Richter – Painting After the Death of Painting
In two essays analysing what the success of Gerhard Richter’s work tells us about painting after the ‘death of painting’, Peter Osborne describes Richter’s work as inhabiting ‘…the ontological space of a suspended double negation’ (Osborne, Abstract Images:Sign, Image and Aesthetic in Gerhard Richter's Painting, 2009, p. 95).
This essay attempts to understand in more depth what has proved to be both a provocative and difficult description, and also consider whether and how painting is still possible, by looking at these essays as well as an essay by Yve-Alain Bois from his book Painting As Model.
In this first essay Osborne begins by considering where to place Richter’s paintings within a critical history of contemporary art, given that Richter’s daily practice of painting consistently addresses the postmodernist problem of the possibility of continuing painting, whilst at the same time, because of its singular nature, (the will and effort of one man), threatens to make it relevant only for Richter.
He then makes the claim that there is something historically exceptional about Richter’s work in the way that it successfully engages with the issues of its time, and in particular, the challenge to painting of photography. Osborne writes that ‘In what follows I offer a preliminary attempt at a reconstruction of the art-historical logic of Richter’s work as it presents itself through the idea of a double negation: of painting by photography and photography through painting’ (Osborne, Gerhard Richter's Negatives, 1992, p. 104).
In the next section Osborne states that by displacing the responsibility for the representational content from the painting to the photograph, and by the photograph predetermining the composition of the picture, painting’s perceived subjectivism is countered. This would seem to imply that before photography, nature was responsible for the representational content of the painting, and it seems more likely that the ultimate responsibility for the representational content is with the painter/photographer (for example Richter would select carefully from hundreds of photographs which in turn had subjective input from the photographer), and while part of the composition was determined by the photograph, Richter would often make changes. This suggests that the adoption of photography as the way forward for Richter not only provided a sound conceptual basis for his work but may also partly have been a defence for his decision to pursue painting at a time of its supposed impossibility. It is also not clear why Osborne believes that painting’s perceived subjectivism needs to be countered. Perhaps it is because an isolated, solipsistic painting practice is unlikely to be sustainable, since it is Osborne’s view that painting needs to recognise and reflect upon the mechanical nature of reproduction (as illustrated by Pollock’s mechanistic method, Richter’s semi-mechanical process, or the focus, in the Greenbergian sense, on what defines and differentiates painting from other art forms). But painting is so much a human endeavour that it would be difficult and perhaps counter-productive to try and completely eliminate/counter subjectivism.
Osborne goes on to describe how Richter’s photo paintings are an affirmation of photography, but remain paintings, and therefore, whilst ‘recognising the historical negation of painting by photography’ also ‘enact a painterly negation of this negation’ and thus ‘would seem to seek to rescue painting’ (Osborne, Gerhard Richter's Negatives, 1992, p. 107). This is arguable; it is by no means clear from Richter’s writing that his main objective was to rescue painting (although this may have been a secondary objective); in fact the texts throughout The Daily Practice of Painting suggest a personal quest rather than a generic one. Osborne goes on to discuss the meaning of this double negation (and hence the ontological part of the initial quote) by looking at three different ideas to do with negativity. The first is the mathematical cancellation of two negatives, which Osborne dismisses, since it implies that painting would be unaffected by the introduction of photography, which is clearly not the case. The second is the idea of the second negation transcending the first and creating a new beginning: in this case for painting. Osborne writes that beginning painting anew is the ‘strongest historical claim that can be made for Richter’s work’ (Osborne, Gerhard Richter's Negatives, 1992, p. 108), but he goes on to say that this optimism and degree of certainty is at odds with Richter’s continual searching, questioning and openness to failure. He also argues that this would imply that the issues facing painting could just be painted over and would remove the tension from Richter’s work in return for a merely affirmative art. However, it could also be argued that the strongest historical claim for Richter’s work was that it showed one way to continue painting, rather than beginning the whole of painting anew. The third idea is something in between the first two, a notion of marking time, where both negations are maintained. Osborne describes this as a stalemate that ‘points beyond itself only negatively in the form of a hope: the hope, perhaps for a labour beyond the alienation of craft, conception and technology’ (Osborne, Gerhard Richter's Negatives, 1992, p. 109), although it seems strange here to regard hope in a negative rather than an affirmative way; hope is, after all, what