Unbidden Memories: Stefan Germer

‘Only that writer of history who possesses the gift to kindle a spark of hope in the past is he who is permeated with the thought that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.’ – Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

I

With his cycle of paintings representing the events of October 18, 1977, Gerhard Richter recalls an experience which has fallen prey to a greater extent to psychological rather than actual political repression: the Stammheim corpses, the demise of the Red Army Faction. From that day onwards, every attempt to discuss this event was characterized by the necessity to declare one’s distance from its political aims. This pressure to distance oneself was initially an authoritarian injunction, but for those who were stigmatized as ‘sympathizers’ by an earlier generation of Mitiaufer, establishing a distance from the political aims of the RAF soon became the subjective form into which this was translated in their efforts to come to terms with the project of the RAF, its history as well as its ultimate failure.

II

The history of the RAF was itself characterized by both a seeking to identify and a reacting to pressures prescribing distance. In Richter’s work, according to the artist; distance was a starting-point for his examination of the theme: ‘Coming from the GDR at the end of the 1960s, I naturally refused to identify with the aims and methods of the RAF,’ he wrote to me in November of 1988. ‘I was certainly impressed by the energy, uncompromising will, and absolute courage of the terrorists, but I could not begrudge the State its rigour. That’s what states are like, and I had experienced another, less merciful one.’ But this distance on the artist’s part was combined with another consideration, which brought Richter closer to the RAF: ‘The death of the terrorists and all the related events before and after describe something monstrous which affected me, and — even though I may have repressed it — has haunted me ever since, like something left unfinished.’

This constitutes a precise description of both the source of and the difficulty inherent in his artistic project. It is a matter of recognizing something of oneself in others, but relying neither on pre-existing interpretations nor on a naive desire for identification in responding to that recognition. For this reason, Richter defines his artistic procedure as a dialectical mediation of proximity and distance, which follows the logic of remembering, repeating, and working through. Via personal analysis, his project points in the direction of a collective re-examination of an historical experience which had become taboo.

III

Richter’s procedure self-consciously maintains a distance between his paintings and what they depict. The use of photographs as source material breaks down the illusion of the immediate availability of the past. It reminds us in effect that the process of convergence contains 2 moment of distance, because he is obliged to use images made by other people, which already owe their existence to a construction of the past that was shaped by a previous set of specific concerns. This photographic material is far from neutral, being itself an interpretation of events.

Not only in the Confrontation pictures, which seem to have their origin in police procedures, but in the other images as well, we are presented with the examining gaze of the investigator as it would seek clues in cell, bookcase or record-player, and find conclusive evidence in participation of certain other individuals in the funeral. Post festum, all of these photographs are documents demonstrating the victory of the State: this is the essence of their cruelty. The painterly distortion employed by the artist in this instance warns us as viewers to be cautious: it fosters awareness of the erasing of traces, which would attempt to make the photographs of others the object of the painter’s own experience.

The starting point for most of these works is the precise transcription of the photographic source onto canvas, but the form of Richter paintings only emerges from the destruction of this basic material by systematic process of overpainting. This method arises from and emphasizes the experiential distance painting provides vis-a-vis the tangibility of images captured in a photograph. The resultant implicit message is that painting must assert itself in the face of historical reality. Only when it achieves a degree of distance from the photographic interpretation does it succeed in reappropriating the meaning of the images in the photographs.

This distancing approach to the subject-matter obliterates certainty we draw closer to the works in order to grasp their subject, because of their obfuscating visual quality it will escape us. In this sense, such painting corresponds both to our historical situation and to our psychic disposition towards the subject of these paintings. From close up becomes clear that the referential reality of the paintings is a fiction, an effect of the painterly process which produced them. From a distance which brings them into visual focus, however, the subject matter refuses to permit psychological distance, despite a photographic method of presentation which would encourage it.

