Other Andrew Otwell Art History papers

Gerhard Richter and the Simulacrum

© Andrew Otwell, 1997

Gerhard Richter began making pictures from photographs in the mid-1960's. From a found image, often a news photo, documentary still, amateur snapshot, and at times his own photographs the artist enlarged and reproduced the image on canvas. Works such as his 1964 pictures Cow, Family at the Seaside, Woman with an Umbrella, and Administrative Building (see figs. 1-4), exhibit the techniques that Richer used to execute the works. In these, Richter brushes and smears wet on wet paint, blurring the image horizontally. Though the source image is always recognizable, the results are a controlled distortion of focus and a smooth, equated surface. The subjects of Administrative Building and Great Sphinx of Giza (1964) (fig. 5)thus appear as if seen from a fast moving car. In some Photo Paintings, such as Family at the Seaside, Richter overemphasizes light/dark contrasts or exaggerates the scale of details. Other pictures include a series of landscape and cityscape works in the late 1960's and a series of 48 Portraits in 1971-72. Despite the evident painterly distortion of the original image in the Photo Paintings, there is little in the works that is truly "expressive."[1]

Why distort the image if not for expressive reasons? Richter's Photo Paintings appeared at the inception of Conceptual art in about 1965. While the term "Post-Conceptual painting" may not characterize the works accurately in formal or chronological terms, the works do have something in common with Conceptualism's ideas and with the legacy of Modernism. Clement Greenberg's famous statement that "the essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence" seems to apply to Richter. That the artist places such a great emphasis on technique in a period characterized by a tendency to move away from discernible "technique" is important. If Minimalism and Conceptual art can be seen as increased degrees of Modernist flatness, reduction, and concentration on the literalness of the object, than Richter's project may be of an entirely different order. Richter recognized that criticism of painting and representation could be accomplished through a more direct engagement with technique as profitably as it could through an abandonment of that technique. Richter's Photo Paintings then, may offer conclusions about the painted object that are not dissimilar to the "lessons" of Conceptual art, but since they are formulated from the terms and technique of Painting itself, successfully "entrench it more firmly in its area of competence." I hope to show that by considering the works to be simulacra of Richter's photographic models, we can understand his project in a new light.

We should try to clarify Richter's position between High Modernist painting (in the Greenbergian sense) and Conceptual Art. Richter told Benjamin Buchloh in 1988 that he had been very impressed by Lucio Fontana and Jackson Pollock at the 1958 Documenta. Though their projects were quite different, both Fontana and Pollock departed from traditional techniques in ways that suggested to Richter new avenues. Richter saw in their work the possibility of "bitter truth, liberation, and . . . a completely different and new content . . . expressing itself."[2] Richter specifically excluded Jasper Johns from this group.[3] Richter saw Johns as engaged with "peinture," an expressive and overly "artistic" practice based largely on traditional technique, much as Marcel Duchamp had despised the "glorification of the [artist's] hand" rather than his brain.[4] Richter dismissed the more clinical Modernist painters such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland for their "Formalist gag," or mere reductionism as a painting strategy.[5]

Richter's affinity for the formal innovations of Modernist painting,[6] however, did not prevent him from admiring the work of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. These artists, and the work of the Fluxus group, further suggested to Richter what he termed "anti-artistic" techniques of exploring painting and the increased objectification of the painting itself. Richter even exhibited in 1962 or 1963 as a "German Pop artist" in Paris.[7] Though Warhol and Lichtenstein are very unlike Pollock, Richter saw all three as somehow opposing and actively denying the historical "culture of painting" mired in traditional techniques. Richter agreed with Buchloh's statement that in the work of these artists "the way of painting itself becomes an object of critical treatment," including even Warhol's anonymous silkscreens.[8]In the work of each, the painting technique calls attention to itself, as does the visible technique of Richter's Photo Paintings.

At the same time, Richter engages with issues that seem "Conceptual." In a telling statement, Richter remarked to Buchloh that "the act of artistic production simply can't be denied. Only it has nothing to do with the talent for 'making things by hand'; rather, it's a matter of the ability to see, and to decide what shall become visible. How that is then produced has nothing to do with art or with artistic abilities."[9] This apparently negative attitude towards the object seems similar to that of some Conceptual artists. Richter implies that the work does not have to be made by hand, much as Lawrence Weiner wrote "I do not mind objects, but I do not care to make them. . . . ." However, since Richter does make paintings, Richter places a new kind of pressure on the object. While his goal is not the "dematerialization of the object" as Lucy Lippard has characterized Conceptualism's basic project, it is the profound subversion of the ability of the painting to represent a reality. Though Richter's project has some similarities with Conceptual art, it is significant that he does not make use of the familiar techniques of Conceptual art (art as text, ephemeral materials, explorations of the institutions that govern art production and consumption, etc.). Rather, his ideas evolved largely out of a consideration of photography as a mass medium.

