A Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker concerning the cycle 18 October 1977.

Jan Thorn Prikker: I'd like to ask you about the genesis of these paintings. All of them are painted from photographic originals. Did you find the photographs first, or did you first decide on the theme and then look for the photographs.

Gerhard Richter: It all comes together, the theme and the pictures that make it visible. I had kept a number of photographs for years, under the heading of unfinished business. It’s hard to say how it came about that late in 1987 my interest revived, and so I got hold of some more photographs and had the idea of painting the subject.

JTP: So you researched far and wide, photographs of attacks, ‘wanted’ photographs, everything to do with this particular context?

GR: Yes, everything, including photographs from the private lives of the members of the Red Army Faction [RAF], their operations, police material, everything I could dig up.

JTP: A very considerable part of your work came before you started painting at all: the research and planning stage of the pictures.

GR: That part is highly important. But then it’s nothing new. Painters in the past did the same thing. They went out into landscapes over and over again, and from their millions of impressions they chose the quite specific, definitive impression. I had a large quantity of photographs. It narrowed down all the time, and it became clearer and clearer what was really there to be painted.

JTP: What criteria guided you in your choice?

GR: It’s more or less an unconscious process. That sounds terribly old-fashioned; it’s definitely no longer ‘in’. These days, pictures are not painted but thought out. Anyway, the material — all the photographs just lie there for a very long time, and you look at them again and again, and then you make a start somewhere, and the choice gets smaller and smaller, the choice of photographs that might be paintable.

JTP: Were you confident from the very start that the terrorism theme was paintable?

GR: The wish was there that it might be — had to be — paintable. But there have been some themes that weren’t. In my mid-twenties I saw some concentration camp photographs that disturbed me very much. In my mid-thirties I collected and took photographs and tried to paint them. I had to give up. That was when I put the photographs together in that weird and seemingly cynical way in the Atlas.

JTP: When I looked at the 1986 Dusseldorf catalogue and saw what you had done, it gave me a strange feeling. You were putting concentration camp photographs side by side with pornography. That seemed to me to be beyond the pale. It shocked me — but in a terrible way I found I understood it. When I was young, those pictures of concentration camp victims were the first photographs of naked people that I had ever seen. You can't imagine what a terrible crossover that was. I still have the book, but I cant look at it any more. I don't want to be reminded of that possibility ever again. Ever since, I've been aware that there are some pictures that simply must not be taken. To me, it was an unfathomable coincidence, to find you trying out such monstrous combinations. Did you never have the feeling that such picture material might be taboo?

GR: No, never. If only because I have always regarded photographs as pictures. But the risk I was running was perfectly clear. There are plenty of bad examples of people hitching themselves to some big, attractive theme and ending up with mere inanity.

JTP: Death, an attractive theme?

GR: Yes, people can’t wait to see corpses. They crave sensations.

JTP: When I saw your exhibition in Krefeld, my first impression was a mixed one: ‘That goes too far. That mustn't be painted.’ My second impression was one of even greater horror: ‘It’s a wish-fulfilment fantasy: a painted, collective dream of hate.’ There were a lot of people at the time who just longed to see those prisoners dead. A longing that was never expressed about the Nazi criminals. I am convinced that in 1977 many people wanted to see precisely the pictures that you have now painted. Can you understand my impression that you have painted a hate fantasy?

GR: I do know that the fantasy exists. But it’s more complicated than that. If people wanted to see these people hanged as criminals, that’s only a part of it: there’s something else that puts an additional fear into people, namely that they themselves are terrorists. And that is forbidden. So this terrorism inside all of us, that’s what generates the rage and fear, and that’s what I don’t want, any more than I want the policeman inside myself — there’s never just one side to us. We're always both: the State and the terrorist.

JTP: What pictures remained unpainted?

GR: The ones that weren’t paintable were the ones I did paint. The dead. To start with, I wanted more to paint the whole business, the world as it then was, the living reality — I was thinking in terms of something big and comprehensive. But then it all evolved quite differently, in the direction of death. And that’s really not all that unpaintable. Far from it, in fact. Death and suffering always have been an artistic theme. Basically, it’s the theme. We’ve eventually managed to wean ourselves away from it, with our nice, tidy life-style.