seems to have sustained Richter’s daily practice of painting. This stalemate is one where painting has not ended, but neither has it begun again, and where the idea of negation as an end is contested. Yve-Alain Bois raises this problem as a double bind. He argues that to answer no to the question ‘has the end of painting come’, is to ignore the evidence that most postmodern paintings have abandoned the essential task of modern painting of working through the end of painting, but to say yes is ‘to give in to a historicist conception of history as both linear and total’ (Bois, 1990, p. 241). Bois goes on to describe a possible solution offered by game theory, where the game is separated from the match, and the ‘isms’ of painting are regarded as matches in the wider concept of the game, painting, and that if the match ‘modernist painting’ is over, the game of painting continues. In opposition to this Bois argues that since the modernist painting agenda was a working through of the end of painting in response to reproduction and the commodity, to claim the end of the end is to ignore the fact that reproduction and the commodity are more prevalent now than when modernism began. He goes on to say that ‘mourning has been the activity of painting throughout this [twentieth] century’ (Bois, 1990, p. 243) and that mourning (continuing to work through the end) is also the future possibility of painting. Osborne also sees painting in the future as continuing to work through the end and describes this as painting having to ‘legitimate itself conceptually as art over and above, and beyond the continuity of the relation to the history of its craft by incorporating a consciousness of the crisis of that history into the modes of its signification, into its strategic deployment of craft’ (Osborne, Gerhard Richter's Negatives, 1992, p. 111). Interestingly, in the light of what is discussed later in this essay, there is a fourth type of negativity that Osborne does not consider, the mathematical concept of the number ‘i’, (for imaginary), the square root of minus one.
In the final part of his essay Osborne addresses the effect of the readymade on painting, saying that the readymade makes the old conception of painting impossible to justify, thereby making a boundary between painting before and after the readymade, and that in the future painting must include an awareness of its historical crisis, locating itself in that crisis. Richter’s strategy of double negation enables his painting to achieve this. This idea of painting’s stalemate is further discussed later in this essay. Osborne ends his essay by expressing a doubt that Richter’s latest abstracts (i.e. those from the mid 1980s onward) still maintain the tension of the double negativity (and hence the critical nature of Richter’s work), due to the painterly nature of the works.
In the second essay, Osborne summarises his previously developed idea of the double negative and returns to the topic of his doubts about Richter’s later abstracts. He goes on to address these doubts and also answer a similar criticism (which is also a criticism of the idea of double negation) by art historian Paul Wood, by looking at the place of the aesthetic in Richter’s work and developing a better understanding of how Richter’s abstracts are abstract images (rather than paintings) and questioning what an abstract image is an image of. He then writes that the theoretical comprehension of the image is split between aesthetics (sensibility and representation) and meaning (semiotics and signification), and that this split registers changing social functions and the development of new ways to produce images and is what Richter’s art is about. There is then a section headed Sign and Image where Osborne describes how Wood’s criticism of the idea of double negation is that the idea reduces Richter’s work to the Saussurean view that visual aspects of the image play a secondary role (aesthetic residues) to the image’s role as a linguistic sign. Osborne’s answer to this criticism is the aesthetic dimension in Richter’s work plays a primary rather than a secondary role and that the use of photography registers historical social and technology processes.
The next section discusses the indexical, iconic and symbolic nature of the photograph, by contrasting Charles Peirce’s view that the indexical nature of a photograph is dependent upon the photograph’s iconicity with Barthes’s view that the photographic image has no iconic (and hence aesthetic dimension), and leads to Osborne presenting a four point thesis. The thesis asserts that its own form of aesthetic totality signifies the photographic, where the determination of the frame predominates over compositional relations, and that this aesthetic totality becomes a normative form to which painting is increasingly subject. It is arguable whether the frame dominates over the content of the photograph; for instance with a zoom lens the frame is to some extent determined by the composition selected by the amount of zoom, and it would seem that, rather than dominance, there is more of a reciprocal relationship between frame and composition, which has also always been present in painting and does not seem exclusive to the photographic process. It can also be argued that the all-over image that Osborne refers to was not imposed by the photographic process, as he argues, but arose partly from painting’s effort to differentiate itself from photography and partly from the effect on painting of Greenbergian theory.
