In my earlier posts on Benjamin Buchloh’s massive book on the painter Gerhard Richter, I have considered first Buchloh’s style and the difficulties it presents for understanding, if not intelligibility; then Buchloh’s general account of Richter’s painting, with some consideration of Buchloh’s novel account of Richter’s early, pre-canonical works in East Germany, as well as Richter’s inaugural mature work Tisch (Table); followed by a summary of Buchloh’s account of Richter’s abstract paintings, wherein Buchloh sees the same principles and concerns embodied that he had identified as central to Richter’s oeuvre as a whole. I turn now to a brief consideration of Buchloh’s interpretation of October 18, 1977, not unusually viewed Richter’s masterwork, followed by an assessment of Buchloh’s account as a whole, along with a suggestion of an alternative interpretation.
October 18, 1977 is a series of 15 paintings of photographs of the so-called Baader-Meinhof gang and of scenes associated with the deaths of their central members Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, and Andreas Baader, and others in prison. Richter painted the series in 1988, and it was rapidly recognized as a major contribution to contemporary art. Uniquely from among his many series, Richter insisted that the works be kept together and exhibited as a whole. Buchloh briefly discusses the series in the book’s introduction, where he characterizes its “haunting referential precision” and “ascetic gray scale.” (p. xviii) He asserts without explication that “the images of traumatic destruction sustain a residual element of mnemonic redemption by the mere fact of their existence as paintings,” (ibid), and that the images “operate as an omen of the persistence of historical tragedy and collective trauma” (p. xix).
After this characteristically opaque series of unexplicated assertions, Buchloh then devotes a short chapter to the series two-thirds of the way through the book. He opens the discussion of the series by remarking that it “immediately confronts its viewers with the question of whether, and how, history can actually be represented in contemporary painting.” (p. 359) In this instance the confrontation is especially challenging, because the series allegedly violates “two prohibitions simultaneously: first, against representing historical subjects in modern painting, and second, the specific prohibition against remembering this particular episode of recent German history” (ibid). Because of this latter alleged prohibition (reiterated at pp. 380-1), the sheer painting of the photographs and their public presentation “construct(s) a pictorial representation of the mnemonic process itself” (p. 373). And not only does the making of the work violate a contemporaneous ban on reflection, their presentation as a whole series ‘contests’ “the current modes of consumption as the exclusive form of responding to artistic practice.” (p. 381)
Buchloh’s central point, if I understand it, in considering the series is that it should be seen as of a piece with Richter’s abstractions, and indeed all of his main work, in presenting a reflection upon and response to the alleged contemporaneous situation of painting. One cannot help but note that he does not consider any particular painting. Further, his claim that in the mid-late 1980s there was a prohibition (in West Germany?) on discussing the activities and suspicious deaths of the members of the Baader-Meinhof group is belied not just by the fact of the contemporaneous publication of various relevant books, but also by the production of a major film, Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn), with segments by the major artists Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, and others, in 1978, only one year after the deaths in prison of the three central figures. Buchloh’s (feigned?) ignorance of this is bizarre, if not inexplicable (except as a buttress to his false claim that Richter’s series violated some (unstated) prohibition.
Perhaps Buchloh might respond that, despite the film and the publication of various books, there remained a kind of resistance to reflection that gave the series a particular frisson of challenge and taboo-breaking. If so, Buchloh’s account might then be seen not so much as error-ridden, but only incomplete, in that he neither attempts to explain whether and why the series retains its power to unsettle, nor attempts to give an account of any particular painting. And again he could reply that those latter tasks were not his. But what, then, is he attempting in this book?
The plain message of the book is that Gerhard Richter has, in all of his major series and in the realized conception which is his oeuvre as a whole, responded to the central demands of the advanced artistic painting after World War II with a unique seriousness, clarity, and rigor, that his intentions and ideas are fully realized in his work, and that Richter’s oeuvre is uniquely successful among the major artists of the past half century. I don’t imagine that I’m the only reader of the book who finds Buchloh’s various accounts poorly argued and obscure to the occasional point of unintelligibility; but I may well be the only one who will then attempt to say where Buchloh has gone wrong. The questions that I posed to Buchloh’s various accounts in my earlier posts adumbrate much of what I would wish to say by way of criticism. So to those questions, I add the following two remarks:
A. Everywhere Buchloh’s account exhibits a curious mixture of the arbitrary and the pseudo-rigorous. The arbitrariness afflicts his stipulation of the three, and only three, demands placed upon serious art in the post-WWII period. Likewise when he claims that some aspect of Richter’s work fulfills one or more of those demands. For example, he claims that Richter’s October series is, in its very presentation of the paintings of those particular images, an act, or at least the representation of an act, of remembering (“a pictorial representation of the mnemonic process itself”). But why is this so? Would any painting of them be accordingly so? Is nothing further required to induce such a process? Couldn’t the very evidence that Buchloh cites support the opposite view, that Richter’s incapacity to remember and mourn is evidenced by his inability to elaborate upon the images and inability to incorporate them into broader concerns and kinds of meaningfulness? And then once Buchloh has stipulated his various conditions and demands upon artistic seriousness, he seems to think that such demands are both uniquely and exhaustively met by Richter. Is there no partial meeting? Are no other concerns relevant? The seeming rigor of Richter’s work, as interpreted by Buchloh, could be with equal justice be characterized as a kind of imaginative and artistic impoverishment.