Richter's use of photography locates his works between the mechanical production of an image and the human production of an art object. Consider role of the documentary images, found amateur snapshots, and news photography that Richter used in the Photo Paintings in light of his response to Buchloh. These are images that are produced, distributed, and consumed almost mechanically. Largely without aesthetic intention or significance, they make up part of a constant stream of such images that flows from anonymous source to a mass audience. Richter has said of them that they "conveyed to me another kind of seeing without all the conventional criteria I had previously associated with art. They had no style, no concept, no judgment . . . they were pure image."[10] In essence, the banal photos Richter uses are images that exist simply due to an "ability to see" and an anonymous decision to select a subject to be made visible that "has nothing to do with art or artistic abilities:" they are the result of a will to make a subject visible, without expression. In doing so, Thus they are for Richter, as Michael Danoff has stated, "primarily models of perception and secondarily depictions of reality."[11]

Richter makes paintings of photographs, not of the content of the photographs. The content for Richter was often entirely unimportant; the Photo Paintings included a Kitchen Chair (1965) and Administrative Building, as well as images derived from amateur snapshots, such as Family at the Seaside. The artist has even called this technique the painting of "readymade" subject matter, and compared it with Duchamp's selection of banal objects as sculpture. He seems to recast Weiner's statement as "I do not mind content, but I do not care to make it." Richter's choice of images was not random, though it was not made on the basis of content. Rather, he chose his source material based on the compositional and formal qualities of the photograph. The artist admitted to Buchloh that perhaps the Photo Paintings had "something to do with death and pain," though he insisted that he made the works without considering their emotional comment.[12] Richter wanted to use images that merely met the criteria of "representations," images that would only recognized as such.

His intent in doing this seems to be the objectification of the painted object--emphasized through his visible, even sensuous, technique--and at the same time the distancing of the artist from the depicted content through the use of "readymade" subject matter. Banal images allow Richter to focus on the fact of representation and on the object doing the representing, not on the content of any single representation. The phenomena of representation is quite powerful for Richter. He has said that "every time we describe an event," he wrote in 1979, "add up a column of figures, or take a photograph of a tree, we create a model; without models we would know nothing about reality and would be like animals."[13] Even paintings can be models: in 1978 Richter made a series of photographs of a single painting from different angles titled 128 Details from a Picture.[14]

Richter and the Simulacrum

I would suggest that by considering Richter's Photo Paintings as simulacra, we can diminish the paradox of his affinity for both Modernist painting and his apparently Conceptual tendencies. If the works can be shown to be simulacra, objects with a kind of "criticizing resemblance" to their subjects, then the blurred and distorted pictures become analogous to Conceptualism's loss of faith in painting, even as they are informed by Modernism's self-criticism through media.

Plato offers the first definition of the simulacrum as an undesirable version of an original model, differing from the more acceptable "copy." The simulacrum has only a deceiving and external resemblance to an original, not the genuine internal resemblance present in a faithful copy.[15] A more subtle conception of the simulacrum has been revived by contemporary critics and philosophers--notably Gilles Deleuze--as a term to apply critically to visual art.[16]The simulacrum emerges as a reproduction of a specific kind which differs evidently and explicitly from the original. Michael Camille has said of the simulacra that it is "an image without a model, lacking that crucial dependence upon resemblance or similitude."[17] Since, to be accurate, it lacks a precise model, it cannot be qualified as merely a lesser version of that original, as Plato does. Crucially, though it has no exact source, it remains an identifiable image of an original.

Richter's Photo Paintings are simulacra in this sense. The works make reference to "originals"--the source photographs--but do not duplicate them. While they are identifiable as having been derived from a model, they do not copy that model.[18] In fact, Richter's painting of the image acts to shift the image away from likeness to a model. Richter recognized the consequences of this act almost immediately. "[Photos] being painted," he wrote in 1964-65, ". . . no longer tell of a specific situation, and the representation becomes absurd."[19] The representation in a picture like Tiger (1965) (fig. 6)is absurd in the sense that, unlike the "objective" (according to Richter) original photograph, we cannot trust the painted image to give us accurate information about the tiger. The painted image give us no information about the tiger, except that which is necessary to affirm resemblance. Richter is able to call into question the representation in both the apparently "objective" photo and in his picture. Such a conscious reevaluation of representation is highly significant in Deleuze's conception of the simulacrum and in his "overturning" of Platonism that accompanies it.[20]

