I was invited by Peter Stevenson to participate in a panel on the German artist Gerhard Richter during a retrospective of his work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on November 16, 2002. The poet and publisher David Breskin had edited a book, Richter 858, for which he had asked a number of writers, myself included, to respond to Richter’s painting.
1.
Until his retrospective last year at MoMA Manhattan, Gerhard Richter was for me a peripheral figure. I could recall seeing only the Baader-Meinhof sequence, his stunning retro-real noir contribution to the iconography of political violence that has occupied so much of our visual landscape.
When the drums began to beat for the Richter retrospective I was caught off guard. I did not know that Gerhard Richter was, as the Sunday New York Times Magazine put it, “Europe’s greatest painter.” They called him, alluringly, “the Enigma.” I wondered to myself who Europe’s greatest poet is, and if she, too, had made a journey from the depredations of the Communist East into the welcoming free-enterprise zone of the West of the coattails of American late modernism.
I am old enough and have been hanging around the art world long enough to remember when German artists began to be players in the international contemporary art world. I remember early days of Joseph Beuys, whose catalytic subversive insurgency crumbled distinctions between politics, performance, and a mystical, if not transcendent, aesthetic. I remember, later, the arrival of Sigmar Polke and Anselm Kiefer. I have a book by Lisa Saltzman called Anselm Kiefer and Art After Auschwitz. She takes up the historical conundrum of Adorno’s remark “after Auschwitz to write a poem is barbaric.” She argues that Kiefer’s work expresses the historically inexpressible, as if he could simultaneously extend and refute German Romanticism.
2. Fragment, Detail
When the poet David Breskin phoned to ask if I would contribute to a Richter book, I accepted. I have learned that as a poet, it is a good idea to say yes when asked, even if you are not sure of the ground.
David and I agreed that I would write not to a painting but to a detail.
I use the word “to” because I am not interested in description per se. I am interested in dialogue. The poems I have written in relation to paintings are essentially dialogues, as if the painting were a form of speech that I could answer. When works of art cause me to begin to speak, that is, to think, I am drawn toward them or into them. Also, I knew I would not be looking at an actual painting, and so I thought a reproduction of an enlarged detail would be more honest than a reproduction of an entire painting. I thought about the simple difference between verbal and visual arts in an age of electronic reproduction; how what I write can be transported anywhere without alteration of scale, color, surface, and so forth.
But the more substantive reason I wanted to write to a detail of a Richter painting is because my own practice has led me to think about the idea of a whole fragment. To think about Richter’s work in terms of whole fragments is interesting, as we might see each genre or style as a kind of example or sample. An example, a fragment, a detail.
The notion of the whole fragment had come in part from thinking about Robert Ryman’s white, his paintings as fragments of whiteness, and about how some abstraction can be perceived as an accrual of individual marks each of which is, on its own, a whole fragment.
I think that we need to bring ourselves into a celebratory idea of the fragment, not to lament a spurious, imagined whole. This is how I construe the present. Perhaps similar to the way Richter eschews a single genre, I have come to believe that ideas of discursive progression, linear narrativity, endemic to history and to language, are constructs which can constrict our reading of where we are and how we act in relation to where we are.
That Richter has refused to be genre-specific is pleasurable; to see an artist who does not have a brand, a way of making a mark, a way of transforming world into style is exhilarating.
3. Presence, Event
Richter’s retrospective at MoMA New York left me dazzled, wanting to locate within its array a perspective or point of view that was not simply an assertion of formidable capacity, not a retrenchment, not only art about art.
Arthur Danto, in his review of the show, suggests that Richter takes on history itself, history, as he put it, in a blur. Danto, who compares Richter favorably with Warhol, comments, “One often has to look outside his images to realize the violence to which they refer.” Danto continues:
But what the show at MoMA somehow makes clear is that there finally is a single personal signature in Richter’s work, whatever its subject, and whether the work is abstract or representational. It comes from (a) protective cool…a certain internal distance between the artist and his work, as well as between the work and the world, when the work itself is about reality. It is not irony. It is not exactly detachment. It expresses the spirit of an artist who has found a kind of above-the-battle tranquility that comes when one has decided that one can paint anything one wants in any way one likes without feeling that something is given up. That cool is invariant to all paintings, whatever their content.
The idea that the twentieth-first century, with its roiling hot terrors, should open with a celebration of a painter whose signature quality is “cool” is disturbing. The artist as production machine, confident, indifferent, cool. There is in these values a reprise of modernist models of masculine genius.
My sense is we need to come into contact with art that brings us closer to the possibility of human engagement, agency, and response, not to be reminded at how distant we are from the actual. Part of our exhilaration as spectators comes from an inner acknowledgment of possibility; that by witnessing an artist’s choices we are brought into contact with our own capacities to act, to choose, to decide; finally, to judge. This is what I call gladness. When I look at Gerhard Richter’s work, I do not cross the threshold into this gladness, but am kept at bay; I come away with an immense admiration for his practice, but no closer to my sense of agency as a result of that admiration. This is not a critique in any real sense of the word. I have been looking at pictures long enough to know that what one resists is often what one comes to love.
Richter’s terms are set, and they are not the terms of presence, or event. Richter is not concerned with signs of presence, he is concerned with the sign of absence, as if the work were the object of a nonsubjectivity. He confers on his art an absence of presence, presenting us with potential tragedy, one that consigns individual agency to the dust heap of the future. The world as we know it is mediated, and Richter seems to fully accept and enforce this mediation, the blur, the cool of re/presentations. Richter’s world is direct in its mediation. In “The Man on the Dump.” Wallace Stevens imagines a world stripped of image, of the typography of presence which syntax, and Stevens’s modernist anxieties, demanded. The poem ends, horribly, with the words “The the.” The specific without its specificity, the empty sign, the no thing of the replication of the definite article: “The the.” Richter makes us enter this world, but instead of the stripped bleakness of the the, there are many representations, many “thes,” but no representer. It is pure materiality.