Theory of Form: Gerhard Richter and Art in the Pragmatist Age 9780226347295

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Theory of Form

Florian Klinger

Theory of Form

Gerhard Richter and Art in the Pragmatist Age

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2022 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2022 Printed in the United States of America Originally published in German as Theorie der Form: Gerhard Richter und die Kunst des pragmatischen Zeitalters, © Carl Hanser Verlag München 2013 All artworks © Gerhard Richter 2020 (10112020) Published with the support of the Marian Goodman Gallery. 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21

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isbn-13: 978-0-226-34701-1 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-34715-8 (paper) isbn-13: 978-0-226-34729-5 (e-book) doi: https://doi.org /10.7208 /chicago /9780226347295.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Klinger, Florian, author. Title: Theory of form : Gerhard Richter and art in the pragmatist age / Florian Klinger. Other titles: Theorie der Form. English Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Translation of: Theorie der Form : Gerhard Richter und die Kunst des pragmatischen Zeitalters. Identifiers: lccn 2021031021 | isbn 9780226347011 (cloth) | isbn 9780226347158 (paperback) | isbn 9780226347295 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Richter, Gerhard, 1932–—Criticism and interpretation. | Art— Philosophy. Classification: lcc nd588.r48 k55513 2021 | ddc 759.3—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov /2021031021 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents I

Response to a Contemporary Challenge, 1

II

Morphological Question: Form as Reaction, 23

III Poetological Question: Form as Judgment, 55 IV Eschatological Question: Form as Transformation, 83 V

Form as Paradigm? 129 Acknowledgments, 143

Notes, 145

Index of Names, 175

Index of Works by Gerhard Richter, 179

I

Response to a Contemporary Challenge Gerhard Richter’s first commitment to pragmatism, found on the opening page of his collected writings, dates from 1962: “Anything that is good or bad is so not in itself, but only under specific circumstances and because we will it so. This fact means that there is nothing guaranteed or absolute about conventions, and it assigns to us the daily responsibility of distinguishing good from bad. [ . . . ] As there is no such thing as absolute rightness and truth, we always aim at the artificial, the leading, the human truth. We judge and make a truth that excludes others. Art plays a formative part in this production of truth.”1 What something is is determined through characteristics that don’t belong to it “in itself,” but rather “only under specific circumstances,” that is, through the role it fulfills in a specific context. If things have no essential characteristics, their determination cannot be “absolute” or unconditional, but only for this time; it cannot be presupposed but must be determined anew in each particular case. It is not encountered or discovered, but “made.” What we “make” in this way depends on our “will.” By placing it in a context in which it makes a difference to a particular purpose, we “decide” what it is supposed to be. By using it as this and not as that, we “judge” and “exclude” other possibilities. As our judgment therefore replaces guidance by the absolute and unconditional, it does so not once and for all— in that case it would again be an absolute— but each time and in each particular case as a “daily,” never-ending task. “Rightness and truth” cannot be based on “uncritically 1

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accepting”2 established authorities— be these the “conventions” of a tradition; the absolute truths of epistemology, theology, or the philosophy of history; or a nature intrinsic to things. Instead it must be “artificial” (as opposed to natural); “leading,” that is, evaluating and constituting the best with regard to a particular purpose (as opposed to inherited); as well as “human,” of one time and place, of this world (as opposed to transcendent). If art has to do with a “rightness and truth” of this sort, it doesn’t depict, embody, or instantiate the latter, but works as an active way of “producing” it. These sparse early remarks already contain a full outline of Richter’s artistic agenda and articulate the central premises that have defined his production ever since. My main argument in this study is that Richter works to replace traditional metaphysical conceptions of artistic form— negotiations of the essence of art— with a pragmatist conception of such form. The philosophical context on which this argument relies is provided in my book Urteilen (Judging), which, from within the Western tradition, diagnoses our present as an age of judgment in which all determination is based on singular acts of distinction.3 For a discussion of Richter, we might also call this age a pragmatist age, and take Richter’s quoted remarks to characterize the production of artistic form in such a way that form is thought of as a singular act of distinction. Thus to conceive of form as the act of making a distinction is itself a distinctive view which, while far from ubiquitous, places Richter in the company not only of pragmatist thinkers such as William James, John Dewey, Ludwig Wittgenstein, or Richard Rorty, but also of fellow artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and John Cage.4 Still, against the larger field of conceptual options articulated by these contexts, Richter’s pragmatist conception is entirely his own; it alone stands at the center of the following discussion, which explores the role of form as developed in both Richter’s artistic and theoretical production. Because the diagnosis of a pragmatist age cannot be formulated from a neutral standpoint but must include itself in this age, our discussion finds itself in a certain justified conceptual alignment with Richter’s work and its artistic and philosophical contexts. The pragmatist articulation of such alignment involves a discontinuous relationship according to which our discussion must embrace the challenge posed by his work while at the same time productively pushing off of it. Accordingly, our discussion positions itself not as