B. One of major aspects of Richter’s work after all is the fact that he makes artistic paintings. Why? Buchloh has nothing to say about this, except that early on Richter decided to paint and to keep painting. Again, why? Buchloh’s inability to so much as recognize this as a question, and furthermore to treat it as anything more than issuing in a demand to strip artistic painting of utopian aspirations comes out spectacularly in one of Buchloh’s own interviews with Richter. At one point in a lengthy interview in 1986 Richter states his basic diagnosis of recent artistic painting: “a specific quality that we have lost . . . all that perfection of execution, composition and so forth . . . I see the basic fact as the loss of the Centre.” Buchloh responds: “In [Hans] Sedlmayr’s sense? You can’t be serious?” Richter replies: “Yes, I am; what he was saying was absolutely right. He just drew the wrong conclusions. He wanted to reconstruct the Center that had been lost . . . I’ve no desire to reconstruct it.” (Richter (2009), pp. 175-76) Buchloh can make nothing then, and makes nothing in the recent book, of Richter’s unambiguous endorsement of Sedlmayr’s diagnosis in the book Art in Crisis (Verlust der Mitte (literally ‘Loss of the Center’) in the original German). In that largely forgotten book the conservative art historian Sedlmayr that modern art was characterized by a number of phenomena: the establishment of ‘pure’ spheres in art (purism, isolation) wherein artists sought to give their works only the characteristics of the very art kind and medium in which they worked; a progressive driving asunder of opposites, whereby works seemed to be either, say, wholly material or wholly conceptual; a tendency to be attracted by lower rather than higher, and so a progressive hankering after the inorganic that shows up in an increasingly intensive and pervasive anti-humanism, also exemplified by a tendency to give an inferior status to human beings; and a detachment from the solid earth, especially in the ‘placelessness’ of sculpture; a tendency to be attracted by the lower rather than the higher, that is, a sense of de-sublimation (Summarized at Sedlmayr (1958), p. 147) Most of the book is devoted to elaborating these diagnostic points. Towards the end Sedlmayr suggests that nonetheless there is a “permanently valid standard by which we must measure the art of our own day” (p. 216), a standard that is somehow to be derived from permanent features of human nature. Following recognition of these features, modern artists are faced with the task of “making the undisturbed supernatural order visible in images of the disturbed natural order” (p. 223), and thereby creating a “revived sacred art,” (p. 247) the making and presentation of which will allegedly create a ‘new center’ for culture. No one could be surprised that Richter rejects Sedlmayr’s proposal for reconstruction, but Sedlmayr’s diagnosis of modern art is hardly idiosyncratic, and broadly and loosely consistent with points urged by figures like Ortega Y Gasset, Theodor Adorno, and Clement Greenberg. My limited point here is just that Buchloh fails to recognize and so has nothing to say about the elements of this diagnosis, and that his insistent that the only serious historical task for a post-WWII painter is secularizing painting and ridding it of earlier, failed utopian aspirations is both idiosyncratic and lacking any explicit endorsement from Richter.
C. Is Buchloh’s interpretation then simply wrong and indeed unhinged from any major elements of Richter’s practice and oeuvre? Not at all. Earlier I noted as a seeming feature of Buchloh’s account the peculiar pairing of arbitrariness and pseudo-rigor. One might think that such features also characterize major aspects of Richter’s practice. Why, after all, does Richter insist in theory and practice that Tisch (Table) is his foundational work, and that all of his subsequent work is bound by the kinds of diagnoses and demands it embodies? Why does he insist on the strict separation of the figurative paintings of photographs and the abstract works? Why do none of his series exhibit as it were some forward movement, some sense of progression or learning by doing? It is for Richter very much as if the painterly conceptions governing particular series and his oeuvre as a whole are derived prior to the actions and processes of painting itself, and the resultant works are various instances of a type that exhibits no further ordering or meaningfulness. It seems to me that this feature accounts for much of what so many people sense as the ‘coldness’ in Richter’s work. One might think of it as quasi-Kantian, in something like the sense of Kant’s moral philosophy, where some command derived from Reason is used to judge all empirical phenomena. Everything is brought before the court of reason, which operates strictly and mercilessly. As with Buchloh’s account, Richter too seems in his conceptions bizarrely rigid and inflexible, while then treating the deliverances of his conceptions as final and so subject to no further reflection or elaboration. Nothing is learned instance to instance within a series, and nothing is learned from one series to the next. Richter has nailed himself to his Tisch. So perhaps the sense that Buchloh is onto something with regard to Richter’s oeuvre stems from his sentimental correspondence with Richter’s works, and not his understanding of them.
In a concluding future post, I shall consider the recent literature on Richter as a whole and offer an evaluation of its virtues and limitations in understanding Richter’s puzzling oeuvre.
References:
Benjamin Buchloh, Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History (2022)
Gerhard Richter, Writings 1961-2007 (2009)
Hans Sedlmayr, Art in Crisis: The Lost Center (1958)