Gerhard Richter – Light
The previous essay in this series looked at how Richter’s distaste for ideologies had influenced his work (specifically the collection of paintings of the Baader-Meinhof gang collectively called October 18, 1977) and how, based on his views on ideologies, Richter had been able to give these paintings a political dimension. This essay examines Richter’s statement made in his notes of 1964-1965:
‘The central problem in my painting is light’. (Richter, 1995, p. 39)
and also how Richter, rather than be intimidated by the weight of painting’s history, has taken aspects of that history as material to progress his own work, much as he has done with photography; and in particular his use of the painting Annunciation to Mary by Titian (Tiziano Vercellio) c1540 as the basis for his series of five paintings all called Annunciation After Titian.
Light is one of the key elements in, and on, paintings, but Titian’s Annunciation to Mary is unusual in as much as light is not only used to make the painting work (in both senses of the word), but is also the metaphorical theme of the painting. The medieval analogy for the Immaculate Conception was that the output of God’s gonads was like the sun’s rays passing through glass (religiously-fit virgin sunbathers beware the second coming).
In his notes from 1964-1965 Richter said:
‘The central problem in my painting is light’. (Richter, 1995, p. 39)
Before considering what Richter may have meant by this, a digression will be made to discuss an experiment involving the physics of light. The experiment is called the double-slit experiment and it suggests parallels between the way that light behaves and the way that artworks work. It involves a light source and a detector, between which are placed two parallel slits. At the beginning of the 1800s the physicist Thomas Young performed the experiment to investigate the nature of light, following Newton’s speculation that light was particulate, rather than wave-like. The results suggested that light behaved as a wave, the evidence for this being a diffraction pattern on the detector, which was taken to be the result of interference between the waves of light going through the two slits. With the splitting of the atom and the advent of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, light was shown also to behave as particles, as Newton predicted. It would seem logical that if light consists of particles, sending just one light particle (photon) from the source would not result in an interference pattern since the particle would either go through one slit or the other (the interference pattern being dependent on light going through both slits). When the experiment was conducted with one photon however, an interference pattern did appear, suggesting that the single particle had gone through both slits at the same time and interfered with itself (so to speak). This became stranger when a measuring device was placed at the slits in order to measure which slit the photon went through. With a measuring device present, the photon didgo through only one of the slits and the interference pattern disappeared. The implication was that a photon exists in a state of maximum possibility (called a wave function) becoming particular (metaphorically and literally) when a measurement is made. This has parallels in the way that artworks function, with the artist as experimenter, the artwork is the light source, the unmeasured state of the light it emits as the artwork’s limitless potential, and the measurement as the critique of the artwork. In the way that there seems to be a symbiotic relationship between the emitted light and the measuring device so there seems to be a symbiotic relationship between the artwork and criticism. Andrew Benjamin discusses this relationship in his book Disclosing Spaces – On Painting:
‘..it is within criticism that the question of the way the particular is art can be discussed.’ (Benjamin, Disclosing Spaces: On Painting, 2004, p. 81).
Not only the way that the particular is art perhaps, but also the way that art is particular. The story gets stranger however. The experiment can be altered to place the measuring device between the slits and the detector and to randomly switch the measuring device on and off. When the device is on the photon behaves as a particle going through only one slit, when the device is off the photon behaves as a wave, going through both slits at once. In other words, a measurement made after the event affects the event itself: furthermore in other experiments in quantum mechanics, measurements, once made, can also be erased, altering the outcome of an experiment that has already occurred.
The analogy with art is that a critique, or measurement, once made, can be erased or superseded by a later critique. In this way, criticism enables the particular to emerge, and the particular is one of many particulars (possibilities) in the artwork. And for a measurement to be made, the artist (the experimenter), the artwork (the light source) and the critic or viewer (the measurer) must do work. This work, and the ability of criticism to draw out the particular, ensure that the artwork’s possibilities are realised. According to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, particles without mass do not experience time, and photons are the only known particles without mass. Light is timeless and the artwork as the light source is also timeless; the artwork never stops.
