david batchelor a bit of nothing

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A bit of nothing

Colour Chart II

ByDavid Batchelor, 1 May 2009, Tate Etc. issue 16; Summer 2009

David Batchelor, Stratford, London 10.03.04 2

David Batchelor, Islington, London 01.05.99

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/tate-etc-issue-16

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/tate-etc-issue-16



David Batchelor, Photograph 2. Stoke Newington, London 20.09.02

My original motives for making monochromes – back in the late 1980s –

were vaguely malicious. The subject was interesting because it seemed to

be pretty much the dumbest kind of painting that it is possible to make. A

single uninterrupted plane of flat unmodulated colour spread evenly

across a given surface – a monochrome appears to involve nocomposition, no drawing, no subtlety; and it requires no skill, and

certainly no craft skill, to make one. Anyone who can paint a door can

paint a monochrome. Or, as El Lissitzky put it in 1925: “Now the

production of art has been simplified to such an extent that one can do no

better than order one‟s paintings by telephone from a house painter while

one is lying in bed.” This was painting as low comedy, the reductio ad

absurdum of high abstraction. Having said that, a part of what attracted

me to the monochrome was also the awareness that for many artists this

form of painting had promised a great deal more – the freeing of colour

from the tyranny of line, the liberation of painting from the register of

representation and the possibility of a brush with some sublime void or

other metaphysical nothingness. It‟s just that I didn‟t believe that anyone

could still seriously maintain its claims to transcendence, be they formal,

spiritual or otherwise.

So there was the monochrome: born in revolution (around 1920, say, in

the tussles between Malevich, Rodchenko, Lissitzky and others); grown

through tricky adolescence to some kind of ambiguous respectability inthe 1950s and 1960s (think Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Lucio Fontana in



Europe; Ad Reinhardt, Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly in the US;

Hélio Oiticica in Brazil, etc.); and now old, fat and bloated, come to die as

corporate decoration in the boardrooms and marble foyers of every other

steel and glass office block, hanging over the head of the CEO like a halo,

only rectangular and usually grey. At least, that‟s what I thought, backthen. In truth it was difficult to think of that many actual corporate

monochromes, but I loved the image none the less and that, for a while,

was good enough for me.

Left to Right: 4. Elephant and Castle, London, 20.02.98 5. Victoria Park,

London, 23.11.086. Quinta Normal, Santiago, Chile, 31.03.05

The monochromes I started making began life as paintings, gradually

turned into reliefs and then, after a few years of flailing around, ended upon the floor as objects. The first ones were black. They turned white over

time, became silver for a while and occasionally went red – out of

embarrassment I suspect. And all the while there was this nagging

question: if the monochrome was so simple, why was this all taking so

long? In retrospect, I realise one of my many difficulties was I had an

idea of what I wanted without any obvious sense of what these things

might actually be made from – which is only a problem if you are working

in a studio surrounded by materials of one kind or another, and with some

space to fill in an as yet unspecified and perhaps entirely imaginarygallery. Which is another way of saying that in art ideas are often much

tidier creatures than objects. And then, to cut a rather long and very dull

story short, at some point in the early 1990s my monochromes tripped up

on a couple of readymades and stumbled into some colour. And in the

process they began, just possibly, to have a life of their own, rather than

one I had dreamed up for them.



Left to right: 7. Alexanderplatz, Berlin, 04.04.08 8. Ponte Lungo, Rome,

17.04.07 9. King‟s Cross, London, 18.11.07

In 1997 I also began taking photographs of what I called “found

monochromes” in the streets around where I lived in London. My initial

thought was that I would somehow refute a thesis I had recently heard

being made by Jeff Wall in a lecture on the work of On Kawara. Wall had

presented a rather vivid account of the history of modernism as the

history of two opposed forces unable fully to escape each other and

equally unable to be reconciled with one another. These forces were

embodied in the painting of modern life, on the one hand, and high

abstraction on the other, and they had found form in photojournalism and

the monochrome, respectively. As I understood it, he appeared to besaying that, in its logic of exclusion and emptying out, the monochrome

was in some structural way unable to engage with or embody the

experience of modernity. That seemed a very plausible argument –

except I just didn‟t buy it. So I went out into the street, literally, with the

aim of finding evidence that the city is actually full of monochromes, that

modernity is a precondition of the monochrome and that, in all its

artificiality, the city is the monochrome‟s natural habitat, an

unacknowledged museum of the inadvertent monochrome. None of which,

I now realise, necessarily refuted Wall‟s thesis, but never mind.

