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My inclination, by training, my practice, is that I am a philosopher. I'd like to through into the mix of our discussion some questions. I think that it is interesting to ask whether now as David Reed was trying to show in showing this work, if there is now a new situation in painting; and if so what it is. And I think if there is a new situation it is accompanied by this not knowing, this lack of certainty, this sense that previous languages are inadequate, that David mentioned.
My sense of that, that it is often in those situations where philosophical thinking is not so much applied but created. And so, it is perhaps an interesting time. The question arises are there new kinds of thinking that fit with a situation, and if so, which ones? If one asks this question, one is confronted with one theory, one account of painting, the modernist account of painting, and I guess none of the panelists hold that theory. Nevertheless, if that theory no longer holds, what other ways of thinking about painting and its history are available to us?
In his collection of writings, Gerhard Richter says at one point in an interview that for him all painting, even painting of old masters is in some sense, contemporary. And so, I think the question that I'd like to get at, is can one apply this remark to his work? In what sense is Richter's work now contemporary? This led me to a few reflections on the situation of theory. People are inclined to distinguish contemporary from modern art, or the situation of contemporary painting form Modernist painting. An important time for the emergence of this division was in the sixties when we know Gerhard Richter came from Dresden to Dusseldorf, and was confronted by a lot of new art, especially American art, and started off on his singular itinerary, after this encounter. At force in the sixties, we see all kinds of new kinds of relations to objects, to markets, to institutions, to social and political movement. So my first hypothesis, question, might be put in this way: Perhaps today we are in a situation with respect to those strategies that arose in the sixties, which are sometimes used to distinguish between contemporary and modern. Our relationship to them is something like the situation of the Modernist one to the sixties themselves. In other words, perhaps they are no longer the ones determining our questions. We have a certain freedom with respect to them, but there's also a danger of forgetting them and their accomplishments. And this is part of this more global arts situation. I agree with David in that the relationship between European and American art that was important for Richter doesn't or wouldn't quite make sense as new kinds of geographies as it were. But I think there are probably lots of places in the world where the contemporary-Modern distinction no longer seems to matter so much, assuming that it does to us. And yet, we are confronted with all kinds of sensations of Modernity. That's the terms that Baudelaire used in the 19th century to talk about what's new, what's happening now. So, post-contemporary would be a very bad way of putting the problem I'm trying to raise.
This leads me to the sort of questions I'd like to introduce into the discussion. One is, What constitutes a moment of new where painting gets into a new situation? Is it in such a situation today? And, what does that have to do with the Modernist-contemporary situation? What kind of theory would therefore be appropriate to it?
The question as to what went on with respect to painting in the sixties is obviously a very complicated moment that we won't be able to settle here. Some years back, I was interested in one thesis, or hypothesis, that was made about this question by a Belgian philosopher and art critic named Thierry de Duve. He was writing back in the eighties, a time of appropriation art, a sort of neo-expressionism. He is a scholar of Duchamp. He proposed the following idea: "What happened in the sixties connected to painting, was that we started to have forms that ceased to be based in tradition or medium and became what he calls generic. One started talking about Minimal Art, or Pop Art, or Conceptual Art, or Land Art, Performance, later appropriation itself. And if one painted it was because one was first an artist. In some sense, he thought that the contemporary situation of painting was a post-medium situation. But I think if we now read this analysis, which I think is still quite interesting, we find this trait: That he still tries to conceive of a problem of the contemporary situation in painting without really breaking with a Modernist theory of painting. On the contrary, his analysis is a way of continuing that theory in kind of end game phase that can be seen in Newman's monochromes or even in Richter's color charts. And, if one looks at challenging, interesting, theoretical, thoughtful criticism, it is surprising how much of it starts with this picture of painting playing out some kind of end. It seems to me this is part of a languages no longer appropriate. So much so that you wonder if it's not the theory that's playing it out this end game and projecting on this situation.
Many debates in Richter's work depend on this framework and once we abandon this framework, we have to think about other ways. In particular, if you look back on Richter's writings or in the work from this early encounter with Pop Art, its very easy to find these themes of uncertainly, of not knowing what art can do. But I would say there is very little sense of mourning. On the contrary, there's a kind of humor, for example, with the association with Polke and Capitalist Surrealism, as if this "not knowing" where in fact very liberating. As though the daily practice of painting were a sort of substitute spiritual exercise in a situation no longer supported by any church, any belief, or any avant garde. There's a very interesting humor in Richter, not to be confused with irony. I think the one -- I'm interested now in the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who also wrote philosophy during the same period, and in part, in reaction to the same impulses.
