"To paint a landscape veiled in mist is to declare the veil, which affects the very act of viewing, and to refuse to allow its self-cancellation in the determination of the object."(1) --Jean-Philippe Antoine
GERHARD RICHTER - ARTIFICIAL SUBLIMITYThe paintings of Gerhard Richter visually propose endless qualifications through the appropriation and recalibration of photographic pictorialism. The landscapes in particular destroy the premise of the image being derived from any object and instead represent the second or third remove of the artistic gaze. The idealization of the image is destroyed through intervening and disrupting conditions. The resultant image is then a pure sign of only itself and the “image disincarnates the real”.(2) Here the qualifications exert primacy within the field of landscape painting with exceptional eloquence. Richter’s blurred landscapes -- derived from his interpretations of the work of Caspar David Friedrich -- significantly embrace contingency and undermine the privileging of the eye producing a veiled, muted view of ostensibly predictable content. The art of painting so cherished by abstract expressionists and their universalizing tendencies becomes, with Richter, an exceptional state within painting: their approach qualifies the object of the visual field without using acute self-referential tactics that would assume primacy within the production of the image. Richter on the contrary steps back to the edge of painting, to the mimetic frontier, and reiterates in pigment the conditions of seeing through the medium of painting, the condition of painting as a reflection several times removed from the act of seeing. The painting stands in the way of seeing. “Painting seems to be making every effort to achieve an objectivity which remains structurally beyond its reach.”(3) While Friedrich deified the veil (Nature), Richter utilizes the conditions of the veil to render “the relationship between reality and the image of reality indecidable”.(4)
This obstruction of seeing clearly is a condition of distance -- both a metaphysical and contingent distance. It represents a critique of the condition of the purely visual -- aesthetic -- reductionism present within painting, and, by extension, within the act of seeing. It suggests a point within being that is irreducible -- the site of that Cartesian subject that haunts all post-cultural attempts to break the solipsistic chains of aesthetic production, including philosophy. “The act of painting establishes a certain relation to the preexistence of vision, and to the division it produces.”(5) This division is the subjective center, the oculus of all perception (of perspective) the center of the spiritual circle that has its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere (Marsilio Ficino). In essence, the subjective center is an elemental abstraction that haunts being. A type of apostrophe, it preempts the emergence of the Real. As a form of elision, it joins unrelated but sequential figures of thought. Abstraction is the foundation of metaphysics (the fictive center that regulates all phenomena through its assumption of omniscience).
Landscape architecture is more a process of restoration -- reclamation -- than absolute making. It reassembles parts once of common assemblage or it combines parts in wholly new, synthetic formulations. It reveals hidden symmetries, proportional systems, or elucidates possible scenarios. By the art of assemblage, it convenes significance within the ordinary. It adds human artifice to natural largesse, or subtracts complications and redundancies to clarify unity and relationship. It plays with light and shadow, organizes disparate units in chains of significance, enhances and channels atmospheric and terrestrial effects. Within the boundaries of a provisional art form the always implicit language of things is rewritten -- as diatribe, joke, lecture, poem, essay and tract. Reconstituting the world, landscape architecture joins together unfathomable flows, indecipherable systems and purely imaginary precepts. It borrows the immense wealth of forms preexistent to its own emergence from the abstract wilderness within language.
Gavin Keeney, excerpted from the essay "The Language of the World", in On the Nature of Things: Contemporary American Landscape Architecture (Basel: Birkhauser, 2000)
ENDNOTES
1 - Jean-Philippe Antoine, “ ‘I want to make a photograph’: photography, landscape and nature in the work of Gerhard Richter”, Pages Paysages 5 (1994-95), p. 50
2 - Emmanuel Lévinas, “Reality and its Shadow”, Lévinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989)
3 - Jean-Philippe Antoine, op. cit., p. 47
4 - Ibid, p. 52
5 - Birgit Pelzer, “There is no there: Gerhard Richter at the Carre d’Art in Nimes”, in Gerhard Richter: 100 Paintings, ed. Hans-Ulrich Obrist (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz, 1996), p. 136
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY / OUTTAKESBenjamin Katz, Benjamin Katz Photos: Atelier Gerhard Richter (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz, 1993)
Gerhard Richter, with essays by Martin Hentschel and Helmut Friedel, and a catalogue raisonné of paintings from 1993 to 1998 [essays translated from the German by David Britt] (London: Anthony d'Offay Gallery, 1998)
Gerhard Richter, Sean Rainbird and Judith Severne (eds.), catalog of an exhibition held at the Tate Gallery, London, Oct. 30, 1991-Jan. 12, 1992 (London: Tate Gallery, 1991)
THE LATEST THING - Gerhard Richter: Paintings 2003-2005 (New York/Köln: Walther König/Marian Goodman Gallery, 2005) - Exhibition catalogue (November 17, 2005 through January 14, 2006) - Cloth, 133 pages, ISBN 0-944-21905-5 - Includes essay ("Richter's Abstractions: Silences, Voids, and Evacuations", pp. 7-27) and interview (November 2004) w/ Richter by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh ...