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an interpretation or explanation of Richter’s conception, but as a reaction that takes license, first of all, to endorse the conception without reservation where necessary, but then also to develop it further independently. (The working title for this book was “Essay about Richter: A Reaction.”) To a reaction, for example, establishing a “true meaning” of Richter’s work would be as irrelevant as attempting to deny or subvert such a meaning. The work appears recast in the reaction’s conceptual light, but it in no way depends on such recasting; the reaction adds nothing precisely as it recasts everything. We will characterize further this special sort of pragmatist response by observing it at work in Richter’s own practice, and dedicate our second chapter to it— anyone looking for a “methodology” of the present study will find it there. Thus to start from a diagnosis of our present is not to say that the questions driving our main argument are primarily designed to do justice to the diverse range of artistic production as it actually exists. As a problem-centered discussion that programmatically aims at maximum conceptual simplification, its objective sets it apart from art historical scholarship, even as it owes much to it. Readers expecting an art historical treatise or a piece of art criticism are bound to be disappointed; and so are those seeking to learn novel facts about Richter’s life and work. The only context claimed here is the one of philosophical aesthetics broadly understood, with an emphasis on the pragmatist tradition of aesthetic thought. As our discussion in no way tries to take full stock of specific phenomena in the art world, we leave unexamined whether and to what degree the conclusions reached here are transferable to other artists, works, and contexts. Still, since we have no reason to assume that such transfer would not generally be possible, we will be open to the thought of treating Richter’s work as a paradigmatic response to the question of artistic form, in the sense that it proposes more generally how art can be understood and practiced under the conditions of our present— a consideration to which we will return at the end of this book. What is important about Richter’s avowal of pragmatism? What is at stake in it? Along with his program of replacing metaphysical models of artistic form with a pragmatist model, his avowal constitutes a reaction to a particular historical and conceptual challenge, an impasse consisting of two positions within the art world that contradict one another, and that to him are both unacceptable.5

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According to one position, one can in principle say what art is— a determination that relies on certain styles, genres, themes, techniques, aims, and so on, as its criteria. According to the other, one cannot do so, which relegates art, ultimately, to arbitrariness. Either art is defined as this or that, bound to satisfy certain presuppositions, or it is defined by an impossibility of appealing to such presuppositions, in which case it can bear no determination. One popular version of this impasse is a juxtaposition of universalism and relativism in their trivial forms— that is, of art as a global language with one authoritative standard, and criteria-free art that can be anything.6 This alternative rules much of twentieth-century Western thinking about art, even as it rarely presents itself in the raw formulation provided here.7 Yet it is precisely this rawness or starkness of the alternative, as we will see, that Richter takes as his initial situation and starting point; what in other ways might seem a caricature or oversimplification provides for him just the right conceptual clarity of a real problem in response to which his artistic project launches itself. And we will see that it is precisely this clarity of the problem that keeps Richter’s response simple at its conceptual core while generating work of virtually unlimited overall complexity. When, to give an example for the ubiquity of said alternative, Clement Greenberg characterizes twentieth-century painting on the whole as an essentialist project, this characterization is not only a historicizing summary, but also a modernist gesture and part of the very project that it describes.8 With Greenberg, modernism— as well as, more broadly, late modernity— gives itself a program that will turn out to have symptomatic status for Richter’s initial situation. To paint in the twentieth century, according to Greenberg, means to inquire into the general characteristics of painting as such— painting as the search for the essence of painting. Whatever it is that painting does, it inevitably pursues the critical, investigative— and, we might add, ideologically charged— goal of determining what it itself is, how its practice must be understood.9 As Greenberg equates the search for the essence of painting with the abolition of the inessential, this search works its way through a long series of conventions that are successively discarded, such as perspective, representation, composition, color, and technique— a process that, he admits, does not always move in a linear way but is best described as a project of experimentally putting to the test the “indispensable” conditions for

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painting.10 As Thierry de Duve seconds, “What emerged with modernity is that the practice of painting gradually became more and more regulated by the idea of its own specificity, or purity, or autonomy, in a reflexive application of the idea of painting upon its name.”11 If such essentialism constitutes one extreme, the other extreme is constituted by the anti-essentialist discourse of an arbitrariness, a fundamental indeterminacy, drawn in large part from the dismantling of painterly criteria and presuppositions. Twentieth-century art offers a great inventory of emphatically anti-essentialist gestures, figures, or projects, many of them so notorious— think of Duchamp’s Fountain, Beuys’s actions, or Warhol’s Brillo Boxes— that speaking of them, while for conceptual reasons unavoidable, inevitably seems to be dealing in clichés. While the European avant-garde— in the guises of fauvism, futurism, dada, surrealism, and others— is invested in an ongoing redetermination of the essence of art, Duchamp’s readymade questions art’s general determinability: the exhibited object has no inherent essence, there is nothing about it that might “in itself” distinguish it as art. And while abstract expressionism in 1960s New York celebrates painting as expression, virtuosity, and authenticity, Warhol asks: “How can you say any style is better than another? You ought to be able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling you’ve given up something.”12 Such thinking follows the paradox of “making a criterion out of the absence of criteria.”13 This describes artistic practice at least to the extent to which the search for an essence requires one to do away with these or those particular criteria— a dismissal that serves as the determining feature of the practice. The rejection of criteria altogether, however, is another matter, which is not settled with Duchamp’s readymade, and certainly neither Duchamp nor Warhol would subscribe to the blanket notion that anything goes.14 Rather, their dismissal of criteria is driven by a positive interest in opening up new possibilities with each such negation, of releasing art from its principled commitments in order for it to embrace any number of operations that were previously unavailable to it. What happens here, then, is ultimately no different than the opposite, first position— one way of determining the essence of art is replaced with another— only this time with a reversed validation of negation, as it were, which now occurs for the sake of an increase in freedom rather than regulation.

