Death in Warhol’s and Richter’s Work
This essay compares and contrasts the response to death in Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol’s work. Richter and Warhol came to prominence at about the same time in 1962, and the work of both artists seems to have inhabited what Peter Osborne describes as ‘…the ontological space of a suspended double negation..’ (Osborne, 2009, p. 95); Richter’s work occupying the space between painting and photography, and Warhol’s work the space between mass culture and fine art. Both artists were dealing with the issue of the death of painting and both used photography as a device to address this issue, but whereas Warhol could be said to have accelerated the death of painting through his ‘hands-off’ approach (silk-screening and assistants to make much of the work) and his assimilation of mass culture and the vernacular into his art, Richter, despite also using ‘ordinary’ photographs as the basis for his paintings adopted a ‘hands-on’ approach and was attempting to show what painting still had to offer. This difference in their approach to the death of painting is echoed in their approach to death in their work.
Richter rarely depicted death directly; one of the most notable examples is the October 18, 1977 series of fifteen paintings of the Baader-Meinhof group, and he painted these works ten years after the events depicted took place, despite having amassed a considerable number of photographs relating to the Red Army Faction (of which the Baader-Meinhof group was a subset) over a number of years prior to 1987. This suggests that Richter had considered the RAF as a possible subject for painting for some time, but it is unclear why he decided to proceed with the project when he did (‘It’s hard to say why in 1987 my interest revived’ (Richter, 1995, p. 183)) Certainly what and how to paint are questions that consistently arise in Richter’s writing, but although he had considered painting subjects with a political content prior to 1987 (for example concentration camp pictures which, although never painted, were published in Richter’s Atlas juxtaposed with pornographic photographs), he had not actually done so, perhaps because of the difficulty that the overtly political in art often removes any political impact and perhaps, given his lack of belief in ideologies, because he did not wish to be seen to be endorsing any particular political position. Paradoxically this wish may have been one of the reasons for painting October 18, 1977, in so far as Richter wished to portray the terrorists’ deaths as being a tragic consequence arising equally from the ideologies of the state and the terrorist; but it is also the grief resulting from this tragedy that Richter seems to have been intending: ‘I’d say the photograph provokes horror, and the painting – with the same motif – something more like grief. That comes very close to what I intended.’ (Richter, 1995, p. 189).
Andy Warhol’s motivation for painting the Death and Disaster paintings is also unclear. Warhol got many of his ideas from other people, both by being open to suggestion and by solicitation, and Arthur Danto suggests that it was the former (Arthur Geldzahler, the curator of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, showed Warhol the photograph of a jet crash in the New York Mirror on June 4th 1962 saying “It’s enough life. It’s time for a little death.” (Danto, 2009, p. 41) that prompted Warhol to show death directly in his Death and Disaster paintings, although Warhol, when asked in an interview with Gene Swenson why he started the ‘Death’ pictures said: ‘I was also painting the Marilyns. I realized that everything I was doing must have been Death.’ (Swenson, 1963, pp. 24-27) - Warhol had started the Marilyn paintings a few weeks after Monroe’s suicide. Death in Warhol’s paintings is however subtler than its overt depiction. Warhol’s use of the repeated silk-screen image and the fact that he would leave the imperfections of the process in the images, in itself contributes to the idea of the death of painting, and contributes further in its contrast to the medium-specificity and the emphasis on individuality and the painterly gesture that had preceded it in the work of the abstract expressionists and of Johns and Rauschenberg. The emphasis on the mechanical (‘…I want to be a machine…’ (Swenson, 1963, pp. 24-27)), the use of assistants to produce a lot of his work (and ultimately the use of a photo booth for ‘portraits’), the serial repetition, the removal of authorial decision-making (the number of Campbell’s soup paintings was determined by the number of varieties available) and his own elusiveness can also be seen in the context of the death of the author, although, as with John Cage, Warhol’s work is paradoxically immediately identifiable as his own. Interestingly, in the context of the death of the author, Richter wrote of Warhol: ‘Andy Warhol is not so much an artist as a symptom of a cultural situation, created by that situation and used as a substitute for an artist.’ (Richter, 1995, p. 180). The extent to which an artist is a symptom or a cause of a cultural situation is a discussion beyond the bounds of this essay, but if Warhol was a symptom, he was also a contributor to the cultural situation which Richter and other artists after Warhol’s work in the 1960s had to deal with.
