View. Gerhard Richter 18 Oktober 1977: Isabelle Graw

The basis for this discussion is Benjamin H.D. Buchloh’s essay on Gerhard Richter’s exhibition 18 Oktober 1977’ and the specific approach to Richter’s painting expressed in it. Covered by Bettina Semmer in Artscribe International no. 76, the exhibition has been the most controversial in Germany for years, sparking off debates about the possibility of history painting, of political engagement in art and whether or not it has been effective in this case.

Isabelle Graw: Can we admire Richter for digging up forbidden memories and bringing the repressed subject of the Red Army Faction back into the public eye, if we consider that over the last few years we have seen a period of reappraisal in the Federal Republic involving the production of books (Baader Meinhof Komplex) and films (Stammheim), and that history has not been repressed but rather represented in a distorted way?

Benjamin Buchloh: The inability to deal with history in an undistorted way is a sign of repression. That aside, the reappraisal that you mention did not happen until ten years after the events, which also tends to indicate repression. And once the Baader-Meinhof group was finished no-one insisted on an explanation of the circumstances of the deaths. With these new paintings about the 18th October 1977, Richter is showing that this repression is still with us.

IG: You have consistently taken as your starting-point the idea that Richter is attempting to demonstrate the idea that the impossible is actually possible, which, in the context of the ‘18 Oktober 1977’ paintings, means that he depicts history while at the same time demonstrating the impossibility of the representation of history. But these paintings seem to be more possible and less ambiguous than the early photographic paintings, because they have been painted better, more carefully and in a less blurred way.

BB: These paintings were not painted either more or less carefully than the ‘48 Portraits’, in which a dialectic was produced between the depictive function of photography and the depictive function of painting — a dialectic that didn’t need the additional emphasis of being blurred. Photographic depiction eliminates the claims of painting just as depiction in paintings negates photographic depiction. This dialectic still exists, and I cannot see that it should have been destroyed by the perfection that you have seen in these works, or by technical brilliance.

IG: I also feel that the paintings are successful principally because they launch an attack on photography and question its claim to truth. We are still left with the question of whether the foregrounding of a content that is more loaded than earlier, more neutral contents, whether the dominance of content does not tend to overshadow the dialectical operations that you have mentioned.

BB: The question of whether the prominence and historical visibility of the victims qualitatively locates the paintings on another level, turning them into real history paintings, is a difficult one to answer. In my essay I have suggested that we should see Richter’s position as being on the one hand the European interpretation of Warhol's rendering death anonymous, and on the other hand a critique of Kiefer’s work, a critique of the idea, predominant in Germany, that history is easy subject-matter for painting.

IG: The contrast with Kiefer that you have emphasised in your essay came about through the fact that Richter is working historically, and is also aware of the inadequacy of this project, while Kiefer acts as if history had never been forbidden as an area for artistic depiction. How does this more indirect treatment of history manifest itself In Richter’s works?

BB: Richter’s works never cease to remind us that these are archive and police photographs, which takes some of the drama away from the question of historical depiction, and creates a sense of distance. Despite the terrible intensity of these paintings, the directness of their effect is obstructed by the fact that as photographic depictions they never claim to provide direct access to history, or to present a direct reappraisal of that history, as historical plunderers such as Kiefer have tried to do. In Kiefer’s work there is nothing that admits to its own triviality and incapacity, or that constantly reflects its own limits — it merely claims to achieve real historical work through the process of depiction. Hence the major difference lies in the fact that even the terrible and dramatic paintings in the ‘18 Oktober’ series always provide some sense of their absolute worthlessness, insignificance and triviality as photographs.

IG: To continue to contrast these works with paintings by other artists, I have a question with regard to the difference between Richter and Warhol. For these two artists are distinguished by precisely the same issue that differentiates Richter from Kiefer. Richter differs from Warhol in that he still believes that there is a degree of ‘play’ in his work, that individual intervention is still possible and that moral duties are still imposed — that’s something that sits uneasily with your- idea that his treatment of history is indirect and distanced.

BB: Richter’s painting is distinguished by the fact that in his work these contrasts are presented in a concrete form and shown in juxtaposition. His works are free of Warhol's indifference and anomy, and free of the naiveté of the counter-trend, as found in Kiefer, in which sentimentality is the product of aesthetic ignorance. When he seeks to distinguish himself clearly and drastically from Warhol, Richter is suddenly revealed to be a very conservative artist — conservative in the sense that he does not accept the experience of death as something anonymous and trivial, and that he refuses to accept the absolute ineffectuality of artistic practice. The victim that he represents is not the anonymous and random victim of a technologically motivated failure. In his series of works, Richter counters the position of Warhol, which has become a generalized attitude in contemporary American art, just as much as he opposes the current stance of the German proponents of ‘Polit-kitsch’.