On 17 November 1997 I photographed a monochrome I found on a street

in King‟s Cross, near where I lived at the time. It was off -white and

cracked, but I thought it would do the job if I could find another four or

five to go with it. But then, slowly, or maybe not so slowly, something

happened. I found there was something strange and rather compelling

about these readymade blanks. And from time to time I found new ones.

So I photographed them too. And in the process I learned a few things: a

found monochrome has to be a blank surface in the street, but not just

any blank surface. It has to be rectangular or square, vertical, white and



in some sense inadvertent, unplanned, or temporary. For it to work, the

monochrome has somehow to detach itself from its surroundings. That‟s

why white is better than black or other colours (I photographed some

reds and blues and yellows too, early on). And in detaching itself from the

surroundings, by being white and parallel to the picture plane, themonochrome plane can begin to form a small empty centre in an

otherwise saturated visual field. A bit of nothing – but more nothing-much

than nothing-ness; a presence that is more like an absence, at least for a

moment or two. Or, to put it another way, the monochrome became more

interesting – more ambiguous, more uncertain – than I had been

prepared for it to be. Rather than just a dumb blank or just a bit of exotic

emptiness, it appeared that it might occasionally be both, or it might

somehow flicker between the two mutually exclusive alternatives. A plane

and a void. But not a mysterious void-in-general, rather a contingentvoid, a void in a place, here, today, on this particular railing in this

particular street; here today, and probably gone tomorrow. A void in a

place, but not in every place: these incidents are not, I noticed,

distributed evenly throughout the city; they have a tendency to cluster in

more overlooked and transitional environments, and are scarce in more

refined and elegant districts. For me, and perhaps only for me, these bits

of peripheral vision are little heroic moments, small monuments to

modernity – if modernity can still, in part, be defined in that great phrase

of Baudelaire‟s as „the ephemeral, the fugitive and the contingent‟.



David Batchelor, I Love King‟s Cross and King‟s Cross Loves Me 1996-

1997, Found dollies, acrylic sheet, enamel paint, Dimensions variable

Yves Klein, Untitled Monochrome Blue IKB 67 1959, Oil on canvas

92 x 73 cm, Courtesy Yves Klein archive

Since 1997 I have found versions of these occasional void-planes in areas

of London and in just about every other city I have travelled to. There

were around 400 at the last count. I have come to think of the series as

an openended project that changes shape as it grows and can be

exhibited in a number of forms – as a slide show, as individual prints, as

an installation of images pasted on a wall in a grid. Together the seriesforms a map of sorts: a city map; an autobiographical map; a mildly

psychogeographical map; and a map that principally indicates the location

of something that is no longer there.

On Kawara, May 25, 1966 from Today Series No. 89 „A rocket scientist

was killed by a foreign-made .25 caliber pistol, Columbus Ohio‟ 1966,

Liquitex on canvas, 25.4 x 33 cm, © On Kawara



One Photograph #8. ‘Monochrome and Malfunction.’ by David

Batchelor.

„Found Monochrome No. 19, Islington, London, 10.04.99,„ by David

Batchelor.

There is something about Found Monochrome No. 19, Islington, London,

10.04.99 that I have always liked, but I have never been exactly sure

why that is. There are a number of things about it. I didn‟t have to travel

far: it was literally on the street directly outside the studio I worked in at

the time, a vaguely run-down residential street in north London. The car

was an old Vauxhall Chevette and I assume the rectangle of paper taped

to the inside of the rear window was a handwritten „for sale‟ notice that

had faded in the sunlight. Everything about the image is both

commonplace and provisional: the car parked just where it was at the

time, the homemade sign, the wrinkled and uneven Sellotape, the non-

lightfast ink, the here-today-gone-tomorrow everydayness of an

improvised urban event gone slightly wrong.

In November 1997 I began talking photographs of blank white rectangular

panels that I found in the streets around where I lived. At the time of

writing, August 2012, I have shot just over five hundred such images.

The majority were found in London, because that is where I spend most

of my time, but I have come across others in town and cities – almost

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always towns and cities – elsewhere in England, Scotland, Continental

Europe, North and South America, and Asia.