JTP: To the same degree that it has vanished from art, it has found its way into the mass media. Television and magazines largely live on murder and crime.

GR: Yes, but only quite superficially. In fact, all the media convey an artful, highly effective image of happiness and comfort, which then seems to be imposed on us. It’s education, of a sort — educating people for something entirely false and unreal. This compulsory happiness is dangerous.

When I look at how earlier periods presented themselves, this phoney happiness ts not there. The pictures dwell on the pain and suffering, the perils that threaten us as human beings. That was more realistic; such prototypes didn’t give currency to the illusion that life in this world is all that wonderful. The worst thing about these illusions is that they make people even unhappier: they feel worthless and abnormal because they don’t look as happy as the people who smoke 11B [A common brand of cigarettes in Germany] or whatever.

JTP: Happiness in former times was not a thing of this world.

GR: No, and perhaps that was less of a lie than the lie that promises happiness here and now — the right to happiness: that’s pure nonsense.

JTP: Might you as a painter have had any chance of inventing images on this theme — or is there an aesthetic necessity of some kind that means that such images must be painted from photographs?

GR: I consider it quite simply unthinkable to invent such pictures. That’s just not possible nowadays. Painters used to train for years on end, to the point where they could to some extent invent nudes. That ability no longer exists. It’s gone.

JTP: I meant something different, not the loss of technical skill, not the painter’s virtuosity. I'm asking whether photography sets aesthetic norms that absolutely prevent one from painting such a theme out of one’s head?

GR: I do know one such picture, by a Norwegian painter, rather Old-Masterish, as phoney as Werner Tiibke. — Now, photography is so unsurpassed by definition, it’s changed painting so greatly, there’s just nothing to be said.

JTP: What do you mean by unsurpassed? As far as I am concerned, these photographs are unsurpassed in their inhumanity. Anyone would look away at once. Photographs capture a thing that it would be impossible to look at. They simply register. Finish, comma, out. They are totally impersonal. To be able to see such pictures, you need a glass wall in front of your eyes: you need the filter that a camera lens provides. In reality you wouldn't be able to look.

GR: Photographs are almost Nature. And they drop onto our doormats, almost as uncontrived as reality, but smaller. We want to see these terrible pictures, and maybe they even spare us public executions, even capital punishment. We do need that. Just think of motorway accidents, how that fascinates people. Can you explain that to yourself?

JTP: Because we're still alive. Because we got away scot-free. Because we play a privileged role as spectators. Because that single instant makes us more powerfully aware that we're alive.

GR: That’s a great advantage. But in the process we also see our own end, and that also strikes me as very important. And photographs can do the same thing, which is why I have never seen them as inhuman. As pictures, I don’t consider them any worse, Just different. They have a different effect. More direct, close to home, more immediate.

JTP: I find that astonishing. The photographs petrify me. The paintings seem to me to transcend them, to make mourning possible. It seems to me that the photographs don’t permit that. They duplicate blindly.

GR: Can I fetch you a photograph? What I can read in this — the compassion that is so directly released here — the way this young woman lies there, all the details that tell so many stories: a painting hasn’t got that with the same immediacy. It’s all much stronger here.

JTP: I can't understand Benjamin Buchloh, when he writes [in the Krefeld exhibition catalogue] that you intended a criticism of the ‘cruel gaze’ of the police photographs.

GR: No, that’s not what I meant at all.

JTP: You share that gaze, in every detail. In your painting, you participate in its horror. And yet the painting is something very different from the police photograph.

GR: It’s meant to be. Perhaps I can describe the difference like this: in this particular case, I’d say the photograph provokes horror, and the painting — with the same motif — something more like grief. That comes very close to what I intended.

