Playing in the Ruins:
The Late Abstraction of Gerhard Richter

Jonathan Field

 

Introduction

"Richter’s late abstraction re-constitutes aesthetic totality from the ruins of modernism. It compels conviction because, rather than pretend that the ruination never happened, it is made of that debris, that negation."[1]

In the summer of 1995 the Anthony D’Offay gallery in London held an exhibition entitled Gerhard Richter: Painting in the Nineties. Comprising abstract painting alone (Richter’s oeuvre is notoriously heterogenous) the exhibition provided the opportunity to consider Richter’s development since his Tate Gallery Retrospective of 1991.[2] My instinctive reaction to these new paintings was two-fold: first, these late Abstract Paintings were qualitatively better than those that came before (that is Richter’s "painting in the eighties"); second, that this improvement related somehow to a playfulness in this later work, a desire to frolic—as Wood puts it—in the "ruins" of Modernist painting.

A similar sense of "playing in the ruins" is evident in the writing of American author Thomas Pynchon (albeit in the ruins of literature rather than painting). Where Wood uses the term "ruins," Pynchon prefers the term "entropy." Central to this study is the belief that play—with its emphasis on openness and subjectivity and its rejection of closure and prescriptive outcome—is an essential part of what I will term "counter-entropic" practice. In this paper, the late abstraction of Richter is approached using Pynchon’s terminology. Drawing together American literature and contemporary German painting, it demonstrates how both writer and painter have found playfulness the best means to counter the entropic tendency—the ruins—that both consider one of the salient characteristics of Postmodern culture.

 

1. Two Paintings by Gerhard Richter

If I am to demonstrate that Richter’s abstraction of the 1990s marks a qualitative shift in comparison to that of the 1980s, it is first necessary to define the salient characteristics of both periods: that is, what do these paintings look like? This question can be addressed most effectively if an individual painting is elected to represent each suite of paintings. In so doing I run the risk of undermining other elements of Richter’s painting project (the Photo Paintings, Colour Charts, Grey Pictures and so forth). Nonetheless, all the paintings on show at D’Offay belonged to Richter’s abstract oeuvre, and, as such, Red [821][3](1994) (Fig. 1) has been taken to represent his recent interests and obsessions. If one is to compare like with like, it is also necessary to elect an abstract painting to represent his painting in the eighties. Abstract Painting [576/3] (1985) (Fig. 2), therefore, will stand for the earlier decade.

 

Red [821]

Red [821] is a large painting, measuring 200cm x 320cm. Filling one's field of vision, it suggests monumentality, grandeur even. Our visual experience is dominated by the eponymous color of the title, which forms a veil through which we peer at a chaos of earlier workings. This is not, however, the triumphant primary of Yves Klein or Barnet Newman. Rather, it is a bleached and dirty looking red, an impure variant generated by the smearing of wet paint into wet paint. Bits of acid green and blue poke through, signs of the earlier activity which led (perhaps) to the completed work. The main manufacturing process seems to be one of accretion, dominated by the building up of layers of paint: yet the red paint which determines the character (and title) of the painting serves as much to destroy that which is underneath as to construct the visible image. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that some sort of spatula or squeegee has blurred the wet surface of the painting, and many of the arabesques and swirls of paint which remain visible are the product of this pseudo-mechanical process.

This fact directs our attention toward the means by which Red [821] was produced. This line of enquiry is aided by the suite of thirty three color photographs contained within the exhibition catalogue which chart the complex of gestures and counter-gestures that led to the finished painting. It is clear, on attending to these, that the production process is lengthy and unpredictable: the initial stages bear no relation to the finished painting. The working process is difficult to define causally: Red [821] has been constructed through the interaction of "organic" (brushed, controlled) paintwork and "mechanically" (scraped, squeegeed) interventions.[4] It is clear on attending to the painting itself, however, that these "scrapings" are neither the multi-directional marks of erasure, nor has Richter chosen to submerge them behind subsequent layerings of paint. If anything, their role is positive (compositional) rather than negative (erasive). Their mechanical identity (as opposed to the organic brush-marks and semi-expressionistic gestures which underlie them) is integral to the identity of the painting. Richter has afforded them prime position: they sweep across the top of the painting in bold strokes, generating Red [821]’s primary dynamic (horizontal, from left to right). The underlying layers of paint also bear traces of the same semi-mechanical disruption which has afflicted the top (red) layer of paint. Creation is also destruction; construction also de-construction.

In short, there is a sense of play here, an openness to accident and unpredictability.

 

Abstract Painting [576/3]

Abstract Painting [576/3] is a smaller painting than Red [821], measuring 180cm x 120cm. Like Red [821] it is not representational, yet where Red [821] comprises mostly one color, this earlier painting is multi-colored. A large block of yellow dominates the upper half, the centre is occupied primarily by a tinted salmon-pink, and ultramarine blue dominates the bottom section. These three areas of color have been applied with a large brush, and are flat, uncompromising monochrome statements. The (many) painterly incidents which surround them are, however, not so easy to describe. Grey "squiggles" dynamically traverse the canvas, and are in turn overlaid by frenzied painterly activity. The yellow area is overlaid with gestural red brush-marks, and the pink-tinted mid-section by thick opaque smearings of pure cadmium red. Underlying the blue area are gesturally brushed passages of grey paint, and the left side of the painting is dominated by an acidic lime green which is in turn overlaid with the same salmon-pink that dominates the centre of the painting.