A number of things have changed in the sixteen years between the first

and the most recent photograph: for example analogue photography has

almost entirely given way to digital media, although I continue to use film

for this work. There are a few reasons for this: pure habit and my love of

carousel slide shows being the main ones. The main change within the

project however is that my reasons for starting out bear almost no

resemblance to my reasons for continuing. I only ever intended to take

four or f ive images of these things I called „found monochromes‟, and I

took them initially in order to disprove or at least question something Jeff

Wall had claimed in a lecture on On Kawara and the monochrome. This

argument I conducted mainly with myself ceased to have any part in mythinking after I took the first few images.

These monochromes of the street are occasional, often inadvertent and

always temporary. They are little heroic moments of blankness in an

otherwise saturated visual landscape. It is an ambiguous blankness

because rectangular planes of nothingness could also be seen as voids at

the centre of the field of vision. As such they are like errors: a space

where there shouldn‟t be a space, an absence where there should be a

presence. And, soon enough, these errors are corrected: removed,

painted over, filled-in or tagged. So a monochrome usually has a short

life-span; over a few days it comes into being and it passes away, usually

unnoticed. I never know where or when a monochrome will occur, except

that they usually crop up in more transitional neighbourhoods and

generally don‟t feature in the more carefully tended areas of a town or

city. Looking back through the original transparencies I realise I

remember nearly every occasion that I photographed – and each feels

like an incident that was recorded as much as an object that existed.

I have never thought of these works as photographically significant: if themonochrome is landscape, the photograph is landscape; if the

monochrome is portrait, so is the photo. I simply frame the event, centre

the monochrome, make sure it is parallel to the picture plane and leave

enough space on each side. Each image is a document; the series as a

whole is a narrative of visibly imperfect repetitions, and a map that

indicates the locations of incidental things that are no longer there.

For all its informality and contingency, No 19 is formally quite succinct.

The white rectangle is framed and isolated by the largely dark interior of the car; there is a bit of depth in the space behind the glass; the chipped



metallic green of the car body frames the event in an abstract kind of

way. It is a simple picture of three surfaces, all of which require and

sustain each other, and there is nothing else. The metal supports the

glass that supports the paper. The paper behind the glass calls attention

to the metal that it advertises, or fails to advertise: the intendedrelationship – the purposeful but entirely un-aesthetic placement of

materials in relationship to one another – has come undone, has slowly

dissolved, along with the ink that is no longer there. In doing so, it has

become something else. A malfunction has become a monochrome.

David Batchelor is an artist and writer based in London.

While it is true that das Ding functions through lack it is also true that

prohibition is a significant element. Prohibition can be seen as functioning

through the incest taboo…the prohibition against the child‟s merging with

the Mother vi, the pre-historic Other, who can also be seen as the

ultimate Good. Here the cost to the subject of merging is that of being

overwhelmed as it were with “too much of a good thing” which then takes

on the quality of the bad, the disturbing. While criticised vii it does seem

that the elements of lack and of prohibition are necessary. This is because

the notion of das Ding involves not simply that of a lack seeking to fill

itself but of lack for something so totally desirable as to seem essential

and yet when approached too closely is experienced as terrifying and

destructive. The German poet Rilke described beauty in the first his Duino

Elegies in terms very similar to those Lacan uses in his descriptions of the

Thing, Beauty is only

the first touch of terror

we can still bear

and it awes us so much

because it so coolly

disdains to destroy us viii

In the many descriptions and discussions of das Ding articulated by Lacan

within his Ethics Seminar none is more visually pertinent for our purposes

than his metaphor of the vase. ix Lacan describes how the signifier grows

around and is defined by the emptiness of the Thing rather similarly to



how a vase‟s function and identity are defined by and in its construction

actually modelled around, an emptiness – in this example form and

emptiness work are shown to work together as one. X In conclusion das

Ding is thus like a complex blank or rather a complicated/pregnant void.

It is not nothing rather it is a charged nothing. And it is charged,complicated, by all that revolves around it as in itself it cannot be seen; –

it is to quote Silverman “the impossible non object of desire”.xi

The subject, via the pleasure drive circulates around it. The risks to the

subject getting too close can be catastrophic, with reality becoming

threatened with being overwhelmed by the real, resulting in a disinteg

'Nothings'David Batchelor in conversation with Jonathan Rée

Jonathan Rée: When I look at the sequence of your found monochromes,

I feel they are trying to tell me several stories – not only general stories

about life in modern cities, but also personal stories about your

development as an artist. Let‟s start with the second: can you tell me

what first made you go out into the streets looking for monochromes?

