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 notes of 1981-1993 become longer conversations of questions and assertions between Richter and himself.
Notes, 1981 [96-99]
‘The big Strokes are first of all only reproductions of brushstrokes….manifestations of their outward semblance...even the semblance is called in question, firstly because it is not painted in a ‘deceptively real’ way, and secondly because there can be no such thing as a truly credible semblance, for the simple reason that such big brushstrokes cannot really exist.’ [96]
Reproductions as reproductions...neither truth nor lie...only that which they are. There is no deception when the reproduction is acknowledge as itself and not as the thing it stands for. In this way it is not representative of anything other than what it is although it is also in part that which it stands for.
The alter ego for me should function in a similar way. A reproduction of fragments of my own identity in conjunction with fragments of other identities...a reproduction of identity, but only a reproduction, not representation. In this way the alter ego can function truthfully, but not deceptively.
This is key to development of the authenticity of the alter ego, and the work produced by the creating-persona.
‘I want pictorial content without sentiment, but I want it as human as possible.’ [98]
An impossible task? Can we be human without sentiment?
No.
So the solution is to dwell on the edge?
The alter ego cannot lack sentiment and be authentically ‘human’. At which point, the question is raised, can the alter ego, an authentically human creating-persona, create content without sentiment? Would an alter ego lacking sentiment be better suited to create content without sentiment, and would that content be ‘as human as possible’...be authentic?
‘If the Abstract Pictures show my reality, then the landscape and still-lifes show my yearning. This is grossly oversimplified,...the anachronism in them takes on a subversive and contemporary quality.’ [98]
This is something to keep in mind as I and as the creating-personas make. How are our separate realities and yearnings showing themselves in the work? What are the qualities?
‘Painting is the making of an analogy for something nonvisual and incomprehensible: giving it form and bringing it within reach. And that is why good paintings are incomprehensible….’Not comprehensible’...And it partly means an analogy for something that, by definition, transcends our understanding, but which our understanding allows us to postulate.’ [99]
What is more incomprehensible than identity? Identity is fragmented and fleeting. Through painting I am seeking to make an analogy of identity, give it ‘form’, bring it ‘within reach’. Can we ever understand identity beyond its fragmented and fleeting nature? Most likely not. But can the exploration of identity in/through the act of painting, through the painter, and the resultant work in conjunction with the analogy of performance enrich the possibilities by which painting functions as an analogy for identity? Can [how] this be postulated?
Notes, 1982 [101]
‘Everything made since Duchamp has been a readymade, even when hand-painted.’ [101]
Richter stealing back his [all painters’] birthright?
I looked over what I wrote a little more than six months ago about how I was understanding Richter’s relationship to Duchamp...I think I’ve altered my perception a bit. Not to say it couldn’t happen that I’ll change my perception on this again, and again, and again…
Richter is acknowledging he too is making Readymades...and he is not only ‘making’ them, he is making them in/thru paint/ing.
Notes, 1983 [101-107]
‘...Minimal Art: I saw this as an attempt to develop a new alphabet for the art of the future...it doesn’t look as if it is being used in that way, my hopes still go in that direction. But then perhaps that is a completely wrong way of looking at it.’ [101]
Wasn’t this what Duchamp was [not] trying to do? And what the Minimalists misunderstood about Duchamp?
‘But then perhaps that is a completely wrong way of looking at it.’ [101]
A statement from Richter, not a question.
Regards to traditional, ‘old’ works of art being contemporary [have=look; think of Wollheim postulating that art happens through the engagement with the object by the spectator]...
‘But the better we know tradition--i.e., ourselves--and the more responsibly we deal with it, the better things we shall make similar, and the better things we shall make different.’ [101]
Knowing not just the technique how- but the why-how; or if not necessarily ‘knowing’ (because it is incomprehensible) then at least hypothesizing why-how so as to better know ourselves. This, I think is the crux of why I am proposing what I am proposing, and why my ‘audience’ would be painters. First, the knowledge I gain, whatever it might be, will be foremost for myself and manifest itself through the work. Second, the documentation of the process, setting down the ‘how I go about obtaining this additional knowledge for myself’ (methodology?) is the contribution to my audience, painters. [I’ll write about this some more in a later post about Wollheim’s three lectures at the National Gallery, Washington D.C. which took place almost two years after Richter wrote this note to himself.]