It is immediately clear that Abstract Painting [576/3] comprises a far wider vocabulary of formal languages and painting styles than Red [821]. Indeed, it appears to comprise a catalogue of the rhetorical devices of the expressionist abstract painter—Jackson Pollock’s drip co-exists with Mark Rothko’s flat fields of primary color, Franz Klein’s gestural calligraphy and so on. This range of styles and techniques draws our attention toward Richter’s method. The mid-1980s is the period of the "color-sketches" whereby Richter reproduced (via a process of transfer and enlargement) small paintings on a large scale. Painted in 1985, Abstract Painting [576/3] epitomizes this policy of re-presenting the rhetorical devices and codes of painterly abstraction: to apply the terminology used in my description of Red [821], it re-presents "mechanically" an "organic" original. This process is clearly visible here: the painting appears to comprise areas of flat color which co-exist with seemingly "gestural" brush-marks, yet this initial perception proves deceptive. The paint-marks that transverse the canvas from the top-left corner have been "shaded" to create the illusion of spatiality, their upper half tinted to create a three-dimensional trompe l’oeil effect; the flecks of green paint that suggest unmediated painterly activity have been printed onto the surface of the painting with a sheet of glass; the cadmium red which overlays the mid-section of the painting has been applied with a printer’s squeegee, and so on. As such, the gap between organic (model) painting and the mechanical method of production could not be further emphasized.

In short, Abstract Painting [576/3] is the product of a prescribed and carefully executed process: that sense of play evident in Red [821] is absent.

A Shift

The above descriptions point to similarities as well as differences between the two paintings (and, by association, the two periods): both comprise a combination of "organic" and "mechanical" modes of painting, and both maintain an uneasy relationship between the two.  Interpretation of both paintings, however, remains difficult. (Conventional) abstract expressionism operates on the premise that there exists a direct and unmediated relationship between artist and artwork. Both Red [821] and Abstract Painting [576/3] problematize this relationship. Nor is it possible to categorize either as "abstract" paintings in the conventional sense. The process of abstraction generally involves a two-way relationship between an external reality (whether that be physical, psychological or whatever) and the canvas. Neither Abstract Painting [576/3] nor Red [821] maintains such a relationship. Neither can be described using conventional psychological categories such as gesture or expression; nor theological terms such as transcendence. Neither tells us of Richter the author, and nor do they point outward toward some reality that exists beyond itself.

Where these issues are the subject of much literature on Richter, what is interesting here is the shift from a prescriptive methodology to one characterized by playfulness and openness. The manifest subject of Richter’s abstraction, as many commentators have noted, is the crisis of legitimacy facing abstract painting in the Postmodern present. Abstract Painting [576/3] demonstrates this crisis through that process of double-negation described above (of organic painting by mechanical re-presentation, and vice-versa). Red [821], however, was produced through a process more complex than the simple re-presentation of an organic original. The method here is one of concretization, a building up of the paint surface through the combination (fusing) of organic and mechanical painting.

Why this shift?

The answer, I suggest, can be understood in relation to "entropy." Where there are few examples of the term appearing in relation to visual practice, the theme of entropic decline is common within twentieth century American literature and is particularly significant in the work of Thomas Pynchon. In order to introduce the manner in which Pynchon’s work engages with the theme, the following section is structured in relation to two of his stories [Entropy (1960) and The Crying of Lot 49 (1965)]. Only five years separates these two works, yet the development between them, I suggest, provides a model with which to understand and evaluate the shift in Richter’s painting between the 1980s and 1990s.

 

2. Two Stories by Thomas Pynchon

Entropy

Entropy revolves around two central characters. The first is Meatball Mulligan, a "beatnik" observed in the process of holding a lease-breaking party which is slowly degenerating into chaos. Upstairs, the second character, Callisto, is living a carefully monitored life in a hermetically sealed hothouse. Where Mulligan’s domain is dominated by raucous interaction, Callisto’s is an ordered enclave which insulates him from the vagaries of the outside world. The story is therefore composed around the opposition between Callisto's order and Mulligan’s chaos. As literary critic Tony Tanner (1972) puts it,

There is a kind of perfect music which acts like a ‘closed system’ and finally resolves all into a terminal sameness; there is a noise which might lead to chaos (a terminal sameness of another kind)...[5]

In the search for "perfect music," Callisto has retreated from the world of interaction into his own airless void. His fear of chaos and ambiguity has led not only to a supremely ordered environment, but to an extreme form of entropy (in his closed system, heat energy cannot be transferred to the small bird whose life he is trying to save by warming it in his hands). The futility of attempting to live in a "hothouse," isolated from the world, is finally revealed: Callisto’s "perfect music" has resolved all into terminal sameness.[6] Callisto’s hothouse is counterbalanced in Pynchon’s story by an alternate form of entropic death. Mulligan’s party has moved into its fortieth hour, the guests are in various states of inebriation, and communication between the revelers has become increasingly discordant and reached the point at which it has virtually collapsed.[7] Where Callisto faces the terminal sameness of inertia, Mulligan faces that of chaos.

If entropy may be defined as a tendency toward both "disorder" and "inertness," then Mulligan metaphorically represents the former, and Callisto the latter. In short, both characters demonstrate conditions of entropy.

