Paper II, Semester II

Variations of Representation
Cameron Bennett
Written April 2010


Representation is inescapable in art. This may not be a widely held viewpoint, but for those representational painters for whom the so-called “dialogue” of art history is tantamount, demonstrating this is of vital importance. One such painter is Mark Tansey, who, in a word, believes that every work of art represents something, at least itself, and its own experience. If one subscribes to this, then one accepts that all art is representational, even in spite of the intentions and claims of its creators. I would add that each work of art is also a self-referential entity insofar as it is an indexical representation of the process of its own creation. Read into this what one may regarding the role of self-appropriation in postmodern art or the importance currently attached to process, the underlining point is clear: representation is inescapable in art. If that point validates, to a certain extent, all representational art, then two of the foremost contemporary painters who use representation in their work, Mark Tansey and Gerhard Richter, are worth examination, particularly in how they address my own artistic concerns .

Richter and Tansey are each interesting to me, but for different reasons. Where Tansey is deliberate in the esoteric and eclectic messages of his work, Richter is less clear, more circumspect. Where Tansey involves himself in the pageant of art theory and philosophy, Richter often withdraws from it in order to use his medium for political commentary. Whereas Richter conceals, Tansey reveals. Aside from these distinctions, however, and aside from the common ground of merely painting recognizable images, what these artists share is appropriation, a concern with the influence text has over the work, a willingness to operate within the parameters of photography, and a strong concept-based impetus for their work.

Probably the most notable, and for me the most relevant, shared aspect of Tansey’s and Richter’s work is the way in which each uses photography. In this vein, the most obvious similarity between the two artists’ work is the unabashed nod to the photograph in the use of black and white, or in Tansey’s case, black and white, or blue and white, or sepia and white. Today, because photography has universally graduated, so to speak, to the common use of full color, the device of black and white as a link to photography may seem inappropriate, but the photographs after which Richter made his paintings were largely done in the lingering era of pre-digital black and white photography. In Tansey’s case, though, it is not necessarily mere photography itself which is summoned by monochrome, but the photograph’s quality of other-ness. The unique separate-ness of the photographic image, the way in which the photograph is separate from everyday experience in its static monochrome, is what Tansey is after. His use of monochrome is intended to give a clue to the viewer that there is something more going on in his work than mere realism, that there is more afoot than what fully-colored naturalistic, illusionistic pictures usually provide. Lately, in my own work, I have been working with a more monochromatic palette of browns due to comments received during critiques to use less color. In this way, I feel, my work has moved toward Tansey’s.

Richter, on the other hand, uses photography for very different reasons. Since the importance of photography has grown in the arts, which has been seen by many as causing the diminishing importance of the once-dominant medium of painting, then painting photographs, especially one’s own, ought to return a certain importance back to painting. Richter, a painter not limited to realistically representational painting but also fully engaged in painting non-recognizable subject matter, seeks to validate painting by making photo-paintings. Richter attempts to imbue his paintings with the qualities of candid and casual snapshots: arbitrariness of subject, lack of pictorial composition, and freedom from the personal artistic touch. Ironically, it is this restriction of the photographic image which actually provides a painterly liberation: freedom from the conventions of traditional realistic painting permits Richter to enjoy the haptical part of the painting process, that is, the pure handling of the medium of the paint.

I confess that I, like Richter, have found in painting from photographs a more carefree enjoyment made possible by the ease of capturing the image. This ease is addictive, and dangerous, in my opinion. My particular preference, if realistic drawing and painting can be said to be appropriation, is to appropriate from nature, not from photographs. This is the uniqueness of the artist who draws and paints realistically, this is his or her qualifying genius, to use Mary Anne Staniszewski’s term. If Walter Benjamin’s idea of “aura” is important, that is, the desirable quality which emanates from something original which is lost in mass-production, then working from photographs can be seen to be “aura-less.”

Unlike Tansey, who uses photography mainly in the sense that an illustrator would, that is, only as a tool the ends of which serve the pictorial needs of his work, Richter’s use of photography is intended to address a specific philosophical aspect of postmodern art, namely appropriation. It has been shown by critics like Craig Owens that postmodern art is almost entirely appropriation. Installation art, earth art, collage, assemblage, pop art, contemporary photography and painting all call for the reinterpretation of existing spaces, materials, or works. Richter largely uses his own photographs for his photo-paintings, photos which were not created for the purpose of reappearing as a part of a greater composition, and paints them without rearranging their fomal qualities. In this way, he is unlike pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, who took on a more active role as artistic mediator in that he reorganized the pictorial elements of his appropriated comic panels. Not so Richter.