JTP: Does death in this context possibly have a grandeur that it now no longer automatically has in everyday life? I am always finding news items which I collect under the heading of ‘Death Without Dignity’ There’s a story of someone who’s been run over by a mechanical sweeper or shut in a freezer. Or people being buried standing up, because of the lack of space in Berlin cemeteries. and so on. I often wonder whether the editors realize that they're redefining our relationship with death through these stories. Stories like this are our time. it seems to me. Do you set out to involve yourself in the truth of this cruelty?

GR: Far from it. I want to show death in all seriousness.

JTP: So why the blurring?

GR: I first paint the pictures very precisely from the photograph, sometimes more realistically than the originals. That comes with experience. And the result is, of course, an unendurable picture from every point of view.

JTP: It reminds me of the working of psychoanalysis. As if you wanted first to cancel the repression. in order to reinstate it later. When you paint the photograph in a much bigger format, does that make it more terrible?

GR: Partly, yes, because it’s like a reconstruction of the event, just by virtue of being life-size, with all the details.

JTP:The photographer needs only a fraction of a second — but you have to spend hours creating all those details.

GR: But it’s work, after all. I feel that I’m not reduced to being a mute spectator. I have something to do. That makes it more bearable.

JTP: How do you decide on the right size for a picture?

GR: Entirely primitive. Life-size.

JTP: The pictures of Gudrun Ensslin alive are more than life-size, something like one-third bigger than reality.

GR: I don’t know why I painted her larger than life. The portrait of the young Ulrike Meinhof is larger than life, too. Perhaps it was a vain wish —

JTP: — for life to be bigger than death? What about the format of the burial scene.

GR: I couldn’t make that life-size. The picture would have been eighty metres long. It’s still the biggest picture in the exhibition, but in comparison to the event itself it’s small.

JTP: The cycle consists of comparatively small pictures.

GR: Which I’m quite glad of now, a certain plainness that I find appropriate. ‘Two years ago, when I started to work on this theme, I thought: “This is a gigantic theme, and these are going to be gigantic pictures" It did come out as a cycle, but the pictures are not outsize ones — rather modest, in fact.

JTP: The RAF. as seen by you, is primarily a women’s movement.

GR: That’s right. I do think that women played the more important role in it. They impressed me much more than the men.

JTP: Did you tackle the theme purely as a painter. or did you also need to know about the personalities, the politics. the events and the context? Did you read books about terrorism?

GR: Yes, I read everything, sooner or later. Stefan Aust’s book was very important to me. So knowledge of the people, knowing the people, was basic to the pictures.

JTP: I was particulary struck by the portrait of Ulrike Meinhof as a young girl. It’s the only picture that shows an RAF member outside the magic circle of RAF politics. It could be anybody. It’s touchingly innocuous, even sentimental. Is it a special picture?

GR: It does have a specific function in the cycle, because you see it in relation to the others. But all the fifteen pictures relate to each other.

JTP: There is always an anti-painterly element in your work. If your painting here reminds me of the blurred pictures on ill-adjusted television sets, does that bother you?

GR: The reproductions are like that, but not the pictures themselves.

JTP: How long does one picture like this take you?

GR: It’s relatively quick. That is, applying the paint is a lengthy process, a week or so. The burial picture took longer, there were so many details to be painted, but a head would only take two days. Most of the work lies elsewhere — and that can go on for almost a year.

JTP: Can you paint anything else concurrently.’ Do you need a counterweight, to hold in check the depressive mood that hangs over pictures like these?

GR: There were breaks.

JTP: But you didn’t, for instance, work on colour abstractions at the same time?

GR: No, that’s not on. A break of one week, that’s all right. I did paint my daughter once during that period.

JTP: Did she have anything to do with the cycle?

GR: No, nothing. But I did find it interesting that the portrait of Ulrike Meinhof came out so much better than that picture.

JTP: Was it clear to you from the outset that this was going to be a grey cycle.

GR: Yes, it was.

JTP: Did you ever consider painting the terrorists’ victims as well. Hans-Martin Schleyer, for instance.

