One of the striking features of contemporary art is the peculiar authority granted to the artist to determine whether some artifact counts as one of the artist’s works of art. As with so much of the social myths surrounding contemporary art, this kind of authority is widely thought to have been somehow conjured into being by actions of Marcel Duchamp. In the1910s Duchamp inaugurated a sub-genre of visual art that he called ‘readymades’, whose instances were created by the artist’s declaration that this (this shovel, this urinal) is an artwork with such-and-such title. Further, the resultant artwork was thereby a work by the artist who made the declaration. So Duchamp did not declare that this shovel, now an artwork called ‘In Advance of a Broken Arm’, was a hitherto unrecognized work by Picasso or Matisse, but was a work by Duchamp; accordingly the work enters the oeuvre of Duchamp, along with paintings such as ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’. With the widespread recognition of the artistic possibility of artists making artworks by dubbing ordinary artifacts, it might be thought only a minor extension of this authority for the artist to declare that extant works seemingly by the artist are not, or at least no longer, by the artist. This further authority additionally bears the mark of tradition: artists have long destroyed or disowned works with which they’ve become dissatisfied; and just as a mature poet might not include any number of published poems in a volume of her collected poems, a mature artist might declare certain earlier works not part of her oeuvre, because the works are unserious or trivial, or so flawed as to be unworthy of inclusion, or perhaps because the making of the works was guided by conceptions and ideologies that the artist has repudiated. It is seemingly only a small step further for a young artist to exclude all her previous works outside her oeuvre, and to declare only those that she makes henceforth shall be part of her oeuvre. And so the possibility of Jasper Johns is born, who as a young artist who destroyed his previous work, dreamt of a flag, and acts as if his work (and so his oeuvre) would consist of the painting of the oneiric flag and everything thereafter.
Having had some notable success as a mural painter in East Germany in the 1950s, Gerhard Richter fled to West Germany in 1961 and enrolled in the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, where he studied primarily with the painter Karl Otto Götz, who was affiliated with so-called ‘Informel’ art, a pan-Western European avant-garde movement, or at least sensibility, whose members as included Jean Fautrier and Lucio Fontana. Informel works typically involve the renunciation of narrative and realism, the use of non-traditional manners of painterly facture, and the renunciation of representation generally in favor of treating the canvas as an only roughly circumscribed arena that registers directly the artist’s gestures. The artistic ideologies of Informel art overlap with those familiar from what came to be called Abstract Expressionism in the United States. It is a commonplace in interpretations of Richter’s art that in 1961 Richter renounced both his murals of the 1950s and his older student works at Düsseldorf that experiment with Informel styles and ideologies, and began his artistic oeuvre with Table of 1961, a canvas that shows a depiction of a plain table over which has been laid loosely brushed swirls of paint so as to partially obscure the figure. In his recent book The Artwork of Gerhard Richter, Darryn Ansted argues, following a line of interpretation initiated by the art history Jeanne Anne Nugent, that much of the seeming unintelligibility of Richter’s works dissolves if by contrast one considers his ‘mature’ works in light of his earlier murals and student works. Beyond that, Ansted further argues that Richter’s mature artistic method is best understood by treating it as an instance of the conception of ‘negative dialectics’ introduced by the social philosopher Theodor Adorno in the 1960s. Finally, Ansted offers a series of interpretations of various works by Richter that attempt to consider some of his paintings either as instances of ‘deconstruction’ in the sense popularized by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, or as exhibiting claims and conceptions somehow reminiscent of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s claim that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’.
