Photographobia and Gerhard Richter’s “September”
— By Adri Wong | January 7, 2010
Gerhard Richter’s “September” painting is, for more than one reason, attracting a lot of attention. For one thing, it is a rendering of the Twin Towers shortly after one of the planes crashed into them on September 11th. For another, it happens to be a beautiful print. Then there is the “painting is dead” controversy it has inexplicably stirred.
In a particularly tedious piece of art criticism, TimeOut magazine’s Howard Halle used the painting as a springboard to declare: “It’s a widely held belief in the art world that painting is dead.” Perhaps worried that some reader would continue, undeterred, Halle spends the remainder of the article doing strange acrobatics around Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Halle’s conclusion appears to be that Benjamin got it wrong because Richter’s show was beautiful. Hmm.
Bombers (1963) - Oil on canvas
Richter is best known for his hyper-realistic paintings of photographs, an excellent example of which is his “Baader Meinhof” cycle. To that effect, one can barely blame Halle for invoking the name of our favorite moustached marxist mystic in considering Richter’s work. But Richter’s paintings are significant not because they restore the aura of gallery painting, but because his work – both abstract and representational – manages to challenge the powerful aura that mechanically reproduced images themselves have accrued since Benjamin put pen to paper.
Reuters (2001)
September is a canvas print of a painting of the first image I ever saw of the September 11th attacks – at the time, I was watching a live broadcast of the scene on television. The photograph is still frightening to me, for reasons I can not fully articulate, but which likely include its lasting intensity and the widespread effectiveness with which it has been mobilized as political propaganda.
I am not alone in my fear of the photographic aura. For years the Bush Administration – and now the Obama Administration – have been fighting to withhold unreleased photos of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison. The government has turned over written descriptions of the torture, but they’ve fought tooth and nail to keep the photos hidden away. In fact, they were about to take the fight to the Supreme Court, before they convinced Congress to pass a law specifically exempting photographs from the general requirement of government transparency. Their rationale? The photos, if released, would endanger the lives of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan because “the enemy” could easily reproduce the photos and distribute them for propaganda purposes, thereby helping insurgency/terrorist recruitment efforts.
(AP Photo/Francois Mori)
In contrast, the government has made no effort to prevent artist Fernando Botero from touring the country with his exhibition of paintings depicting the torture that prisoners at Abu Ghraib underwent. Botero’s paintings are no mere conceptual representations of the abuse – they are based on specific documented reports of particular incidents. So why isn’t the government worried that those will be reproduced and used as propaganda? In an age where any teenager can photoshop an image, what power do photos have that paintings don’t?
Richter’s September is haunting, but not frightening. It brings into relief just how constructed our collective visual memory of September 11, 2001 is, without presenting any obvious point, without demeaning the tragedy of the events of that day, without betraying any political leaning. It has none of the didacticism of Botero’s Abu Ghraib paintings. It simply stands as a quiet challenge to the uncomplicated representation of truth. Such an aspirational defiance of propaganda is far more worthy of our hope than Shepard Fairey’s all-pervasive Obama poster (another print of a painting of a photo).
This is some big talk about a little painting. It is actually a shy little piece, blues and greys, modestly sized, tucked into a corner space of a gallery filled with pieces of impressive scale and vibrancy. The collection is fantastic as a whole, and will be up for just a few more days. Richter’s lacquer pieces alone are worth the trip, although they seem to have been overlooked by visitors and commentators alike, amidst the hubbub.
Through January 9, 2010
Marian Goodman Gallery
24 W 57th St (between Fifth and Sixth Aves), NY NY
Preview the show at the Marian Goodman Gallery website
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nice, adri
And today is the last day for the show!
Excellent piece. But I am wondering what you make of Stockhausen’s comment that 9/11 was “the greatest work of art there has ever been,” especially in consideration of the phenomenon described by many people in which they felt that they were watching ‘a movie’ when watching the events on tv?
In this regard, do Richter’s paintings become somehtng like annotation to the (none the less horrible!) performance?
Well, you completely misread my review of Richter, and my lede about painting being dead, for which I’ve gotten a lot of flack, and not just from you. But let me make my meaning clear, or try to: I would stand by my assertion that indeed, the belief that painting is dead is a widely held one in the art world. This hasn’t stopped anyone from painting, of course, but I’d submit that the notion has been internalized by artists who consider themselves painters. Exhibit A: Gerhard Richter; he’s repeatedly brought up the very idea in numerous interviews. Just about every one of the catalogs of his work on display at Marian Goodman had an essay in it by Richter’s good friend Benjamin Buchloh, surely one of the main proponents of the painting-is dead-meme. It is has been Buchloh and other critics like him, not yours truly, who have been doing “strange acrobatics” around Benjamin in order to justify their evident admiration of Richter. This was in part what I was attempting to get at in my piece, however tediously. But I would also argue that contrary to your assertion, trying to restore the aura of painting and trying to challenge the aura of the mechanical reproduced image are not mutually exclusive in the Richter’s work; the collision of the two are the crux of his work. One last thing: You keep referring to September 11 as a painting; it’s not a painting, it’s an offset lithographic reproduction of one.