GR: Never

JTP: The scene in Victor-Statz-Strasse, with the pram as an obstacle to stop the car. The occupants’ corpses on the street with blankets over them, the Mercedes?

GR: No, never. After that you'd have to go on painting the same sort of thing. That was the ordinary crime, the ordinary disaster that happens every day. What I chose was an exceptional disaster.

JTP: What was exceptional about it?

GR: Firstly the public posture of these people: nothing private, but the overriding, ideological motivation. And then the tremendous strength, the terrifying power that an idea has, which goes as far as death. That is the most impressive thing, to me, and the most inexplicable thing; that we produce ideas, which are almost always not only utterly wrong and nonsensical but above all dangerous. Wars of religion and the rest: it’s fundamentally all about nothing, about pure blather — and we take it utterly seriously, fanatically, even unto death. I’m not talking about the facts. The crimes of Vietnam do have to be taken utterly seriously, but that’s a different matter.

JTP: Is it the tragedy of these people that they tried to be active doers? That they refused to reconcile themselves to their own impotence — isnt that the hidden, positive core.

GR: Yes, that’s the other side — which I see, of course, despite my scepticism. That’s the element of hope that the pictures were meant to contain.

JTP: Has the ideology of the RAF never interested you?

GR: No. I have always rejected it as an ideology, as Marxism or the like. What interests me is something different, as I’ve just tried to say: the why and wherefore of an ideology that has such an effect on people; why we have ideologies at all; whether this is an inevitable, a necessary part of our make-up — or a pointless one, a mere hindrance, a menace to life, a delusion —

JTP: So you consider the RAF dead as the victims of their own ideology?

GR: Yes, certainly. Not the victims of any specific ideology of the left or of the right, but of the ideological posture as such. This has to do with the everlasting human dilemma in general: to work for a revolution and fail —

JTP: Significantly, ‘avant-garde’ is a political as well as an artistic term. Is there a relation between art and the revolutionary impulse? What causes an established, bourgeois artist like yourself to be interested in the RAF? Surely not its actions?

GR: Yes, the actions. Because someone is trying, with total radicalism, to change something — one can understand this, and also see it as the other side of the coin. Art is sometimes described as radical, but it isn’t really — only artificially, which is something quite different.

JTP: Is painting an attack on reality. in the attempt to create something entirely new?

GR: It’s all sorts of things — an alternative world, or a plan or a model for something different, or a reportage — because, even when it only repeats or recalls something, it can still create meaning.

JTP: Recalling — that is the concept that underlies these pictures. What can one profitably remember about the RAF?

GR: It can give us new insights. And it can also be the attempt to console — that is, to give a meaning. It’s also about the fact that we can’t simply discard and forget a story like that; we must try to find a different way of dealing with it - appropriately.

JTP: I sometimes feel that works of art can momentarily disable the real world. That they keep at least the idea of change alive.

GR: Yes, certainly. It’s just that I sometimes feel scared at the many demands that are made of art. Art is a perfectly natural human quality, and from that point of view it can’t be called in question. You can’t say that art is no good because Mozart didn’t prevent the concentration camps, any more than you can say that no more poems are possible after Auschwitz. All I know is that without Mozart and the rest we wouldn’t survive.

JTP: I have compared a few of the paintings with the photographic originals. Some quite fundamental changes have been made. It’s clearest in the cell picture, for instance. This picture speaks impulsively, directly to the viewer. At the time, people were always arguing that a cell with a record-player and books. not three books but three hundred, was as comfortable as living in a hotel. In your picture I found the reality of a cell captured with total conviction. The hell of an enclosed space with no way out.

GR: I was very unsure about that picture, to start with. It seemed over- simplified. Everything that goes through your head, everything that I took a lot of trouble painting, had been painted out. But it holds up.

JTP: The pictures are both rigidly conceived and apparently left to chance. The motif is carefully selected from hundreds of others, but the transposttion into paint seems to go its own way —

GR: — as if against my will, or at least against all that one tends to think.

JTP: Do you subject yourself to a photograph?

GR: It’s my point of departure.