Plato locates the simulacrum at the end of a continuum of reproduction, from original model, through the copy (with identical proportions, colors, size, etc.), and onwards to increasingly less recognizable imitations ending in the simulacrum (with only superficial resemblance to the original). The simulacrum is a reproduction with the greatest degree of discernible difference from the original, but which is still recognizable as a derivation from a model. However for Deleuze the simulacrum is not a "degraded copy," but something of an entirely different order.[21] Deleuze's project in rethinking the simulacrum was to overturn the system of values inherent in the Platonic hierarchy of original-copy-simulacrum. The simulacrum "is built upon a disparity or difference, it internalizes a dissimilarity," thus actively emphasizing its status as a literally different thing from the original.[22] Where Platonism privileges the identical and impossible copy, in Deleuze the simulacrum powerfully threatens representation by emphasizing its difference instead of likeness. As Richard Shiff has noted: "The copy makes you aware of resemblances; the simulacrum, because it is so alike, makes you aware of the differences. The direction of evaluation is reversed: you become conscious of differences rather than samenesses."[23]

Richter's Photo Paintings make Deleuze's overturned hierarchy visible. Of his 48 Portraits (1971-72), the artist wrote that "in a portrait painted by me, the likeness to the models is apparent, unintentional, and also entirely useless."[24] The (all-male) subjects of the 48 Portraits were significant in cultural history. For Richter, the appeal of this project was the formal organization of a series of pictures based on the turn of the men's' heads from frontal to three-quarters view in the identically scaled and cropped photos. Resemblance--though is less important to the artist than the formal qualities of the original photographs. Richter considers resemblance to be both present and irrelevant in other works, as well. The artist described his Stroke (On Blue) (1979) and Stroke (On Red) (1980), pictures consisting solely of representations of huge single brushstrokes (see fig. 7), in terms that nearly define the simulacrum. They are "representations of brushstrokes, that is, manifestations of their outward semblance. But even the semblance is called into question . . . for the simple reason that such big brushstrokes cannot really exist. But the pictures do show a brushstroke, though they neither display it as a real object, nor represent it in any realistic way, nor manifest it illusionistically in the trompe-l'oeil sense."[25] Like the 48 Portraits, and like the early Photo Paintings, the resemblance is again paradoxically "apparent" but "entirely useless" as a means of understanding the images. By doing away with the content and leaving only the dissociated representation of it, Richter is able to threaten the value of the phenomena of representation itself. If indeed, as Richter stated, "without models we would know nothing about reality," in his pictures we can no longer even trust the model.

The artist's creative power introduces in the simulacrum an accentuated difference from the original. Paul Patton, writing on Deleuze and art, has noted that "the return of representation in this sense is the differentiation of transformation of representation itself: [the project now is] no longer the maintenance of identity but the production of difference."[26] Art has ceded its mimetic function (to such media as photography) and shifted its focus to the creative distancing of the image from the original. Deleuze writes of the simulacrum that "it harbors a positive power which negates both the original and the copy, the model and the reproduction" because it cannot be judged in terms of similarity to an original.[27] Crucially, then, the simulacra is not simply a copy of a copy[28], but a version with the addition of something else. In other words, the difference between original and copy is not the same as the difference between the copy and the simulacrum.[29] There exists an essential created difference between a simulacrum and the original that we might locate as "intent." Deleuze writes of the simulacrum that "it still produces an effect of resemblance; but that is a general effect, wholly external. . . ."[30] That is is an effect implies that a conscious change has been made by its creator.

This "creation of difference" is crucial in Richter's Photo Paintings. The artist has written that "what we regard as blurring is imprecision, and that means [the pictures] are different from the object represented," thus implicating his technique in a such a creation of difference.[31]He also recognizes that his works are not "objective" models of reality in the same way he considers photographs to be.[32] While the loss of faith in representation is a phenomenon associated with Conceptualism, that Richter creates a painted object must surely be seen as an essentially Modernist approach. Also Modernist is his supreme confidence in his medium; he has said, "I know for a fact that painting is not ineffectual. I would only like it to accomplish more."[33]

Perhaps "Post-Conceptual painting" is not such a poor designation for Richter's painting after all. Certain of the self-critical capacity of Modernist painting but unconvinced of painting's ability to communicate meaningful content beyond simple portrayal, Richter found a way "to accomplish more." Readymade photographic content offered him a useful way to deal with issues that Conceptualism tried to resolve, but without making direct use of its techniques. In doing so, Richter was not only able to circumvent the critical dialogue of the Conceptual period that would consign his pictures to the past, but also to create simulacral works that reinvestigate representation. While there is no evidence that Richter thinks of his own works as simulacra--though his comments about the Strokes above very nearly approach such a definition--Deleuze's model provides a useful schema for thinking about the works in the context of Modernism and Conceptual art.

This text is copyright Andrew H Otwell and is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Please read this disclaimer before contacting me about this material.