I turn now to Benjamin Buchloh’s account of Gerhard Richter’s abstract paintings. Richter’s best-known type of abstractions are his ‘squeegee’ paintings, so called because they are evidently made by dragging a rigid element across a very large canvas upon which numerous and various pigments have been deposited. Many of the works seem to be the product of multiple episodes of depositing and squeegeeing, and some bear the additional marks from vertical smearing by hand and scraping with a pointed implement. A second type consists of works Richter made, starting in 1966, of squares or rectangles of solid colors arranged in a grid; the best known of these are his ‘color charts’ from the early 1970s. Along with these two types, Buchloh also discusses other relatively recent and lesser known types, including some dense works on glass where the paint seems poured and puddled, some works consisting of complex drawn and painted marks largely covered and obscured by an over-painting of white, and some digital prints of a great many variously colored narrow horizontal stripes. And of course when Richter paints these abstract works during the past sixty years, he also paints a great many works in his other major category, figurative works that appear as paintings from photographs, typically wherein the elements are very slightly blurred.
The abstractions present a number of challenges to understanding. Besides the general question as to why Richter maintains, while keeping separate, his two great kinds of paintings of photographs and abstractions, there is the question of how to so much as to begin looking at these works. One might well think that for much of the world’s painting one begins to understand and appreciate an artist’s oeuvre anywhere one likes or happens to find oneself; the process of artistic looking, though it has no terminus, begins with immersive attention to some particular work. But in Richter’s work the presumptive unit of appreciation seems rather to be the series; the works do not typically reward attention as particulars, but rather as members of a group, where different instances show how some conception and associated procedures result in this, but also this other and that. Secondly, as noted by Buchloh, Richter works as if to block the sense that one series arises from reflection upon a previous series’s achievements, failures, and unrealized potentials. It is as if there is no ‘development’ in Richter’s work, no working out of some ruling passion, obsessive motif, or responsiveness to intra- and extra-artistic changes, nothing, that is, of what one usually finds providing a kind of unity to an artistic oeuvre, but only a kind of quasi-timeless instantiation of different possibilities. How can one make sense of this?
As with his more general account of Richter’s oeuvre, Buchloh begins from the stipulation that a fully serious artistic oeuvre that emerges c. 1960 must in some way acknowledge and embody responses to three demands: that the oeuvre recognize the (alleged) historical failure of the utopian dimension of early twentieth-century avant-gardist art movements; that the oeuvre ‘work through’ this failure while expressing an appropriate attitude of mourning; and that the oeuvre acknowledge and ‘negate’ its contemporaneous conditions of ‘spectatorship’, specifically those formed by the predominance of industrialized imagery (in advertisements and popular arts) of the post-WW II world. Richter’s alleged response to the first demand is most prominent in Buchloh’s account, wherein he repeatedly claims that Richter’s abstraction represents a ‘secularization’ of prior avant-gardism.
Buchloh states his central claims in some exceptionally difficult and obscure pages (most centrally at pp. 163-69); here is my best attempt at a summary: Richter accomplishes this secularization through various artistic strategies of ‘effacement’ (also ‘withdrawing’, ‘withholding’, ‘erasure’, ‘negation’, and ‘concealment’), whereby the artist invokes some prior manner of artistic achievement and then does something expressive of dis-identification with or rejection of that achievement; further, something suggestive of that achievement is subjected to handling that aims to attack, dismantle, or undermine that achievement. This description of course is evidently appropriate for Richter’s manner in the inaugural work of his oeuvre, Tisch (the painting of a table partially obscured by large scumblings). This artistic strategy of effacement is seen in perhaps its most general form with ‘withdrawal’, especially the artist’s withholding of some figure, some expression, and/or some ‘statement’ where such might be conventionally expected. Richter’s combines three prior models of withdrawal: Kazimir Malevich’s, where abstraction is in the service of transcendence of this world; John Cage’s, where artistic silence (on Buchloh’s bizarre, if not preposterous, account) is expressive of ‘sublime indifference’ to the world (p. 159); Theodor Adorno’s, where the refusal to depict utopia helps maintain the active memory of utopian aspirations in the face of their contemporary degradation or extinction. Buchloh asserts that Richter’s fusion of these three philosophico-artistic models “makes up . . . the paradoxical foundations of Richter’s nonrepresentational paintings.” (p. 165)
At one point Buchloh claims that in Richter’s abstractions the impulse to withdraw fuses with “the opposite impulse—to suspend abstraction itself in extreme ambiguity” (p. 169). But it seems to me that in much of the text Buchloh treats something like ‘extreme ambiguity’ as an effect, and not a coeval impulse, of the various strategies of withdrawal. For the most part he refers to the characteristic artistic effect of these strategies of withdrawal as ‘undecidability’; elsewhere Buchloh writes of “the unfathomably contradictory nature of [Richter’s] abstractions” (p. 42) and “the inextricably aporetic structures of [Richter’s] work” (p. 177). On yet another alternative formulation he writes that in the abstractions “we encounter the dialectics of chance and control”. (p. 492) This ambiguous/undecidable/contradictory/aporetic result of the ‘dialectics of chance and control’ is instantiated variously in the different sub-types and series. So in the squeegee paintings the ‘control’ is given in the conceptually and inferentially transparent simple (though determinedly inexpressive) gesture of dragging the implement across the large plane of the canvas, while the dimension of chance (which Buchloh usually refers to as ‘the aleatory’) is given in seemingly non-finite and non-ordered micro-detail of layers and striations of paint. Analogously, in the color charts the ‘control’ is given in the equally saturated monochrome patches and their arrangement in grids, while the arrangement appears random. Buchloh repeatedly praises every aspect of these abstractions as the product of a unique insight on Richter’s part, one that was ‘historically necessary’ (p. 552) as a response to the three demands Buchloh places upon serious art.