JTP: Did you mean to paint the idea of a cell? I can't imagine that.

GR: Certainly both. I mean, that particular cell and of course also what cell means. But a thing like that has to be automatic, somehow.

JTP: You have a sense of something, you see it, it’s right or it isnt right.’ But you can't formulate it.

GR: I notice this in abstract painting, If I read an especially good text that makes it clear to me what I have done, and I try to do the same thing again, the result is nothing but nonsense. If I work methodically, it just doesn’t work. A picture has a logic that can’t be verbalized until afterwards; it can’t be designed. We talk about thinking a thing over, meaning over again, afterwards. I am more and more aware of the importance of the unconscious process that has to take place while one is painting — as if something were working away in secret. You can almost just stand by and wait until something comes. It has been called ‘inspiration’ or ‘an idea from heaven’ — but it’s far more down-to-earth and far more complicated than that.

JTP: Are these pictures something new in your work? You have never before chosen source images with such a social charge, but only neutral ones.

GR: That’s true, I have always shied away from so-called political themes, and from anything spectacular.

JTP: But this whole cycle is built on the spectacular nature of the events concerned.

GR: And really that is the most natural thing in the world, picking up on exceptional events. It would be absurd to have a taboo against the very thing that concerns us most. Then we'd be left producing nothing but banalities.

JTP: You're pointing with a deprecating gesture to your own abstract works. Is it part of the newness of your other pictures that they involve themselves with contemporary history? This is a very risky business. I can't imagine any painter now even trying to paint a theme such as unemployment, and yet it remains one of the central issues of twentieth-century society. Artists in the 1920s still knew how to do it. Now there’s no one left who knows how it might be painted.

GR: It is very difficult. What could one paint about unemployment, when other media cover the theme so much better?

JTP: In the Overholland catalogue in 1987, you published some journal entries that had an uncompromising tone that I very much like. There was a harshness in them that came as a welcome contrast to the banality of so many arts pages. I'll quote something: 25 November 1982. The whole art world is one vast scene of pettiness, lies, deceit, depravity. wretchedness, stupidity, nonsense, impudence. It is not worth wasting one word on it.’ Aren't statements like that rather risky.’ You are part of this business, after all.

GR: That’s why I didn’t publish them here but in Holland, where nobody was going to read them.

JTP: But publication is always —

GR: — my wish to be unconditionally known. Only I’m a bit of a coward.

JTP: A bit of a coward and a bit courageous.

GR: That’s the only way that suits me.

JTP: Are your pictures intended to provoke?

GR: Well, they certainly weren’t meant to be boring!

JTP: These pictures always seem to take us as viewers out of ourselves, and at the same time they bring us up short — speculations and all — at the edge of the image. They answer none of the questions that they pose. I've never come across anything like this before: a picture that almost systematically jams its own signal, shoves the viewer away, and forces him to come back for more, only to start the whole thing all over again. Sometimes I have had the feeling that these are brazen oversimplifications. But in the end I feel that the success lies in the simplification.

GR: That’s the real point of the work: not to make things simple, but to reach a result, a summing-up. Initially just for oneself.

JTP: Do you see a private dimension?

GR: Certainly. You don’t take up a theme like this unless it matters to you — that’s a premise. What counts is that the pictures then become universal. They are there to show themselves and not me: that would be dreadful. That’s why form is so important — and that is difficult nowadays.

JTP: But you try

GR: Yes, because without form communication stops; because without form you have everybody burbling on to themselves, whenever and however, things that no one can understand and — rightly — no one is interested in. The form that we have in the art world today — the universally comprehensible form, that is — is entirely superficial. Openings, dealership, social game-playing: these have become the form of art. They have long since wholly or at least largely taken its place.

JTP: I have the feeling that these pictures attach themselves to an explosive historical theme, that they’re an expression of your desire to endow pictures with historical weight. But at the same time they seem to me to strike a blow against contemporary art, including — perhaps especially — your own art. An attempt to say: 'Not this way.'

GR: Yes, with all due scepticism, because I’m a part of the art world myself.

