Gerhard Richter - Snapshots of Indifference
cypher
This weekend I went with my girlfriend to the stylish Glucksman
gallery in Cork - which was housing a small retrospective of Gerhard
Richter paintings and photographs. I had traveled 300 miles from
Dublin just to see this show (well admittedly also so that my
girlfriend could catch up with her folks and we could have a little
holiday) to say it was a wasted trip is maybe a bit overstated. But I
was heartily disappointed in the exhibition (thankfully the rest of
our holiday was great fun).
However the Richter exhibition was a major coup for Cork over Dublin
and a sign of the high esteem that the Glucksman gallery is held in.
You just don't get many other painters in the world today who are more
revered - Freud, Kiefer, Tuymans and Neo Rauch are the only close
competitors. Richter works in many different styles - blurred
photorealism, gesturally abstract, colour field abstraction and more
or less conceptual. At auction his paintings have sold for several
millions, he is beloved in the art magazines, a hero to many young
artists who still want to paint - and even conceptualists who hate
painting often have time work his work.
But it was with very mixed feeling that I went to the Richter
exhibition. I have ambivalent feelings towards his art - which mirror
the ambivalence in his work. I can honestly say I have never really
cared too much about his work. I find most of his work very boring.
The exhibition titled 'Survey' featured 27 works - oil paintings
(mostly very small by his standards - on canvas, alucbond, plywood, or
paper) Cibachrome photographs and offset prints. Both the title and
the selection was made by Richter who aimed to give an over-view of
his lives work from his blurred photo-realist paintings of the 1960's
to his abstract canvases of the 1980's and 1990's. In fact it was a
very minor exhibition of his work - no photo-realist works were
present except if they had been photographed by Richter. The title
'Survey' came from an Offset Print he made in 1998 - in which (using
objective sources like encyclopedias) he listed the most important
artists, writers, philosophers, composers and architects who shaped
Western culture from 1300 to the 1990's. Richter's name is listed -
fair enough it's not his opinion but others - but I looked and looked
and could not see Anslem Kiefer listed! Oh how the grand artists spar
today - watch out I'll leave you out of my Offset-Print!
Richter is a painter who works simultaneously in many different styles
each of which seems to contradict the other. His necrophilic paintings
are made by a man who does not believe in the fictions of photo-
realism (photos are not real) or the fictions of abstraction (abstract
art is not spiritual) and his life's work seems to be a deconstruction
of the myths of romanticism that lurk behind the western eye. The
trouble is that much of his work is willfully experimental in a rather
dishonest way. Its is the pointless experimentalism of a callow art
student given the endless paint and canvas supplies, mythology and
price tags of a serious academic and art-world-star. Yes Richter is a
very technically accomplished artist but he has skill without vision,
passion or genius. He is a good painter - but even in realist mode he
is nowhere near the genius of Lovis Corinth, Richard Gerstl, Max
Beckman or Otto Dix never mind Casper David Fredrick or Albert Durer.
He is utterly incapable of inventing an image from his head or working
from life - his whole world is a scrapbook. As for his abstracts -
they look like lifeless zombies compared with a Kandinsky, Pollock or
De Kooning.
Long ago back in the 1970's conceptualists liked to prattle on about
the commercialism of modernist painters. They liked to pour scorn on
the doodles Picasso drew on napkins and were then sold for thousands -
seeing it as indicative of the craven, reactionary and capitalist
actions of old-school oil-painters. But what even 'serious'
conceptualists like Richter have now proven is that they too can be as
mercenary. By making photographs of his well-known works - exhibiting
them in Perspex boxes, which show you more of yourself than the art
work - Richter has basically just done the conceptual equivalent of a
doodle on a napkin. But at least a doodle on a napkin doesn't come
with a sanctimonious lecture on simulation, appropriation and Post-
Modern reproduction.
I first became aware of Gerhard Richter's work at the age of nineteen
(1990) as I read 'Contemporary Art' written by Klaus Honnef (Taschen
1988). When I flicked excitedly over the pages of Honnef's book -
amongst all the bombastic, hectoring, macho and ragged canvases of
painters like Baselitz, Clemente and Schnabel - Richter's paintings
looked enigmatic, puzzling - yet entrancing. I had never really seen
an intelligent photorealist painting before (one that so clearly
stated its artificiality and imperfection) most third-rate photo-
realists try to paint pictures more real that the photographs they are
copying - but Richter's photo-realist paintings seemed at once
powerfully realistic and true but also artificial and constructed.