The Crying of Lot 49

Five years later Pynchon published The Crying of Lot 49. The story follows one central character, Oedipa Maas, in her investigation of the estate of an ex-lover. As she sets about her task she discovers more and more clues pointing to the existence of an underground organization (the "Trystero") which opposes (and provides a secret alternative to) the official lines of communication. Oedipa is never sure if the Trystero exists or whether she is hallucinating its existence as an antidote to the drabness of her life. As her quest for truth progresses, she has many hints of an alternate reality which hovers just outside her perception. One example of this strange experience occurs when she arrives at the city of San Narciso:

Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern California, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There'd seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute in San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.[8]

This location of meaning just beyond the "threshold of understanding" is a central aspect of the novel. The clues which appear to Oedipa reveal only glimpses of reality, but "...never the central truth itself which would destroy its own message irretrievably."[9] This phrase captures the essence of the book: The Crying of Lot 49 consistently rebuffs the reader’s attempts to locate a coherent meaning within its narrative. The principle means by which this is effected is Pynchon’s ambiguous treatment of the Detective genre of literature. The Californian detective stories of Raymond Chandler provide a model for the story. But rather than the narrative leading toward the denouement of a criminal, a set of clues eventually pointing to a resolution of previous mysteries, Pynchon's story begins with conventional life firmly in place, and gradually moves toward a condition of increasing mystery and ambiguity.

A Shift

Despite the brevity of the above synopses, a distinct shift can be observed between these two stories. Entropy is a dialectical story: Callisto and Mulligan stand not so much as characters in their own right but metaphoric equivalents to a crisis within American literature. Pynchon has written a story which engages dialectically with its eponymous title: the two characters represent the polar culminations of inertia and chaos so absolutely that they become little more than ciphers for the scientific tendency that provides its title. Where Entropy engages with its eponymous theme in a dialectical manner, The Crying of Lot 49 abandons the metaphor in favor of a more ambiguous mode. If Callisto and Mulligan represent two polar entropic threats, it is unclear whether Oedipa represents anything at all: her name seems either to signify too much or too little. Names in novels operate traditionally either in a literal or metaphoric manner, but Pynchon rejects this convention. The name "Oedipa Maas" is neither real nor metaphorical (in the sense that Callisto and Mulligan are metaphors). "Oedipa" suggests a female version of Oedipus. "Maas," it has been suggested, may denote "mass," and therefore link with Newtonian physics.[10] Terry Caesar, on the other hand, has suggested that the name may consist simply of a verbal joke: "Oedipa my ass."[11] Any of these interpretations may reflect Pynchon’s intention, or none. In refusing to confer a unique identity upon his heroine, Pynchon frustrates our desire to predict her behavioural patterns. Where the meaning of Entropy occupies a central role in the construction of the story, the meaning of The Crying of Lot 49 exists peripherally.

This shift—from the dialectical to the playful, from the prescriptive to the open—is not dissimilar to that which occurred within Richter’s practice between the 1980s and 1990s.

And this shift—in both painting and writing—can best be understood, I suggest, using Pynchon’s terminology: entropy.

 

3. Entropy

The 1980s so far have led us to the discovery that the craving for unlimited freedom may be ultimately entropic. It deprives art of direction and purpose until, like an unwound clock, it simply loses its capacity to work.[12]

...as the society is saturated to the limit, it implodes and winds down into inertia and entropy.[13]

Generally associated with the running down of a system (whether that be a small machine or the universe) the culmination of the entropic tendency has been theorized variously as disorder and inertia. The two claims cited above reveal such a tendency: for Suzi Gablik, the collapse of the guiding principles which bound cultural activity under Modernism has engendered a crisis within the visual arts, whereas for Jean Baudrillard it is the saturation of images that characterizes the contemporary world which is the entropic agent. Further examples range from Danto’s thesis that art after Warhol is merely the repetition in diluted form of what came before, to Fukuyama’s claim that we are living after history.[14] Such claims may easily be confused with alarmist assertions of a deterioration in cultural standards. My intention here is avoid such generalized claims in favor of a more precise definition that relates to the cultural context within which Richter is working.

The Fantasy of Theory

The first entropic danger is the colonial tendencies of visual theory. The tendency for the art work to be considered a text to be deciphered rather than an object to be evaluated is typical of a Postmodern critical sensibility, as Grizelda Pollock outlines in her appraisal of new feminist theory:

...art is perceived as something made, produced, by a social mind and psychically-shaped body which 'writes' upon it's materials to produce a series of signs which have to be read like hieroglyphs or deciphered like complex codes. The real realm is not that of optics but graphics.[15]

What is significant in the present context is the hegemony of such a trend within contemporary theoretical and curatorial practice.[16] In order to explore this tendency, I turn to Ian Heywood’s paper "Primitive Practices: Against Visual Theory" (1994).[17] The purpose of Heywood’s paper is to criticize the aggressive tendencies of "visual culture." Heywood begins by noting that visual art is especially vulnerable to the reductive tendencies of cultural theory. Borrowing from Bauman’s essay "Legislators and Interpreters" (1987), he suggests that the effect of theory on art over the past twenty years has been largely negative.[18] Heywood first outlines the theorist’s ideology of culture (which, following the breakdown of traditional modes of social organization in the early eighteenth century had the net effect of empowering the intellectual via the legislative power of knowledge), and goes on to note that within late modernity the legislative power of grand theory is on the wane. As a consequence the theorist/legislator has been replaced by the expert who enjoys absolute autonomy and freedom, yet (consequently) finds him/herself politically impotent and detached from any real ethical responsibilities. It is this aspect, for Heywood, which lends visual theory its sinister undertones. It is the fantasy of theory to imagine that it can (indeed, must) step in to inform and illuminate what is otherwise an ignorant practice: for the expert, art is a "primitive" practice desperately in need of the legitimizing power of theory.[19] Where Pollock notes that the Postmodern critic attends to the textual qualities of the art work, Heywood goes further in suggesting that recent theory is actively antagonistic to the intrinsically visual qualities of the work. For the expert, the deeper stratum contained within the art work is theoretical, (rather than poetic) but ill-formed or incomplete and the task of the theorist to correct what is an ill-informed, and (at worst) dangerous practice. The metaphor which Heywood applies to this process is that of coursing:

With special concepts and methods we are to course for meaning, to flush out slyly innocent representations from their hiding places; ‘decoding’, ‘deconstructing’ and ‘demystifying’ we catch and flay our quarry, laying bare its secret interior, and ending its earthy, secret life.[20]

It is this recognition of the tendency for contemporary theory to deprive art of its auratic quality, to render it textual, that is of particular significance here. Visual theory, which seeks to colonize painting for its own instrumental ends, represents the first entropic threat to what Richter calls the "incomprehensibility" of painting. The Daily Practice of Painting (Richter’s studio notes, exhibition statements and interviews) is replete with statements which assert the value accorded an opaque, auratic form of practice.[21] However, the belief that the deeper stratum contained within his art work is theoretical rather than poetic has led many critics – most notably Benjamin Buchloh - to suggest that the Abstract Paintings represent a memorial to the past possibilities of painting.

Taken in isolation, the solution to this first "entropic" difficulty would seem to be a non-theoretical, organic form of painting. This is not, however, Richter’s choice: the distinguishing characteristic of both Abstract Painting [576/3] and Red [821] is the very problematizing of ‘organic’ painting (Pollock’s drip, Kline’s calligraphy and so on). The reason for this, I suggest, can be understood in relation to the debased nature of the organic gesture today. To defend this claim, I turn next to Jean Baudrillard’s vision of entropy.

A Saturated Culture

Jean Baudrillard’s first writings represent an effort to extend the Marxist critique of capitalism beyond the scope of the theory of the mode of production. His later work evolved a theory that attempts to comprehend the nature and impact of mass communications. He began focusing on the media in the mid 1960s, and developed the belief that, in the new Postmodern world, we are bombarded with information-rich images every moment of our lives, the consequence of which is the collapse any distinction between what is real and what is not. For Baudrillard, we live in a world of "simulacra"[22], in which the image of an event has replaced direct experience. For Baudrillard, therefore, it is the breakdown of the correspondence between the real world and the image of the world that is symptomatic of entropic decline within contemporary culture. The Marxist critic Douglas Kellner provides a useful outline of this tendency in Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Poststructuralism (1989):

In a society supposedly saturated with media messages, information and meaning 'implode,' into meaningless 'noise,' pure effect without content or meaning. Thus Baudrillard claims, 'information is directly destructive of meaning and signification, or neutralizes it...information dissolves meaning and the social into a sort of nebulous state leading not at all to a surfeit of innovation but to the very contrary, to total entropy.'[23] (my italics).

Entropy, according to Baudrillard’s vision, is implicated in the very structure of contemporary culture, which, saturated to the limit, has brought with it the "death of art."[24] The principle characteristic, as Kellner notes, is the loss of an organic relationship between experience and the representation of that experience. In the face of the mass production of imagery, the capacity for an image to stand as an unmediated (organic) representation of experience is problematized.

Unsurprisingly, such claims have not been met without criticism. As Christopher Norris has noted, the rejection of any form of "truth" (Baudrillard rejects any defense of truth claims as a hopeless appeal to obsolete Enlightenment habits of thought) can lead only to moral nihilism.[25] Furthermore, the conception of reality as nothing more than a product of various codes and signifying systems assumes that experience can be interpreted only from a socio-cultural perspective.[26] Nonetheless, the notion of a breakdown between experience and its representation is symptomatic of much Postmodern critical practice (it is central to both Benjamin Buchloh and Stefan Germer’s critiques of Richter’s Abstract Paintings, for example). It also remains a constant concern for Richter himself. Both Red [821] and Abstract Painting [576/3] explicitly problematize organic painterly activity through a process of mediation (whether that be one of transfer and enlargement or one of mechanical disruption of organic gesture), and the Abstract Paintings take their place within a body of work dedicated to resisting an organic artistic vision.

Wood has written of the recent ruination of traditional aesthetics. This ruination, I suggest, has been brought about by a variant of that saturation of visual information to which Baudrillard refers: the quotational tendencies of Postmodern practice. High Modernist styles of painting are now being quoted as part of the Postmodern project of deconstructing originality and authenticity (Phillip Taaffe’s recycling, for instance, of Minimalist and Optical painting). The "ruins" to which Wood refers are generated by the reduction of organic and mechanical modes of production to the level of rhetoric. The second entropic threat to the kind of auratic painting Richter values is the rhetorical (even clichéd) nature of Modernist abstraction, when, as Benjamin Buchloh puts it, "...gesture could still engender the experience of emotional turbulence, when chromatic veils credibly conveyed a sense of transparency and spatial infinity, when impasto could read as immediacy and emphatic material presence..."[27]

In short, Richter cannot return to an unproblematic (organic) mode of painting, just as Pynchon cannot return to the unambiguous denouements of Raymond Chandler.

 

4. From Demonstration to Non-Demonstration

Returning to Pynchon, the significance of Entropy in relation to this study becomes apparent when one considers the ease with which it gives itself to theory. Callisto's fear of chaos and ambiguity has led not only to a supremely ordered environment, but to homogeneity and inertia,[28] whereas Mulligan's party brings with it the alternate entropic condition of disorder.[29] Pynchon has written a story which engages dialectically with its eponymous title: the two characters represent the polar culminations of inertia and chaos so absolutely that they become little more than ciphers for the scientific tendency that provides its title. Pynchon acknowledges this irony years after writing the story:

The story is a fine example of a procedural error beginning writers are always being cautioned against. It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.[30]

In presenting a dialectical equivalent to the entropic process, the story is rendered subservient to the interpretation. Tanner writes of the "dangerous seductiveness of metaphors of doom"[31], yet this is precisely how Entropy has been constructed. Entropy is unable to counter its eponymous tendency precisely because it demonstrates it.