JTP: I've jotted down a quotation from Francis Bacon: ‘I believe that art is recording: I think it’s reporting. And I think that in abstract art, as there’s no report, there’s nothing other than the aesthetic of the painter and his few sensations.’

GR: That sentence suits me very well: ‘I think it’s reporting.’

JTP: What about the rest of the quote?

GR: I don’t believe that quite so completely. I think that even those vacuous little abstracts on that wall over there — even those are a form of reporting.

JTP: Arent they just authentic documents of your own inner state?

GR: Being authentic gets you nowhere. Every picture is authentic. The worst pictures are the ones that tell you what’s up with the painter and with painting in general. That’s what makes them so uninteresting.

JTP: When I was preparing for this conversation and looked up your catalogue raisonné, I wondered whether there wasn't a sense of desperation in the sheer quantity of pictures. I get the feeling that there are so many pictures because you needed to search for one picture. the picture, through the many.

GR: I don’t believe in the absolute picture. There can only be approximations, experiments and beginnings, over and over again. That’s what I wanted to show in the catalogue: not the best pictures but everything, the whole work of approximation, mistakes and all. In my Atlas it’s even more extreme: a deluge of images that I can control only by organizing them, and no individual images left at all.

JTP: Wasn't, for example, Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat (1793) more than an approximation?

GR: Yes, of course, there are some lucky strikes like that. There are a few almost absolute pictures. And that’s the hope that keeps you going most of the time —

JTP: Have you quoted David? In the three Dead Woman pictures, I was forcibly reminded of David, and of the space above the person in particular. The expression of dignity that these pictures contain comes through the emptiness above the closed eyes. Your picture, like David’s, is elevated by the dark area above the person.

GR: One has half of art history in one’s head, and of course that sort of thing does find its way in, involuntarily — but as to taking something out of a specific picture, that doesn’t happen.

JTP: Within the cycle, these three pictures seem to me to be extraordinary successful. How do you see it? Are they all equally successful?

GR: I’m not sure. Perhaps this first version of the Shot Man isn’t that good. There was an earlier one that went wrong, and I had to destroy it. It’s hard to say. I’m still too close to it.

JTP: The first is more like the police photograph.

GR: That may be why I like the second version. It’s calmer.

JTP: When I asked about a successful picture. you named one that youre doubtful about. Is there one that make you say 'That’s it, that’s how I wanted it’?

GR: The Dead Woman, those three pictures, there I agree with you, I wouldn’t have any reservations about them. I like the record-player. But it seems to me to be a bit unfair, talking about them like this — it’s not right.

JTP: Yesterday I was watching the visitors to your exhibition. They were constantly trying to find the right viewing point, walking up and down, trying it from every angle, sometimes close up, sometimes standing well back. The viewpoint must be a particularly difficult problem here, in both senses of the word.

GR: That’s good. That’s what it’s about, in every sense —

JTP: What is your viewpoint? Making a record?

GR: Partly. And also grief — compassion and grief. Certainly also fear.

JTP: Grief at what?

GR: That it is the way it is.

JTP: Does the person you're depicting count for anything? Is it clear to you whom you're painting?

GR: You can’t really avoid that. As I said, it’s only the work, the craft element, that makes it bearable. It was worse when the pictures were hanging here, in these rooms. Having these pictures around one all the time, that was unendurable. Now they’re gone.

JTP: Is it important to you that the pictures be seen?

GR: Absolutely. That’s what they’re there for.

JTP: What were you trying to do in these pictures?

GR: To make pictures. To picture my own thoughts and feelings. By which I mean that my own motivation and my views about them are entirely unimportant, and ultimately beside the point: there are other professionals whose job it is to come along and talk about these things.

JTP: And yet here we are talking, and you are saying something.

