User:Lbattich/David Batchelor, Chromphobia

"Inside this house was a whole world, a very particular kind of world, a very clean, clear and orderly universe. ... There is a kind of white that is more than white, and this was that kind of white. There is a kind of white that repels everything that is inferior to it, and that is almost everything. This was that kind of white. There is a kind of white that is not created by bleach but that itself is bleach. This was that kind of white. This white was aggressively white. It did its work on everything around it, and nothing escaped. ... Pure white: this is certainly a Western problem, and there’s no getting away from it."

"If colour is a indivisible, a continuum, what sense can there be in talking of colours? ... Colour spreads flows bleeds stains floods soaks seeps merges. It does not segment or subdivide. Colour is fluid." (86)

"Colour may be a continuum, but the continuum is continuosly broken, the indivisible endlessly is divided. colour is formless but ever formed into patterns and shapes. From at least the time of Newton, colour has been subjected to the discipline of geometry, ordered into an endless variety of colour circles, triangles, stars, cubes, cylinders or spheres. These shapes always contain divisions, and these divisions, as often as not, contain words. And with these words colour becomes colours." (86)

"To concieve of colour in terms independent of, say, luminosity or reflectiveness is in itself a cultural and linguistic habit and not a universal ocurrence." (89)

"The interdisciplinary is often the antidisciplinary made safe. Colour is antidisciplinary."(97)

"The colour chart offers an escape from all that [from the colour circle of colour theory, with it feudal hierarchy of colours]. It is in effect, simply a list, a grammarless accumulation of colour units. In the colour chart every colour is equivalent to and independent of every other colour. There are no hierarchies, only random colour events. The colour chart divorces colour from conventional colour theory and turns every colour into a readymade. It promises autonomy for colour; in fact, it ofers three distinct but related types of autonomy: that of each colour from every other colour, that of colour from the dictates of colour theory and that of colour from the register of representation." (105)

"The colour circle is analogical; the colour charts is digital... digital colour is individuated; it comes in discrete units; there is no mergence or modulation; there are only boundaries, steps and edges." (105)