Seeing how Richter constantly avoided painting in one coherent style
bolstered my own confidence in my youthful refusal to be tied down to
one style. Moreover I utterly adored his large abstracts with their
thick paint - scrapped across with wooden slats, super saturated oil
colours and their intelligent re-interpretations of Abstract
Expressionism. Often Richter made small abstracts - which he then
photographed in a rather blurred manner - and then repainted the
photographs on a large scale - creating abstract trompe-l'oie's. His
abstracts seemed more like three-dimensional abstracts spaces than an
emotional expression of himself - though they did also seem to be a
sensual release from his more demanding and deadpan photo-realist
works.
When in 2001 I saw a handful of his huge oil paintings (each in a
totally different style) in the Pompidou Centre in Paris I was awe
struck by his technical mastery and professional rigor - they were
some of the best paintings I had seen in the whole museum. But after
viewing them - I quickly forgot them - they meant nothing to the way I
wanted to paint. My favorite painting was '1024 Farben N. 350/3', a
massive, great lacquer painting of his from 1973 - which was a huge
colour chart (like you might get in paint supply shop but made up
musically by a budding Paul Klee) made up of hundreds of different
coloured rectangles of oil paint. My immediate thought was - Hirst
stole this idea from Richter and converted the rectangles to circles!
It is just one example of Richter's importance to and influence on
young artists of our day.
But as the years passed my interest in his art evaporated. I came to
dislike the negative persona of his art - his works dance of the seven
veils, its political and economic hypocrisy and moral neutrality. Time
and again I balked at buying a book dedicated to him - I succumbed
only once before this time in Cork (this is from a man with over 300
art books alone). I just never really cared that deeply for his art. I
found his work increasingly boring and pointless. I did not know what
he stood for - or if he stood for anything. I still don't know - and
that for me is the most telling indictment of his art. Warhol had
faced similar criticisms but I think compared to Richter - Warhol is a
genuinely honest, political and socially active artist - and that's
saying something! The difference I think lies in Warhol's honesty
which throws into relief Richter's dishonesty - first and foremost
with himself and secondly with his public. Warhol's frank admittance
that he was; a businessman, a voyeur, a sensationalist, a consumer of
mass-culture, a capitalist, a Catholic and a homosexual stands in
direct contrast to Richter's Post-Modern, Deconstructionist lack of
faith in anything and refusal to state any ethical, aesthetic or moral
belief. It is also is typical of the worst excesses of the Post-Modern
academic.
The argument behind works like Richter's is that art is 'an enquiry'
or 'an investigation' the artist (much like a journalist) makes no
attempt to moralize or judge - merely record. But this is a dishonest
cop-out and also an autistic form of solipsism - every cultural
product has a social effect and a political basis - if only in terms
of the politics of the art world. Moreover the whole notion of 'an
objective-enquiry' is bullshit. Every artist or thinker is motivated
by his/her own family, class, social, sexual, political, national and
racial background as well as a dark sea of inner subconscious drives
and desires - objectivity is a pure fiction. Having spent my life
trying to understand the motivations behind the subjects I choose to
paint (if only for my own enlightenment) and then defending my choices
in the art world - I find Richter's Machiavellian evasion of telling
questions about his motivations blood-boiling.
Then in 2005 I read Julian Spalding's 'The Eclipse of Art' (2003) in
it Spalding points out how Robert Storr (in his essay in the catalogue
for Richter's major retrospective in M.O.M.A. in New York in 2002) had
compared Richter to Velazquez and Vermeer. But how could that be
Spalding asked when Richter had never developed an artistic identity.
All of which lead me to believe that Richter might merely be an
academic opportunist. One who had wedded his traditional Communist
academic skills learnt in the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts - to the
Post Pop-Art, Post-Modern and Post-Structuralist concerns of the
Capitalistic West.