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Insofar as the determination of the essence of art comes to lie in an abolition of the inessential, or criteria formation in a negation of criteria, arbitrariness moves from being a conceptual opposite of determinability to belonging to determination itself. “The essential norms or conventions of painting” are, for Greenberg, “the limiting conditions with which a picture must comply in order to be experienced as a picture. Modernism has found that these limits can be pushed back indefinitely before a picture stops being a picture and turns into an arbitrary object.”15 Structurally speaking, the “arbitrary object” is produced every time a negation of essential criteria (“norms or conventions”), a pushing back of established limits, is performed. It is arbitrary insofar as the loss of criteria does not immediately lead to other criteria, but rather constitutes an absence of a frame of reference altogether. Any time arbitrariness appears to have been reached (or at least appears to be perilously imminent), however, it dissipates in the face of other, still extant criteria, which now occupy the place of the essential: something else is identified as authoritative.16 Cézanne abandons the realism of illusory space and turns the painting’s surface into the central element; Kandinsky gives up figurality only to declare color the essence of painting; and Duchamp suspends the manufactured character of the artwork so he can replace it with a staged choice of object. Each essentialist innovation carries within itself the anti-essentialist impulse to dispose of what is already there— in fact, it depends on this very impulse. Taken this way, periodically emerging affirmation of arbitrariness is a function of modern essentialism itself and cannot be separated from it. This is why we should not simply juxtapose both positions under the labels of modernism and postmodernism, even as the latter does fly the flag of anti-essentialism. And yet, anti-essentialism is not only a constitutive element of the modern/postmodern negotiation of the essence of art, but also the endpoint of a sweeping development at which artistic production has cast off all presuppositions and criteria. Already in Greenberg’s modernity, the disappearance of criteria manifests the negation and at the same time the full realization of essentialism, the work of which proceeds reductively and with a certain consistency— in the radicalization of which, Greenberg is surpassed by, for example, de Duve or Arthur Danto— to finally arrive at a point of zero criteria. Danto, who can be taken here to represent a spectrum of similar

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approaches, describes the difficulty of Richter’s situation particularly well when he says that “the master narrative of the history of art— in the West but by the end not in the West alone— is that there is an era of imitation, followed by an era of ideology, followed by our post-historical era in which, with qualification, anything goes. [ . . . ] In our narrative, at first only mimesis was art [i.e., premodern art] then several things were art but each tried to extinguish its competitors [i.e., modernity from circa 1900 on and particularly the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century], and then, finally, it became apparent that there were no stylistic or philosophical constraints. There is no special way works of art have to be. And that is the present and, I should say, the final moment in the master narrative. It is the end of the story.”17 This endpoint establishes “a certain structure of production never, I think, seen before in the entire history of art.”18 It is “an objective historical structure in which everything is possible. If everything is possible, nothing is historically mandated: one thing is, so to say, as good as another.”19 The artist lacks criteria that would indicate what or what not to do; a priori inclusions are as impossible as a priori exclusions. This leads to a condition of artistic production that we encounter for the first time here: there are now far fewer generalized presuppositions regarding genre, style, topic, medium, technique, and ultimate purpose than at any other time in the history of art— which is to say, virtually none at all.20 The inconsistency of this diagnosis is obvious. On the one hand, it situates itself in a final state of anti-essentialist art, while on the other hand, it attempts to be the last word on the determination of art as such. As a part of the same history that it claims has ended, it runs into a paradox: if today’s art can in fact be anything, then this very determination of it is only one among other potential ones, which deprives the determination of universality so that one can no longer speak of art as such (“in the West but by the end not in the West alone”), and the diagnosis contradicts itself. But if we then move on to assume to the contrary that art is part of history, then history is not over— it cannot end while it is narrating its own end— and the diagnosis again contradicts itself. Our “posthistorical era” is inseparable from the history within it to which it bids farewell. If Richter’s situation can be characterized with Danto in this way, then he finds himself at an impasse where there are no viable conceptual

