Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
HISTORY
Early one morning, words were missing. Before that words were not; facts were, faces were.
Anne Carson
Gerhard Richter paints a memory; a collective one, a rupture in a nation's unconscious. His series of
paintings (15 ones, to be exact) created between March and November 1988 depict a very recent
historical reality in a rather unlikely fashion. Just like how a video reel accompanies more and more
visual snow the more you replay it, his paintings are blurry, in shades of gray, with faces of the actors
of the event made rather unrecognizable. It is almost as if he holds on to the last particle of truth
before the event fully gains the status of nostalgia or myth; the last photograph of Gudrun Ensslin re-
captured, her smile resembling that of the Cheshire Cat, in the center of the painting, with everything
next to her becoming an unrecognizable blur.
The historical reality that Richter depicts is the deaths of the members of the German Red Army
Faction, the notorious terrorist organization, whose controversial deaths that took place while they
were in the prison, leaving many doubts about whether they were caused by suicide or murder. The
event was loaded with symbolical importance for German artists; the slow death of 1968's optimism
reaching a peak and the world politics moving to a complete spectacle beyond the dualistic right/left
division was summarized in the last moments of RAF. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, famed German
director, made two films concerning the topic right after the event took place. In the most bitterly
cynical fashion, the characters in Die Dritte Generation respond with hysterical laughter ('Look at our
little boy!' screams a main character) when they open one of the young and aspiring terrorist's
baggages and run into a book by Nietzsche. The film is cryptic, gloomy and puzzling; it is also filled
with icy, deadpan comedy. The uniqueness of the event is accompanied by the uniqueness of the ways
to depict it; Fassbinder moves his camera through daily conversations, newspaper headlines, half-
empty apartment buildings and scribbles on the public toilets. The same is true for Richter; the
incompleteness, the vagueness of the content is tied to the very form of these artistic depictions of it.
It is as much as the lack of truth, or perhaps the death of truth (as it was perceived then), than the mere
reflection of truth then; it is rather challenging but fruitful to apply Heidegger's notions of
concealedness/unconcealedness to an artwork that is both embedded in the fabric of the social, and
works as a negative image of it. It is a challenge because these paintings are both reproductions of real
life images, and reproductions of memory of the artist. For Heidegger, truth is found in revealing -
unconcealedness; the painting reveals a world of truth, a rendering of intelligibility; yet even though
this revealing is not yet truth, and truth cannot be understood as anything more than this opening of
presence itself. Can Richter's depiction of Ulrike Meinhof in her dying bed, pallid and still, can be
understood as a depiction of what is in truth, a case of truth setting itself to work? Richter does not
depict the historical memory solely as a reproduction of a present thing; he instead captures the
essence of the memory, with its fading, vibratile movement, with its ability to make caricatural images
of what once were living, breathing beings.
The truth here is that of an happening; a temporal, historical one. Yet Richter introduces another layer
to the puzzle, a very humane one too; that of the retrospection. It is as if the memory of Red Army
Faction, overflowing with symbolicism, had already gained the status of art once it started circulating
in TV screens and newspaper clippings; these images charged with metaphors became monuments of
a reality that was lost (the reality of fight for a singular justice through justified violence, before
utopia became fragmented and violence became a spectacle), a monument of struggle circulating on
earth, when the struggle itself was rendered unintelligable due to the paradigm shift. Or perhaps what
these paintings do is laying bare this very process of loss of meaning, depicting it with loss of facial
features or distinguishable backgrounds. Paul Geraldy, a French poet, has once said that memory is a
poet and not a historian. Is it this peculiar characteristic of memory that allows Richter's works to be
so simple yet powerful?
The joyful, transcendent, lively excitement of Heidegger when he talks about a painting of muddy
boots cannot be duplicated here, yet to brush off these paintings as mere postmodern aestheticizations
of an event would be falling into the trap of postmodernistic discourse. Richter is not an artist of the
negative categories; genuine loss and history is at play in his work. Thus, these paintings does unify a
certain world by 'giving to it its look', whether it may be a look of confusion and uncertainty. Moreso,
the history here is also one of uncertainty. Would the German public approach this event in the same
manner if the deaths were ruled out, with adequate evidence, as suicides or state-assisted murders?