David Batchelor: That‟s quite a long story. I began making monochrome

paintings and drawings back in the mid-1980s. By the early 1990s I had

started to construct object-like things that were largely monochromatic,

but it was only when I began to attach shiny panels of brightly coloured

acrylic sheet to old low-slung warehouse dollies, that I felt any sense that

they could hold their own in the world. That was in 1996. Around the

same time, I photographed my first Found Monochrome. It was 18

November 1997, to be precise.

The first thing I should say about the photographs is that at the time I

never thought of them as works. Rather, I imagined them as ammunition– blanks possibly – in an argument about the monochrome and the

relationship of abstract art to modernity. The first ones were made as a

response to a lecture given by Jeff Wall at the Slade on the work of On

Kawara. In a nutshell, Wall argued that the monochrome was the

apotheosis of the tradition of abstract art that turned its back on modern

life in the city in favour of whatever abstract art was meant to be in

favour of. The spiritual, formalism, autonomy: all the usual suspects. I

think I have always been sceptical of that notion. I often feel that abstract

art is the art of the city and that the monochrome is its exemplary form.



So I went out into the streets of King‟s Cross, where I lived at the time,

with the idea that I would show this, literally. I would show that the city is

full of monochromes. And it is: billboards, screens, doors, walls, the backs

of signs, faded notices, the sides of trucks, etc, etc. I am now rather less

sure that Wall‟s argument was about all the things I thought it was, butmaybe that doesn‟t matter too much. The reasons why I began to hunt

them down, back then, are quite different from the reasons why I

continue to do so over a decade later.

JR: So you were happy, when you started out, with the idea that

monochromes – whether coloured or black or white or grey – are a

culmination of abstract art; but you didn‟t go along with the argument

that there was something anti-urban, perhaps even anti-modern, about

abstraction. How has your attitude to monochromes changed since then?DB: Well, I wouldn‟t say they were a culmination of abstract art, but they

are, or certainly were, a fairly extreme form of it. Perhaps the main

change in my attitude is that I used to think monochromes were simple.

In a sense they are, conceptually: a single colour spread evenly over a

given surface with no drawing, no incident and no figure/ground

relationship to bother about. But in practice it‟s a rather different matter,

thankfully. As I‟ve said before, anyone can make a monochrome; the

tricky bit is to make an interesting one. At least, that was the tricky bit for

me. But I‟ve also come to realise that as well as being quite difficult to

make, monochromes can be quite complex things, spatially, optically,

even psychologically, if that is the right term. I used to enjoy the irony

that for all the talk of spirituality and the like, a monochrome is at the

same time as dumb as a door. Or to put it another way, a monochrome is

always situated somewhere between the mystery of an infinite void and

the ordinary materiality of a flat surface. What I find surprising and

interesting is the possibility that a monochrome might be both a void and

a plane, or that it might oscillate between the two, without settling on

either. That‟s quite a large part of why I have continued to make these

and some other monochromes. These days I have a little more respect for

some of the things I used to take the piss out of, back then. It‟s probably

an age thing.

JR: As dumb as a door? Surely doors are not that dumb: they speak, and

they speak about two elemental human activities: secrets shut away and

vistas opened up. Or so it seems to me. So I wonder what you really

mean, deep down, by your disobliging comment about doors. And I

wonder if this might be linked with that ambiguity in the word



„monochrome‟, sometimes implying black-and-white-and-every-shade-in-

between, and sometimes the coloured variety.

DB: I think we may carry around different default doors in our heads.

Yours sounds a little rustic and carefully stripped down; mine is the

standard B&Q plywood-faced, blank panel. And those doors really are

dumb and prosaic, and painting one really does make me think of painting

a monochrome. I can be extremely literal-minded at times. Strangely, I

find that quite useful. Yours is a very much more interesting door, and a

well-read one, and it reminds me that I have found Aldous Huxley‟s Doors

of Perception immensely useful when writing about colour.

There are certainly many ambiguities within the term „monochrome‟, for

all its apparent simplicity and singularity. Incidentally, there are a great

many more black or white or grey monochromes in art than chromaticones. That‟s ironic given Yves Klein‟s wonderful assertion that the

monochrome represents the final liberation of colour from the tyranny of

line. I have really never understood why this is, but the ambiguity is there

in my work. Nearly all my three-dimensional monochromes are highly

colourful, but the photographed ones are all whites. In the early days, I

also photographed some black ones and also some blues and reds and the

odd yellow, but they didn‟t really work. The colours just sat in the picture

space, whereas the whites can appear to lift themselves out of the visual

field, or cut a hole in it.