‘We often neglect this side of things by concentrating on the formal, aesthetic side in isolation. Then we no longer see content in form, but form as embracing content, added to it (beauty and artistic skill slapped on)- this is worth examining. The fact is that content does not have a form (like a dress that you can change): it is form (which cannot be changed).’ [102]
It is what it is. -Das Ding an sich- I. Kant believe it only ‘About 28,700,000 results (0.85 seconds)’ when googled! Noumenon and Phenomenon? Time to break out the Kant. Noumenon is Phenomenon. [nomen est omen...form follows function follow the link for the relevance of this today...]
On Matisse…
‘Later, the few good things are exceptions:..., a painting here and there, but most of the paintings are vacuous or positively irritating. They show a painter engaged in privatizing his work: one who has given up wanting anything, who paints what amuses him. And this personal gratification is of no general interest whatever:...’ [103]
Matisse painted before (and after) Duchamp. He was free to paint in this way. Richter (and all painters, the illegitimate children of Marcel and Rrose) is not. Jealousy?
Today this tweet came my way: ‘the deception that interests me the most is making something hard look easy, which is what Matisse did.’ ~ Amy Sillman.
Richter is not interested in deception of any sorts. And his paintings never look easy, the hard process of the making always comes through. Is ‘making’ ever not hard; and ‘looking’ ever ‘easy’? Should they or can they be otherwise; and not be deceptive but authentic?
‘13 May 1983. I have always been resigned to the fact that we can do nothing, that Utopianism is meaningless, not to say criminal. This is the underlying ‘structure’ of the Photo Pictures, the Colour Charts, the Grey Pictures. All the time at the back of my mind lurked the belief that Utopia, Meaning, Futurity, Hope might materialize in my hands, unawares, as it were; because Nature, which is ourselves, is infinitely better, cleverer, richer than we with our short, limited, narrow reason can ever conceive.
….(It can also be viewed another way: that today’s art really is the most wretched and worthless imaginable, like that of some obscure transitional period unmentioned in any history of art; or in other words that we have no art, but a hiatus, which we fill with productivity.) Whichever way, I am part of it.’ [103]
It only took Richter 17 years to say what he on some level understood and expressed in his Note from 1966 [58]. There is hope; it just takes time, and maybe a ‘hiatus, which we fill with productivity’?
'Art is somewhere else.' [107]
Outside the academies(=established, officially sanctioned and sanctified structures, the ‘status quo).
Where? In itself? In the other?
Not in the artist.
Notes, 1984 [107-111]
‘16 January 1984. My pictures are devoid of objects; like objects, they are themselves objects. This means they are devoid of content, significance or meaning,...This is the quality that counts. (Even so, there are good and bad pictures.)’ [108]
Compare to Richter’s writing from the previous year [102]
‘...Then we no longer see content in form, but form as embracing content, added to it (beauty and artistic skill slapped on)- this is worth examining. The fact is that content does not have a form (like a dress that you can change): it is form (which cannot be changed).’ [102]
This means as objects devoid of content they are also devoid of form...formless. They are, and that is all they are. Readymades. But simply being does not eliminate aesthetic judgement. The artist role remains to respond to, judge, to respond.
‘Art in the real sense does exist, but it is almost impossible to recognize with any certainty. It always has existed, and it continues to operate as the loftiest yearning for Truth and Happiness and Life, or whatever you may call it; this is truly the most perfect form of our humanity.’ [109-111]
This is the statement which connects Franz and Petra.
Notes, 1985 [118-123]
‘20 February 1985. Of course I constantly despair at my own incapacity, at the impossibility of ever accomplishing anything, of painting a valid, true picture or even of knowing what such a thing out to look like. But then I always have the hope that, if I persevere,it might one day happen. I have no motif, only motivation.’ [118-119]
Hope is the motivating factor that trumps the painter’s despair. Hope/Despair are the figure/ground.
A couple of days later Richter was mulling over the formalist argument against content (representation of the object), the case of object/objectivity...turned on its head.
‘(Comparable nonsense is written about Baselitz: by being turned through 180 degrees, his figures are said to lose their objective nature and become ‘pure painting’. The opposite is true: there is an added stress on the objectivity, which takes on a new substance.) Anyway, pure painting is inanity, and a line is interesting only if it arouses interesting associations.’ [119]
Anything ‘pure’ is usually defined as such by some ideology or dogma...I agree, inane. Painting can only be painting, there is no ‘purity’. As to interesting lines and interesting associations...this is all about context. And the contextual is not limited to the canvas...it stretches far beyond and most context exists beyond the artist.
‘28 February 1985. Letting a thing come, rather than creating it--no assertions, constructions, formulations, inventions, ideologies--in order to gain access to all that is genuine, richer, more alive: to what is beyond my understanding.’ [119]
Flow. Nothingness. The key to authenticity.
