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Essay by Lynne Cooke
In my picture atlas...I can only get a handle on the flood of
pictures by creating order since there are no individual pictures
at all anymore.
-Gerhard Richter
In 1964 Gerhard Richter began amassing onto panels photographs
he had collected over the previous few years--sometimes as potential
sources for his paintings and sometimes on their own account.
Eight years later these and subsequent related panels were exhibited
in Utrecht, Holland, under the title Atlas van de foto's en
schetsen (Atlas of photos and sketches). Since then Richter
has continued, albeit intermittently, to supplement his "picture
album."1 And periodically it has been returned to public
view: it was shown in 1976 in Krefeld, 1989 in Munich, and 1990
in Cologne.2 Recently updated, it now is comprised of almost six
hundred panels and some five thousand photographs.
Atlas is not quite as homogeneous as its first panels seemed
to predict. While they contain mostly amateur snapshots together
with reproductions from newspapers and popular magazines, these
categories were rapidly expanded to include portraits, pornographic
imagery, and pictures of famous historical figures and events--Hitler
and concentration camp survivors among them. In addition, the
artist's own photographs, working sketches, and seemingly casual
views and vistas soon infiltrated the increasingly heterogenous
array. That Atlas would serve other functions than simply
those of a repository for storing memorable images became evident
when sketches for installations, plans for public commissions,
technical drawings for domestic furnishings, and collages of hypothetical
settings on a truly monumental scale were added.3 More recently,
large sequences of almost serially produced landscapes, travel
vistas, and still lifes have been incorporated, suggesting that
once the piece grew, the artist began to orchestrate it in terms
of an overall composition, establishing larger rhythms, conjunctions,
and references among the parts, and instituting a more strictly
gridded layout. That is, what initially had a contingent, improvisational,
cumulative character has taken on, with time and with repeated
public presentation, a certain internal logic and dynamic peculiar
to itself. In this way an album has metamorphosed into a potentially
encyclopedic project, notwithstanding the personal, provisional,
and incremental impulses continuing to generate it.
It is apposite that photography is the pivot of this, the most
extensive work in Richter's oeuvre. A constant in his art of the
past three decades, for him it has always had a dialectical relationship
with painting. Given that questions of representation lie at the
heart of Richter's enterprise, this relationship has inevitably
proven a shifting, mutating one--from the early sixties when photography
provided motifs for paintings to the past decade when the artist
has both overpainted photographs and exhibited as prints photographs
of certain paintings originally generated by rephotographed photographs.
Dave Hickey has persuasively argued against the canonical historical
rationale for the changes that took place in the practice of painting
after the advent of photography: namely, that painting changed
because photography appropriated its descriptive and representational
functions. "Richter's photo-paintings infer,"Hickey
argues, "...[that] painting changed after the advent of photography
not because photography usurped its descriptive function,
but because photography prioritized it, thus valorizing
the referent over what it signified."4
If photography provided the painter, faced with the question of
what to paint, with certain basics, abstraction offered
another set of possibilities that were, for Richter, equally but
not necessarily more plausible; abstraction and figuration, he
believes, have parallel status as pictures. Through recourse to
mirrors, panes of glass, and small reflective aluminum spheres,
Richter then further permutated this preoccupation with representation
by wedding these works to their contexts. Incorporating the surroundings--in
effect, an idiosyncratic mode of working in situ--allowed
him to extend in more encompassing ways the dialectic between
what is seen and what is represented, as well as the media of
that representation.
Richter has frequently asserted that he has no program and no
ideology, and that he proceeds according to no preconceived plan.
For all its compendious nature, Atlas is governed by no
overriding logic and no polemic. Unlike, for example, Bernd and
Hilla Bechers's projects, Atlas is not an archive: there
is neither a coherent and systematic compilation of an identifiable
body of material nor an archaeological exhaustion of a specific
subject. In retaining a hybrid identity, Atlas loosely
adheres to some of the preoccupations informing Richter's paintings
without being exclusively governed by them. Most of its recent
components are photographs taken by the artist himself rather
than images culled from published sources, corresponding to the
fact that since 1975 Richter has seldom depended on found motifs
for subject matter. Not only are the initial images now his own,
but they are often made in closely related series or sequences.
Nonetheless, those that have been retrospectively included in
Atlas do not necessarily constitute all that the artist
took of any particular motif, nor are they always the very ones
that provided the models for individual paintings. Images only
exceptionally stand alone, independent and iconic; on such occasions
they are framed within pencil borders as with presentation drawings,
contextualized in hypothetical installations, or masked and glued
to sheets onto which color studies can be developed in preparation
for painting. The relational character of the groupings within
most of the panels is fully in accord with the contingency underpinning
the presentation of the work as a whole. For, the arrangement
of the panels follows a loose rather than strict chronology, with
placement determined in part by the character of the venues--wall
dimensions, heights, and proportions--in which Atlas is
to be exhibited. Sequencing and grouping is thus employed to establish
a mode of reading that is differential and contextual.
Faced with the mass of imagery available today, Richter asserts
that all one can do is try to order it. He makes no attempt to
offer an overriding interpretation, there is no promise of comprehensibility
and definitiveness of the kind vouchsafed in an archive or by
archaeology. As Benjamin Buchloh astutely notes, the relationships
between the images "generate meanings and disintegrate readings."5
Hence, something provisional and resistant to precise meaning
emerges in Atlas, something which Buchloh eloquently characterizes
as a check both against the impulse to generate understanding
and the ever-present desire for it. Atlas hovers, therefore,
between the promise of taxonomic order as devulged in the archive
and the total devastation of that promise, which is implicit,
for example, in the amorcellated, antirelational potential of
photomontage. The images, fragments or details are commonplace,
almost stereotypical. In their sheer ordinariness, conventionality,
and ubiquity, many of these photographs seem almost interchangeable
or generic, and hence serve to underplay those staples of photographic
discourse: the photo as icon and the photo as index. They approach
the condition Richter seeks for his paintings, which as pictures
are located always between the concrete and the abstract. Buchloh
argues persuasively that "We can no longer speak of 'photography'
in terms of a homogeneous formation of practices, discourses,
and institutions (no more than we could speak of 'politics').
Photography can be discussed as a private phenomenology and as
a partial semiotics, but not as a coherent, comprehensive history."6
At a moment when the digital is replacing the analogue and the
dominant paradigms of photography are undergoing a sea-change,
Atlas returns the question of the referent to centerstage.
Notes
1. "Gerhard Richter/Jan Thorn-Prikker: Ruminations on the
October 18, 1977 Cycle," Parkett 19 (1989), p. 143.
2. Small sections of Atlas have been shown on occasion,
for example, in the recent retrospective, "Gerhard Richter,"
Kunst- und Austellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn,
1993.
3. In a recent interview, Richter spoke of the "dream of
mine--that the pictures will become an environment or become architecture,
that would be even more effective. Quoted in Dorothea Dietrich,
"Gerhard Richter: An Interview," The Print Collector's
Newsletter 16, no. 4 (Sept./Oct. 1985), p. 130. In effect
Atlas does this when fully on view.
4. Dave Hickey, "Richter in Tahiti," Parkett
35 (1993), p. 86.
5. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Gerhard Richters Atlas:
Das Archiv der Anomie," Gerhard Richter, vol. 2 (Bonn:
Kunst- und Austellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1993).
Translation by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh.
6. Ibid.
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