One of the reasons why I think it's interesting to read Deleuze is that he's perhaps the first philosopher since Nietzsche to have most given the sense of thinking or philosophy or aesthetics as a gay science, rather than as a melancholy one, as it was for Hegel, or Heidegger or even Adorno. This sense of the gay science of aesthetics therefore has a certain relationship to now, a certain affirmative relationship, let's say, to a situation of not-knowing. And its combined by degrees in Deleuze by a very interesting alternative account of what went on in modernism, which is not based on reduction, but rather a certain multiplicity or complexity. Something that would fit not so badly with the description applied to Richter of bringing together disparate impulses. It is this different logic that he works out in a book called Logic of Sense, which is connected to this idea of what's now and what's happening. It is interesting in this regard if you look back to Deleuze writing in the sixties, that rather like Richter in a way that very much impressed his friend Michel Foucault, that he was drawn to Warhol in a European context. He wanted to understand Warhol in a relationship to what he called differences. He was very much interested in the problem of seriality in Warhol, and how, in those series, there are small differences. In this problem of series and differences is very much a part of the logic, very much connected to the problem of now or time to Proust's search for lost time, or what Deleuze reads as Beckett's examination of the attitudes the body assumes when it seems that all possibilities have been exhausted. Something he also sees in the sort of rituals of waiting in Andy Warhol's' films.
It is very interesting to juxtapose the reading of this book by Deleuze with Richter and what he was doing in the sixties. And perhaps we might even take up his idea of series. If you look at those eight student nurses, or again the forty-eight portraits from the encyclopedia he did later in 1972, and you contrast them with these thirteen most wanted men by Andy Warhol which Phillip Johnson put in the New York Pavilion in the 1964 World's Fair, I think you start to see a different kind of investigation going on. The concern is less than Warhol's irony and celebrity and more with a kind of mock heroism of the artist and his mostly male friends, mixing together with, among others, female prostitutes, in the sort of gray zones of post-war Dusseldorf: as though in search of a new figure of the artist or painter in a situation, deserted by romantic heroes or geniuses. And this interest in occurrences not only got away from composition, but also give us a relationship to what he calls occurrences, and become important in a historical way in the Bader-Meinhoff series.
One other interesting parallel: Deleuze went on to write a study on the painter Francis Bacon, written in the eighties. He thought that we ought not see in Bacon a return to figuration, but on the contrary, the invention of a new and different kind of figurality. On the other side, Richter's rediscovery of abstraction, was not at all a rediscovery of the logic of reduction and self-reference, important for the modernist artist. In both cases, you have ideas about abstraction for which the contrast with figuration is no longer the determinant element. And finally these problems of chance and open form that Richter talks about in relationship to his abstract painting, strike me as ones that might lead me to interesting Deleuzean parallels. In a short essay, which I won't try to talk about here, I try to start with Deleuzes' idea and develop a new and nonreductive concept of abstraction that might be interesting in trying to understand some of the work that David was showing.
I have now a series of remarks that have to do with debates within Richter scholarship, and surround the idea of dialectics, which is often applied to Richter's work. In particular, I wanted to contrast the view of a Marxist philosopher named Peter Osbourne, a British philosopher, with a painter, Stephen Ellis. Both writing in the eighties and both talking about dialectics. I end up liking a bit better Stephen Ellis' sense of this, since he tries to explain as part of this dialectic, the reversal which allows Richter to get back to painting, which Osbourne can't accept, since he thinks, according to this earlier way of thinking, that painting is dead. So one way of thinking about what Stephen Ellis talks about or tries to see in Richter is what he calls suspended differences. And there's something in Richter that might be called neutralizing all of the divisions that surround what a painting or a painted image is, including the division between abstract and figurative that was central to the Modernist theory of painting. Maybe that's connected to Anne Rorimer's sense that you get the painting itself, or only the painted picture itself. One should not read this neutralization as a kind of exhaustive inventory of possibilities that can no longer be those of painting, but rather opening up other possibilities to be taken up in other ways when there's new or fresh situations of uncertainty. To try to formulate my question of Richter's painting, in what sense it is contemporary, or in what sense it is posing new questions in a post-contemporary situation, I think that among the many things that we can still see with Richter is a certain attitude. First the specificity of the powers of painting are not to be found in the discovery of its pure or essential elements. On the contrary, it is in the new kinds of relationships it can construct with many other things and mediums. Second, the problem is not one of reduction anymore--the exhaustion of possibilities--but of invention and reinvention in situations where all the divisions no longer seem to work. |
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