Where Entropy communicates its meaning dialectically and unambiguously, communication in The Crying of Lot 49 is always incomplete. Pynchon’s concern in both stories is related to the problem of decipherment; but where Entropy engages dialectically with this concern, it manifests itself in the later story as a permanent instability—a playfulness—in the relationship between the interpreting mind of the reader and the varying fields of signification it must negotiate. Of prime importance to the present thesis is the fact that the shift which occurs between the two stories does not represent a volte-face in Pynchon’s practice. The Crying of Lot 49 is not a demonstration; yet, significantly, nor is it absolutely non-demonstrative (there remains throughout a curious sense of meaning just beyond the threshold of understanding). The shift is from binary, dialectical structure to one that is open, multivalent and playful.

The same is true, I suggest, in regard to the shift from Abstract Painting [576/3] to Red [821].

Abstract Painting [576/3] polarizes organic and mechanical modes of practice in an equivalent manner to that in which Callisto and Mulligan polarize the two culminations of entropy. What is significant is the ease with which paintings such as Abstract Painting [576/3] lend themselves to dialectical interpretation, the ease with which Buchloh et al are able to course (to use Heywood’s term) beneath the surface of the 1980s abstraction. After such "expert" analyses, Abstract Painting [576/3] comprises little more than hidden text (and not well hidden at that). What marks Richter’s 1980s abstraction is its binary structure—its lack of playfulness—which allows "meaning" to be woven easily around it. Organic and mechanical modes of practice are rendered textual through incongruous juxtaposition; as such, they remain little more than ciphers for painting’s crisis (as Pynchon’s Entropy remains little more than a cipher for literature’s crisis). The visual particularity (and consequent meaning) of the early abstraction is submerged beneath its textuality. In demonstrating crisis, the locus of the 1980s Abstract Paintings is fundamentally theoretical: they come behind the various interpretations of Richter’s abstraction.

Where Entropy provides a model for understanding Abstract Painting [576/3], Pynchon’s later story provides a paradigm for Richter’s later painting. Importantly (again echoing Pynchon) the shift which occurs between the two paintings does not represent a volte-face in Richter’s practice. Red [821] certainly operates in opposition to the binary structure of the early work. Where the early abstraction demonstrates the difficulties which confront painting through a process of double-negation, the late abstraction is produced through a process more complex than the simple re-presentation of an organic original. Red [821] was produced after countless actions and counter-actions (the repeated application and removal of paint). Each canceling of the plethora of earlier painterly activity was also the moment at which a new possibility was made visible. If the traces of this layering proved unsatisfactory visually, then Richter continued to work. By its very nature, the sheer quantity of visual phenomena which are brought into being through this (playful) method cannot be adequately conveyed through language. In being produced "backwards," theory is forced to come after practice.

But what exactly is at stake here: what are the "ruins" in which Richter is playing, and why does "play" represent a positive quality in Richter’s painting? In other words, a closer understanding of the term "play" is needed.

 

5. Red [821]: Playing in the Ruins

The term "play" suggests a lack of seriousness, a certain frivolousness.[32] But Richter’s playfulness is deadly serious (one only has to read The Daily Practice of Painting: Richter’s studio notes, exhibition statements and interviews—to appreciate this). I have argued that "play" might be understood as an attempt to counter the “entropic difficulties facing contemporary cultural production,” and in the previous section suggested that the concretization of his late abstraction represents an attempt to overcome these (as noted, Red [821] plays with the tropes [mechanical and organic] of abstract painting, carefully walking a tightrope between the two modes.) By repositioning, re-constituting, pushing one way then the other, the process that generated Red [821] is dominated by a constant sense of becoming and transformation– a significantly different form of play, I would suggest, to that witnessed in much Postmodern practice. Where many Postmodern strategies (irony, pastiche and so forth) are described as "playful," Richter’s methods are driven by a different agenda.

Postmodern play

The kind of "play" that dominates Postmodern practice is generally theorized as a reaction to the "seriousness" of Modernist practice. Many commentators have noted that Modernity is marked by a relocation of art away from the life-world,[33] and this interest in autonomy, this will to purity, can be seen in much abstract painting of the twentieth century. One example will stand for many others: Ad Reinhardt began his painting career with geometrically abstract paintings. His first contact with the theories of Modernist abstraction came in the late thirties and early forties with the study of Malevich and Mondrian, and his oeuvre is famously dominated by a continual process of reductivism. His career ended with a seven year period (1960-1967) during which he painted nothing but square canvases in which two barely distinguishable coats of black paint form a cruciform trisection of the surface. With these ‘black’ paintings, he argued, reductive Modernist painting refines itself to a point at which further progress cannot be made. Here, playfulness is forbidden, seriousness, purity and closure are all. And it is this closure—this seriousness, this drive toward (Parnassian) purity which many Postmodern painters react against. If Reinhardt represents Modernist exclusivity, the paintings of David Salle might be taken as emblematic of this opposing tendency. In "Post-Modernism," Charles Jencks describes one of Salle’s paintings:

Disparity is the key, as in Burning Bush, 1982, where two pornographic images contrast with a political cartoon and a burning bush (?) of abstraction. The implication is that they are all the same at the level of imagery. We make no sense of the First World War caricature fleeing with his loot of clocks; nor to the girl peering at the viewer from between her legs. What does give pause is the way these images jump back and forth in successive readings. No sooner has one finished decoding the outline cartoon than one is off chasing a three-dimensional girl with a headache...[34]

Salle’s painting is certainly more "playful" than Reinhardt’s: In combining imagery from such diverse sources as pornography, advertising and abstract painting, Burning Bush generates alternate and conflicting interpretations. However, in encouraging the breakdown of the traditional signifier/signified relationship, the playfulness of Salle’s painting, I suggest, merely demonstrates the Postmodern condition of painting. And in surrendering to demonstration, Burning Bush represents a significantly different form of play to that we see in Red [821].