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parameters for the production of art: attempts to free art from the essentialist conception end up affirming art’s essence; the suspension of a priori standards for artistic endeavor finds itself embedded in the assertion of a specific nature, which remains without consequence as long as the suspension is accepted. Then again, attempts to shield art from the arbitrariness of “anything goes” by emphasizing its attachment to context and tradition find themselves affected by arbitrariness because they, too, are part of the “anything goes” of the present. Let us then note two things. First, regarding the alternative according to which art is either determinable according to its essence or not determinable at all: As Danto’s dismissal of essentialist determinations concerns art as such, we must take the rejection of criteria to mean that “anything goes,” “everything is possible,” and “one thing is [ . . . ] as good as another.” Second, the alternative is flawed by an internal contradiction that renders it sterile— each of the options it presents as well as the alternative as a whole. If these few coordinates describe Richter’s situation, Greenberg and his amplification through Danto can in this context be understood as manifestations of broader and historically older Western tendencies. Efforts to determine the essence of art— or, as we also said, to determine art as such— are traditionally part of a metaphysical project that understands such essence in terms of representation (“imitation”), the pursuit of truth (“ideology”), or redemption (we will see in a moment what this means). The negation of these efforts in the present final state (“the end of the story”) then shapes up to an antimetaphysical project that denies art all these determinations, while at the same time, through the inversion thus performed, it remains tied to the very metaphysical project it set out to discard. We can therefore speak of a metaphysical-antimetaphysical project— in the sense these terms carried from Nietzsche to Rorty that remains distinctive despite their by now slightly anachronistic ring— that, in its attempt to determine the essence of art, poses said unacceptable alternative. Richter identifies this alternative as barren and sees in its avoidance the first requirement for artistic production.21 But without readily available alternatives to the alternative, the latter’s aporia cannot be easily ignored. Rather, it brings with it a “responsibility” for decision, as Richter says, and poses the question of what future art might look like. He explicitly understands this not as a private concern, but as a binding task for our time: “I do see myself as the

response to a contemporary challenge

heir to a vast, great, rich culture of painting— of art in general— which we have lost, but which places obligations on us.”22 As sure as Richter is that “art in general” (or as such) is not to be saved— “to paint, one must have lost art”23— and as little as he intends to participate in a narrative continuation of its history, he does not consider himself unbound from the challenge connected to the very word “art” in the present situation.24 The goal, then, is to develop a conception that sustains the viability of art in the face of the impasse. This means that we should neither rely on a priori commitments to stylistic or ideological imperatives nor allow artistic determination to become arbitrary. Like Duchamp and Warhol, Richter rejects an essentialist determinability of art, but he also sides with the avant-garde movements and abstract expressionism against arbitrary artistic practice. He subscribes to a suspension of fundamental artistic guidelines and also to the authority of the distinction between right and wrong. He wants to maximize both the freedom of his production and its “binding power [Verbindlichkeit].”25 This, however, calls for a pragmatist conception— one that does not seek to determine art according to what it is (its essence), but according to what it does (its performance).26 It is no coincidence that Richter never discusses the essence of art, for what art is, in this sense, is irrelevant to him. This conception can be called nonmetaphysical insofar as it renounces a transcendent substrate that inheres in artistic form. Such a substrate might consist of certain thematic, medium-specific, technical, or stylistic criteria, and it might enlist these criteria for projects such as representation, the pursuit of truth, or redemption. But the substrate might also consist of a negation, subversion, or inversion of the same criteria, which precisely in their emphatic repudiation can never achieve independence from these projects. Thus, instead of depending on essential criteria, a pragmatist conception of art is based on a distinction that is formal with respect to all criteria and in this sense prior— a distinction Richter calls, indeed, form. His work suggests that such a conception not only does not need to dispense with the concept of form, but, on the contrary, can be articulated only through it. Only the concept of form enables us to speak about the distinction of art without at the same time having to make presumptions about its particular execution in a given instance. And yet, as I will show, the concept of form does not allow for any arbitrariness of genre, style,

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theme, and so forth, but rather implies that we cannot generalize about what works and what doesn’t work, as this must be decided anew in each individual case. Accordingly, both Richter’s art and his writing affirm a nonlinear construction of history, as Julia Gelshorn has shown. From the very beginning, for example, the strictly serial numbering of his works, instead of emphasizing connections between them, has implied the totality of an oeuvre, complicating attempts to interpret them in terms of discrete developments. In his writing, manifest inconsistencies and breaks with earlier stances work to the effect that homogeneous points of view and developments tend to become unrecognizable.27 On the one hand, Richter sees no principled orientation and observes that “there isn’t a dominant trend at present. [ . . . ] There’s just work.”28 Apparently, the manifest lack of direction is by no means in the way of further productivity. In particular, the absence of a general trend does not mean that artistic production must therefore become arbitrary. On the other hand, for Richter, this lack of direction hardly constitutes the endpoint of a historical metanarrative, but needs to be understood “outside the trend that thinks it fashionable to decry tradition, and to talk about the end of history and of art.”29 Thus, he sees himself not in a tradition-free space, exposed to arbitrariness, but rather, in a specific way, bound: “Tradition was simply a given, a valuable cultural heritage that provides the criteria.”30 It would therefore be a mistake to assume that with the discarding of essentialism and metanarratives, tradition goes by the wayside. In fact, its importance remains undiminished. But it fulfills a function different from the role it plays within metaphysical conceptions. While in the latter, tradition is taken to ensure the derivability of determination from the status quo, in the pragmatist conception, tradition is a requirement for determinability in such a way that it cannot ultimately rely on regulation or derivation. Here let us look once more at the opening quotation, this time slightly expanded: “There is no reason whatever for uncritically accepting what we take over from others. Anything that is good or bad is so not in itself, but only under specific circumstances and because we will it so. This fact means that there is nothing guaranteed or absolute about conventions, and it assigns to us the daily responsibility of distinguishing good from bad.” Within this scenario, the only possible frame of reference for form is tradition, understood here as

