I continue my review of recent philosophical writing on the painter Gerhard Richter with a consideration of a line of interpretation expounded in Christian Lotz’s recent book. For Lotz a philosophical consideration of Richter seems especially appropriate in that Richter “is the philosopher in the world of painters—there is no doubt about that.” (221) Lotz seems to indicate three senses in which Richter is the most ‘philosophical’ of contemporary painters. First, there is the sense that basic aspects Richter’s artistic conceptions and poetics involve general claims or diagnoses, that is, Richter takes a stance towards not this or that conception of representation or expression, but towards representation and expression as such. Second, there is the sense that Richter’s artistic practice is uniquely philosophical in its rigor and consistency; Richter’s initial mature works of the early-mid 1960s embody certain characterizations of modern art and modern painting, photography as a medium, and diagnoses of contemporary life that never vary thereafter, and that these characterizations and diagnoses govern Richter’s artistic practice for some sixty years. And finally there is Lotz’s claim that a central aspect of Richter’s creative process is best understood as modeled on a distinctively philosophical conception and method, namely the so-called ‘phenomenological reduction’ first introduced and propounded by Edmund Husserl. This third sense is particularly important for Lotz’s interpretation of Richter, in that this reduction models the artistic mechanism wherewith Richter works photographs into paintings, a mechanism that can quite plausibly be construed as the most distinctive, and among the most basic, of Richter’s artistic procedures.
Before attempting an interpretation of Richter’s works, Lotz sketches an account of the basic conceptual resources that are needed for and that he will mobilize in interpreting Richter. Although the title of Lotz’s book is ‘The Art of Gerhard Richter’, oddly Lotz does not include an account of art or artistic painting among such resources. Rather, Lotz’s central concept for interpretive and explanatory purposes is image, which he gives a highly technical construal through appropriating remarks and analyses from several philosophers from disparate traditions, and most prominently the philosopher of hermeneutics Hans-Georg Gadamer and the neo-Kantian philosopher of culture Ernst Cassirer. For Lotz paintings are images (67), and are throughout the book strongly contrasted with photographs as exhibiting different kinds of reference, meaning, and roles in understanding the world. I take Lotz’s view of photographs to be the following: A photograph is always a photograph of something. When a photograph focally presents some person X, the photograph is about person X. And generally, the subject, what the photograph is about, is something external to the photograph itself.
On Lotz’s account, by contrast images are (always?) much richer in content than photographs, at least in respect that they exhibit a greater internal complexity than a photograph. An image (i) is an artifact arising from a temporally extended formation, and (ii) retains some sense of this temporal extension ‘within’ itself, that is, as part of its content. Whereas a photograph always retains its indexical link with what it is about, an image is ‘distanced’ from that which it is about by virtue of the fact that it is a product of a process of formation, wherein whatever materials stimulated or are incorporated into its formative process are worked over, synthesized, and articulated (Lotz calls this ‘condensation’). This process of working is also a process of simplification, as the image-maker necessarily selects only parts and aspects of the materials for incorporation into the formed image. And because the image embodies a condensation and simplification of its integrated materials, what an image is about is not an individual (as is the case with a photograph), but rather something more general. Following aspects of the phenomenological tradition, Lotz says that an image presents or is about an ‘essence’. (Perhaps one alternative way of suggesting Lotz’s point is to recall Aristotle’s claim that poetry is more philosophical than history, in that history presents particulars and poetry presents possibilities.) Because the ‘essence’, which is the subject of the image, does not precede the formation of the image, the subject is ‘internal’ to the image. Finally, following Gadamer, Lotz claims that because the image is addressed to some (future) viewer, both maker and viewer are part of a larger structure wherein their subjectivity resonates with each other’s, and both do so as directed to something ‘objective’, that is, the image narrowly construed. The act of viewing an image is there a kind of ‘participation’, wherein the three mutually defining and interacting elements (maker, viewer, and image) emerge together. This mutual engagement is ‘festive’, a kind of celebration of each element in itself and of others.