You see there are some master painters like Rembrandt, Goya, Van Gogh,
Picasso or Freud whom I revere, adore, wish to emulate and nearly cry
when I fail. But then there are other painting masters of the academy
like Raphael, Nicolas Poussin and Gerhard Richter that leave me
feeling conflicted and bewildered. The art lover part of my brain is
thrilled, the art critic side of my brain is intellectually stimulated
- but the painter in me feels antipathy for their work. I can admire
their art but at the same time not take it to my heart.
I know full well the importance, technical genius, and Devine
preciosity of Raphael but he represents everything in art I am against
- order, harmony, idealism, purity and devotion. I have been stunned
into silence by the beauty of many of his canvases - but have never
wanted to emulate him.
Similarly Poussin has all my life left me cold - I find his art like a
dead fish. I see no pleasure in the handling of paint, no passion in
his compositions and no humanity in his antiquity. But I also know
that to many painters my comments would come as a sign of the highest
ignorance and Expressionistic prejudice. To them Poussin's restraint,
order and emotional stoicism is admirable in the extreme.
Finally there is Gerhard Richter - somewhat a God for today's art
world - but who knows how his reputation will live after this cynical
Post-Modern, academic, theory-bound, Mannerist and disjoined period of
art has ended (I do not believe that art is dead - art can never die).
But for his era Gerhard Richter is the Poussin of the snapshot - it is
his cold repressed cynicism and emotional detachment that not only
caught the early Post-Modern Zeitgeist but also stayed its course the
longest. Personally I find his work necrophiliaic, autistic,
solipsistic, academic, dishonest, pretentious and posturing. I have
never seen any so called 'great painter' - work with such contempt for
his medium or with so little passion for its makeup - paint, colour or
the imprint of the brushmark. You see Modernism could and did happen
without the likes of Richter and his necrophilic Post-Modernist
buddies - but Richter could never have made art without Modernism. His
work is a purely reactionary counter punch to the melee that was
modernism. Like a parasite on the corpse of modernism - he strips the
whole Modernist legacy (which is profoundly anti-academic) of all its
idealism, energy and creativity - in order to bolster the power of the
new Post-Modern academy.
The old academy - the one rebelled against by Courbet, Manet, Monet,
Degas, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso and Polock was fetishisticlly
obesessed with craft, against any modernisation and narrow mindedly
concerned with an idealized kind of realist art that stretched back to
Raphael. It was caught up with tedious and unrealistic mythology,
uninspired detail and painting pictures with a moralizing story. It
over emphasized near photographic technical skills at the expense of
personal vision, emotional authenticity and intellectual complexity.
It is the boogey man in all the histories of modernism - but if those
artists thought the old academy was bad they should see the one today!
First of all this academy is a thousand times larger, more powerful
and detrimental to real art - than anything in the ninetieth century.
In today's academy it is a sin to have a manual skill. Those who can
draw or paint or sculpt with passion, craft and panache are the demons
of elitism and a reactionary element in the Post-Modern circus. Art
history is seen as something to sneer at rather than learn from. Art
is thought of as a form of hippie self-realization rather than craft
to be mastered. Very quickly today's art students learn the two most
important lessons of the art world - how to bullshit and how to arse-
lick. They think they are rebels because they turn up to class late or
tell a joke about a tutor - yet have no idea just how brainwashed and
conformist they really are. For every hour taken from the life room -
one is given over to theory. Today's art student is expected to be
more than a maker of art interventions - he/she must also be a
philosopher of existence! Or rather a philosopher of the small bits of
fluff in his/her navel - and how it relates to the cotton trade and
the slavery of the African-Americans. It is this shabby academy - with
all its elitist, pretentious, politically-correct, PO-Mo, Post-
Deconstructionist, Post-Feminist and multi-cultural bullshit - that
Richter is the godfather to.
Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932 one year before Hitler
took power. Typical of many Germans of their generation, Richter's
relatives were involved in the Nazi movement; his mother's brother,
Uncle Rudi died a young Nazi officer, while Richter's mentally
disabled aunt was imprisoned in a euthanasia camp. As a youth Richter
was part of the Hitler youth - though this was not uncommon - most of
the young German population (girls and boys) were indoctrinated in
this manner. He was thirteen when the Allies bombed Dresden in 1945.