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the space of convention, a practical context in the broadest sense. But, as in a legal trial, deciding a case involves reference to laws that cannot apply themselves and therefore require an act of application, so the production of painterly form cannot depend on being determined by tradition, for only the production itself can determine what it is about tradition— which tradition? what part of tradition? what rule or precedent?— that is relevant this time, and thus provide the relevant determination of a particular form. As this must be decided anew each time, tradition persists only by being continuously— that is, with every making of a form— actualized and adapted.31 Which also means that form cannot dispense with tradition without becoming fully arbitrary and ceasing to be form. From a pragmatist point of view, we are looking not at a new premise but at one that is able to respond to the dual desideratum, deriving from the contemporary impasse, of a denial of an inherent essence to art, on the one hand, and an affirmation of its binding, nonarbitrary character, on the other. Now, what are the particular challenges to which Richter’s program reacts? The comprehensive approach to his works and writings that forms the material basis for this book allows us to summarize these challenges in the shape of three questions. These reveal what Richter contributes to the overarching question of a present-day conception of art by splitting that larger question into discrete strands that can then be addressed individually: 1. How can art be understood as “production,” as something new

that is not measured against something preexisting— in the sense that art serves as its reproduction, depiction, or some other attempt to do it justice— but instead constitutes a reality in its own right? This question challenges the metaphysical model of representation that ties form to a reproductive function in which it must correspond to something other than itself, to which in such correspondence it remains secondary. 2. How is art possible if “there is nothing guaranteed or absolute” to

guide it? How can art manage without conventional assurances and still avoid becoming arbitrary— that is, how does one generate unregulated rightness? This question challenges the metaphysical model of epistemology that subjects form to a pursuit of truth and proclaims

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that only such knowledge authorized by a transcendent substrate can be free of arbitrariness. 3. If there is no ultimate goal toward which to strive, then why expend ceaseless effort to produce “human” rightness and truth at all? What is the purpose of art? This question challenges the metaphysical model of restitution that binds form to the recuperation of an origin and asserts that art has a point only if, through it, something reaches its actual or ultimate form.

Richter seeks to respond to these questions by replacing each of the metaphysical-essentialist partial models of form with a pragmatist alternative. First, he replaces the model of representation with a model of reaction: what form represents no longer counts, only what it does. This involves a priority of the enactment of form over its theory, and of its pragmatic dimension over its semantic dimension. Second, he replaces the epistemological model with a model of judgment: form here is not derived from a principle, but is singular, of this time only. This goes along with a priority of immanent determination based on coherence across forms over transcendent determination based on correspondence with a preceding substrate. Third, he replaces the model of restitution with a model of transformation: the making of form is not bound to circularity, but to linearity. This implies a priority of form as progression over form as regression, of a singular meaning of painting over a principled one, of an always new as opposed to an ultimate fulfillment. More specifically, each of these replacements proceeds by transforming a specific tension found in the metaphysical accounts of form in such a way that it corresponds to the demands of Richter’s situation. Each time, the replacement modulates the tension, reconceiving the relation between the tension’s sides— or, as we will also say, dimensions— such that the tension is not abolished but is brought to work in a different way. The transition from representation to reaction reconceives the tension between mimesis and performance; the transition from epistemology to judgment reconceives the tension between underivability and rightness; finally, the transition from restitution to transformation reconceives the tension between deficiency and compensation. All this will be developed in

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our discussion of Richter’s work; we here limit ourselves to outlining the transformation of the tensions in general terms. If we said that Richter wants to break with the false alternative without breaking with tradition as such, then how does he relate to tradition? As already suggested, Richter’s program would stand no chance to succeed if his efforts to replace representation, epistemology, and restitution carried a tone of confrontation, destruction, inversion, or subversion. For this reason his work cannot be categorized as a modern anti-essentialism, nor can it otherwise be described in terms of an anti- or post- (that is, by labels such as antimetaphysics, postmetaphysics, or posthistory). From this precarious starting position— one cannot discard one’s heritage, but one also cannot carry on as before— the three aforementioned tensions provide Richter with the possibility of a genuinely new way of determining art, in the sense that they each encompass both the metaphysical and the antimetaphysical, both the essentialist and the anti-essentialist side. Thus, while the model of representation encompasses reproduction through mimesis, it also encompasses the opposing concept of performance (which still belongs to representation through its very opposition to it). The epistemological model encompasses certainty through rightness, but also the opposing concept of underivability (which opposes epistemology while serving as an inverse continuation of it). Finally, the model of restitution encompasses fulfillment through compensation, but also the opposing concept of deficiency (which opposes restitution even as it extends it in reverse). If Richter’s conception seeks to break away from these opposites— core constituents of a metaphysical heritage— it does so through a productive uptake and conceptual balancing act. Instead of treating the opposites as mutually exclusive, form embodies them simultaneously; and instead of focusing on them negatively as essentialist/ anti-essentialist ballast, they are cast positively as desiderata of Richter’s work. He responds to each of the tensions by moving beyond it, but what is left behind in such transgression is not the opposing sides that make up the tension, but the alternativity of the sides, their being locked into the mutual exclusivity of an either-or. Only by receiving and in a sense affirming the inherited tensions in this way is Richter’s concept of form a nonmetaphysical one that unpolemically

