Books by David Batchelor
Lawrence Weiner (Phaidon Contemporary Artist Series)
by Alexander Alberro, David Batchelor
Lawrence Weiner's art can appear painted across an entire building, floating inside a souvenir pen or sung as a lyric by a country and western band. One of the canonical Conceptual artists of the 1960s, Weiner was among the first to 'dematerialize' the object of art into the realm of language and ideas.
He composes texts that describe process, material and structure while evoking a poetic drama that unfolds in the reader's mind. Using a utilitarian yet elegant typeface and stark monochrome or vivid colours, his works have a striking formal beauty. Dedicated to the circulation of art and ideas, a single statement of Weiner's can take the form of myriad media, ranging from paint to stone to video. This book is the first comprehensive survey of an internationally-celebrated artist who continues to compose innovative new commissions around the world.
Alexander Alberro, contemporary art scholar and author of numerous texts on Conceptualism, collaborates with writer and art archivist Alice Zimmerman to overview Wiener's extensive oeuvre. Renowned art theorist Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, who has written widely on postwar European and American Art, conducts an interview with the artist. Author of a survey on Minimalism, critic and artist David Batchelor examines the chameleon changes of one work in a range of contexts. The artist has chosen poems by Kenneth Patchen and W. B. Yeats for the Artist's Choice, and for the Artist's Writings he has made a selection of his his own scripts, lectures and previous interviews.
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Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between the Wars (Modern Art Practices and Debates)
by David Batchelor, Paul Wood, Briony Fer
This book begins by considering responses by French artists to the First World War, showing how Purism, Dada, and early Surrealism are related to the ethos of post-war reconstruction. The authors then discuss the language of construction in places as dissimilar as France, Germany, and the Soviet Union; the contrasting demands of the utility and decoration of objects and paintings; and the relationship of surrealism to questions of sexuality and gender and to Freudian theory. The book concludes by addressing the widespread debate over realism in art: whether it represents an alternative to the elitism of the avant-garde or whether avant-garde art should play a role in the development of a modern realism.
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Chromophobia (Focus on Contemporary Issues)
The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse - a fear of corruption or contamination through color - lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought. This is apparent in the many and varied attempts to purge color, 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 forms of resistance to it. Writers have tended to look no further than the end of the nineteenth century. David Batchelor seeks to go beyond the limits of earlier studies, analyzing the motivations behind chromophobia and considering the work of writers and artists who have been prepared to look at color as a positive value. Exploring a wide range of imagery including Melville's great white whale, Huxley's reflections on mescaline, and Le Corbusier's journey to the East, Batchelor also discusses the use of color in Pop, Minimal, and more recent art.
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Colour (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art)
Writings on color from modernism to the present, by writers from Baudelaire to Baudrillard, surveying art from Paul Gauguin to Rachel Whiteread.
Whether it is scooped up off the palette, deployed as propaganda, or opens the doors of perception, color is central to art not only as an element but as an idea. This unique anthology reflects on the aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical meaning of color through the writings of artists and critics, placed within the broader context of anthropology, film, philosophy, literature, and science. Those who loathe color have had as much to say as those who love it. This chronology of writings from Baudelaire to Baudrillard traces how artists have affirmed color as a space of pure sensation, embraced it as a tool of revolution or denounced it as decorative and even decadent. It establishes color as a central theme in the story of modern and contemporary art and provides a fascinating handbook to the definitions and debates around its history, meaning, and use.
Artists surveyed include:
Joseph Albers, Mel Bochner, Daniel Buren, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Jimmie Durham, Helen Frankenthaler, Paul Gauguin, Donald Judd, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Yves Klein, Kazimir Malevich, Piero Manzoni, Henri Matisse, Henri Michaux, Beatriz Milhazes, Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, Hélio Oiticica, Paul Signac, Ad Reinhardt, Gerhard Richter, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Bridget Riley, Mark Rothko, Yinka Shonibare, Jessica Stockholder, Theo van Doesburg, Vincent van Gogh, Victor Vasarely, Rachel Whiteread
Writers include:
Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Charles Baudelaire, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Charles Blanc, Jacques Derrida, Thierry de Duve, Umberto Eco, Victoria Finlay, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Johannes Itten, Julia Kristeva, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacqueline Lichtenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John Ruskin, Adrian Stokes, Ludwig Wittgenstein
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The Luminous and the Grey
Color surrounds us: the lush green hues of trees and grasses, the variant blues of water and the sky, the bright pops of yellow and red from flowers. But at the same time, color lies at the limits of language and understanding. In this absorbing sequel to Chromophobia―which addresses the extremes of love and loathing provoked by color since antiquity―David Batchelor charts color’s more ambiguous terrain.
The Luminous and the Grey explores the places where color comes into being and where it fades away, probing when it begins and when it ends both in the imagination and in the material world. Batchelor draws on neuroscience, philosophy, novels, films, and artists’ writings―as well as his own experience as an artist working with color―to understand how we see and use colors. He considers the role of color in creation myths, industrial chemistry, and optics, and examines the particular forms of luminosity that saturate the modern city. Following this inquiry into the hues that we face every day, he turns to one that is both color and noncolor: grey itself, which he reveals is as much a mood, feeling, and existential condition as a shade that we experience with our eyes.
Deftly argued, always thought-provoking, and ever entertaining, The Luminous and the Grey is a beautiful study of how we see and feel our multicolored world.
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