GR: Yes, of course, and I certainly don’t regard myself as a blinkered specialist. But —

JTP: The RAF ought probably to be seen as an attempt to break with the idea of passive complicity, which was so important to our fathers’ generation. Fascism only works if there are people who go along with it. I get the feeling that the RAF was trying to say: ‘We will never again permit ourselves to be made into the accomplices of historic crimes.’ That seems to me to be the starting point. Being informed, as we are, we are all now accomplices. None of us is going to say in the future We didn’t know.’ That standard excuse of the 1950s is no longer available. We have no excuse any more. We are contemporary observers of all the crimes that are being committed today. We are all callous accomplices. Blackmailed into impotence, we are spectators of political and economic crimes that are made possible only because we connive in our own impotence.

GR: This interests me in a general sense. The callousness, for example. The fact that we have only so much compassion in us; we tend to refuse our compassion whenever we get the chance. This makes sense, in a way; it has to do with survival strategies. But when you realize just how much we do refuse our compassion, how calmly we look on while hundreds of thousands starve or are tortured or killed — we never choke on a single forkful. This is more than avoiding compassion in order to survive: it’s almost worse than killing. And the killing goes on anyway, day after day. We can always push the responsibility off onto other people — but it’s really all of us. No other species does this.

JTP: Only humanity?

GR: Man kills as no animal kills, he kills himself, as if under a compulsion. You can’t hold aloof and say it’s other people, they’re the criminals. That’s no use, it’s just self-serving glibness. This kind of thinking is dangerous. Another thing that’s absurd is those people who try to make exceptions of themselves and describe themselves as peace-loving. That’s just as bad as joining in personally. I’m not talking about the RAF, I’m talking about us.

JTP: The RAF began as a resistance movement against the war in Vietnam. It all ended in crimes committed by the RAF, but it all started as a struggle against the crime of war. Now there has been a historic shift. The last ten years have not been so much overshadowed by wars: it’s been a decade of historic catastrophes in the production process. Bhopal, Chernobyl. Sandoz. Death tolls like Bhopal used to exist only on battlefields. The situation has got worse and worse. Ordinary industrial production is becoming a crime against humanity and against Nature. However fast the opposition movements grow, impotence grows faster still.

GR: Our state of impotence hasn’t changed much — or, to put it another way, it’s not only the perils that have grown; the possibilities of doing something about them have grown too

JTP: With the RAF, did it interest you that here were some people who were saying 'Thus far and no further’?

GR: Yes, of course. But that’s our daily bread, so to speak. What is really wretched is when those who want to change something fail, not just because they are prevented from succeeding, but because the means they use — and yes, that does mean their ideas — are false.

JTP: Was your experiment with history a necessary experiment?

GR: It was necessary. I’d continue it straight away, if I could find something that works. Something that has both: that alters the painting and has an importance beyond that. Perhaps the experiment will bear fruit in future.

JTP: Is this cycle an experiment in lending weight to your painting?

GR: Certainly. Everyone is always trying to do that. Why we never succeed, I don’t know

JTP: With a cycle like this, are you also trying to make life difficult for the art business as a consumer trade?

GR: Impossible. The demand is so great that practically everything is swallowed up.

JTP: You can imagine a museum director buying this cycle?

GR: They haven’t got any money.

JTP: So you wouldn't sell these pictures?

GR: No, for the moment it’s out of the question. But if the interest keeps up, I'd be glad to give them to a museum on permanent loan.

JTP: Will you insist that the cycle can't be broken up?

GR: Absolutely, even if the pictures go into store. I don’t suppose any museum can afford to have fifteen pictures by one painter permanently on show. We shall have to see how the pictures hold up. That’s why they are being exhibited, after Krefeld, in Frankfurt, then in Rotterdam and somewhere else after that.

JTP: Would you like to influence the public presentation of the pictures?

GR: I would absolutely forbid any spectacle.

JTP: Can you imagine the pictures in private galleries?

GR: No, that wouldn’t be the right place for them. They can only be shown in museums.

JTP: You don’t have didactic aims in view?

GR: The pictures are not partisan, they’re quite clear about that. They are hard to enlist, to make use of. Grief is not tied to any ‘cause’. Nor is compassion.

JTP: What is the object of your compassion?