JR: You‟re right: there is something very special about white

monochromes. For you at least, and for me, and perhaps for everyone,

they come across as absences rather than presences – like silences in a

musical performance, perhaps, or gaps in a conversation. But it seems to

me that there is something disturbing, even freakish, about such

absences. They are essentially provisional, a bit like the interval between

the lightning flash and the clap of thunder. They are nothings awaiting

their own destruction.

DB: There is a story that John Cage composed 4' 33" in response to a

series of white monochromes made by Robert Rauschenberg in the early

1950s. I can‟t imagine it being made in response to Rauschenberg‟s black

works of the same period. And 4' 33" is a great absence-event – one

always at risk of being undone, invaded by noises off. I really like the idea

of nothings like these as moments. It is literally true of the monochromes

I find in the streets: they are never around for long. They are either

painted-over or tagged or removed. It‟s like they are errors in the visual



fabric that have to be corrected. A blank in a cityscape is a bit freakish,

even a temporary one; that is what attracts me.

JR: Is it too sentimental and subjectivist to say that your found

monochromes always tell a story? Or at least, that each of them suggests

a before and an after, placing us in the midst of an unfolding history –

one that began before the monochrome existed and that will end when it

is defaced or taken away? Might they serve as illustrations of what Paul

Klee once said about art exploring the prehistory of the visible?

DB: I remember the occasion on which pretty much every one of the

photos was taken, where I was, what I was meant to be doing. Amongst

other things, the series is an autobiographical story or map. Each image

feels like a reminder of a small event more than just a memory of a place,

especially the ones I found outside London which crop up in small clustersthroughout the series. And the term „found‟ presupposes a narrative of

some kind. So they are stories at least in that sense. But each

monochrome is also its own short story of coming into being and passing

away. Having said that, when I‟m actually photographing a monochrome

it is the last thing that‟s in my mind. At that moment it is a flat, static

abstraction that I need to line up in the frame figuring out the right

proportion of monochrome to cityscape. It‟s only when I print the photos

or project them in a slide show – I have always shot them on 35 mm slide

film by the way – that the story becomes apparent to me. And that can

be months or years later.

I hadn‟t come across the statement by Klee. Is it about the notion that art

can bring things into visibility that might otherwise remain hidden or be

overlooked because of their insignificance or ordinariness or ubiquity? Or

is it more about how we learn to distinguish and differentiate what is in

our visual field, how we learn to see „things‟ in the flood of coloured light

that hits our retinas? They are both pretty rich ideas that have left their

mark on art of the last century and a half. I suspect Klee was moreconcerned with the latter, whereas with this series of works at least, the

former is more to the point. It‟s more Baudelairian, or Warholian.

JR: When I talked about being in the midst of an unfolding history, I was

not thinking of the history of your stomping the streets for 10 or 15 years

with your old film camera, nor exactly of the story of each monochrome

coming into being and passing away; I was thinking more of what they

may suggest to us, your audience, or what they may do for us. That‟s

where Klee came in.



Surely he‟s elaborating on the familiar fact that visual experience involves

more than opening your eyes to what‟s in front of them. Part at least of

what it involves is seeing as: seeing the sky as sky, seeing it as blue, and

seeing its blueness as the colour blue; or seeing blankness as an

absence; or seeing a screen as an obstruction waiting to be removed, oras a blank surface waiting to be filled. Klee‟s maxim develops that point,

it seems to me, by suggesting that art is a bit like hypnosis: it enables us

to regress into our prehistory – to make a journey into our visual past,

before we saw as we do now, and then to retrace our steps to the

present, and perhaps to find that it no longer looks familiar.

I think there may be a significant ambiguity in the response these works

elicit: is it about the monochromes you found, or is it about your photos

of them? Perhaps I was assuming the former, but I can see that youmight disagree. But even if my presumption is wrong-headed, I think it

connects with a general point about what the public expects from its

artists: traditional artists had to market their work by saying „Look what I

have made‟, whereas contemporary artists can simply say „Look what I

have seen‟.

If someone told me they‟d come across something that reminded them of

a BatchelorFound Monochrome, I‟d assume they‟d come across a white

rectangle in the street, rather than an image of one in a gallery.

