The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962-1993. Edited by Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Translated by David Britt. The MIT Press Cambridge/Anthony d’Offay Gallery London. 2002.
Notes on Notes
The past two nights I fall asleep only to wake up again within the hour thinking about the words of Richter. I think about his words about his paintings and not about the paintings.
A few days ago a. encouraged me to take another look at Richter’s writings. I decided to read only his Notes. The Notes are a collection of his thoughts in the studio across the thirty year period that is collected in the book The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962-1993. The Notes, read as if the writer is aware of someone else he is writing to, a reader or listener, but the Notes are always documenting an internal conversation Richter is having with painting, with himself.
This time around I am reading them not just for me. I am reading them for Franz, Petra and Melusine. Well, more for Franz and Petra than Melusine, I think. But still, I am reading them for myself again too.
I titled this essay/post GERHARD RICHTER I because I know there will be more. Here I am writing only about the Notes from 1962, 1964, and 1964-1965.
Richter was in his early thirties when he wrote these. He had only recently arrived in West Germany [Düsseldorf] from Dresden fed up with the ideological doctrines of the German Democratic Republic and its dictatorship exerted upon art and the artist. In Düsseldorf Richter continued his studies at the Kunstakademie and co-developed the style of German ‘Pop Art’ known as Kapitalistischer Realismus [Capitalistic Realism], in contradiction to the Sozialistischer Realismus [Socialist Realism] from which he had fled. It is from Kapitalistischer Realismus that Richter’s photo-paintings originate, and it is from this period these Notes come.
A quick note of my own regards to Richter’s Wikipedia biography. I found the sentence in the top paragraph sums up what sparks my interest in Richter’s work [it is not necessarily the paintings themselves]
‘His art follows the examples of Picasso and Jean Arp in undermining the concept of the artist's obligation to maintain a single cohesive style.’
In Richter’s subversion of ‘a single style’; style is subverted by the coherence of the concept. This is what connects the photo-painting logically to the abstractions. [I recall that Heinrich Klötz writes about this connection in his book Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert. Moderne – Postmoderne – zweite Moderne. Beck, München 1994, I should take another look.] In a way this is also what connects and differentiates Richter to what I am attempting to do in this project. Richter is always painting as Richter is painting...conceptually the structure is the same. Whereas I am attempting to paint as someone else is painting; both style and conceptual structure are undermined by an additional sub-structure, the conceptual layer that is the alter ego and its manifestation through the material, the paint.
What I will do here in this post is cite some of Richter’s notes (italics) and the penciled-in responses I have made in the book. This is for me the process again the thoughts on Richter’s words, capture them in another location by both externalizing and internalizing them. Eventually I might revisit them both, his words and mine, again elsewhere. For now I am storing them here.
Notes, 1962 (11-15)
The first impulse towards painting, or towards art in general, stems from the need to communicate, the effort to fix one’s vision, to deal with appearances (which are alien and must be given names and meanings). (11)
Is this the first impulse for me and for my alter egos?
Every word, every line, every thought is prompted by the age we live in, with all its circumstances, its ties, its efforts, its past and present. It is impossible to act or think independently and arbitrarily. This is comforting, in a way. (11)
From our time, yes, this is impossible. But from our self, that is questionable.
But all we can represent is an analogy, which stands for the invisible but is not it. (11)
As a. recently wrote, images are always metaphors...and that is what I (we) work with.
For no thing is good or bad in itself, only as it relates to specific circumstances and to our own intentions...it gives us the daily responsibility of distinguishing good from bad. (11)
Context matters, and we (us=the artist) are responsible for the context in which we create.
Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense….We are well aware that making sense and picturing are artificial, like illusion; but we can never give them up. For belief (thinking out and interpreting the present and the future) is our most important characteristic. (11 and 13)
Taking a view, communicating the point of view of the alter ego is critical to the development of the believability of character and what he or she makes. What a. said: Show me something I haven’t seen before [or maybe I have seen it, but didn’t believe it?] and make it believable. This is what will say the alter ego is more than fiction (simply made up)...the alter ego is human (real). Making and making sense.
...Art can just as well be made in harmony with the circumstances of its making as in defiance of them. In itself art is neither visible nor definable: all that is visible and imitable is its circumstances, which are easily mistaken for the art itself. (13)
Defiance of the circumstances, is this what I am doing with the alteregos? But if the alter egos are also the art? This is where it gets tricky...I want the paintings to remain the art, but what then are the alter egos? Can they be a tool, crafted, but not be the ‘art’ in this project? How and where is the differentiation? How can the mistake of which Richter writes be avoided, and should it?
...To be alive is to engage in a daily struggle for form and for survival. (13)
Note to alter egos.