In the next section of the essay, Reproducibility and Abstraction, Osborne argues that as a result of the way that Richter engages with the problems imposed by photography his works acquire a ‘speculative identity that produces a new kind of image space’ (Osborne, Abstract Images:Sign, Image and Aesthetic in Gerhard Richter's Painting, 2009, p. 103), and that his later abstracts, rather than lessen this effect (as Osborne had suggested at the end of the first essay), actually enhance it, by ‘concentrating on the formal aspects of a new kind of postphotographic [sic] painterly image space. Richter’s abstract images are images of this image space itself’ (Osborne, Abstract Images:Sign, Image and Aesthetic in Gerhard Richter's Painting, 2009, p. 109). What Osborne seems to be saying here is that Richter’s paintings have created a new kind of image space, and that some of the images (the later abstracts) are images of the image space that they have helped to create. Not only does this seem somewhat paradoxical, but it also seems to be taking the concept of double negativity too far. An alternative interpretation, and one that seems to be endorsed by Richter’s assiduous pursuit of painting and by his own writing in The Daily Practice of Painting, is that Richter’s main focus and love was to paint; that he was astute enough to realise that to pursue painting in the 1960s required a significant conceptual basis to his work, and that photography could provide that conceptual basis: a basis of double negation as proposed by Osborne. When the attitude of the art world towards painting began to soften, Richter perhaps felt able to pursue the possibility of painting in a more direct manner, resulting in abstracts that are dominated by paint and its effects.
The arguments expressed by Bois and Osborne concerning the death of painting invoke an image of the match that is postmodernist painting stuck in a stalemate, never ending, played by black-clad artists constantly referring to, and mourning, a death that may or may not have taken place: rather like the thought experiment in quantum physics where a cat is in a sealed box with a subatomic particle. The cat’s life or death is dependent on the state of the particle, which quantum physics dictates is in a superposition of states until measured, and therefore the cat is neither alive nor dead until the state of the particle is measured by lifting the lid of the box. Painting today also seems to be neither alive nor dead, stuck in an artistic aporia of mourning, ironically like the effect of the photographs that have played such a big role in effecting this condition: painting present looking at the photograph of painting past, simultaneous absence and presence. Richter found a way to continue painting in these conditions, and although his work is exceptional, it seems to be more of a personal quest, one painter’s way to deal with the issues at hand. The negative, self-referencing situation that painting finds itself in today does not seem to bode well for future, less gifted, painters.
The crisis in painting, the issue of painting’s continuing possibility as a relevant and significant art form, is posited on painting’s main role having been the primary method of representation (in both the semiotic and aesthetic sense) and the usurpation of this role by photography and mass reproducibility. This view is historicist, dependent on painting preceding photography and industrialisation. But what if painting had been invented after photography? What would the possibilities be then? And what possible resources are available to the painter today that were not available to the artists of the 1960s dealing with the crisis in painting?
Firstly it seems unlikely that painting would be forced (painted) into a corner by mechanisation, since there would be no historical role for painting and therefore no crisis to deal with; painting would no longer be the hegemonic modernist art form to react against. Painters might be considering what could be done with the new medium of paint, a medium more intense and varied than the inkjet process used extensively to reproduce images, and also with more materialistic possibilities than an inkjet print. Secondly it also seems unlikely that painting would be seen as having a primary role representing the ‘real’ world, given the success of the photograph and more recently of digital imagery so copiously (some might say profligately) propagated via the internet. There is however another world that has come into being since the crisis in painting, and that is the world of the virtual. There is also a resource unavailable to the artists of the 1960s, that of personal computing and associated software. Perhaps there could be a role for a practice built on the materiality of paint that, whilst acknowledging the primary role of photography in representing the real, sees a role for itself representing the limitless virtual realm of mathematical possibility. A practice that embraces and integrates the use of technology in a similar, but perhaps more complete way, to Richter’s integration of photography into his practice. It can also be argued that the representation of the virtual, of mathematics, is the representation of the real, but at a fundamental, quantum level.