‘The Photo Pictures: taking what is there, because one’s own experiences only make things worse. The Colour Charts: the hope that this way a painting will emerge that is more than I could ever invent….The Abstract Pictures: more and more clearly, a method of not having and planning the ‘motif’ but evolving it, letting it come….Now the constant involvement of chance (but still never automatism), which destroys my constructions and inventions and creates new situations (As ever, Polke, I am glad to say, is doing something comparable.)’ [120]
Taking stock on what ties together these three...I need to look again at Polke, through the lens of Richter.
‘Using chance is like painting Nature--but which chance event, out of all the countless possibilities?’ [120]
True! Selection. Or in German ‘Der Qual der Wahl!’ How do we ‘select’, choose? And how could one possibly ‘choose’ chance? We can only look at what is there and respond, and then respond again,...And when it is alter ego/creating-persona who is responding, not the ‘I’ holding the brush? I’ve started thinking about what Agnes Martin wrote about dropping the ‘ego’, the self, when painting. I need to re-visit this lecture; and consider how painting as the alter ego might in one regard, for the painter, be a means of releasing her own ego. Because, unlike Martin, I’m not sure it is ever possible to completely ‘drop’ the ego when painting.
But replacing the ego for an ‘alter ego’...now that is a point of exploration. In regard that artist speak of ‘flow’, of reaching the point where the painting is painting itself (a.?)...what happens to the ego, the painter, the ‘I’ holding the brush? I am still there, but ‘I’ am not?
On Kiefer exhibition, Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Spring 1984...
‘...-make the most of the fact that, so long as you avoid a definition, anything at all will serve to prompt an association.’ [120]
Be definitive about the context. (Richter seems to think Kiefer is not…)
‘The one thing that frightens me is that I might paint just as badly.’ [120]
Not be as definitive of the context either?
‘The way I paint, one can’t really paint, because the basic prerequisite is lacking: the certainty of what is to be painted, i.e. the Theme….When I paint an Abstract Painting (the problem is very much the same in other cases), I neither know in advance what it is meant to look like nor, during the painting process, what I am aiming at and what to do about getting there. Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned,...’[121]
Letting the painting paint itself? Or the almost blind leading the blind? Eventually they’ll get somewhere.
‘So I am as blind as Nature, who acts as she can, in accordance with the conditions that hinder or help her. Viewed in this light, anything is possible in my pictures; any form, added at will, changes the picture but does not make it wrong. Anything goes; so why do I often spend weeks over adding one thing? What am I making that I want? What picture of what?’ [121]
I am not leading, but I am still doing. The ‘I’ is still present, but I do not know what I want. How do I connect to ‘I’? Can I connect through another? Will that reveal anything about what it is that I want?
‘30 May 1985.’ [121]
Nothingness.
‘...but painting…, painting as change, becoming, emerging, being-there, thusness; without an aim, and just as right, logical, perfect and incomprehensible...to my paintings, whose immediate cause is my inner state, my happiness, my pain, in all possible forms and intensities, until that cause no longer exists.’ [121]
Painting is both nothingness and becoming.
The final portion of this quote makes me think more about the question of RM as to the relation between myself and my alter egos. If there is always a kernel of myself in the alter ego, and there is, then there will always be something of myself in the paintings. When Richter writes ‘until that cause no longer exists’ it could mean either until he no longer paints...a which point there must be death (in some form), or he has reached a point of no longer becoming, the I is no longer present. Then what is left? Nothing? Or is nothingness always dependent upon the possibility of becoming?
‘The Abstract Expressionists were amazed...the wonderful world that opens up when you just paint….It was as if theses paintings were producing themselves; and the less deliberate the painters were about infusing them with their own content and mental images, the better the paintings became.’ [122]
Ah, the painter’s utopia!
‘But the problem is this: not to generate any old thing with all the rightness and spontaneity of Nature, but to produce highly specific pictures with highly specific messages (were it not for this, painting would be the simplest thing in the world, since in Nature any old blot is perfectly right and correct.) [122]
Damn MD!
‘Even so, I have to start with the ‘blot’, and not with the new content...With all the techniques at my command, especially those of elimination, I have to try to compel something that I cannot visualize-...-to appear as an existing picture of something.’ [122]
I have to let the paint, the stuff that is the ‘blot’ lead, the techniques are there not for me to deceptively manipulate the blot into becoming something, but to act as erasers, to remove the deception to reveal what is there… (ok, I’ll take a closer look at Sartre while contemplating this).