Painting has nothing to do with thinking, because in painting thinking is painting. Thinking is language-- record keeping-- and has to take place before and after. (13)
This is similar to what I did with the Double Portraits. There was some writing, then some making, followed by more writing, and now I’ve returned back to them for more making...it is a loop, a Möbius Strip...writing and painting...and both are thinking.
Art serves to establish community. (13)
Identity is established in large part through community.
My concern is never art, but always what art can be used for. (13)
I think he might contradict himself to a degree in this regard later; at the same time I think I know what he is trying to get at here. It is what in a sense connects the Capitalistic and the Socialistic Realism...Realism… but it is also what differentiates the two. It is not the material, the technical, it is the conceptual. But the common denominator is not a particular concept, it is concept. So where does this leave my project, the material up against the double-conceptual? It leaves me seeking the art...the material double. [work on this!]
...we always pursue the artificial, leading, human truth. We judge and make a truth that excludes other truths. Art plays a formative part in this manufacture of truth. (15)
We make the image [via metaphor] that we want to believe is true. This loops back to the beginning of this section of Richter’s notes.
Strange though this may sound, not knowing where one is going-- being lost, being a loser-- reveals the greatest possible faith and optimism, as against collective security and collective significance. To believe, one must have lost God; to paint, one must have lost art. (15)
A starting point.
Notes, 1964 (22-24)
Much of what Richter expresses in these notes seems to be the kindling for Capitalistic Realism, the frustrations with painting, what art had become, that was echoed by the Pop artists and Conceptualist.
… the fascination of a photograph is not in its eccentric composition but in what it has to say: its information content….(22-23)
Information content...this makes me think about how I have felt recently about the art I’ve been looking at; it is not about those formal issues, the ‘how’, but the ‘what’ that is being said. Yet, there is still the making. Richter goes on with the following metaphor:
It is hard, say, to cross out six different numbers on a Lotto ticket in such a way that the arrangement looks convincing. And yet the sequence that emerges after the numbers are drawn seems entirely right and credible in every way. (23)
This is when the decisions, seemingly random, products of chance, click. The intention to pick the ‘winning’ combination generally ends in selecting the losing combination. This is the ‘magic’, the luck of the draw, We can trust that the odds of winning are so high it is best not to play...but the desire to believe we could pick the winning combination is great...as the therapist played by Robin Williams says in Good Will Hunting I got the winning ticket right here.
I prefer the ‘naive’ photograph, with a simple, uncomplicated composition. That’s why I like the Mona Lisa so much; there’s nothing to her. (23)
I read this and thought the words could come from Petra. I don’t know why. But now reading it again as I type this I think of L.H.O.O.Q. and the, in my opinion odd, animosity Richter displays towards Duchamp, although everything Richter has done he has only been able to do because of Duchamp...He must hate L.H.O.O.Q. because that little moustache and goatee robbed her of her simplicity; it made her complex. Perhaps this is the immaturity of Richter coming through, but I don’t think he has changed his course here much. Neither the photo-paintings nor the abstractions are simple or uncomplicated on the surface because their apparent simplicity reflects the complexity that lies beneath.
It’s all too easy to get carried away by one’s own skill and forget about the picture itself. (23)
Skill- technical or conceptual. When I read this I thought of it as first and foremost a warning. But also a revelation, particularly in regard to Franz. Was this the problem for him? Did he realize he let himself be carried away by skill and could no longer remember the picture? Maybe this is why he stopped making art?
Technique is really a side issue. (24)
Material or conceptual? Both? What does it mean to the other three, and to myself?
Perhaps one day I shall find something that works better than painting! For the moment, however, I am used to working with brush and paint, and I find this both simpler and more full of potential than photography, which is too bound up with easily repeatable tricks and manipulations. And even when I paint a straightforward copy, --something new creeps in, whether I want it to or not: something that even I don’t really grasp. (24)
Yes.
...nothing comes in isolation. (24)
Are the alter egos just another way of defying the isolation of the studio?
Notes, 1964-1965 (30-39)
When I draw--a person, an object-- I have to make myself aware of proportion, accuracy, abstraction or distortion and so forth. When I paint from a photograph, conscious thinking is eliminated. I don’t know what I am doing. My work is far closer to the Informel than to any kind of ‘realism’. The photograph has an abstraction of its own, which is not easy to see through. (30)
Painting or drawing. The building of the structural support as opposed to layering of the facade. Reaction rather than response. The very process of photography is a form of abstraction. A paragraph identifying the paradox.
