Monochrome Archive, 1997-2015: David Batchelor in conversation with Artimage

19 January 2015

We talk to David Batchelor about his series of Found Monochromes, currently on show for the first time in Monochrome Archive, 1997-2015, at Whitechapel Gallery, London until 3 May 2015. The exhibition complements the Whitechapel’s major new abstract art show, Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015.

Monochrome Archive, 1997-2015: David Batchelor in conversation with Artimage

Your series of Found Monochromes starts in 1997. Can you tell me about how your idea for the work came about?

I'd been to a lecture by Jeff Wall at the Slade School of Art in London. It was about On Kawara and the monochrome, amongst other things. Jeff made this argument that the monochrome – the epitome of high abstract art – was the opposite of the ‘painting of modern life’ and couldn’t represent the everyday life of the city. So on the one hand you had the painting of modern life from Manet through to photojournalism, and on the other you had the emergence of abstraction, which led to the monochrome. These two trajectories, for Wall, are co-existent but irreconcilable.

It was a great argument, but I didn't buy it. I thought, “Okay, I'm going to prove Jeff Wall wrong by finding monochromes in the city and showing them to him”. I hadn't seen one at that point but I had a feeling that flat, unvarying panels of rectangular colour could only be found in the city. They certainly don't exist in nature. I got out my camera and I walked around until I found one. The first was down the road from where I lived in Kings Cross. I managed to find about four or five more. I wasn't necessarily looking for white monochromes; I found some black ones, and some red and yellow ones. I got the three or four or five that I wanted – and then I saw another one. The whole sequence has continued simply because I keep seeing them. My initial reason for photographing them, to refute Jeff Wall's argument, got lost quite quickly because I found them interesting in their own way, and for their own sake.

How do you organise the monochromes as images, aesthetically and on a practical level? How have the aesthetics of the series evolved?

I originally imagined the series as being a suite of four or five photographs hung next to each other on a wall. When I had a lot more than that, I began to imagine it as a slide projection where there would be a central white panel and the world would change around it. It didn't quite work on a slide projector because the system was too slow, and the shapes changed rather more than I had imagined. When I had a couple of hundred images, I realised I could produce the series as a book. As the series has grown, the possibilities have changed. I literally don't know what it's going to be next.

So is the series an open series?

It seems to be, yes. I've never planned it, but that’s what it's turned out to be. It renews itself each time I show it, and this is the first time I've shown it as a four-screen projection.

In terms of the aesthetics of photographing a monochrome – again, I only worked this out after I'd done a few – if it's an upright rectangle, I shoot it in a portrait format. If it's a landscape rectangle, I take a landscape format. I always put the rectangle in the centre of the image, slightly above the horizontal centre. I always show the images chronologically, except that with this version of the work, I've separated out the portraits from the landscapes so that the image it can fit the screen format exactly.

How has the shift from analogue to digital photography affected the series - particularly regarding your organisation of the images and your criteria for selecting which ones to include and which to discard?

The first images I took were on a 35mm film camera because that's all that was available. I've subsequently stuck with this format. I have my Nikon FM2, which I only use for photographing monochromes. I have it in my car usually, and when I travel it's always in my hand luggage. It's just a classic manual single-lens reflex 35mm camera, and it does the job.

Even though very good digital cameras are now available I’m still married to film. But these days I scan the slides, and that means I can crop some of them if I need to, which is less easy with film. So I use digital and analogue. They are shot on film and then become digital projections.

Has it affected the way you archive the work? In the exhibition, the original slides are shown on a lightbox and you can see your notes around the edges of the slides. In that sense, there's a material proximity of the image and its metadata. Do you find that problematic?

No, I'm still an analogue kind of guy, I need hard copy.Each group of 20 slides has this lovely rigid transparent slide wallet, which unfortunately I can't get anymore. Now of course I've got the digital files of all the images as well.

Do you transfer that metadata, the labels?

Every Tiff file has a unique number, and then on another document each number has a corresponding title – which is a place, the city, and the date. For example: “No. 57, Stoke Newington, London, 15.08.98”. So that's it, it's not overly complex.

What is your criteria for including an image in the series? Do you take images that you then throw away?