The mass disappointment of German left is embedded in these paintings, and in return, it is these
paintings (and many other artworks inspired by RAF following their leaders' death) that renders this
historical situation intelligible and available to interpretation. 'A push enters into history, and history
either starts up or starts again', Heidegger puts it so precisely when talking about the relationship
between history and art. The 'push' he speaks about that rewrites the history can be argued to first
happen when historical reality of RAF is turned into televised imagery; the second push done by
artworks themselves are the ones that renders visible to us how the history has been re-written, by
showing us how our understanding of history and ethics has been transformed (in this case, muddled,
blurred and emptied). The painting of Meinhof's deathbed and cell and the image of those in the
newspaper, when put side by side, resemble each other. Yet, these two distinct forms are two distinct
instances of re-shaping of history, rendering visible different aspects of the historical reality the nation
of Germany was placed in. The painting here works both as the-world-made-intelligible and the thing
which rendered it intelligible. It is both immersed in the historical background of the time it is placed
in, and transcending it.
The photographic images inspire Richter's paintings. The characteristic of the photographic medium
(especially in the case of 'press photographs free of artistic intentions' as it is here) is, as Roland
Barthes puts it, that it is a message without a code in need of other signifiers to convey meaning. It is
purely denovative. The historical text(of the evening news), as Barthes puts it, latch parasitically onto
the sign that is the photograph in order to render it reprehensible. The meaning thus can be said to
exist in the realm of history and culture. The meaning understood is the meaning that results on the
perceiver's prior understanding of the world, and through processses of various connotations. In
Richter's paintings, the medium allows this to wither away; the painting allows for a new historical
dimension to open, and allows for feelings of loss, grief and melancholy to be expressed without the
need to know much of the historical background. Yet the only differences are brushstrokes, intentional
blurs and deformations, haziness and indistinctiveness. These are not paintings of RAF only; these are
projections of universal emotions such as nostalgia, guilt and confusion. They are also projecting the
fragility of the memory itself and at the same time, rendering this fragility visible to the spectator who
is placed within the historical situation. The paintings of the photographs both double the distance
between us and the subject (speaking medium-wise) and brings us closer by freeing it from the
constraints of the temporality. Christian Lotz puts it more adequately:
Stretching the English language here, we could say that while a photograph is being taken,
painting takes away the photograph as photograph and turns the image into a formation. We
take pictures with our cameras, but we take away this 'taking' while painting the photograph.
The painted photograph hence is a return and a 'giving back'.
Richter has famously said he does not believe in 'the reality of the painting'. For him, painting was a
product of semblance and so was photography; both recall the object yet unable to reform it. He goes
on to mention that the camera, in contrast to the painting, sees the objects; it does not apprehend
them. Thus the question of the perception between the two is one of meaning and of projection.
Richter's maneuver here resists simplistic reductions; one cannot say the only change in question is a
doubling of the distance and thus a postmodernist falsification of the subject. These paintings of
photographs place these photographs in a web of meaning and makes them objects-for-understanding;
the referent is now within the artwork itself, within the painting and internal to it - unlike the case of
the photography when the referent stays outside the object of art, needing connotations to function
adequately.
A paradox is at play here; the circular movement of these paintings from still photographs to
memory, from memory to paintings, and from paintings to back to historical reality of the world
again- makes them hard to place them in a rigid framework. Even after all of this, what the painting
gives to the audience is a throw-back into a state of confusion (and perhaps melancholy). Heidegger
may oppose vehemently against the aestheticization of the art later promoted by many postmodern
thinkers, but I think he would be rather puzzled by the postmodern world itself, when those new pages
opened up to history only refer back to the mythified and missed past of the 'really real'.
rem Kayra zdemir / 2005924
Bibliography:
Barthes, R., & Heath, S. (1977). Image-music-text: Roland Barthes. Glasgow: Collins.
Carson, A. (2005). Glass, irony, and God. New York: New Directions Books.
Fassbinder, R. W. (Director). (1988). Die Dritte Generation [Motion picture]. Germany: Cinema
Guild.
Heidegger, M. (1950). The origin of the work of art. Waterloo, Ont.: University of Waterloo.
Lotz, C. (2016). The art of Gerhard Richter. Hermeneutics, images, meaning. London: Bloomsbury
Academic.
P., Geraldy. (2000). Toi et Moi. STOCK editions.