Gerhard Richter: Why Paint?
After seeing the retrospective of Gerhard Richter’s paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2002, I began to think about iconoclasm and the fact that in the West it lives on, not in its old haunts—religion or politics — but in modern art. Eve
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After seeing the retrospective of Gerhard Richter’s paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2002, I began to think about iconoclasm and the fact that in the West it lives on, not in its old haunts —religion or politics — but in modern art. Even now, long after Clement Greenberg’s dogmas have faded and Ad Reinhardt’s teleological works have entered art history, the unself-conscious anachronism remains an arch enemy of the contemporary art business. By business, I mean the buying and selling of new art, museum shows, and the critical apparatus that attends to it. Visual art, painting in particular, has had a singularly radical modern history that separates it from literature, music, and film. Lots of people can go to movies or buy cds and books, but few have either the money or the desire to buy art by living artists. Although the relative smallness of the art world has freed painting from the conservative drag put on more popular genres, it has also boxed it into an almost continual endgame. Since the invention of photography in the nineteenth century, the painting— that familiar flat rectangle —has been seen as a space in crisis. The death of the novel is declared almost as often the death of painting, but such comments about literature are generally ignored by working novelists and have little effect on them. The well-made, old-fashioned book is widely championed by most reviewers, who have little interest in literary history. Joyce, Stein, Beckett, not to mention Dada, could just as well have never existed. Therefore, although the act of making art now —whether it is a work of fiction, a film, a piece of music, or a painting— may be theoretically problematic, it is only in the world of contemporary visual art that the philosophical issues of why and how to make art are crucial to a work’s reception. Gerhard Richter’s painting manages to sit squarely inside the ongoing critical debate about the form itself while deftly eluding it at the same time. Richter’s work is one of active resistance to ideological category, a continual refusal to be squeezed into the perimeters of the very theories that, ironically, have helped to catapult him onto the aesthetic mountain where he now finds himself. Richter turned seventy not long ago. His career spans a period of tumultuous changes in the art world —from the early sixties to the present— and he didn’t spend all those years as a darling of the critics. As he tells Robert Storr, his curator at MoMA, he worked outside critical sanction from the late sixties to the mid-seventies. “I didn’t know what to do but to paint,” Richter tells Storr, “I was ‘out.’” 1 When Storr suggests that being out might have offered avenues
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of freedom previously blocked to him, Richter replies with typical honesty: “Well, the freedom and the comfort gained from being out were not very substantial. Being out didn’t have such a positive effect. After all, I wanted to be on the inside.” 2 Curated according to a meaningful but unslavish chronology, the show is a walk
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