con la otredad.

Ad esempio, la parte sulla cosmetica in ottica di cromofobia (intesa quest’ultima come genere culturale e non come patologia) alla fine si risolve in: il make up viene visto come contro/anti natura.

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I will not question the equivalence between “wild” and “savage” though “savage” carries a derogatory meaning in its Latin root. I will question the couple “uneducated – of refinement” for the German couple “ungebildete Menschen – gebildete Menschen.” The concept of “refinement” carries a positive meaning that rejects “uneducated” into some derogatory meaning. The German couple is more objective about one single concept, the first word negative and the second word positive. I insist it is the same concept, “unconstructed – constructed” or “uneducated – educated” or “unelaborate – elaborate,” the idea that on one side some process of complexification did not take place and on the other side it did take place. Maybe education leads to refinement, but refinement is a positive behavioral term whereas educated is the positive side of the negative side of the same concept, that of education. But the main objection to this translation comes from “lebhaft.” Though “vivid” is connected to the Latin root for “life,” it is not directly connected to the standard English concept of “life,” and the German version uses the word twice and its root is “Leben,” the verb or the noun. The translation uses a word that refers to the flashy brightness of the colors, not the fact that they are directly connected with life as is implied in German where the adjectival suffix “-haft” means “endowed with,” in this case “endowed with life.” Goethe was often using his words with great care. When in the concluding verses of the Second Faust he says the future of man is woman, he uses for “woman” the old neuter root “das Weib” instead of the more modern feminine root “die Frau” and in this case again in the form of the adjective “weiblich,” amplified as the fourth rhyming “-liche” line ending. These four rhymes are the echo of the final stage of Faust’s soul’s salvation by four women, Mater Gloriosa presiding over three “Büsserinnen” (penitent women): Magna Peccatrix, Mulier Samaritana, and Maria Aegyptiaca. He touches on the timeworn privileging of drawing over color -- disegno versus colore -- and notes how color has been equated with drugs -- Aristotle's pharmakon. According to Batchelor, color has been equated with the fall of man: "it is dangerous because it is secondary... The minor is always the undoing of the major." Names exist that mean fear of specific colors such as erythrophobia for the fear of red, xanthophobia for the fear of yellow and leukophobia for the fear of white. [2] A fear of the color red may be associated with a fear of blood. [2] Overview [ edit ] Taussig, Michael (2009-05-01). What Color Is the Sacred?. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226790060 . Retrieved 22 August 2014. YAX (yax) (T16) 1> adjective "green" 2> adjective "blue" 3> adjective "blue-green" 4> adjective "first."

Bleicher, Steven (2005). Contemporary Color Theory and Use. Cengage Learning. pp.17–. ISBN 9781401837402 . Retrieved 22 August 2014. What is surprising is the “objective” tone of David Batchelor who is telling an enormous crime against humanity that went on with genocide and systematic exploitation of more than 80% of the world as if it were a simple story about how the West was chosen by the highest authorities in the cosmos to conquer and dominate the whole humanity. And he does not hesitate to push his fishing corks and hooks up to the year 2000. And it is the same story with Mikhail Bakhtin, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Salman Rushdie, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. And he dares conclude on this very segregational theme of his with a quotation from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: In complementary, it is captured that the color is what make the sculpture or the drawing beautiful. [6] He however, cautions that it is not all color that makes an art working and appealing but more is the drawing.En definitiva, me quedo con mis propias divagaciones sobre el texto, usándo su posicionamiento como herramienta de análisis más que con el texto en sí que, como decía, es más bien fallido. Por lo tanto el color es accesorio, irrelevante, es más, es tentador, es peligroso porque distrae de la forma, de la pureza del blanco y de la línea. Esta "cromofobia" ha estado en la base de toda enseñanza artística academicista y ha sido la triunfadora de todos los debates pictóricos sobre la forma y el color. El color (la disidencia, la otredad) se debe someter a la forma (al sistema, al statu quo), la función del color es servir, ser útil y sumiso, a la forma. Todo este análisis que hace Batchelor me parece súper revelador y tremendamente interesante. Sin embargo, el autor, despacha estas ideas en breves paginas y se centra en unas implicaciones más filosóficas que pragmáticas, entre otras cosas debido a sus referentes casi todos señoros de pro. Además en muchos casos no se sabe cuándo analiza o crítica las ideas de estos referentes o son los pensamientos del propio Batchelor.