David Batchelor

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David Batchelor

David Batchelor's Electric Colour Tower 666 dominates the main space. A seven meter stack of colored light boxes on a tall steel rack stretches from floor to roof beams. A cascade of black electrical cords falls down the back. Batchelor reconstructs the urban clutter of lighted signs into a modern day totem pole with an unfussy, ad-hoc functionalism. His second piece, Electric Colour Letter Box, is equally well placed, shining an eerie green light through a slot in the gallery's front door. As in his tower, the mechanism that produces the light effect is obvious. Less mystical than the light art of James Turrell, whose effects are made to appear as if by magic, more down to earth than the techno-fetishist minimalism of Dan Flavin, Batchelor uses found light boxes from old signs, relishing the grimy mechanisms behind the pretty lights, playing one off the other in a street smart, pop-art light show.

 

Biography

 

Senior Tutor in Critical Theory for the MA Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art. David Batchelor studied Fine Art at Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham (1975-78), and Cultural Theory at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Birmingham University (1978-80), and was AHRB Research Fellow at the Royal College of Art (2001-2004). He has exhibited in the UK, continental Europe and the United States; written two books, MINIMALISM (1997) and CHROMOPHOBIA (2000), and contributed to a number of journals including ARTSCRIBE, FRIEZE, and ARTFORUM. In 2001 he was appointed Visiting Faculty member in the School of Sculpture, Yale University.

Recent Work

David’s practice-based AHRB research project was titled COLOUR AND THE CITY and mainly concerned the transformations in the experience of colour that have occurred with the development of new materials, and with their application in contemporar y art. His three-dimensional works mostly combine brilliant colours (using fluorescent light, neon, plastics, etc) with a range of found light-industrial materials (steel shelving, commercial lightboxes, warehouse dollies, etc). He also produced drawings, photographic series, a computer screen-saver, and a large-scale work for the South Bank of the River Thames, close to the GLA building at Tower Bridge (June 2003), entitled EVERGREEN; the work comprises a tree-sized artificial tree that glows in the dark.

 

Current Research

David is currently developing a number of projects relating to his research into colour and urbanism. Having worked mainly with acrylic, vinyl, fluorescent light, gells, household paints and modified industrial readymades such as warehouse dollies, lightboxes and steel shelving, he has recently begun to research the properties of computer generated and projected colour. The results of this new research and other recent three-dimensional and photographic works were shown at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, early in 2004. In addition David has been commissioned to make a large-scale public work for the redeveloped West Wing of Bart’s Hospital, London, which consists of an eight-colour neon work set into the fabric of the building’s interior (April 2004).

 

David Batchelor at Anthony Wilkinson at Sadlers Wells - Brief Article
Art in America,  March, 2001  by Alex Coles

 

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The blast of color coming from the column of 30-odd monochrome light boxes was unremitting. Viewed from any of the exhibition space's three floors (the column rose in a gap between the end of the flooring and an interior wall), David Batchelor's 33-foot-high Electric Colour Tower bathed the gallery in a pool of glowing light. Lest the work appear Minimalist, dozens of electric cables were left hanging down, each one buzzing as it imported electricity to its respective light box. These wires, along with the distressed look of the found boxes, gave the work its funk.

The boxes Batchelor uses are scavenged exit signs (an objet trouve from the industrial backyards of London), each with a slick sheet of colored Perspex covering its front. The light tubes inside the boxes make the color of the Perspex jump forward into the viewer's space. In this work an assortment of lipstick pinks rubbed up against lemon yellows and pale turquoises, different combinations of which were unsystematically repeated up and down the tower. Complementing the interplay of hue, there was also great variance in surface. Some of the Perspex sheets were quite translucent (on occasion even the light tube inside the box was visible). Others were relatively opaque, and so established a firmer plane that resisted the gaze. Besides the pitch of color, the objectness of the units was also affected by the nature of these plastic surfaces. When translucent, they felt lighter and, oddly enough, worked more three-dimensionally; when opaque, the tower was all surface. As in Donald Judd's work, Batchelor's electric color and synthetic surfaces are too abstracted to actually refer to a particular source. Which is not to say that their use of color and surface is not specific: the nuance in its pitching and weighting sees to that.

Besides its optical presence, which is so powerful as to have an instant physical effect on the viewer, Electric Colour Tower also had a significant art-historical impact which only revealed itself upon reflection. As in his earlier "Monochromobiles" (a series of found porters' trolleys with Perspex sheets inserted into them), Batchelor hero flipped our preconceptions of the historical avant-garde. In a sly moment, Duchamp once bemoaned of his archenemy in the stakes of the avant-garde: "take a migraine tablet for your Matisse." With Batchelor's powerfully retinal Electric Colour Tower, you needed an Advil for your readymade