There is also something deeper going on Warhol’s work; something to do with the death of individuality, of the self, in the onslaught of mass production and rampant consumerism. Whereas the prosperity of the west and the supposed choice and freedom available to the individual was used politically to demonstrate the superiority of the west over the east, Warhol in the early 1960s, seems to have had a different view: ‘Russia is doing it under government. It's happening here all by itself… Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we're getting more and more that way.’ (Swenson, 1963, pp. 24-27). Consumer culture, with its increasingly pervasive advertising, and its never-delivered promise of the improved, happier, future-self, helped to negate the validity of the present-self: ‘Warhol, though he grounded his work in the ubiquity of the packaged commodity produced his most powerful work by dramatizing the breakdown of commodity exchange. These were instances in which the mass-produced image as the bearer of desires was exposed in its inadequacy by the reality of suffering and death.’ (Crow, Saturday Disasters:Trace and Reference in Early Warhol, 2001, p. 51). Crow goes on to say that this is exemplified in Warhol’s Marilyns and that the pictures represent a form of mourning, not necessarily for the star herself, but for the ‘absence of a richly imagined presence that was never really there’ and this idea is supported by the fact that Warhol did not use a contemporary photograph of Monroe, but one taken from the early 1950s. The death of the self is more obviously exemplified in Warhol’s Death and Disaster series, where the deaths of the anonymous individuals are often shown as the result of the failure of the promise of technology (Plane Crash, Saturday Disaster, Ambulance Disaster) or the failure of the promise of consumerism (Tuna Fish Disaster). These images are ambiguous in that they allow not only for a voyeuristic fascination that death is happening not to the viewer but to someone else, but also as a reminder that death is there for everyone. This latter point was more starkly shown in Warhol’s Skull of 1976, for, as one of his assistants, Ronnie Cutrone, said, ‘to paint a skull is to do a portrait of everybody in the world’. (Fairbrother, p. 96).
Richter was undoubtedly aware of the difficulty of his position as a painter in the 1960s when art was in a state of fragmentation and there was no obvious single strategy: (‘it is no easy matter to avoid either harking back to the past or (equally bad) giving up altogether and sliding into decadence (Richter, 1995, p. 148)). He was not prepared to follow Warhol’s direction; when asked in an interview with Benjamin Buchloh in 1986 if the negation of the productive act in art was acceptable to him Richter replied ‘No. Because the artist’s productive act cannot be negated. It’s just that it has nothing to do with the with the talent of ‘making by hand’ only with the capacity to see and decide what is to be made visible.’ (Richter, 1995, p. 140). Richter adopted a number of strategies to address his difficult position. The diversity of his work made it more difficult for him to be pinned down, and he claimed that he made no changes to the content of photographs that he was painting from in order to remove aesthetic decision-making from his work, and thereby to distance himself from the abstract expressionist aesthetic. In fact, when comparisons are made between the final painting and the originating photograph, it is evident that Richter was making aesthetic decisions; for example Ema (Nude on a Staircase). Unlike Warhol’s negation of painting, Richter approached the death of painting from a position of possible affirmation; seeing what painting was still able to do; and whereas Warhol used photography in a mechanical process to produce his paintings, Richter was surprised to find that photography offered him the opportunity to retain the non-mechanical tradition of hand painting and still produce something new and relevant.
If Warhol’s paintings can be interpreted as a form of mourning, it seems to be a state of perpetual mourning that the loss inherent in a photograph embodies; they do not seem to offer any mediation for the viewer, any way forward; rather they seem to emphasise death. The paintings in Richter’s October 18, 1977 series however do seem to offer some form of mediation, a way to deal with mourning and move on, as described in Michael Kelly’s essay The Richter Effect where he relates how Astrid Proll (a member of the Baader-Meinhof Group) was unable to look at the 1977 media photographs of her dead colleagues until she saw Richter’s October 18, 1977 (Kelly, 2009, p. 258), and how this enabled Proll to move on from the unresolved position that she had been in for ten years. If Warhol’s work is more about the end of things; painting, the author, the self, Richter’s work constantly seeks new beginnings, to find out what is still possible. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Warhol died twice and Richter is still painting.
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