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absorbs the possibilities of both metaphysics and antimetaphysics; only in this way does their opposition turn into something else. Both sides of the opposition remain suspended, and their tension functions as the generative principle of a type of production through which the tension can in turn be sustained and carried out. Even the most cursory acquaintance with Richter’s work familiarizes one with this double motion: On the one hand, Richter determines the genre, topic, materials, style, and method of his production anew each time without depending on a particular plan, principle, or ideological commitment. On the other hand— and at the same time— he holds fast to the binding power of form regarding its reference to the world (mimesis, first tension), its nonarbitrariness (rightness, second tension), and its transformative power (compensation, third tension). We will get to the details later and for now only note that the connection between the two sides of each tension requires our discussion to divide up the pragmatist concept of form into three discourses and three chapters, respectively. Together they provide the positive formulation of Richter’s program: 1. The first tension corresponds to a morphological discourse that

concerns the structure of form as it articulates itself in the basic operations of mimetic reference building and performative self-enactment. Unifying the operations under the concept of reaction permits Richter to place an emphasis on the performance of form without having to relinquish its reference to the world. Not only are these operations not mutually exclusive, but, in fact, they can only be constituted through one another. 2. The second tension has to do with the production of form, which

is why its discourse is poetological. Central to this discourse are, on the one hand, the rightness, nonarbitrariness, and commensurability of form, and, on the other, its underivability from rules, conventions, and principles. Richter’s unification of the second tension under the concept of judgment means that the underivability of form does not throw into doubt its rightness. On the contrary, the distinction of right and wrong becomes available only through such underivability. 3. The third tension is addressed by an eschatological discourse that

concerns the question of what form accomplishes, why we produce

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it, and what, in fact, the point of art should be. The primary eschatological elements are, on one side, a deficiency that motivates the production of form and, on the other, a compensation for this deficiency that such production of form accomplishes. By unifying both elements under the concept of transformation, Richter achieves a mutual dependency— similar to the two previous mutual dependencies— between deficiency and compensation, problem and solution, the lack of the world and the fullness of the work. Overall, this conveys a sense that Richter’s program is neither a continuation nor a refutation of the situation, but an altogether different response to it— its practical reconception. This reconception doesn’t concern painting as such or art as such, and it does not fundamentally differentiate between progress and standstill. It provides no answer to the question of what the situation means from an art historical perspective, nor can it absorb or eradicate the situation’s irresolvability. Instead, it reacts to the situation with a conception in which this irresolvability can no longer manifest itself. Such reconception cannot declare that art or its history has come to an end; as a pragmatist model, it has no use for the idea of a state “after history.” It is incapable of directly challenging, and thus invalidating, any of the theoretical desiderata that come with the metaphysicalantimetaphysical conceptions, and, most importantly perhaps, it therefore cannot claim that its own response to the situation is the only appropriate one. Neither does it, however, attempt a mediation of the opposites in which the latter continue to exist and perhaps even appear reconciled. In sum, we might say that Richter’s response, rather than continuing the terms set by the established conceptions, either by affirming these terms or by countering them through determinate negation— an operation that logically remains attached to the conceptions it leaves behind— abandons these terms altogether. Their rule is replaced with a primacy of the act, which locates the production of form in the underivable and therefore logically singular performance of individual decisions. Thus, while Richter’s practice can be accounted for to a point, what he offers is ultimately not accessible through generalization; it stands and falls with the execution of individual acts of form. What is at the center of his practice cannot be explained, which is not a failure of our accounting. On the contrary, our accounting would fail

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if it did not take this into account; it would not be able to account for the way Richter processes the tensions on the level of the individual execution of form that are therein rendered indifferent with respect to the inherited conceptions. Our account is neither incomplete nor esoteric; it doesn’t leave unexplained what otherwise might be explained, and there is nothing occult left out of reach, but it strictly manifests the impossibility of incorporating the act’s priority over theory into theory itself. So while a theory of form is no paradox and no contradiction in itself— after all, form can be accounted for in general terms, according to its concept— we are looking at a theory of something that is not in itself theoretical and that can only be constituted as an object of theory as we acknowledge its theoretical inexplicability. In this qualified sense, a theory of form is the accounting for something under the premise of its unaccountability. The unpolemical inclusion of both a structurally metaphysical position and its contrary pervades all facets of Richter’s production and perhaps suggests self-contradiction and a lack of direction precisely where he is most consistent in his determinations. He makes radical use of pragmatist freedom to decide without ever falling prey to the idea that at any given point, everything might be possible— a fallacy that is refuted already by the very structure of decision itself, which after all is based not only in the alternativity of particular options faced in any given case, but also and ultimately in the alternativity of a rightness and wrongness that is only of one time and place. Within this context it is relevant, for example, that while Richter is convinced of the threat posed by all ideology, he does not want to reject belief as such. That he distances himself from political activism does not prevent him from participating in the concerns of his day. That he doesn’t make a point of being a Western artist goes together with unambiguously understanding himself to be one. His aversion to sensationalism of all sorts does not hold him back from topics that move him greatly, nor does his grounding of works in the world motivate him to ignore their aesthetic specificity. His incessant reflection, in work and word, on everything that painting cannot or should not do does not close him off from the fullness of its historical possibilities— on the contrary, it makes accessible these possibilities as indispensable resources. That he furthermore embraces a “classical” enforcing of boundaries as well as a “romantic” tendency for their dissolving, and does not abstain from either modernist stances