Photographs were regarded as true, paintings as artificial. (31)
Richter’s thoughts photography make me think not just of how I have used photography in relationship to painting the past few years, but also what if photography is the practice of one of the alter egos? How does this implied ‘credibility’ coexist with the artificiality of the alter ego, and the implied artificialness of painting with the credibility of the alter ego? Does it come back to the question of believability, and our desire to believe in spite of what we know is the truth? So what role will photography play,or continue to play, in this project?
Life communicates itself to us through convention and through the parlour games and laws of social life. Photographs are ephemeral images of this communication--as are the pictures I paint from photographs. Being painted, they no longer tell of a specific situation, and the representation becomes absurd. As a painting, it changes both its meaning and its information content. (31)
Is a point of collaboration between the alter egos and myself through photos? This is sort of happening through the Double Portrait collages with the found Images. How might it happen if the alter ego is photographing...or finding the photos? Similar to Melusine finding the text...but consider the believability…
A photograph is taken in order to inform. What matters to the photographer and to the viewer is the result, the legible information, the fact captures in an image. Alternatively, the photograph can be regarded as a picture, in which case the information conveyed changes radically. However, because it is very hard to turn a photograph into a picture simply by declaring it to be one, I have to make a painted copy. (31)
Richter, 1964. We have moved beyond this final sentence...but still what he states in the first two sentences lingers and all three are pertinent to the question of the role photography plays in relationship to painting in this project.
Perhaps because I’m sorry for the photograph, because it has such a miserable existence even though it is such a perfect picture, I would like to make it valid, make it visible-- just make it (even if what I make is then worse than the photograph). And this making is something that I can’t grasp, or figure out and plan. That is why I keep on and on painting from photographs, because I can’t make it out, because the only thing to do with photographs is paint from them. Because it attracts me to be so much at the mercy of a thing, to be so far from mastering it. (33)
Because. I don’t know. Making? Making. The total Verzweiflung of the artist.
Do you know what is great? Finding out that a stupid, ridiculous thing like copying a postcard could lead to a picture. And then the freedom to paint whatever you felt like….Not having to invent anything anymore, forgetting everything you meant by painting...and all the things you previously knew and thought. Suddenly none of this was a prior necessity for art. (33-34)
Freedom obtained by the conceptual...but still paint.
...And technique lies outside my voluntary control and influence, because it is itself a reality like the model, the photograph and the painting…. (34)
I want to leave everything as it is. I therefore neither plan nor invent; I add nothing and omit nothing. At the same time, I know that I inevitably shall plan, invent, alter, make and manipulate. But I don’t know that. (34)
Intention vs Reality
There is no way to paint except the way I do it. (34)
And when I am not I? How then do I paint?
Photography as a means of abstracting the reality of the artist's personal POV which cannot be avoided in drawing, the structural basis of painting….an apprehensive process according to Richter.
...By tracing the outlines with the aid of a projector, you can bypass this elaborate process of apprehension. You no longer apprehend but see and make (without design) what you have not apprehended. And when you don’t know what you are making, you don’t know, either, what to alter or distort. …(35)
Apprehend, comprehend. Apprehension, comprehension. When I’ve used a projector in the past, how have I used it? What role could projectors play in this project?
...I paint like a camera… (35)
When I purpose copying the work of the alter ego and vice versa..?
Back to POV…
Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless. It demonstrates the endless multiplicity of aspects; it takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view. (35)
It is not a singular, individual identity...a name...but many. I think of the lineages of kings being read to validate their right to the throne...their identity as king. But it is more than because the one before...it is the many before that make the king who he is...king. After the first or second generation counted backwards the list becomes a blur of names...and here Richter goes on to talk of the technical blurrings conceptual role in the photo-painting….it is the same as that endless genealogical list being read to the masses.
...Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information. (37)
There will be blurring in this project...but its purpose must be clear.
...If I had any way of abandoning the object as the bearer of this structure, I would immediately start painting abstracts. (37)
FLW...he did find the way, but still kept painting the photo-paintings too…
The photograph makes a statement about real space, but as a picture it has no space of its own. Like the photograph, I make a statement about real space, but when I do so I am painting; and this gives rise to a special kind of space that arises from the interpenetration and tension between the thing represented and the pictorial space. (38)
That is the between space.
For an artist there must be no names: not table for table, not house for house, not Christmas Eve for December 24, not even December 24 for December 24. We have no business knowing such nonsense. (39)
For Richter this denotes a fixed POV...something that is impossible for artist to have.
Talk about painting: there’s no point. By conveying a thing through the medium of language, you change it. You construct the qualities that can be said, and you leave out the ones that can’t be said but are always the most important. (39)
Wittgenstein.
Polke thinks there must be some point in painting, because most lunatics paint unbidden. (39)
Polke was a smart man, a great painter, and often the preferred paint of the lunatic is his or her own feces.