‘13 November 1985. ‘I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.’ It does not matter what Cage meant by that, or in what context. Every time I suffer by it, it convinces me that I am doing the right thing, the only natural thing. And the Others, so-called, are either wrong, because they make statements, or just as right as I am, because I have been mistaking their works for statements. In defiance of ideology, pictures everywhere therefore say nothing. They are always only efforts to get at the truth(?). I ought to formulate that more precisely. Even if I realize, to my delight, that I am doing the only natural thing, then--
I know nothing, I can do nothing, I understand nothing, I know nothing. Nothing.
And all this misery does not even make me particularly unhappy
Better be an engineer, a bridge-builder, a physicist or a gardener.’ [122]
Hmmm, familiar tune. I think I’ll hang this in my between space…
‘...the Something that is to take the place of nothing cannot be evolved from Nothing, though the latter is so basic that one wants to believe in it as the necessary starting point.’ [123]
Richter goes on to write we can only respond with a statement to the nothingness, because it is not known to us, cannot be known to us...the statement is a surrogate for what we cannot otherwise visualize. When I think of this re: alter ego, they too function as surrogates in this way. Richter writes of the Abstract Pictures and their basis in ‘any old motif’ which evolves during the process of painting into a picture. The alter egos evolve in a similar way, from a ‘type’-motif through the process (of painting).
‘So they imply that I do not know what I want to represent, or how to begin; that I have only highly imprecise and invariably false ideas of the motif that I am to make into a picture; and therefore that- motivated as I am solely by ignorance and frivolity- I am in a position to start. (The ‘solely’ stands for life!) [123]
I’d say the implications are the same, but what about the motivation factors? If what Richter writes are viewed as synonyms for ‘play’, then possibly that is a link. I think they could be. What is more playful than life motivated by ignorance and Frivolity?
Notes, 1986 [124-132]
‘Formalism stands for something negative: contrived stuff, games played with colour and form, empty aesthetics.
When I say that I take form as my starting point, and that I would like content to evolve out of form…, then this reflects my conviction that form,..., generates a content- and that I can manipulate the outward appearance as it comes, in such a way as to yield this or that content.
I only have to act in accordance with the laws and conditions of form in order to get the materialization right.
…
The more complicates this process is, the more functional Nature’s ‘contents’, qualities, capabilities become. The issues of content is thus nonsense; i.e. there is nothing but form. There is only ‘something’: there is only what there is.’ [127]
The uniting factor in the paintings is the formal; the I enters the painting in and through the content that emerges from the manipulation. The materialization of the content is the materialization of the ‘manipulator’...that doesn’t sound like the best choice of words to describe, but what I mean is the artist/creating-persona/alter ego. Whoever is making is doing so with the formal ‘rules’, so the question becomes for me who/how are the ‘formal rules’ being responded to in the materialization of content and by whom? Was it the same artist who created this portrait of Truman Capote in 1952: http://collection.warhol.org/view/objects/asitem/items@:1901 and this one of Capote in 1978 http://collection.warhol.org/view/objects/asitem/items@:1126. Yes, and no. And is there anything more than a portrait of a man? {Note: See 4 November 1989 Note for Richter on Warhol. [180]}
[128]
Makes me thinking of the criticism directed at the paintings in the most recently exhibition of a member of the contemporary canon. What Richter describes as the trap, the failings of ‘Message Art’ is very much in line with what has been deemed what was lacking in her paintings…At the time Richter wrote this he was working on a number of the landscapes, but also two years before the Baader-Meinhof paintings. Thinking of the titles, the ‘captioning’ of both is very straight forward. They are what they are.
‘Art...It is a special mode of our daily intercourse with phenomena, in which we apprehend ourselves and everything around us. Art is therefore the pleasure taken in the production of phenomena that are analogous to those of reality, because they bear a greater or lesser degree of resemblance to them. It follows that art is a way of thinking things out differently, and of apprehending the intrinsic inaccessibility of phenomenal reality; that art is an instrument, a method of getting at that which is closed and inaccessible to us…; that art has a formative and therapeutic, consolatory and informative, investigative and speculative function; it is thus not only existential pleasure but Utopia.’ [128]
This is a great way of formulating the work of art.
‘...because there is no central image of the world (world view) any longer: we must work out everything for ourselves, exposed as we are on a kind of refuse heap, with no centre and no meaning; we must cope with the advance of a previously undreamt-of freedom.’ [128]
The fragmented nature of identity; we have to put the bits and pieces together for ourselves, and this freedom is something we have to deal with…work out for ourselves, not an easy task because it means that there are no duplicates. The reproduction is always an original too.