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or postmodern irony, may count as the clearest manifestation of a certainty that involves having moved past each and every such stance and tradition, as well as an inability to forgo stances and traditions altogether. Because Richter is unafraid to engage the resources of the past, he can make use of them as perhaps no artist before him has done and productively transform them into something else, not previously available. Thus, to take this last line of thought further, Richter is not working to reject modernism or postmodernism but leaves these movements behind precisely by appropriating both. By affirming them together as a matter of course, he has in fact always already abandoned them toward something else. From the position of a modernist avowal of transgression and authenticity, Richter— with his sustained simultaneous embracing of the most dissimilar genres, themes, media, and processes, as well as his emphatic negation of principledness— appears a cynical postmodernist committed to no style or program, no innovation or originality.32 But to postmodernists who value heterogeneous, eclectic, and transgressive artistic production, Richter appears to be just the opposite: in his adherence to the categories of form, painterly craftsmanship, and incorruptible rightness, along with the steadiness of his course over many decades, he seems to be a self-righteous modernist with little sense for the playful ambivalence, cunning, and baroque allusiveness found in many of his contemporaries.33 Richter himself, of course, would not label one set of characteristics cynical and the other self-righteous; by occupying and inhabiting both the modern and postmodern simultaneously, his work disengages from any obligation to either side and leaves behind their alternative altogether. Certainly Richter is modern, and certainly he is postmodern, but that is precisely why these categories say very little about him. Generally, criteria-driven categorizations must fail where a pragmatist approach to production admits all criteria without requiring any one of them. This is not to say that specific observations about Richter’s work lack merit, but it means that none of them can account for the whole. The spectrum of Richter studies can be characterized as either approaching his work through its heterogeneity— that is, a comparison of the diverse genres, styles, themes, techniques, and the like (Benjamin Buchloh is probably the most influential example in this regard)34— or, as the majority of Richter interpretations

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do, focusing on particular segments selected from this heterogeneity, such as his abstract, photo, monochrome, or history paintings; the drawings; the Cage cycle; the work from the 1960s. Alongside these studies one finds a wealth of attempts to approach Richter in terms of particular themes and questions, which again highlight, for the most part, individual sets of works or even just a single aspect of his work— grief, emigration, memory, image theory, contemporaneity, critique of ideology, and so on.35 A synthesis is attempted via the detour of a biographical narrative— Robert Storr’s work is a prominent example— which, however, means to establish the unity and distinction of Richter’s work not through the work itself but through the principle of biographical context.36 Just as the differentiating or analytical approaches don’t reach beyond accounting for the work’s diversity as such, the identifying or synthetic approaches come to a halt with establishing the work’s unity as such. This overview does not aim to discredit the existing studies, but its goal is to clarify what has been missing until now: an attempt to chart what all of the parts of Richter’s work have in common. “I think it comes down to different aspects of a single thing,” he himself says.37 The “premises” and “possibilities” that provide the “foundation” and “starting point” of his work are “largely unchangeable.”38 Out of them emerges “an unchangeable basic attitude, a constant concern that runs through all my works. [ . . . ] That’s why it’s quite easy to identify my pictures, however different they are externally; they’re often easier to recognize and identify as ‘Richters’ than pictures by any other painter.”39 Such steadiness in his premises, direction, and results allows Richter’s work to be understood as a consistent response to the contemporary challenge. With that in mind, this book presents a discussion of Richter based on the category of artistic form. This undertaking reveals him to be a threshold artist whose transformative program drives a reconception of form geared toward the characteristics form needs to have in our present. If we look past all divisions and focus just on his production of such form, then Richter’s efforts— this, at least, is my guiding intuition— should be largely homogeneous and able to be described as a single coherent whole. Thus to account for Richter’s work on the basis of its formal unity does not require us to devalue, marginalize, or extinguish diversity by subordinating it to an identifying principle.40 Questions of form must not be confused