The image has to be good enough. Sometimes I haven't pulled the focus properly, or there are other practical reasons. You'll notice on the slides that I've re-numbered them. That's because after I've mounted them and filed them and then looked back at the series I decided some of them aren't good enough, so I’ve chucked them out. Then I have to re-number the subsequent ones.

Sometimes if the monochrome has sky behind it, the sky will look whiter than the white rectangle and the rectangle will look grey. That doesn’t work, so I have to exclude it or simply not photograph it in the first place. Sometimes the shape of the monochrome is just too irregular, too stretched as rectangles; they have to be a standard rectangle shape. Each monochrome has to be at eye-level too and parallel to the picture-plane, otherwise it becomes foreshortened in the image. These are things I've learnt about them over the years and which I didn't know to begin with.

Many of the works were taken in London as well as in cities around the world. How have these places informed your sense of the collection?

For ages I was trying to think of how to organise the work as a group and originally I had two series; one was called Found Monochromes of London and one was called Found Monochromes of the Rest of the World. And then I realised that was kind of stupid, so I just amalgamated them.

Initially most of the images are from London, and the earlier ones are specifically from around Kings Cross, where I was living at the time. Then there’s a whole sequence around Stoke Newington, where I had my studio, and then Bow and Hackney and so on. It's a kind of map, to me at least, of where I've been located.

I always take the camera whenever I travel and I always try to make time to go walkabout with the camera and hope to find at least one monochrome. So far I have images from about twenty cities in the UK, continental Europe, North and South America and Asia.

So when you go into these cities, you’re not taking other photographs – there’s no dérive into the psychology of a tourist?

It is a kind of dérive. I think it’s about drifting, and I never know where these monochromes are going to crop up. Except that they're probably not in the most elegant parts of town because those parts of town get tided up all the time. I just have to start walking and keep my eyes open. Some days I don't find anything and some days I get lucky.

Many of your works on Artimage more explicitly explore the aesthetic of the readymade object or the found material. Can you say a little bit about your ideas of recycling and waste?

People sometimes say that, because the central element is white, the Found Monochromes are unlike the other work that I make, which is usually quite brightly coloured. But one response is to say that white is a colour like any other, or at least it functions as a colour in these works.

Another way in which this series relates to my other work is that it's based on found material. I used to spend a fair amount of time scrounging materials from the streets, such as old industrial dollies or light boxes – things you'd find in the less tidied-up parts of a city, or in junkyards and suchlike. I was always on the lookout for readymade objects that I could adapt. In that sense, these are also readymades; they're not things that I make, they're things that I observe and record. To me, that’s exactly the same process of drifting in the streets.

In some ways, Found Monochromes is about elements of the urban landscape which have disappeared. How does that relate to your concept of the readymade?

I'm quite an old-fashioned artist in that I still think Baudelaire was the best writer on modern art. In his essays of the 1860s he talked about how artists need to look around the streets. They had to look at modernity; they had to look at the everyday life of their city and not just the parts you’re meant to look at. He has this most beautiful description of modernity, where he says “the ephemeral, the fugitive and the contingent” is the other half of “the eternal and the immutable”. I think that attitude towards the city is a very productive one, and I think there's still something to be gained by that process of observation and recording.

Another way of viewing Found Monochromes is as a series of rectangles and squares within an image - perhaps as frames?

I think the reason I became psychologically attached to them is because they’re ambiguous, even though they're very simple. There's an ambiguity about whether they are planes or voids, presences or absences. In the very best ones, there’s a flicker between them being a hole cut in the visual fabric or something that is masking out a bit of the visual fabric. I like that ambiguity a lot.

The city is a visually overloaded environment and the presence of a void within that visual fabric can seem like a kind error, a mistake, something that shouldn't be there. The curious thing is they don't last long; they get filled in as if these moments of absence are intolerable in some way. They get tagged, they get filled in with what they're meant to be filled-in with, or they get taken away.

The idea that these monochromes get tagged is interesting – they mean different things to different people. In that sense, this set of images is incredibly democratic…

I’m slightly nervous about describing art as democratic. I like the sense that they're entirely external to me, they're not of my making. I've no control over how or when or where they are. I think it introduces a certain amount of humility into the process of making work. The world out there is far richer and more complex than anything that I can make from it and I think to be reminded of that is never a bad thing.