So on Buchloh’s account Richter’s abstractions are explained in the same manner as the artistic oeuvre as a whole. The second and third demands (that is, of mourning and of ‘negation’ of the contemporary conditions of spectatorship) are dealt with more briefly, with the same sort of assertions discussed in my previous post. As with the oeuvre, so with the abstractions: Richter acknowledges and responds to the three demands, themselves arising from insight into the artistic and historical developments of the twentieth-century. Buchloh judges Richter, with his rigor and radicality, to be uniquely successful in meeting the demands. Has Buchloh solved the mystery of Richter?
Again, I postpone a critical consideration of Buchloh’s account until my final blog post on the book, and so will raise for the moment a single question: Does the account so much as offer a recognizable picture of an artistic oeuvre? One way, by no means decisive, of seeing what might be problematic is to recall remarks on the typical character of artistic thinking and artistic creativity. In his book Patterns of Intention the art historian Michael Baxandall compares and contrasts the ways in which describe and explain on the one hand an historical artifact, the Forth Bridge in Scotland built at the end of the nineteenth-century, and on the other Picasso’s cubist Portrait of Kahnweiler. Baxandall argues that the focus of our attempt to explain such artifacts is their ‘intentional visual interest’, which consists roughly in how and why they look the way their makers look precisely as they in fact look. The attempt at explaining intentional visual interest itself presupposes that one adopts the ‘idiographic stance’, wherefrom one is primarily to explain how some particular artifact addresses some problem or set of problems. Baxandall notes that with regard to the bridge, a great many of the problems and relevant concerns are set prior to the creative process of designing the bridge; there are the environmental conditions, the need to bear such-and-such loads, to be long-lasting, etc. There are also aesthetic concerns, some more imposed, such as the sort of appearances that people will take as appropriate to a secure bridge, some relatively freely chosen by the designer, which might include selecting from, combining, or innovating with regard to existing bridge aesthetics. Baxandall then notices that much of this applies similarly to explaining Picasso’s painting, but also with significant differences. With regard to the bridge, the questions ‘Why a bridge?’ and ‘How to make this bridge?’ are conceptually distinct: the need for a bridge arises, and then there are different proposals for particular bridges to satisfy the need. But with regard to the painting, Baxandall suggests that the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ are not so sharply distinct; both ‘saturate’ the realm of artistic thinking. One implication of this is that the artistic painter’s understanding of her situation is much more personal than the bridge-designer’s, as aspects of the painter’s style, concerns, manners of handling and composition interpenetrate with her sense of why she is doing the particular thing she does. One way of indicating where Buchloh may have gone wrong is in noting that with his account Richter’s practice, with its originary insight into a seemingly fixed-for-all artistic and historical situation looks more like the designer’s practice than the artist’s.
Approaching the issue of artistic creativity from a different angle, but with a result that overlaps Baxandall’s points, the philosopher and social theorist Jon Elster in his book Ulysses Unbound has investigated the question of why and with what implications human beings constrain themselves with precommitments, such as promises (‘I shall always do X and never Y), but also follow certain conventions (‘I shall drive on the right and not on the left’) and preferences (‘I shall avoid situations where I’m inclined to drink alcohol’). Elster treats the arts at some length, and suggests that one can understand artistic conventions and styles as instances of precommitments (for example: ‘I shall limit my improvised solo to 32 bars’). Elster’s general point is that precommitments provide artistic constraints without which artistic creativity would lack form, communicability, and intelligibility. On this account artistic creation is conceptually “a two-step process: choice of constraints followed by choice within constraints.” Then he immediately notes that the “interplay and back-and-forth between these two choices is a central feature of artistic creation, in the sense that choices made within the constraints may induce the artist to go back and revise the constraints themselves.” (Elster, p. 176) While Elster’s point about artistic creation as a two-step process harmonizes with Buchloh’s account, one notices that Buchloh, as with Baxandall’s point about the interplay between the ‘why’ and the ‘how’, has no way of accommodating the claim of the interplay of the two steps in artistic creation. By great contrast, Buchloh, like Richter himself, insists upon fixed and unalterable character of Richter’s originary insight as embodied in Tisch.
These critical concerns in part arise from the presumption of the idiographic stance in description and explanation of the arts. To see whether Buchloh can in fact make sense of artistic works as particulars, I turn next to his most sustained and expansive account of a single series by Richter, the canonical October 18, 1977.
References:
Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention (1985)
Benjamin Buchloh, Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History (2022)
Jon Elster, Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints (2000)