From the least to the most probable state

As argued, Richter’s "serious" play is informed by a desire to counter the entropic state of painting in the Postmodern present. Norbert Wiener has suggested that

As entropy increases, the universe, and all closed systems in the universe, tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness, to move from the least to the most probable state...

Both Reinhardt’s and Salle’s painting represent a high level of probability. David Hockney, writing in 1968, claimed to know of eighteen painters working in London, all of whom (following Reinhardt) were producing black square canvases. Salle’s paintings are predictable simply in their repetitiveness. As the American critic Thomas Lawson observes,

Salle records a world so stupefied by the narcotic of its own delusory gaze that it fails to understand that it has nothing actual in its grasp. Amid seeming abundance, there is no real choice, only a choice of phantasms. The world described in Salle's work is a jaded one, rife with sluggish melancholy. The steady leaching of meanings from objects and images breeds an enervating uncertainty. Artists and viewers alike stumble through a maze of false clues and incomplete riddles, coming on the same viewless arrangements and empty repetitions in the search for a coherent identity. Signs and props are ritually shuffled like so many commodities on the floor of a department store of the imagination, with a compulsive repetition that offers a dwindling satisfaction.[35]

The concretization of Red [821] – Richter’s refusal to demonstrate the jaded condition of contemporary culture (defined so eloquently by Lawson)– represents a different form of “play” to that which dominates the studio practice of David Salle. This is not a “ritual shuffling” of the rhetoric of painting. Rather, it is an attempt to allow play a positive role in generating a genuinely aesthetic form of painting. In other words, Red [821] communicates the difficulties confronting painting through visual means – a quality inextricably linked to the playful means of its production. The red paint which provides the painting with its title has a highly specific character: stood in front of the painting, its "soiled" quality is tangible, physically present within the irregular and partially transparent smears of pigment which vainly attempt to cover the underlying layers of paint. The visual scrutiny provided at the beginning of this study reveals that Red [821] is not reducible to the homogenized sameness of theory. It is clearly a painting which is concerned with the problematic nature of painting in the 1990s (this is undoubtedly Richter’s subject matter), yet it possesses specific material qualities which communicate this meaning in a significantly different manner to Burning Bush. Red [821] counters the (entropic) coursing tendencies of Buchloh et al by refusing to demonstrate the manifest difficulties which attend painting in the nineties.

 

6. The Spectacle of the Unknowable

Writing in 1991, Dan Cameron claimed that the

...legacy of Reinhardt’s painterly proposition is that we now know that if we want to preserve art’s capacity to mystify us, to present us with the spectacle of the unknowable, it is generally preferable to conceal sublimity in the place where we least expect to find it.[36]

Richter values art’s capacity to mystify us, to present the "spectacle of the unknowable": but locating that "place where we least expect to find it" has become increasingly difficult within the Postmodern period. During the early 1980s a "new spirit" in painting was being heralded after its exile of the previous decade. Richter, however, refused to join in the celebrations, openly condemning the return of painting as little more than a market driven phenomenon. His response to "all this entertainment" was to problematize organic painting through that juxtaposition of two modes of practice which characterizes Abstract Painting [576/3]. As the Postmodern period developed, however, this binary mode of subverting organic painting became assimilated into the mainstream: it became an orthodoxy. The "new spirit" of the mid-1980s was, by the time Richter painted Red [821], more than a decade old (A New Spirit in Painting is now as much a part of history as the exile of painting fifteen years earlier). During this period, a host of Postmodernist practitioners (some more talented than others) followed Rauschenberg’s lead and hybrid works (cross-cultural, cross-media and so on) came to dominate the marketplace.

In short, conventional methods of "concealing sublimity" had become, during the period under scrutiny, increasingly orthodox. Where the earlier painting polarizes the two modes of practice in order to deny singularity, such a practice had become orthodox by 1994: to continue with the binary mode of Abstract Painting [576/3] would effectively entrench the crisis of contemporary painting. It is his sensitivity to this problem which prompts Richter to abandon the "model-painting" methodology favored throughout the 1980s in favor of the playfulness of the late abstraction.

Red [821] is clearly "not-Modern," but the manner in which it is "not Modern" is difficult to determine. Postmodern practice is conventionally characterized by subversive tactics such as irony and pastiche (examples range from the allegorical classicism of Stephen McKenna and Carlo Maria Mariani to Mike Bidlo’s copies of paintings by the Modern masters). Richter’s late abstraction, however, neither parodies nor ironises the transcendental pretensions of earlier abstract painting (the various false-starts, changes, shifts, and erasures that led to Red [821] belie such a claim). Red [821] is not a Postmodern painting: Richter despises the contemporary loss of value which accompanies Postmodern art, and rejects the orthodoxies of Postmodern painting as vehemently than he does those of Modernism. To claim—as Buchloh et al have done—that Richter’s late abstraction is determined by Modern (or counter-Modern) orthodoxies is to miss the point that the defining feature of these paintings is their refusal to engage dialectically with either period. Where the existing literature considers Richter a "Postmodern" painter, Richter’s engagement with the orthodoxies of Modernist painting is based on something entirely different: the ontology of painting.