‘It also conforms to a general principle of Nature; for Nature, too, does not develop an organism in accordance with an idea: Nature lets its forms and modifications come, within the framework of its given facts and with the help of chance.’ [128-129]
Nature=Painting
‘And this theory is no less useless than ludicrous, if I paint bad pictures.’ [129]
Message Art.
Notes, 1988 [170-173]
‘...art becomes ‘applied art’ just as soon as it gives up its freedom from function and sets out to convey a message. Art is human only in the absolute refusal to make a statement.’ [170]
See above.
Notes, 1989 [176-182]
‘Nature/Structure. There is no more to say…..these are not simplifications. I can’t verbalize what I am working on: to me, it is many-layered by definition; it is what is more important, what is more true.’ [177]
That is all there is to painting: layer upon layer, and somewhere, in the beginning, at the base, a structure of sorts...but it is the layers that make the painting.
‘...I paint all that away, out of myself, out of my head, when I first start on a picture. That is my foundation, my ground. I get rid of that in the first few layers, which I destroy, layer by layer, until all the facile feeble mindedness has gone. I end up with a work of destruction.’ [177]
Those first few layers, the ones destroyed, possibly the ‘structure’?
‘It goes without saying that I can’t take any short cuts: I can’t start off right away with the work in its final state.’ [177]
If you could start a work ‘finished’, why do it at all? If you could know a ‘finished’ work, why do it? I think of how Agnes Martin said she had a vision of each work finished before she began it; saw a little 2 inch image in her head. Still she had to paint it, to get it out of her head. But Martin and Richter had two very different approaches and ways of thinking about painting. I might have a vague inkling of where a painting might be going, but it usually ends up far from where I thought that place was. Sometimes I would say, of course I knew what I was painting, how it would turn out. I stopped saying it early this year. I realized that was a form of control that I needed to relinquish. I can set parameters...those formal, internal rules...but the rest must happen elsewhere, externally...at which point those internal rules become less and less meaningful.
‘3 November 1989. Chance as theme and as method. A method of allowing something objective to come into being; a theme for creating a simile (picture) of our survival strategy:
The living method...exists solely as that nonstatic ‘process’, and in no other way.
Ideological: denial of…the worldview whereby...’big pictures’, are created…..(life is not what is said but the saying of it, not the picture but the picturing).’ [179-180]
Not what is made but the making...
Notes, 1990 [218-221]
‘Accept that I can plan nothing.’ [218]
If only I could! Reassuring to know he had to write this to himself.
‘My only consolation is to tell myself that I did actually make the pictures- even though they are a law unto themselves, even though they treat me any way they like and somehow just take shape. Because it is still up to me to determine the point at which they are finished…’ [218]
I hadn’t thought of this, but the alter ego will determine when the work I do on his or her behalf is ‘finished’ or rather, reached the end of my intervention...how will this work? Like the rest of the process, I suppose. But I need to think of this, too, a bit more.
‘30 May 1990. It seems to me that the invention of the Readymade was the invention of reality. It was the crucial discovery that what counts is reality, not any world-view whatever. Since then, painting has never represented reality; it has been reality (creating itself). And sooner or later the value of this reality will have to be denied, in order (as usual) to set up pictures of a better world.’ [218]
A bit more of Richter’s attempt to come to terms with MD...paintings are reality, Readymades. Pictures of a better world, a utopian vision...but we can’t make utopian pictures, we can only make reality. But at least we are freed from Ideology by this.
‘Art takes shape in spite of it all, rarely and always unexpectedly; art is never feasible.’ [221]
Notes, 1992 [242-251]
‘22 September 1992. Scraping off. For about a year now, I have been unable to do anything in my painting but scrape off, pile on and then remove again. In this process I don’t actually reveal what was beneath. If I wanted to do that, I would have to think what to reveal (...);
The process of applying, destroying and layering serves only to achieve a more varied technical repertoire in picture-making.’ [245]
Doing nothing. Waiting.
‘Artist: more of a title than a job description….
Understandably, everyone would rather be an artist than endure the shame of some ordinary occupation. But the artist’s image is going to be adjusted, sooner or later, when society realizes how easy it is to be an artist, and to set down (on or off the canvas) something that no one can understand and consequently no one can attack; how easy it is to inflate one’s own importance and put on an act that will fool everyone else and even oneself. By then, if not before, the title of artist will induce nausea.’ [247, 249]
I think this is how Franz feels about ‘artist’...with the exception of perhaps Petra.
‘Hope blinds reason.’ [250]
And all we do is hope, therefore we are permanently blind to reason.
‘