Had he been only a couple of years older he might have been enlisted
into the Hitler Youth to fight in the foxholes against the Russian
steamroller. But by thirteen the war was over - however he lived under
occupation by the Soviets until he left to live in Düsseldorf in West
Germany in 1961. That means that he spent the first thirteen years of
his life under Nazi manipulation, propaganda and delusion, and then
spent the next sixteen years under East German communist manipulation,
propaganda and delusion - before living in West Germany and lived
under our Capitalistic manipulations, propaganda and delusions.
Despite the national slaughter, tragedy, grief and enslavement that he
witnessed in his nation all around him - his art is surprisingly
controlled and unemotional. But having seen just how brutal and
sadistic ideologies can be - he seems to have taken the stance of
impassive reporter.
For a future Post-Modern academic his training was impeccable. First
he studied in The Dresden Academy of Fine Arts - learning the skills
of 'reactionary' figurative Socialist Realism. Then he studied at The
State Academy of Fine Art in Düsseldorf - learning all about the
latest trends in abstract, figurative and Pop art. No doubt it was his
scyzophrenic training, which led him to such an objective mix - of the
traditionally realistic and crafted oil painting - and the concepts of
Pop art and the mass media.
In 1962 - Richter made his first paintings based on family snap-shots
and photographs taken from newspapers, magazines and books - only six
years later did he start to take and use his own photographs though he
also has continued to use mass-media images. What position that puts
him in terms of copyright restriction (or any other artist - including
myself - who uses other peoples photographs) I don't know.
The key painting in this early series of work is 'Uncle Rudi' 1965 -
his commemoration of a family photograph of his beloved, charming and
handsome Uncle Rudi (Richter's account of his mothers account of her
brother who died early in the second world war). But what we the
viewers see is a German Lieutenant in peaked hat and trechcoat and
smiling brightly in front of what looks like a military barracks. The
painting is blurry and in parts illegible. Although the actual
painting was not in the show - a Cibachrome photograph of it taken by
Richter was - creating a mirage of a colour photographic copy of a
mirage of a handmade painting which itself was a copy of a old black
and white mechanical snap shot which itself was only a mechanical
counterfeit of nature. These are the stupid games of the simulacrum
that the artistic academics of today love - but to me its just a snide
money making scheme.
The basic notion of simulation or simulacrum is that in today's media
world - there is no such thing as 'reality' or 'authenticity' - it has
been replaced by the trillions of 'hyperreal' duplicated images of
itself. Cultural products produced through photography, film, video,
TV or today the internet - are forgeries of reality which themselves
have been duplicated and reduplicated - making them part of an endless
hall of mirrors - images reflected in images upon images into
infinity. But what does this all mean in the art world? Well it means
that old-fashioned notions about the individuality, authenticity,
passions and the brushstrokes of the artist (even if they are 'torn
from the body') all amount to a hill of beans in a cynical Post-Modern
art world which has only one role - to deconstruct and plagiarize the
edifice of Modernism and Western Culture in general.
Time and again Richter has stated that there is a difference between
the subject of a painting and its meaning, a topic and its depiction.
His paintings were not based on the real world but on the reproduced
world of photography. He was not painting his uncle Rudi he was
painting a copy of a photograph of his uncle Rudi. That is why Richter
is probably the preeminent painter of our day - for in his moderately
skilled and moderately intelligent works he strips bares the
mechanisms of photographic 'reality', 'truth' and 'authenticity'. At
the same time he exposes the fiction of the painted canvas - which
promises a counterfeit of reality and its myths of artistic vision,
subjective emotion and creative soul. Finally he strips bare the
mechanisms of abstract painting - and its myths of spontaneity,
expressiveness and spiritual depth. All this he delivers in a deadpan
way that would have put Buster Keaton to shame. Why is it nearly
always men who come up with philosophical notions like this? Neurosis
comes in many different forms - not all madmen are raving lunatics -
some are autistic solipsists with no concept of the real resistant
world around them. They think like small boys that the world is theirs
to state into being. They are not creators - they are dissectors.