Richter has suggested that "Painting is the making of an analogy for something non-visual and incomprehensible: giving it form and bringing it within reach. And that is why good paintings are incomprehensible."[37] Playfulness—an openness to accident and visual specificity—is one means, I suggest, with which to achieve this incomprehensibility. This belief is informed partly by conventional "academic" research, but also, and importantly, by "practical" research (painting and making). It is this experience which informs this authors belief that "play"—an essential part of good studio practice—is  to be defended in the face of the colonial tendencies of theory. The studio experience involves decisions, analyses and evaluations that attend to the visual particularities of the art work and which are integral to the development of a piece (indeed, they frequently determine the outcome). Richter’s repeated claim that "good" painting can be neither categorized nor anticipated reflects my own belief that a healthy studio practice is characterized by a more multi-faceted, playful, non-reductive relationship with the work in hand than a more dialectical, prescriptive mode of practice. This study has revealed that what Buchloh and Germer find "difficult to understand" (from outside practice) Richter (playing in the studio) does not.

 

 

Bibliography

Blackmur, R. M. Reason in the Madness of Letters. (Harcourt, 1967)

Buchloh, Benjamin. "Richter’s Facture: Between the Synecdoche and the Spectacle,’’ in (Ed. Papadakis), New Art. (Rizzoli, 1991).

Caesar, Terry. A Note on Pynchon's Naming. (CEJL 1981).

Cameron, Dan. "Robert Ryman: Ode to a Clean Slate," in Flash Art, Vol.XXIV, No.159,         Summer 1991.

Fukuyama, Francis. "The End of History," in The National Interest, Vol.16 No.1.

Gablik, Suzi. Has Modernism Failed? (Thames and Hudson, 1984).

Heywood, Ian. Primitive Practices: Against Visual Theory. (Routledge, 1995).

Kellner, Douglas. Baudrillard: A Critical Reader. (Blackwell, 1994).

Kellner, Douglas. Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Poststructuralism. (Blackwell, 1994)

Norris, Christopher. Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War.            (Lawrence and Wishart, 1992).

Pollock, Grizelda. "Trouble in the Archives," in Women's Art Magazine, (Sept/Oct 1993).

Richter, Gerhard. The Daily Practice of Painting: Writing 1962 – 1993. (Thames and Hudson, 1995).

Tanner, Tony, City of Words. (Harper and Rowe).

Poster, Mark (ed.). Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings. (Stanford University Press, 1988).

Pynchon, Thomas. ‘Entropy’ in Slow Learner: Early Stories. (Picador, 1985).

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. (Pan, 1979).

Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. (Houghton Mifflin, 1954).

Wood, Paul. "The Ruined Abstraction of Gerhard Richter," in (ed. Roberts), Art Has No History!: The Making and Unmaking of Modern Art. (Verso, 1994).

 