Quantum physics has shown us that the classical idea of materiality is untenable at the quantum level. Elementary particles such as the photon, the electron and the quark (interestingly named after a line from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake - ‘Three quarks for Master Marks!’ (Joyce, 1939, p. 383) and with the properties of electric charge, mass, spin, colour charge, and flavour) exist in a superposition of possible states; in other words they exist in a state of alternative, and eventually mutually exclusive, possibilities. This superposition cannot be observed, since as soon as an observation is made, all the possibilities with the exception of one, the result of the observation, disappear. The only way that the superposition of states can be accurately described is by mathematics, by a wave function, and the change from a superposition to a single state is called the collapse of the wave function, or decoherence. Decoherence has been actively studied in the last thirty years but is still not fully understood. However, it can be viewed as a loss of information from a system into the environment. This suggests that the idea of materiality as the fundamental constituent of the real is less than certain, and in the hierarchy of the real, information sits under matter; beneath the materially real is the virtual real, the world of possibility, described by mathematics. It is perhaps no coincidence therefore that mathematics has been so successful in describing (science) and modelling (computer science) the macroscopically real. Mathematics is also no stranger to art; the golden section (obtained by cutting a length in two such that the ratio of the shorter piece to the longer is the same as the longer to the uncut length, and approximated by the Fibonacci sequence) has been found to be particularly aesthetically pleasing to the human eye (as well as being prevalent in natural forms) has been widely used in art, from the architecture of the Parthenon and the Notre Dame cathedral to David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash. Geometry has also been widely used in art: in composition; in the calculation of perspective in painting; in the grid system of scaling up images, and in its incorporation in abstract art. A painting practice representing the virtual, based on mathematics and integrated tightly with computer technology, seems to offer many new possibilities for painting, but it is just one option. It is interesting, and possibly productive, to imagine painting as having been invented after photography, but as both Osborne and Bois have argued, if painting is to continue as a primary art form its history cannot be ignored. However, rather than continue with endless mourning, at some point the wake needs to finish and a new match needs to begin.
​
Bibliography
​
Benjamin, W. (2008). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (J. Underwood, Trans.). London, UK: Penguin Books.
Benjamin, W. (2008). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In W. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (J. Underwood, Trans.). London, UK: Penguin.
Benjamin, A. (1996). What is Abstraction? London, UK: Academy Edition.
Benjamin, A. (2004). Disclosing Spaces: On Painting. Manchester, UK: Clinamen Press.
Bois, Y.-A. (1990). The Task of Mourning. In Y.-A. Bois, Painting as Model. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
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.
Crow, T. (2009). Hand-Made Photographs and Homeless Representation (Vol. 8). (B. H. Buchloh, Ed.) Canbridge, USA: The MIT Press.
Crow, T. (2001). Saturday Disasters:Trace and Reference in Early Warhol. In A. Michelson (Ed.), October Files - Andy Warhol. Cambridge, MA, USA: The MIT Press.
Danto, A. C. (2009). Andy Warhol. Newhaven, CT, USA: Yale University Press.
Fairbrother, T. Skulls. In G. Garrels (Ed.), The Work of Andy Warhol. Lightning Source Inc.
Foster, H. (2001). Death in America. In A. Michelson (Ed.), October Files - Andy Warhol. Cambridge, MA, USA: The MIT Press.
Jean-Philippe Antoine, G. K. Gerhard Richter. Paris, France: Editions Des Voir.
Joyce, J. (1939). Finnegan's Wake. London, UK: Penguin Books.
Kelly, M. (2009). The Richter Effect. In J. J. Francis Halsall (Ed.), Rediscovering Aesthetics. Stanford, CA, USA: Stanford University Press.
Osborne, P. (2009). Abstract Images:Sign, Image and Aesthetic in Gerhard Richter's Painting. In B. H. Buchloh (Ed.), October Files 8 - Gerhard Richter (Vol. 8). Cambridge, MA, USA: The MIT Press.
Osborne, P. (1992 йил October). Gerhard Richter's Negatives. October (62), pp. 102-113.
Osborne, P. (1991). Modernism, Abstraction and the Return to Painting. In A. B. Osborne (Ed.), Thinking Art: Beyond Traditional Aesthetics. London, UK: Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Swenson, G. (1963 йил November). What is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight Painters. Art News .
Storr, R. (2002). Gerhard Richter. New York, USA: Museum of Modern Art.
Richter, G. (1995). The Daily Practice of Painting. (H.-U. Obrist, Ed., & D. Britt, Trans.) London: Thames and Hudson.