Objectivity without emotion is often a quest in a Richter oil
painting. For example I doubt the bomber in a Royal Air Force
Lancaster or American B17 Fortress bomber over Dresden - could have
painted a less emotional paintings that Richter made in 1968 (not in
the show) of bombed out German cities. But then how could a German
after 1945 - express the thoughts that were going through his or her
mind. How does any nation deal with that kind of collective shame,
guilt - and inner anger? Many adopted the role of self-censorship and
self-repression and Richter was one of them. But spiking out of his
work came images from his childhood nightmares - British Spitfires and
American bombers. As an Irish man my first split second thought coming
from a childhood saturated in Hollywood films is: 'oh there are the
heroes planes', or 'those are the good guys'. But to a German child,
who saw his beautiful and cultured home burnt to the ground and
25,000-35,000 of its citizens, killed by bomb, incendiaries, and then
firestorms - well what would you think? Even some of those in Allied
countries were later to believe this had been an Allied war crime.
How do you deal with that? Especially if you know that your suffering
in historical terms was seen as a necessary evil to end an even worse
regime. Ground like grain in a mill the German population where bombed
into the ground - a revenge for Coventry and London. Yes the German's
voted for Hitler, yes they fell for his lies, yes they fought and died
for him on the battle field in their millions, yes thousands of SS
sadists killed six million Jews, and up to five million others; Roma
Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, physically disabled people, mentally
ill patients, homosexuals, communists, Catholic priests and nuns,
political agitators, artists, writers and journalists. But in many
ways they too were victims of one of the most cunning, manipulative
and sadistic regimes the world has ever seen. The tools of propaganda,
policing, censorship and brutal beatings the Nazis either invented or
adopted from Italian Fascism or Russian Communism were so powerful on
a fragile democracy and naive population that it is fair to say that
most where hypnotized into National delusion, racial prejudice, and
maniacal faith in Hitler. How else can one explain the suicidal deaths
of young boys of the Hitler Youth (only a few years older than Richter
at the time) - who still believed Hitler would reverse the course of
the war with new wonder weapons - as Berlin was being blasted into
oblivion by Russian artillery. Today some might look cynically at the
German people and this defense of it - but have things changed that
much? Young men in their millions still fight for regimes and
ideologies they are convinced are on the side of the good in a war
against evil.
After the war the philosopher Theodor Adorno famously wrote that:
"After Auschwitz writing poetry is barbaric," (though he subsequently
added that "perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a
tortured man has to scream."). But artists are born to make art - no
matter what their nations crimes - so art had to be made. In the
1950's German artists adopted the abstract mannerisms of French
Taschism and American Abstract Expressionism - it was a cop out.
Then from this toxic dump of history a few great artists emerged in
Germany in the early 1960's. First the godfather to everything since -
an inventive sculptor, an inspired draughtsman, a teacher, a spiritual
healer of wounds, a social worker, a mystic, a bibliophile, an
activist, a social-sculptor and a liberator - Joseph Beuys. He showed
that art could become a way of reconnecting with a deeper - older
German history - one that had either been brutalized or censored by
the Nazi historians.
If Beuys was the Wiseman of German art - Baselitz was the adolescent
thug - that brutally crashed against taboos and raised iconoclasm to a
pitch not seen since Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon 1906/7 (the
ultimate iconoclastic - "Everything We Think We Know About Painting Is
Bullshit! Lets Start Again!"- Canvas of the Twentieth century).
Baselitz's upside down paintings are thought of as a gimmick. I don't
think that does them justice. Baseltiz's work was always about
thuggish rebellion - he made that clear in his adolescent penis
paintings like The Great Night In The Bucket 1962-3. But he only began
turning his paintings upside down after first slowly fragmenting and
metaphorically tearing them. The up side down paintings were a rebuke
to painting yet paradoxically like many iconoclastic gestures it made
the viewer look more closely at paintings and how we understand them.
Today Baselitz's is not talked about much - it's a shame because he is
a far greater artist than Richter.
I would argue that Anslem Kiefer is by far the greatest artist and
most important painter Germany has produced since the heydays of
Kirchner, Nolde, Beckman, Dix, and Grosz. In fact I think he is
greater than Bueys his teacher or Richter, Balelitz, Polke, or
Kippenberger. Only Kiefer took radioactive Germany history head on and
established a mode of understanding, healing and re-birth. On a
technical level I also find his complexly constructed canvases
(plastered with unruly oil paint, woodcuts, clay, broken ceramic,
lead, barbed wire, or straw and filled with all kinds of images of
Germania and the Jews) - the only successful slayers of these ghosts.