Endnotes

[1] Wood, Paul. "The Ruined Abstraction of Gerhard Richter," in (ed. Roberts), Art Has No History!: The Making and Unmaking of Modern Art. (Verso, 1994) 19.
[2] Gerhard Richter. Tate Gallery, 30 October 1991 - 12 January 1992.
[3] The bracketed number that follows each of Richter’s titles denotes its numerical position with his oeuvre (that is Table [1] (1962) is the first catalogued work).
[4] In "Richter’s Facture: Between the Synecdoche and the Spectacle," Benjamin H. D. Buchloh notes that "Mechanical and organic aspects of the painterly procedure - these are the two oppositional terms between which Modernist painting has shifted since Manet with ever increasing radicality and exclusivity." Buchloh, Benjamin. "Richter’s Facture: Between the Synecdoche and the Spectacle," in (ed. Papadakis), New Art. (Rizzoli, 1991), 91.
[5] Tanner, Tony. City of Words. (Harper and Rowe), 35.
[6] Aubade, Callisto's companion, breaks the window of the apartment and "...turned to face the man on the bed and wait with him until the moment of equilibreum was reached, when 37 degrees Fahrenheit should prevail both outside and inside, and forever, and the hovering, curious dominant of their seperate lives should resolve into a tonic of darkness and the final absence of all motion." Pynchon, Thomas. ‘Entropy’ in Slow Learner: Early Stories. (Picador, 1985), 94.
[7] "In the kitchen two of the girls from George Washington and the sailors were singing Let's All Go Down and Piss on the Forrestal. There was a two-handed, bi-lingual morra game on over by the ice-box... (The players) were nose to nose, screaming trois, sette at the tops of their lungs...The noise in Meatball's appartment had reached a sustained, ungodly crescendo." Pynchon, Thomas. Ibid., 92.
[8] Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. (Pan, 1979), 13.
[9] Pynchon, Thomas. Ibid., 69.
[10] Tony Tanner develops this argument in Thomas Pynchon. Ibid., 60.
[11] Caesar, Terry. "A Note on Pynchon's Naming," (CEJL 1981), 52.
[12] Gablik, Suzi. Has Modernism Failed? (Thames and Hudson, 1984), 35.
[13] Kellner, Douglas. Baudrillard: A Critical Reader. (Blackwell, 1994), 56.
[14] Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History in The National Interest, Vol.16 No.1., 3-18.
[15] Pollock, Grizelda, ‘Trouble in the Archives’ in Women's Art Magazine, Sept/Oct 1993, 12.
[16] One example will stand for the others. In the summer of 1995, the Institute of Contemporary Art, London held an exhibition entitled Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire. Its aims and ambitions read as follows: “An exhibition which charts the influence of Frantz Fanon and his text Black Skin, White Masks upon a generation of young black artists... Renee Green’s work Revue examines, through text and image, how Josephine Baker was regarded by contemporary critics as an archetype of exotic African sexuality, engendering fear and fascination. In his series of black and white stenciled canvases Glen Ligon uses text to raise important issues concerning race and identity...” Catalogue statement, Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire, ICA, London, 3.
[17] A paper which was published in Artists from Europe; "Works from the Leeds European Fine Art Symposium," 1994.
[18] As an example of this he cites the effect of Modern Art and Modernism (1982) on the study of art, which distinguishes between "good" (politically correct) and "bad" (Formalist) modernism.
[19] “In this fantasy, culture is an all embracing set of encoded texts which can be understood and regulated (in the mind at least) through the concepts and methods of theory...” Heywood, Ian. Primitive Practices: Against Visual Theory. (Routledge, 1995), 98.
[20] “Visual culture is chronically unable to see or understand the work of art as art. Its object, the thing it studies, is formed of dumb materials containing ‘meaning’. The work and its meaning are divided into two levels: an obvious or surface layer and a deeper, more obscure stratum, a ‘hidden text’. The significance of the art work, why it is worthwhile for theory to bother with it at all, resides in this text, and in the influence, the effects, it may have.” Heywood, Ian. Ibid., 98.
[21] “Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures...” Richter, Gerhard. Ibid., 99.
[22] Jean Baudrillard defines simulacra as "copies of an original which never existed" (see Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings. (ed. Mark Poster). (Stanford University Press, 1988), 253.
[23] Kellner, Douglas. Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Poststructuralism. (Blackwell, 1994), 68.
[24] For Baudrillard, Pop is the point at which art implodes, at which the relationship between the real and the representation collapses, the point at which art becomes merely the reproduction of signs within the world.
[25] Norris, Christopher. Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War. (Lawrence and Wishart, 1992), 45.
[26] Nonetheless, Baudrillard’s writing has proved highly influential upon practitioners and critics alike. A direct response to Baudrillard’s critique of simulation was developed by the Neo-Geo school during the early 1980s (at the same time that Richter was developing the early Abstract Paintings). A group of New-York based artists (including Peter Halley, Philip Taaffe and Ross Bleckner dedicated themselves to illustrating Baudrillard’s theories in the form of simulacra of late Modernist paintings. Halley for example produced simulated versions of high-Modernist abstract painting (which, perversely, are emptied of the "emptying" drive of classical Modernist abstraction).
[27] Buchloh, Benjamin. "Richter’s Facture: Between the Synecdoche and the Spectacle," in Papadakis, Ibid., 194.
[28] Tanner turns to Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings (1954) in support of this definition. For Wiener, “As entropy increases, the universe, and all closed systems in the universe, tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness, to move from the least to the most probable state...” Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. (Houghton Mifflin, 1954), 12.
[29] As the social scientist R. P. Blackmur claims, “Entropy, from the point of view of the rational imagination is disorder and is indeed its field. Actually we have been as busy, as violent and as concentrated as the ant-heap. We are torpid only because we feel glutted with energy and feel it only as trouble.” Blackmur, R. M.  Reason in the Madness of Letters. (Harcourt, 1967), 62; Pynchon, Thomas, op. cit. (1960), 14.
[30] Pynchon, Thomas. Ibid., (1960), 14.
[31] This claim is substantiated (paradoxically) by Tanner’s summation of the story’s meaning: "'The attractions of 'the closet' in the madness of the modern world are clear enough in Pynchon, but so is the need to resist those attractions in some way. The 'closed circuit', the sealed off refuge, the hothouse world of fantasy, the dangerous seductiveness of metaphors of doom: these can lead to inhumanity and death." Tanner, Tony. Ibid., 35.
[32]   Play: “(1): to engage in sport or recreation: to move aimlessly about: TRIFLE (2): to toy or fiddle around with something <played with her food> (3): to deal or behave frivolously or mockingly : JEST (4): to deal in a light, speculative, or sportive manner." Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.
[33] Jurgen Habermas provides a succinct definition of this tendency in Modernity: An Incomplete Project: "The project of modernity formulated in the eighteenth century by the philosophers of the Enlightenment consisted in their efforts to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic... Each domain of culture could be made to correspond to cultural professions in which problems could be dealt with as the concern of professional experts..." Habermas, Jurgen. "Modernity - An Incomplete Project." (in Postmodernism: A Reader), 103.
[34] Jencks, Charles. "What Is Post-Modernism?" in (ed. Anderson) The Truth About the Truth. (Tarcher/Putnam, 1995), 84.
[35] Lawson, Thomas. in Suzi Gablik, Has Modernism Failed? (Thames and Hudson, 1984), 50.
[36] Cameron, Dan. "Robert Ryman: Ode to a Clean Slate." (in Flash Art, Vol.XXIV, No.159, Summer 1991), 15.
[37] Richter, Gerhard. The Daily Practice of Painting: Writing 1962 – 1993. (Thames and Hudson, 1995), 99.


Since 1999 Jonathan Field has taught Art History at the Savannah College of Art and Design and has exhibited his artwork widely throughout the United States. Visit www.jonathanfield.org for more information on Field’s academic and practical interests.


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