Richter’s ideas to me at this point seem transparent and weak, particularly those discussed in this essay. An attempt to save painting by painting photographs would seem only to further demonstrate the inadequacy of painting, to further bury it, and not to redeem it in any way. Creating an exact replica of a photograph in oil paint, manually, also seems like an unhealthy waste of time. In any event, it can be said that Richter’s reinterpretation of his own photographs fully aligns him with the conventions of contemporary postmodern thought. This is not to say that he is more relevant as a postmodern painter than Tansey.

Like Robert Rauschenberg, Barbara Kruger, and many contemporary artists for whom the inclusion of text in a work is important, Tansey includes text throughout many of his paintings. Addressing the complex field of semiotics which has sprung up around the visual arts, his text actually creates text-ure. One of the best examples of this is his painting “Derrida Queries de Man”, in which the two philosophers dance/grapple on a precipice, whose text-ural roughness is created by ribbons of text which give the visual impression of a rocky mountainside.

Tansey also uses text in a way which applies equally to Richter, which is in the way the title of a work enhances its concept. About Tansey, it has been said that he frames his paintings not with physical frames, but with their titles. In his case, the titles are inseparable from the works and indispensible in terms of comprehending them. In this way, he is different from Richter, whose titles (when he uses them; he often, like many modern and contemporary painters who leave their work untitled, leaves his work with clinical titles like “Abstract Painting” or “Abstract Picture”) conceal more than they reveal meaning. An example is his photo-painting “Man Shot Down” in which we see little more, or perhaps less, than what the title already tells us: an unhappy man lying on the ground. If we are unfamiliar with and unaware of the topicality of the appropriated photograph, its meaning will be lost to us. If we recognize the subject, we begin to be able to get an idea of Richter’s concept, but only if we see how the title works with the image, or in the work in question, how it does not work.

In the case of “Man Shot Down,” as in all of the works in the series of which it is a part, the title is intentionally ambiguous. We are meant to see that ambiguity itself is central to the concept. How the audience is meant to comprehend the tragedy of the events which the initial pre-appropriated photograph represents is what Richter calls into question. There is a barrier between the image and its meaning which the image itself seems to create, and the titles of the works in the series of which “Man Shot Down” is a part echo this effect in the barrier Richter creates between his ambiguous titles and the viewer’s comprehension of the work.

Ultimately, Richter is addressing the old semiotic question of sign representing meaning, of representation itself. Even so, to make a point about the barrier between sign and meaning by giving one’s paintings obscure titles seems sophomoric and easy. On the other hand, the general unease and uncertainty which was characteristic of Richter and with which he approached his artistic endeavors resonates with my own personality. I also applaud his dogged devotion to his “daily practice of painting,” regardless of how much or little I care for his work.


Endnotes

1. Mark Taylor, “The Picture in Question,” (The University of Chicago Press, 1999)10,11
2. Taylor 30-32
3. Jason Gaiger, “Post Conceptrual Painting: Gerhard Richter’s Extended Leave-Taking,” Themes in Contemporary Art. Ed. G. Perry, P. Wood (Yale University Press, 2004) 102
4. Gaiger 104
5. Mary Anne Staniszewski, “Believing is Seeing,” (Penguin, 1995) 111
6. Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse.” Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation.” Ed. Brian Wallis. (The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984) 209
7. Taylor 32
8. Taylor 1
9. Gaiger 130


Bibliography

Gaiger, Jason. “Post Conceptual Painting: Gerhard Richter’s Extended Leave-Taking.” Themes in Contemporary Art. Ed. G. Perry, P. Wood. Yale University Press, 2004

Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. “Gerhard Richter, Catalogue Raisonne 1993-2004.” Richter Verlag/DAP/Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. 2005

Schwarz, Dieter. “Gerhard Richter, Drawings 1964-1999, Catalogue Raisonne.” Kuntsmuseum Winterthur/Richter Verlag Dusseldorf, 1999

Taylor, Mark. “The Picture in Question.” University of Chicago Press Books, 1999