I have no confidence or interest in Ansted’s third claim concerning Derrida and Lacan, so I set it aside in favor of a summary of and reflection on his first two claims. Now, a basic consideration in interpreting Richter’s paintings is his oft-stated hatred of ‘ideology’, and his wish that his works be non- or anti-ideological. What does this mean, and how does this hatred manifest itself in artistic painting? Richter has also said that his works are instances of or expressive of doubt; accordingly one might think that Richter’s diagnosis of ideology is of a piece with that of other Eastern European intellectuals, like Leszek Kolakowski, of the state Communist period from the end of World War II through the late 1980s: namely, that ideologies are (i) ‘total’, in claiming to provide authoritative orientation towards important economic, cultural, and political issues; (ii) articulated linguistically and exhaustively expressed in a small number of texts; (iii) instituted in practice in a top-down by manner through directives from political authorities; (iv) not subject to questioning or doubt on pain of social ostracism or worse (for a representative example of such a conception of ideology, see Kolakowski (1990)). On Ansted’s plausible account, Richter acquired his antipathy to ideology from exposure in the 1950s to the East German advocacy of socialist realism in the arts and its denigration of ‘Western’ styles of ‘bourgeois’ or ‘elite’ painting involving abstraction. Under such circumstances, the restricted conception of an artistic ideology, such as one motivating realist styles, fuses with the broader conception of a total political ideology, such as state Communism. One immediate benefit, then, of Ansted’s interpretation is that it illuminates why Richter treats opposition to ‘ideology’ as among the most basic motivations for his artistic practice, wherein for decades he makes marked different kinds of paintings, in particular the ‘blurred’ realism of his paintings of photographs and the squeegeed layers of his abstracts. Richter’s refusal to work within a single style is an intelligible expression of his commitment to an anti-ideological artistic method.
It would seem to follow for Richter that any use of any single artistic style would be an instance of ideology. While it is evident how the imperative of using multiple styles is fulfilled across his oeuvre, one wonders how it can be fulfilled within and by a single work. The key for Ansted is again in Richter’s early student work. Table manifestly contains two very different kinds of treatment, the drab realistic rendering of the table, and the obscuring non-figurative swirl. Ansted treats the swirl as an invocation of Informel art’s directly expressive gestures, while its placement with the realistic rendering deprives it of the sense of being an element of a system of making that dominates the canvas. Then Ansted notices that the viewer must think that table and swirl are not equal and balanced elements, but rather that, as obscuring, the swirl acts as if to withdraw the assertion ‘this is a (depicted) table’ to which the content of the painting might otherwise be delimited. Someone steeped in the philosophical works of German Idealism and its twentieth-century revisions and criticisms might put the content of the painting as ‘the positing (or assertion) of and its negation’.
Since Table retains both the sense of something posited and something negated, and not of something and its opposite overcome, reconciled, and presented in a higher unity (as in Hegel’s conception), Ansted reaches for Adorno’s conception of negative dialectic as the conceptual model for Richter’s work. Adorno’s conception is complex (for accounts see Rosen (1982) and Geuss (2005)), but a key feature for Adorno and stressed by Ansted is that a negative dialectic is, put crudely and minimally, a movement of thought that does not come to a (provisional) conclusion, but rather one wherein the always provisional outcome places some act of classification (such as ‘this is a table’) against aspects of the object not included in the classification (especially its qualitative aspects such as color or texture). In a negative dialectic an object, its concept, and its conception are confronted with their ‘other’: not just any old other, but some of those aspects of the object that are part of a rich and replete experience of the object, but which are ignored in ordinary encounters in standard contexts. Since the presentation of the ‘other’ undermines something of the routine conception of the object, the negative dialectic can be thought of as a kind of internal criticism of experience, wherein relatively rich experience undoes relatively impoverished experience. The swirl in Table, then according to Ansted, is ‘destructive’; and although Ansted ignores the point, one might think that something of the sense of profundity of Table, if indeed there is such, comes from its re-articulation of the perennial sense of art embodying forces of creation and destruction. Conceptually, it is not as if a and not-a are balanced; rather something is done and undone, so there is an implied temporal directionality. Ansted goes on to treat the ‘blurring’ of images and squeegeeing of abstract painting characteristic of Richter’s mature work as immediate descendents of Table’s swirl, and thereby inheriting its destructive role in the quasi-dialectical process of his artistic making.