Thus these paintings are continually reformulating the question of what attitude it would be appropriate to adopt towards them. On the one hand they escape the consensus view that art has nothing to do with ‘reality on the other, they insist that — as paintings — they should be distinguished both from reality, and from the photographs on which they are based. This forces the viewer to make the impossible decision between distance and proximity, through which he can become aware of his attitude towards the subject represented and the nature of representation itself in its various forms. In this process, every one-sided decision — whether for close aesthetic examination or distanced political interpretation — is immediately counter-acted by it positional opposite.

IV

The ambivalent character of Richter’s works derives from the fact that they are history paintings that problematize the possibility of representing history. This dilemma takes as its starting point a conception of photography which views it as the medium that has crucially transformed the representation of history, and thereby redefined the status, practice and possibilities of painting. With the advent of photography, according to this point of view, painting lost its function as a primary means for the production of images in a social context — a development which meant for the traditional medium both an increase in autonomy, and a loss of socio-cultural relevance.

Richter’s choice of photography as a source-material acknowledges this by ignoring the freedom socially given to painting, breaking with the illusion of the autonomy of art and the independence of the creative act. That is, he abandons the myth of the ‘creator’ by concentrating his artistic work on the selection of his sources, the definition of format, excerpt and enlargement, transfer to the canvas, and finally the systematic process of overpainting. In this way reducing his own part in the creation of his paintings, Richter procedurally acknowledges the actual present status of painting.

At the same time, this forces him to redefine the socio-cultural function of art. As it has ceased to be the primary medium for the social production of images, and is not only competing with but rather outmoded in comparison to photomechanical reproduction, Richter uses his art less for the production of what would assert themselves as ‘new’ pictures than to reflect on pre-existing images. The distinction between painterly ‘signifiers’ and photographic ‘signifieds’ produced by this process has a subversive quality. It stresses the fictional character of the reality indirectly conveyed, and thus restores to painting — which has allegedly become obsolete since the arrival of the new medium — its critical function, in both senses of the word.

This is so because these paintings, which escape close examination precisely because of their painterly treatment, undermine all certainty about events and erode belief in the explanatory capacity of words. In this situation painting asserts its position in relation to that of photography by means of doubt: by presenting the apparently irrefutable evidence of facts, upon which the newer medium’s authority is based, as possibly being a mere construction. But the aspiration which lies within this doubt, the hope for another solution (or even only for another interpretation) of events, is too weak ultimately to withstand the power of a photographic definition of reality.

For with the advent of photography, a new form of imagining and constructing historical reality came into being. Unlike the referent of traditional history painting, the photographic referent is not simply a fiction, but an absent, past reality. In other words, photographic evidence is defined by the fact that it gives us not the illusion of a presence, but rather presents us with a ‘real’ event which has the condition of being past. As Roland Barthes has observed in Camera Lucida, photography can never give us the comforting illusion of the presence of that which is represented, but only always the brutal reality of the absence and death of that which is seen within the image.

Extending this idea, it can be suggested that the particular authority of photography lies in this affinity to death; it is able to show us the person revenant, but never the living being. The ‘funeral rites’ therefore employed by photographers in their efforts to capture the live appearance of those whom they nevertheless eventually present in an embalmed state, cannot conceal the fact that their medium deprives the image of that magical dimension which had historically established its status — whether acknowledged in the form of respect for, or fear of, the lifelike quality of images. This loss does not solely affect the new medium, but also has an effect on its historical antecedent — painting. Such eradication of transcendence gives rise to a definition of reality that places it entirely within the realm of the mortal.

In art-historical terms, this loss of the power to overcome death on the part of images, and the consequent transfer of their concerns to the domain of historical factuality, is present for example in the work of Edouard Manet. His painting Dead Toreador (1864-65?) embodies this process of the painting’s becoming an object, and in a sense defines the task of painting as being in part a work of mourning: both for the irretrievably-lost subject of painting, and for the limitation of the painter’s possibilities to precisely that death-dominated making of objects. This means that from then on, history painting must constitute its subject as something ‘past’ — thus abdicating its power to history rather than triumphing over it.

V

The connection between the image and death is therefore closer in Richter’s paintings from photographs than an iconographical search for themes of death in his oeuvre might have us believe. For death is not simply the theme of the works, but the very relationship of painting to its subject. This means that it is not only corpses that we, as viewers, see as corpses, but living people as well; even the Portrait of a Young Woman contains the implicit idea that she is dead, and will die.