What’s the difference between Found Monochromes and your other work, for example, Skip, which you showed in Brighton Festival 2012?

Skip relates very directly to the work I did at the Royal Festival Hall, Festival Remix. They are different from Found Monochromes in that I took some rough old objects that are generally overlooked and ignored – or seen as unwelcome interruptions or obstructions – and highlighted them with neon. But in another way I'm doing the same thing with Found Monochromes, which is to draw attention to these overlooked forms and objects. It's about looking at what's already there and drawing attention to it.

What artistic traditions do you follow?

I look at as much work as I can, from Fra Angelica to contemporary art. I’m not sure I follow any particular tradition but I am a child of the 1960s, so perhaps inevitably I am drawn to Arte Povera, Minimalism, Pop (or Warhol at least), Brazilian Neo-Concreto, some Gutai work, and so on. A lot of this work employs everyday objects, and ordinary, unembellished industrial materials that carry the marks of their makers and their use. Over the last year I have also had the chance to have a very long look at Malevich again, which has been an enormous pleasure and something from which I have learned a great deal. I still think the work of Malevich and some of his contemporaries is some of the greatest work of the twentieth century. So, the monochrome and the readymade, and planar abstract art in general – these are the things that underpin what I make.

Can comparisons be drawn between your work and street art?

I think it's the antithesis of street art. It's in the street, but it's not art when it's in the street. I see street art as part of the over-egging of visual culture in the city – there's just too much to look at. Banksy et al have a lot to answer for: its mostly illustrative and sentimental. Worst of all it has a message. A blank rectangle is a resistance to that, I hope.

How do you perceive Found Monochromes? Are they physical, are they colour, what is the texture of the rectangles and squares?

I like the title of the adjacent show – ‘Adventures of the Black Square’. The adventures are many and varied and diverse. Found Monochromes is my way of continuing the discussion about abstract art in the city. Malevich's work was about abstract art in the city, about planes of colour, and about the autonomy of colour and shape from the demands of representation. For me, that was the great liberation of art in the twentieth century.

I couldn't have begun to think about making these works, if I hadn't been steeped in a history of twentieth century abstract art. As a student in the 1970s, it was very exciting to learn to about the revolutionary art of the 1920s. I think every generation of students needs to discover for themselves this relationship between art and the political culture. For my generation the art of the inter-war period offered a model where art could be radically abstract, but also radically dissenting at the same time. That was stirring stuff.

At the risk of generalization I would say all art is an invitation to look. You can't force people to look and I wouldn't want to. So when people say “this work is a challenge” to our very being or whatever – come on, no it's not. It's an invitation to look in a certain direction. It's no more than that, and it's no less than that. The best art, I think, in some strange way helps you to open your eyes. The best art is a wonderful invitation.

What are your plans for the collection? Have you made prints?

I'd like to exhibit all 500 images as prints, but the framing costs would be slightly excessive. The first time I showed the work was as a small set of Cibachrome prints, in 1999. By 2003 I had enough images to make it into a continuous slide projection. More recently I have shown them as Lambda prints; in 2010 I published a book of 250 images and also made it into a looped digital projection, also of 250 images. This is the first time I have shown 500 images and it seemed right to show them as a four-screen projection. It is also the first time I have separated out the portrait format images from the landscapes, which is a much more satisfying way of presenting them on screens and monitors. But I don't know what's going to happen to the series or what I'm going to do next.

Have you had any unusual requests to use your images?

Once I was asked to show them as a slide projection on stage, to accompany a piece of music by Morten Feldman for a festival at the Almeida Theatre. I don't have a great knowledge of avant-garde music of the 1950s and 1960s, but I’m always happy when the work gets taken away from me in this way. It's generally a good sign – it suggests people see something in the work that you haven’t.

Interview by Mark Waugh, Head of Research and Innovation at DACS.

Browse related artworks by David Batchelor

Images of David Batchelor's artwork can be licensed through Artimage. Browse related work below.

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19 Islington London 010599 David Batchelor

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Festival Remix, 2006:

Caçamba, 2012:

Brick Lane Remix, 2004:

Hackney Road drawing 04, 2004:

Hackney Road Drawing 04 2004 David Batchelor

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Monochrome Archive, 1997-2015: David Batchelor in conversation with Artimage

Browse related artworks by David Batchelor

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