DB: I like the formulation „Look what I have seen‟ because I have never

found a better description of what art is than an invitation to look.

However, I suspect the seen/made opposition is less straightforward than

it sounds. Certainly I am more interested in pointing to monochromes-in-

the-world than to my photos of them, and one reason is that the

photographs are not intended to be anything special as photographs.

They are documents. On the other hand, the act of putting together 250

of these images in a book (or as a slide show, or as prints) shifts the

balance between seen and made – at least a little. Something changes, Isuspect, for the viewer. At least something changes for me, although I‟m

not sure I can say exactly what. Perhaps that‟s where „seeing as‟ comes

in. It is about seeing these unintended events as if they were intended, as

if they were monochromes, as if they were works of art, even. And as if

they were an ongoing and unfolding series of connected events that are

taking place in every city all the time, only just below the threshold of

visibility. Incidentally, people do come up to me and say „I saw a

monochrome in Dalston yesterday‟, and I rather like it when they do.



JR: I was a bit wary about bringing in the old idea of „seeing as‟, but it

seems to me you have revived it with the idea of seeing as if. (There‟s a

book from the early twentieth century called The Philosophy of As-If,

whose author, Hans Vaihinger, maintained that all knowledge is founded

in fiction, in make-believe.) I like the idea of seeing these monochromesas if they arose from some kind of conspiracy dedicated to subverting the

way we usually see our urban environment.

But why urban? When we began, I went along with the assumption that

there‟s some connection between monochromes, modernity and the city,

but that was only for the sake of the argument. Can there be natural

monochromes – angular limestone outcrops perhaps, or the white cliffs of

Dover – and if not, why not? Is it because they are natural rather than

artificial, or because they are too solid, too deep, too three-dimensional – coloured not just on the surface but all the way through?

DB: I wasn‟t even aware that I had added the „if‟ to „seeing as‟, but I like

what happens when an „as if‟ is there, especially when it comes to

abstract art and monochromes. To see a monochrome in a gallery as a

deep imponderable void is one thing, but to see it as if it were that may

add a little scepticism a little uncertainty and self-doubt, and the

possibility of a number of other fictions...

Nature abhors a monochrome. A square of sky on a moonless cloudynight might just about pass the test, but apart from that... Do you know

about Alphonse Allais, the late nineteenth-century prankster who

somehow ended up showing two blank rectangles of colour – one white

and one red – at a Post-Impressionist exhibition? The titles are brilliant

„as ifs‟:Anaemic Virgins Taking First Communion in a

Snowstorm and Apoplectic Cardinals Harvesting Tomatoes on the Shores

of the Red Sea. This must have been the first time monochromes were

presented as art and there‟s something about the spirit of his

interventions that I love and admire.

It seems to me that our experience of colour was transformed during the

Industrial Revolution, with the advent of electrification and in the

development of artificial paints and dyes, and later of coloured plastics

and the like. There may not be any such thing as a completely new

colour, but in the city we certainly see colours in entirely different forms

and conditions than in the natural world. Allais could play with the idea of

an undifferentiated expanse of red in a landscape, a reductio ad

absurdum of Impressionist painting, but he would only be likely to haveencountered one that was manufactured in a paint or a dye factory.



Actually there are two monochromes-in-landscapes early in the series,

but they read like interventions from outside that block entry into the

landscape, which is probably just what they were meant to be.

A monochrome has to be uniform: the slightest hint of modulation breaks

the spell. Looking back I‟d say some of the earliest monochromes in the

series have a bit too much incident in them, too many variations on the

surface. But that was when I was just beginning to get going; I had no

idea then where it would lead or what, if any, were the possibilities and

limits of the series.

It isn‟t just the opportunity to see a single uninterrupted colour on a large

scale that is unique to the city; it is also that the city is a landscape of

regular surfaces, planes and facades – a landscape of edges and limits.

And the colours we see are for the most part additions; somethingsapplied to those surfaces rather than qualities integral to them. So colours

in the city can be vivid and intense, but they tend not to be deep and

stable and enduring. Colours do not belong to forms in the same way; it

always feels that a colour is more its own presence rather than the colour

of something. I suppose it is the implied autonomy of colour that makes

every surface in the city a potential monochrome, a surface on a surface,

a provisional, contingent, temporary presence.

London, 31 May 2010

david batchelor a bit of nothing

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