Since Lotz’s account of the image is built upon the contrast between photograph and painting qua image, its application to Richter’s work is straightforward. Lotz’s first extended example is the painting ‘Youth Portrait’ (1988) from Richter’s 18 October 1977 that depicts a photograph of the young Ulrike Meinhof, who later became one of the central figures of the so-called Baader-Meinhof group whose incarceration and deaths are the subjects of the photographs that Richter used as material for the series. Unsurprisingly, Lotz claims that the photograph is ‘about’ an individual, Meinhof, whereas the painting “offers us a view of what it means to be a human like Meinhof through looking at her. Put differently, Meinhof becomes an instantiation of humanity.” (81) More interestingly, Lotz treats the distinctive meaningfulness of the painting as arising from Richter’s choice of the particular photograph, combined with his manner of treatment. The photograph shows Meinhof “before she became a terrorist”, and so the painting contains as part of its content the knowledge that she was to become a terrorist. Thereby the painting embodies a ‘tension’: “the true conflict [in the painting] is between seeing (presence) and memory (absence).” (114) Richter’s restriction of colors to blacks, whites, and grays serves two purposes: the sense of the image (in the restricted sense) as formed is highlighted, and the emergence of the face out of seeming neutral and mediocre handling is dramatized. In the painting the face is an event. (115) Meinhof seems to gaze to the viewer’s left, with a touch of the inwardness associated with the film director Robert Bresson’s characters, so intensifying the sense that although something of Meinhof is present, she remains distanced and unknowable. As Lutz puts it: “The desire of the spectator to look at her is blocked by the painting itself; for the gaze does not speak to us but remains silent. Ultimately, this distancing makes the painting even more beautiful, insofar as it refuses our desire to see her.” (116) He concludes by claiming that what makes this painting in particular “so telling” is that it “reflects on one of the main categories of hermeneutic aesthetics, which is mimesis.” (124) ‘Mimesis’ is conceptually richer than (mere) imitation, in that it includes, so Lotz claims, further something of the sense of how that which is imitated has come to be what it is, and correlatively some sense of understanding of the imitated thing and its genesis.
Lotz summarizes the interpretation as follows: “the painting imitates something, namely a young person. Accordingly, it builds up specific relations and throughout its interpretation, which requires our participation, it brings out the young person as something. It lets us understand the young person as human corruption. Moreover, it helps us understand this human corruption in an image and, accordingly, it lets us see what human corruptibility is.” (125)
Lotz goes on to consider a handful of other paintings by Richter as somewhat lesser length. But perhaps enough has been said to raise questions about the account that Lotz offers. 1. It is a peculiar feature that a book entitled ‘The Art of Gerhard Richter’ has nothing to say about the concept of art. For the most part the book silently equates images with artistic paintings, but there is not a word in the book that provides any support for the equation. Lotz never acknowledges the basic point that not all paintings are works of art; likewise, he passes over any consideration of whether and in what sense poems, buildings, pots, or songs are or might be images. 2. Lotz models a central feature of Richter’s practice, the passage from (chosen) photograph to made painint, upon Husserl’s ‘phenomenological reduction’. But Lotz fails to note that Husserl gave a number of different accounts of the reduction, and seemed to indicate that there is more than one kind of reduction. Further, Lotz ignores the standard criticisms of Husserl’s account, in particular that it seems to presuppose the acceptance of an unmotivated methodological solipsism: all of ‘existence’, both of nature and the world, are supposed to be ‘bracketed’, and the act of reduction is seemingly carried out without invoking any aspect of intersubjectivity or sociality. The point of invoking the reduction seems to be to underwrite Richter’s claim that photographs and paintings are ‘completely different’, and in particular that a painting, unlike the photograph that it depicts, is in no sense ‘about’ the focal object or person depicted. But is this right? 3. Accordingly, and like Florian Klinger’s account given in my previous blog post, Lotz inherits from Richter an implausibly restrictive conception of photography that makes it a conceptual impossibility for a photograph to be a work of art. In endorsing without criticism Richter’s diagnosis of photography, Lotz like Klinger turns a particular diagnosis into a philosophical absurdity.
I will return to Lotz’s claims in a few weeks after finishing the critical summaries of the recent literature on Richter. Next I turn to Darryn Ansted’s The Artwork of Gerhard Richter: Painting, Critical Theory, and Cultural Transformation.
References:
Aristotle, Poetics
Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (1944)
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (1960)
--The Relevance of the Beautiful (1987)
Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1913)
Christian Lotz, The Art of Gerhard Richter: Hermeneutics, Images, Meaning (2015)
Gerhard Richter, Gerhard Richter: Writings, 1961-2007 (2009)