IG: If Richter distances himself as much from Kiefer as he does from Warhol in the way you have suggested, then there must be something in his paintings that is more than Kiefer and Warhol’s projects, something that we might call a responsible representation of history.

BB: Richter is in a position to reflect on the limitation of artistic work without necessarily accepting that limitation. Both of these positions lead either to absolute cynicism, which reads as social desublimation, or to bad painting. To give more concrete examples we would have to mention another name — Hans Haacke — although it’s hard to imagine that Richter would like to be discussed in the same context as Haacke. But if concepts such as the ‘responsibility of the artist’ or ‘a critical social awareness on the part of the artist’ are raised, then Haacke is the first artist who springs to mind, since he has developed and stood by this position over the past twenty years. His instrumental claim, in the sense of direct intervention, enlightenment and political critique is, of course, not explicitly stated in Richter’s work. Richter’s intervention is artistic, both demolishing a specifically German repression of history and practising a critique of a specifically German illusion about the possibilities of historical depiction in art.

IG: To ask you about the ‘something more’ that you mentioned in the context of mutually exclusive attitudes, I'd like to ask whether this might not be a kind of statement or attitude that is conditioned by the content. Does Richter reflect on the status of the subject-matter?

BB: These paintings cannot be seen as a belated attempt by a bourgeois artist to legitimate terrorism. Neither are they a call to arms, a call to revive the tradition of Baader-Meinhof anarchism. There are no open references to the subject-matter, however paradoxical that may sound. The importance of this subject-matter is probably overrated, and in the course of time it will be concealed by the other questions that these paintings provoke. And yet these are not merely paintings which, from a humanistic point of view, lament the death of a group of historical figures, but rather paintings which quite specifically reconstruct the death of this particular German anarchist group as commemorative paintings. These paintings reveal an attitude on part of the artist, just as Mies van der Rohe put his politics on the line when he built his monument to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg without sharing their political position, although he was doubtless more sympathetic towards them than Richter is to the Baader-Meinhof group.

IG: But Richter’s refusal to sell his work, and his demand that the paintings should be kept together applies to these and only these paintings, which also means that this must be a special case. With this gesture Richter seems to put himself on the side of the people who have refused to cooperate with the system.

BB: Richter’s wish to keep the paintings together and to avoid selling them represents a naive and particularly hopeless attitude of protest which becomes all the more absurd in the context of an oeuvre that is, now more than ever, the subject of successful commercial distribution. Richter’s stubborn exception to this rule shows up the reality of the total commercialization of contemporary artistic practice all the more clearly...

IG: ... In your catalogue essay you see this exception as ‘resistance to consumer appropriation’...

BB: Yes. Resistance in the sense that — even as an exception — Richter is proving that the artist can keep control over his work, and, in this individual case, can resist the unrestrained marketing of his work, in just the same way as Hans Haacke, in 1981, defended his work Der Pralinenmeister against Ludwig’s attack. Richter has dealt with a theme that inevitably created waves of sensationalist interest, and the fact that this interview is taking place is one result of that. Richter wanted to avoid this misuse of his work, which he himself has already indicated. Any artist can legitimately demand to exercise a minimum of control over his work, even if circumstances increasingly deprive him of the possibility of that control.

IG: Once you attempt to control the market by refusing to sell your work, you achieve the opposite of what you were trying to achieve. Interest becomes more intense, demand increases and in the process you lose control rather than strengthening it.

BB: You wouldn't be trying to accuse Richter of having a calculated media policy?

IG: No, just of not thinking things through.

BB: Whether the artist reflects the conditions of complete marketing, tries to resist them or to control them — he’s still always subject to those conditions. We’ve learned that much. Nevertheless, I should still say that every artist has the right to try and assume control, however hopeless his attempt may be.

IG: There are other signs in the paintings that Richter is making a comment of sorts. They are not painted in an inexpressive or dispassionate way, and seem to tell ‘before and after’ stories, if we compare the photograph of Ulrike Meinhof as a teenager with the painting of her death, for example, or if we see the photographs of Gudrun Ensslin’s arrest as a narrative series. But Richter seems to want to say more than that.

BB: Richter would certainly be the first to refuse to see these paintings as a new variation of the reflection on the relationship between painting and photography. If his painting were defined only by the fact that it reflects the relationship between painting and photography, It would not be particularly important. And also, I don’t believe I have ever said that this reflection is all there is to Richter’s painting — although it is a major starting point of his work.

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