#richter.gerhard

[aamjp]

Gerhard Richter, Lecture by Rosemary Hawker

was visiting the Yale Gallery, decided that it was time to do a PhD and was looking for a topic // was irritated by the Ema (Nude on a Staircase) and Portrait of Holger Friedrich at Yale > felt an unease like when there's a swell in the music before some dramatic moment in a film and you know it’s coming but it still gets you ("damn you and your filmic conventions) > felt like this in front of Richter, in that they're undoubtedly based on photographs but are undoubtedly painting 

later was struck by the diversity of his practice yet still found him "compelling confusing and often contradictory" // the clencher was how he wrote about his own art always in terms of doubt

"I'm not trying to imitate a photograph” > Rosemary’s PhD was (eventually) based on this, taking it not as a rhetorical statement

proposed exhibition to QAGOMA in 2012 for 2015

there’s only been one small exhibition of his editions in Australia, but this is the first big, broad retrospective-ish here

he sees equivalence between his abstracts and figuratives > this is hard to explain // Rosemary made an apologetic comment to a Richter and his studio assistant about there being a lot of figurative work in the exhibition, to which they responded that “you've got to play the heads” [i.e. the hits] 

QAGOMA says that the Richter show is going to be hard for Australian audiences to consume > this will probably be the one of the most labelled Richter exhibitions 

Atlas > a collection of what the image is in the 20th and 21st century // some of these will be at QAGOMA chosen by Richter as representative of the collection (Rosemary, incredulously: "ooh, you chose that one") // Buchloh, writing on Atlas > the look of the thousands of images is what gives an 'image' of a time > nothing can be determined from one image

Reader, 1994 and Moritz, 2000 > double treatment of the same subject with differing levels of photographic blur or painterly sfumato

Baghdad 2010 (Lacquer on glass mounted on Alu Dibond) > they're all one-offs, like a photograph without a negative and also have a uniformity of surface 

Insists upstairs abstraction as representation // appearance of a landscape vs an experience of it

grey as a Base, central colour at the core of everything but which explains nothing

his returning to works and ideas over time is sometimes about working something out through abstraction, it's also sometimes about translating things into different to media > i.e. Abstracts turned into the strip paintings

[aamjp]

Sigmar Polke, 'The Editions', me Collectors Room, Berlin

Monographic show of 150-odd print works from the collection Kunstraum am Limes, undertaken between the early 1960s and 2009. 

idolises printing errors, e.g. build up on plate, holes in the grid > constantly used these as a motif (e.g. in first couple images) // a structural fault in the dotted grid

worked over prints with paint, ink, etc. > interferes with what’s underneath, establishing a tension between the different layers and surfaces // potential strategy for myself? do i need to paint the image? (or is that wasting my time?)

real ambiguity in technique, e.g. Wochenendhaus [Weekend House] (1967-8) > "[starting] with a newspaper advertisement, this time Polke developed the composition by copying the found image by hand [...] mimicking the dots of the ad. He then photographically transferred the drawing to a screen for printing; on a second printing screen Polke added the pink and green brushstrokes that overlay the central flower motif. In the resulting print, the uninflected uniformity of the house contrasts with Polke’s vivid, painterly marks, creating an irreconcilable sense of disconnect.”

early collab with Richter Umwandlung [Transformation] (1968)

Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

Woke up late, supremely hungover, only had limited time.

Warhols were magnificent... Mao, Diamond Dust Shoes // Advertisement > snippets of text, bits removed

Cy Twombly: Thyris > List of words but just on a white canvas in lead pencil, some grubby brown smudges, Middle panel is slightly grey / Empire of Flora, brought to mind Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights

On Kawara — Today series, displayed without the boxes, non-sequential dates, all black backgrounds // also I Got Up (1977) displayed between two sheets of glass so that the backs and fronts of each postcard were visible

[aamjp]

Revision History

Could make revisions myself, recording my own name in a different colour

images connected in a similar way to Richter's October cycle

so then what is the link?

[aamjp]

“Baudrillard has written that the semiotic breakdown of links between the image and what has been pictured leaves the viewer with four possibilities:

“...the image may mask and pervert a basic reality; it may mask the absence of a reality; the image may mask and pervert a basic reality; it may mask the absence of a reality; or it may bear no relation to any reality. Increasingly, he argues, we are at a loss as to which of these cases applies to what we see, and this uncertainty produces a phantasmagoria of possibilities that annul objective truth.” 

(Citing, Jean Baudrillard, ‘Precession of the Simulacra’ in Simulations, p. 11)

“Not all interpretations are equally plausible or equally flawed. But all interpretations do have consequences for the present and the future... 

...Richter’s reticence and the ambiguity of his work are not evasive in this fashionably post-modern sense. They are, instead, the probity of his art. He does not answer the question “How and why Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, and Raspe died,”  but he asked it publicly at a time when others have made up their minds once and for all or have fallen silent.  More importantly, Richter has suggested — and his paintings confirm — that the lasting significance of their lives and deaths rests on the contradictions within society and within the individuals their ideas and actions so violently exposed. Those unresolved contradictions are RAF’s unwelcome but unavoidable bequest and the crux of October 18, 1977.”

[aamjp]

Gerhard Richter Painting

Richter: Painting is a secretive business anyway. Someone who’s not suited for the public, who’s rather quiet, who’s a bit cowardly out there… Someone who wouldn’t speak up in public but then goes for it here in secret. I remember how I used to worry: being afraid when I showed something that people wouldn’t notice.

Interviewer: Notice what? That you had let it all hang out?

GR: Yes. It’s a nice feeling between being caught and… being seen.

I: Being seen?

GR: For the quality to be recognised and the mistakes perhaps overlooked… It’s a complex thing, something you do in secret and then reveal in public. You can also hide behind it.

I: Behind the pictures?

GR: Yes.

I: I don’t quite understand that.

GR: Neither do I.

GR: You can’t put paintings together. Paintings are always “mortal enemies”. That’s the correct term. It has to do with destruction each painting is an assertion that tolerates no company.

After establishing that it’s not automatism (“without a plan the subconscious will articulate itself”) and not is it that without a plan you avoid composition, composition by chance).

Benjamin Buchloch: So what’s the correlation between planlessness and making the judgement: “now it’s a painting?”

GR: Each step forward is more difficult and I feel less and less free until I conclude there’s nothing left to do. When, according to my standard, nothing is wrong anymore, then I stop. Then it’s good.

BB: Then what’s right or wrong: the wrong consciousness, material or process?

GR: (Laughs) It just doesn’t look good. Then it’s wrong.

BB: Can we dig deeper than looking good or bad?

GR: It’s extremely difficult.

BB: It is.