An experiment (painting as experiment) can be repeated, or modified and repeated, in an attempt to discover something new. In the Annunciation After Titian, Richter has repeated and modified Titian’s four-hundred-year-old painting (experiment) to find something new. Why did he pick this particular painting? When asked this question in an interview with Jonas Storsve in 1991, Richter said:
’I saw it in Venice and thought: I’d like to have that for myself. To start with, I only meant to make a copy, so that I could have a beautiful painting at home and with it a piece that period, all that potential beauty and sublimity’ (Richter, 1995, p. 226).
Perhaps Richter had forgotten that he had realised in the early 1960s that it was no longer possible to paint like the old masters, that the systems and institutions that had made that possible had vanished and that photography had offered him a way forward; or perhaps he wanted to see, at this later stage in his career if this was still true. In his essay in October Files Volume 9 Thomas Crow writes:
‘The ambiguous semi-vernacular status of the American photo-realists likewise hovers over Richter’s illusionistic painting of the last decade. If his work were exclusively in the vein of Betty, the 1988 portrait of his daughter, he would not escape easily being labelled as a soft-focus European outrider of that tendency. But he has in common with (Andrew) Holmes the use of photography-based naturalism to signal the limits of some other practice, to map the territory outside its competences. In Richter’s case, that other practice is emphatically that of fine art at its highest degree of cultivation.’ (Crow, 2009, pp. 52-54)
Richter from a postcard of Titian’s original, one of the very few occasions when he broke with his normal practice of using photographs steeped in the vernacular, the everyday. In his failure to make a copy Richter was mapping a historical territory, a limit of fine art today, but the five paintings produced, with their references to Richter’s photographic practice and their foreshadowing of his abstract works also showed the limits of fine art yesterday, and demonstrated Richter’s conviction (and the basis of his practice) that there is place for painting in contemporary art and that the weight of painting’s history can also be a counterweight.
As indicated above, in his notes of 1964-1965 Richter had written of light being the central problem in his painting, and the question was asked what he meant by this. There is the obvious answer that the problem was technical, compositional; but there are other possibilities. Light was the accomplice of the criminal, photography. Photography, the criminal that kidnapped reality and took it to a dark room where it was frozen in stasis, never to develop further than the captured moment; the young pretender, the usurper of painting’s main historical roles that signalled painting’s mortality; the drug dealer that gave the viewer the instamatic fix that left him wanting more; the con man that purports to capture reality when reality, at a fundamental quantum level, is essentially hidden and uncertain. This is why photographs are so powerful; the present the illusion of a captured reality (and this is also why a photographic memory can be viewed as an oxymoron) and why photography is an issue that every serious painter today has to deal with.
Richter has taken the captured images of photography and through his painterly mediation has released them to develop further aesthetically whilst still retaining their indexical quality; “indices of the relation between the image spheres of photography and painting (Osborne, 2009, p. 103). His work has shown that photography does not have to lead to the death of painting and that the criminal can be rehabilitated. And he has used photography to shed light and inspire him on how to proceed with his daily practice of painting.
Bibliography
Benjamin, A. (2004). Disclosing Spaces: On Painting. Manchester, UK: Clinamen Press.
Benjamin, A. (1996). What is Abstraction? London, UK: Academy Edition.
Benjamin, W. (2008). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. (J. Underwood, Trans.) London, UK: Penguin Books.
Crow, T. (2009). Hand-Made Photographs and Homeless Representation. In B. H. Buchloh (Ed.), October Files 8 - Gerhard Richter (Vol. 8). Cambridge, MA, USA: The MIT Press.
Jean-Philippe Antoine, G. K. Gerhard Richter. Paris, France: Editions Des Voir.
Osborne, P. (2009). Abstract Images:Sign, Image and Aesthetic. In B. H. Buchloh (Ed.), October Files 8 - Gerhard Richter. Cambridge, MA, USA.
Richter, G. (1995). The Daily Practice of Painting. (H.-U. Obrist, Ed., & D. Britt, Trans.) London: Thames and Hudson.
Storr, R. (2002). Gerhard Richter. New York, USA: Museum of Modern Art.