So if Ansted’s account of Richter’s work is plausible and illuminating, it shows that consideration of Richter’s pre-canonical work, his murals and his student works, is necessary to make sense of the canonical works and Richter’s mature methodology, with its resolute opposition to ideology and refusal of use of a single style, both within works and across his oeuvre. As with my previous two blog posts considering books on Richter, I postpone full consideration of Ansted’s account and only here offer two critical comments:
Ansted treats Adorno’s conception of negative dialectic as reasonably well-defined, prima facie coherent, and straight-forwardly useful in modeling Richter’s painting. But is this right? It’s striking that Ansted makes no reference to the lengthy studies and range of criticisms of Adorno. Consider Michael Rosen’s criticism: Rosen has argued that Adorno helps himself to Hegel’s technical terminology, in particular ‘mediation’. The term ‘mediation’ terms and its associated conception play central roles in Hegel’s dialectic, and one might think that they gain whatever intelligibility and legitimacy they have only within Hegel’s system as a whole. But Adorno has explicitly rejected the key Hegelian role of ‘mediation’, a ‘moment’ of dialectical ‘sublation’ (Aufhebung) within the dialectic wherein contents and criteria are tested against each other, found wanting, and then ‘negated’, ‘preserved’, and ‘transcended’ into a new richer kind of experience. Rosen suggests that Adorno uses the term ‘mediation’ to disguise, perhaps including from himself, a conceptual gap in his account where there is no mechanism connecting intra-artistic forms and contents with broader social phenomena. Ansted makes nothing of ‘mediation’ in Richter or in what he takes from Adorno, but it’s striking that Ansted fails to notice the problematic way in which Richter invokes ‘ideology’ both in its positive sense as an artistic style and in its neutral or negative sense as a broad pattern of social phenomena including goals, aspirations, and plans. Perhaps something of the coldness people sense in Richter’s work comes from the way in which depiction is meant to stand immediately for something like Socialist (or Capitalist) Realism, and any and all abstraction for a Western and consumerist conception of freedom as choice without consequence.
Then there is Ansted’s employment of the concept of an oeuvre: Ansted fails to notice that for the most part and in its typical employment the concept of an oeuvre is merely classificatory: it tells us which of the universe’s artifacts count as artworks attributed to such-and-such an artist, and which don’t. There may well be issues about whether something made by an artist is or ought to be included in an artistic oeuvre; but once a work is enrolled in an oeuvre, it ranks equally with every other work in the oeuvre. But is ‘oeuvre’ the most illuminating concept with which to grasp an artist’s total body of work? I and others have suggested that it is more illuminating to treat an artist’s body of work in terms of the concept of practice, which implies that the making of an artist’s works is guided by criteria of goodness. Following from the adoption of ‘practice’ (and not ‘oeuvre’) for explanatory purposes, one can make distinctions of relative failure and success, and relative centrality and marginality, within the artist’s body of work. Ansted by contrast imagines that sub-groupings of an artist’s work within an oeuvre are unmotivated constructions of imagination, and considers such constructions as elements of the deconstructive approach he uses in later chapters (and which I have not discussed here, but within which am unable to find something worth discussing (others of course might think otherwise)).
In the next post reviewing recent literature on Richter, I turn to the great monument (or is it rather great obstacle?) of interpretations of the artist’s work, the various analyses given by the neo-Marxist critic Benjamin Buchloh and recently collected in a lengthy volume.
References:
Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (1966)
-----Aesthetic Theory (1970)
Darryn Ansted, The Artwork of Gerhard Richter: Painting, critical theory and cultural transformation (2017)
Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas & the Frankfurt School (1981)
-----‘Suffering and Knowledge in Adorno’ in Outside Ethics (2005)
Leszek Kolakowski, ‘Why an Ideology is Always Right’, in Modernity on Endless Trial (1990)
Jeanne Anne Nugent, “Overcoming Ideology: Gerhard Richter in Dresden, the Early Years”, in From Caspar David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter: German Paintings from Dresden (2006)
Michael Rosen, Hegel’s Dialectic and Its Criticism (1982)