GR: The death that the terrorists had to suffer. They probably did kill themselves, which for me makes it all almost more terrible. Compassion also for the failure; the fact that an illusion of being able to change the world has failed.

JTP: There is a laconic evenness in your attitude, which doesn’t seem to match the emotive power. Do you wish for an illusion, is there a wish in you for an illusion?

GR: That wish is surely born with us.

JTP: The wish not to have to surrender to the bald fact of ‘that’s the way it is’? Might illusions be just as necessary as repressions?

GR: Possibly. I don’t know — maybe my hatred of ideology is mistaken, maybe I’m confusing one thing with another. Because when I say I believe it'll be fine weather tomorrow, that too has something to do with belief and illusion. All the same, I consider belief of every kind, from astrology to every elevated religion and all great ideologies, to be superfluous and mortally dangerous. We no longer need such things. We ought to work out different strategies against misery and injustice, war and catastrophes.

JTP: Is there hope in your art? The abstract paintings formulated something like a faith in the making of beauty. In the photo-paintings it’s the hope of being able to pass judgment on one’s own period, or to compress one’s period into a picture.

GR: Or at least, by reporting, to help to enlighten people. To see how it is.

JTP: One entry in your journal reads like this: ‘Art has always been basically about agony, desperation and helplessness. ... We often neglect this side of things by concentrating aesthetically on the formal side in isolation.’ I'd go along with that. Except that it’s a totally anachronistic position: if I look around in contemporary art, this statement is just not true. Art is more social game-playing than ever. A kind of entertainment with a phoney status element, which is often primarily about an elitist distancing of oneself from trivial amusements.

GR: All of that is true.

JTP: A whole tribe of artists are living and working for the total opposite of your assertion. They act according to the motto: ‘Profundity is out. we're glad to be superficial, and we even get paid for it.’ Walter Grasskamp once wrote that your painting was ‘visual sadism’: a deliberately provocative formulation, but I could immediately see why it was apt. I myself have never been able just to relax in front of your colour abstractions, as one might with pictures by Matisse, say. There is a tormenting streak in the beauty.

GR: That may well be, but it has nothing to do with sadism.

JTP: It’s not an insult to you if I say that I have never been able to find those Abstract Pictures just beautiful?

GR: Far from it.

JTP: Have you ever felt the need to justify yourself for having painted the present cycle?

GR: Not while I was painting the pictures. That came later. Here and now, for instance.

JTP: Could you have painted these pictures ten years ago?

GR: No

JTP: Does an artist have to be successful in order to get away with painting this subject?

GR:I don’t believe so.

JTP: Just a great painter?

GR: A great painter — once I used to think I ought to paint like the ‘great masters’, and of course I couldn’t. I felt it to be a terrible lack in me, I thought I basically wasn’t a painter at all but a fraud, just pretending to be one. It was a long time before I realized that what I do — the desperate experimentation, all the difficulties — is exactly what they all do: that’s the normal nature of the job. That’s painting.

JTP: It strikes me as grotesque, of course. to hear one of the most successful German painters saying he isn't a painter at all.

GR: OK, by now I don’t mind calling myself a painter. There’s no risk in that.

JTP: Was this cycle a risk, as far as you were concerned?

GR: Certainly. But not because of possible objections from the Left or from the Right. By definition, there’s always a risk — the risk of ending up with bad pictures.

JTP: Perhaps this is cynical, but after a certain degree of success there us no longer such a thing as failure. As if that were the price of success.

GR: In market terms, that’s true. By now the market would take any rubbish I might turn out. But what counts for me is something else, and so — self-criticism apart — there are still a few people whose judgment still means something. And so, if they say; ‘Oh, that looks bad — he’s run out of steam — you can forget him — ’

JTP: Does this cycle represent a progression within your work?

GR: Well, I don’t have the feeling that I’ve run out of steam. I realize that these pictures set a new standard, set a challenge to me. I may be deceiving myself. It’s all still too fresh. But one thing I have realized; it’s hard for me to go on painting.

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