Unlike Richter - there is nothing repressed, or cynical about Kiefers
work - it is straight ahead polemic in paint.
Like all good academics from old - Richter is technically very good in
oil paint and watercolour in abstraction and photo-realism. Looking at
his photo-realist canvases the tawdry incompetent and brain-dead
nature of so many also-ran's of photorealism becomes apparent. It is
not just his skill that elevates him above them - for that would not
be enough to defeat Richard Estes brilliantly inter-composed
photographs rendered with such panache. No it is his cold calculating
intellect - his willingness to confound people's expectations and
challenge their commonplace faith in photography as an objective
record of the world. Richter proves that photographs are just one
millisecond captured in time but made by a human with a history and a
prejudice towards the world. Moreover - once in the media arena - they
force people to take a stance - aesthically, sexually, politically,
historically or racially.
But time and again I am baffled as to what Richter feels or thinks
about the subjects that he paints. On the one hand they can appear
random - but on another they are politically, historically or sexually
charged. For example he has painted some soft-core porn (including
some of his first wife) - yet I am unsure that he ever had a lustful
thought over any of these images or any other soft porn images. He
painted members of the Red Army Faction (also known as the Baader
Meinhof Gang) in particular Ulrike Meinhof - lying dead after she had
hung herself (a verdict strongly denied by others who believe she was
murdered by the state). But how can a multi-millionaire artist with no
political allegiances to left or right come to want to paint and
memorialize communist terrorists who's group had killed numerous
people and wounded many more? Nostalgia - did he understand their
warped idealism? Approval - did he approve their goals if not their
crimes? Perhaps he respected their attack on ex-Nazi's who had gone on
to major posts in German government and business and on a cultural of
historical amnesia. Maybe as some suggested he sought merely to
increase his own notoriety. Or maybe as a classic iconoclast he sought
to spark debate and contemplation of what place paintings based on
mass media photographs have within a cultural debate.
Nostalgia is a constant theme of Richter's oil paintings as it is with
all old photographs. Nostalgia is a fanciful and poetic
reinterpretation of history - one that removes the pain of the event
and replaces it with wonder and awe - that it was lived through. I am
reminded again of Richter's interview with the South Bank Show, in
which he recalled his war years as exciting and trouble free! Where it
not for the fact that I have been recently watching the great
documentary 'Hitler's Children' on The History Channel - I would
swallow that hook line and sinker. But listening to these now old men
and women (many Richter's age) describe the delusions they believed
living under the Nazis and how guilty and ashamed they feel today - I
don't believe a word of it. What is it that old veteran soldiers (of
every nation) say again and again: "Any man who says he was not
frightened in battle - is a bloody liar."
At the same time the Glucksman Gallery was staging a second exhibition
entitled 'Overtake (The Reinterpretation of Modern Art)' the show
contained work by Bernd Behr, Andrea Büttner, Kerstin Cmelka, Annelise
Coste, Tacita Dean, Carsten Fock, Iain Forsyth/Jane Pollard, Wade
Guyton, Bertrand Lavier, Mark Leckey, Sean Lynch, Simon Dybbroe
Møller, Jonathan Monk, Falke Pisano, Tilo Schulz, Mario Garcia Torres.
I have only ever heard of a few of these dolts - but I am sure they
are big men on campus somewhere in the bloody world. Most of these
artists are inspired by the ideas of appropriation art from the 1970's
and 1980's. 'Appropriation' is an art world term for 'stealing'. Their
link with Richter is in their mutual fascination with the mediated
world of images that surround us and the nature of reality. All the
work in their show was based on observations, thoughts, or parody of
others artists work. I suppose it was all about how art influences
others artists work - the kind of thing art student's are supposed to
fill their sketchbooks these days with - childish hand written
observations and sketches around pasted in postcards of art works they
like. Personally I found the whole 'Overtake' exhibition pointless,
stupid and yet again hopelessly Post-Modern, cannibalistic and
impotent.