A modern history painting here takes the possibilities of the medium as it now stands to their limit. These paintings shockingly reveal that painting is dead, incapable of transfiguring events, of giving them sense: in short, it is no longer capable of what had previously been the task of history painting. Painting in the present tense becomes the victim of the historical reality that it had sought to examine. They state pictorially that any attempt at the constituting of meaning via aesthetic means would be not only anachronistic, but cynical.

But we are of course compelled to question the validity of painting such as this: if nothing can be altered, because all representation must necessarily end up asserting the inadequacy of the medium, what is the point of these paintings? As in the case of Manet, in Richter’s work history paintings must be seen as monuments of mourning: as a lament for loss, which painting cannot alleviate or even soothe, but must rather assert in its full brutality. Or are these paintings completely indifferent; indifferent, that is, to their subject-matter, which would make this series the formal exercise that critics have frequently seen in Richter’s paintings?

VI

Richter says that none of the photographs have been chosen without some reference to personal experience, hardly a painting made without sorrow. But perhaps it is a positive thing if the selection of images has an appearance of randomness. In fact, the first step here is a question of distinguishing between the personal emotions invested in conception and production, and the form which each painting takes as an object; the former is inaccessible, and for us unreconstructible, while the latter at the time of its perception betrays nothing about the circumstances of its genesis. Only the reality of the paintings themselves can be subject to debate. Anything else might give rise to biographical and psychological speculations, the object of which would be not the paintings themselves but rather the personality of the painter.

Not only would this approach have the disadvantage of being reactionary in a theoretical sense, and — in terms of Richter’s definition of his artistic method, as based on reflection about the historical situation of his medium — anachronistic; but also in its sadistic fixation on the preconception of the suffering artist, it dispenses with any need on the viewer’s part for a considered appreciation of the paintings, with the consequent loss of their political significance.

For Richter’s painting is political in two senses: in its choice of subject, and in its method. His decision to depict the history of the RAF compels painting to confront a subject that is untimely both as a theme for painting, and as a theme of painting. Even if the cycle has been painted for reasons that are private in nature, and rooted in a profound pessimism on the part of the artist that finds a kind of confirmation in the fate of the RAF, it nevertheless points beyond this personal motivation to a definition of the function of painting in a more general sense.

This group of paintings asserts the topicality of a subject declared ‘untimely’ in these same two ways: in its content, and in how it defines itself qua painting. Richter’s series stresses the moral necessity of painting at precisely the juncture where it becomes aware of its own limitations; this is a consequence of that medium’s socially marginal position, and involves a concomitant loss of its transformative or consoling function.

By explicitly confronting painting with a history that it can neither aesthetically transform nor overcome, thereby constructing a substitute for the social debate that never occurred, Richter attacks the notion that artistic autonomy would result in a situation where ‘anything goes’. The psychological distance which he brings to his confrontation with this subject-matter acknowledges the obligation of painting to deal in some fashion with social reality, but without loading his medium with the impossible task of aesthetically creating a coherent interpretation.

The fact that these paintings slip from our grasp, escape hasty categorization, and fail to overcome their subject-matter, gives their content an uncanny character which is due to the fact that it has not been transformed, since the social process of mourning is still blocked by psychological repression. The equivocal mode of representation employed by Richter suspends judgement, refusing to give these corpses the character of being objects, and thus becomes a jolt to memory, anew opportunity to confront the matter. Such refusal to make any statement, to present any preconception which would deprive the paintings of their unsettling quality, and hence their necessity, forces the viewer to take a position in response.

In the process that viewer becomes aware that there can be no aesthetic reality that is not social; that the two spheres, even if they are far from being identical, are mutually referential. The alternation between distance and identification emulates the reaction of society to this political issue, and at the same time calls it into question. It is in this way that Richter’s subjective sorrow, precisely because it is embodied in an artistic object, is transformed into an appeal for a public understanding of a forgotten historical reality.

Stefan Germer, Paris, January 1989

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