RICHTER & LANDSCAPE - Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Oskar Batscmann, Gerhard Richter: Landscapes (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz, 2002) - "This volume presents landscapes by Gerhard Richter spanning 35 years: outstanding, large-format reproductions and two major essays elucidate the artist's working methods and his philosophy -- at the same time demonstrating that Richter's landscapes and abstract works, far from being artistic opposites, are closely related aspects of the painter's unique appropriation of reality." (DAP) - Cloth, 128 pages, ISBN: 3-775-79101-9 / See also, Gerhard Richter: Landscapes (New York: Zwirner & Wirth, 2004) - Cloth, unpaginated, ISBN 0-970-88843-0 - Exhibition catalogue (May 4 through July 3, 2004)
RICHTER @ SILS-MARIA - Gerhard Richter, Peter André Bloch, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Gerhard Richter: Sils (New York: DAP, 2003) - "This small format artist’s book was originally published for an exhibition in Nietzsche House in 1992 and is now available in a new edition with some minor changes. Richter’s series of painted-over photographs of mountain peaks and valleys in all the seasons, with titles such as Val Fex, Piz Tremoggia, and Rosatsch was created during his holidays in the region over many years. An unassuming book, free from clichés and empty rhetoric." (Walther König) - Republication of the catalogue for the exhibition "Gerhard Richter" (Nietzsche Haus, Sils Maria, 1992, and Hôtel Carlton Palace, Paris, 1993) - Cloth, 86 pages, ISBN: 1-891-02455-8 (Köln: Walther König, 2002) / See also, The So-Called Trouble With Nietzsche (Anti-Journal) ...
PHOTOGRAPHS OF NOTHING - Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms (The New York Times, 01/27/02) - "He starts with splashes of color or some geometric composition -- usually something gaudy and generic. Then he employs homemade wood-and-plexiglass squeegees to wipe and drag the paint. The process entails repeatedly building up and wiping off. The effects change depending on where and how he applies pressure with the squeegee. He has become very adept at this, but there is still an element of chance involved. He also pulls brushes through the wiped surface -- fine boar's hair brushes -- and in the end the pictures always turn out to look excruciatingly subtle and calculated. ''I can't say what they are about,' he says. ''I don't think they are expressionistic. I don't know why people say that. Why not say they are like Chinese paintings or like batik? People also talk about the quality of light in the paintings. 'Ah, the light!' Or 'Ah, the space!' It's phony reverence. It's ridiculous.' To the contrary, perversely, he says he expects people to look for something recognizable in an abstract picture, a chair or a cloud, even in an all-gray painting. It is instinctive to search for something, he says. Abstract art is inherently about the search -- and about not finding anything. 'My gray monochromes have the same illusionistic implications as my landscapes,' he insists. 'I want them to be seen as narratives -- even if they are narratives of nothingness. Nothing is something. You might say they are like photographs of nothing.'"
THE BOOK OF THE MAP OF THE WORLD - Regarding Gerhard Richter’s "Atlas" @ Whitechapel Gallery (London) - “It goes on: country lanes winding between cornfields, corpses piled in the road with vultures waiting. Mothers and babies and a food-spattered toddler trapped in his high chair. Innocent things: a toilet roll dangling in cool morning light, an acrobat diving, stags at bay. And guilty things: two women doing something with a cucumber, a man doing something to another woman with a length of pipe, a woman sucking a man's penis, a Nazi hanging a boy who has something almost like a smile on his face. Humiliated Jews, the camps. Emaciated victims in the hut, touched up with vivid happy colours. Photos of trains going by near the artist's studio in Cologne. Is it now possible, in Europe, to watch trains without thinking where the lines once led? Is it possible to look at so many images -- whether mundane, or titillating and pornographic, or inhuman and horrific and filled with despair -- without becoming aware of just how much we like to look, that looking drives us where it will, that we keep on looking?” Review, (The Guardian Unlimited, 12/09/03) - Exhibition dates, December 6, 2003 through March 14, 2004
MORE RICHTER - The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1960-1993, Gerhard Richter, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (ed.), trans. David Britt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995) - Paper, 272 pages, ISBN 0-262-68084-X; Photography and Painting in the Work of Gerhard Richter: Four Essays on Atlas, Gerhard Richter (photographs), Armin Zweite and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (text) (Barcelona: Actar, 2000) - Paper, 138 pages, ISBN 8-489-77191-X / Eight Gray, Gerhard Richter, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (New York: Guggenheim Foundation, 2003) - Paper, 128 pages, ISBN 0-892-07263-6 / Gerhard Richter, Julian Schilling et alia (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2004) - Cloth, 135 pages, ISBN 3-937-57200-7 - Exhibition catalogue: CAC Malaga, Centro de Arte Contemporanea, Lisboa (16 January through 18 April 2004) + Museo do Chiado, Museu Nacionale de Arte Contemporanea, Lisboa (29 April through 27 June 2004)
AND MORE - Gerhard Richter: Doubt and Belief in Painting, Gerhard Richter & Robert Storr (New York: MoMA, 2003) - Paper, 280 pages, ISBN 0-870-70355-2 / Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, Gerhard Richter & Robert Storr (New York: MoMA, 2002) - Cloth, 340 pages, ISBN 0-870-70357-9 / Gerhard Richter: Drawings 1964-1999, Gerhard Richter & Dieter Schwarz (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2000) - Cloth, 320 pages, ISBN 3-933-80704-2 / Gerhard Richter, Robert Fleck w/ Gertrud Koch & Hans Ulrich Obrist (Paris: Editions Dis Voir, 1995) - Paper, 128 pages, ISBN 2-906-57140-7
EN PASSANT - Bente Larsen, Gerhard Richter (For Art, Institute for Research within Contemporary Art, Oslo 2001)