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with logical questions, and what is to be undertaken here is not a synthesis of the diversity but an account of its formal structure. I would even go one step further and contend that in fact the opposite is the case— that the unity, discipline, and determination of Richter’s effort establish the basis on which differentiation becomes possible and meaningful in the first place. The radical heterogeneity of Richter’s work is conceptually viable only as long as that work obeys the unifying pulse of its form. Only through formal singularity can differences across the work avoid subordination, and only a unified overall design clears the conceptual space for singularity (and thus heterogeneity) to be performed in the first place. Instead of dismissing the diversity of genres, styles, techniques, motifs, and so on, my discussion clarifies the formal strategy that allows Richter to maintain such diversity over the entire course of his artistic production and to defend it in the face of every challenge. If a polyphonic and rapidly growing discourse on Richter has already been under way for quite some time, then this study aims to contribute a propaedeutics that limits itself to the simplest conceptual elements on which such a heterogeneous discourse can draw throughout. The goal, then, is not an exhaustive discussion of Richter’s production, but a minimal conception of its foundation in the making of painterly form. With this we resist the impression, promoted over and over by Richter himself, that he might ultimately be furthering a program of artistic negativity in the face of everything that has supposedly become problematic or impossible. Certainly, a repeated critical rejection of all determinations or standpoints characterizes many of his writings and is well documented in his works. But this impulse— perceived through the prism of our problematic situation— has not a negative thrust but a positive one: Only by withdrawing from general determinations does determination in particular cases become available to him. Only by banning the principally impossible along with the principally indispensable can the entire spectrum of the possible be freed. “To me, what counts is to say something; what counts is the new possibilities.”41 What is astonishing, then, is not that Richter’s work comes about in spite of all doubt and uncertainty, but, on the contrary, that his fundamental trust in the potential of the new is so robust that it suffices for rousing and working through all of the doubt necessary to free this potential. When within this context, he attests to himself the “greatest possible [ . . . ] optimism,”42

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this has nothing to do with an “optimistic worldview”— Richter’s general view of things actually seems to be rather sober, to the point of gloominess— but only with the reality of artistic production that keeps presenting the irreducible possibility of form. Underlying this trust is a factual realization of the new through the enactment of form each time, which, insofar as its factuality is concerned, leaves nothing in doubt. In response to Duchamp’s and Warhol’s attempts to banish production from the artistic process through the readymade or through industrialized fabrication, Richter notes that “the artist’s productive act cannot be negated.” After all, form is the act of making a distinction, and its production requires one “to see and to decide what is to be made visible”43— and without this distinction, one would not be dealing with anything at all. The act of painting is something, not nothing— that is, no matter what may be negated, criticized, erased, or disputed, the act is first and foremost a positivity. In generally replacing the priority of a principled foundation with the priority of a transgression from the old to the new in the act of painting each time, Richter’s production prioritizes the factuality of the new over all quarrels with the old. At its core, it is therefore affirmation, and as such it is incorruptible by negativity. But how do newness and transgression go together with affirmation? We already noted that Richter’s work displays no ambition to belong to an avant-garde of any sort, to break out of its time or leap ahead of it; he denies any romantic, revolutionary, or prophetic appreciation for a mythic tribute to the noncontemporary. But he also lacks any sympathy for the opposite program of a skeptical, cynical, or sarcastic post– avant-garde. Instead, his production is directed toward the task of successfully participating in its own time, which is the only way it can meet its ambition: “I want to be like everyone. To think that which everyone thinks, to do that which is done anyway. I see no sense in doing anything different. [ . . . ] I think that one always does what is done anyway (even when making something new), and that one is always making something new.”44 Only through this participation can the new enter the world, and the problems and intuitions driving this process can be none other than those of one’s own time. But it would be a mistake to interpret this as a kind of humility or self-effacement of Richter the painter. The premises cited here don’t imply that the impulse for artistic pro-

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duction is somehow delegated to the present time; on the contrary, they indicate that artistic production has become the medium or site for exploring today’s central questions and concerns. If, according to Hegel, philosophy is “its own time apprehended in thoughts,”45 then, according to Richter, painting is its own time apprehended in images. But, of course, such apprehension is not reproduction but reaction; it is not derivation but judgment; and it is not conclusion but transformation. Taking all this together, we will see that artistic form has the power to communicate under conditions where this would otherwise not be possible. It is shared to a greater extent than normal action and is therefore called upon in situations where shared reality breaks down or turns precarious. This is the ultimate and, in a sense that our discussion will establish, redemptive ambition of Richter’s work: to articulate the central questions of the time in a way that has binding power for that time— not necessarily in the only possible way, but in a way that is authoritative. If Richter might thus be viewed as a painter of our historical moment and his artistic program as paradigmatic for a contemporary treatment of form, it is because his production, precisely in giving itself over to the questions and concerns of the present, transforms them in a way that can claim the authority to affect the present in return.46

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Morphological Question: Form as Reaction Mimesis and performance The first tension links a painting’s depictive function and its self-presentation, or, we could say, its reference to the world and its being at work, its mimetic and its performative dimension. This tension is morphological and concerns the question, What is the structure of painterly form? Richter’s painting Table, registered as the first work in his catalogue raisonné, can be seen as a kind of manifesto in response to that question: a figurative representation of a table is overlaid with a dark whorl of paint such that the space depicted in the painting and the space of depiction— the painted surface of the picture— appear to diverge maximally from each other. One might be tempted to say that the table is “in” the painting while the dark whorl is “on” it. Upon closer inspection, however, the painting proves itself to be a quasi-didactic tutorial in viewing that thematizes the distinction between the two spheres. For in fact, every brushstroke contributing to the figurative composition of the table is as much “on” the painting as in it, just as every stroke belonging to the whorl is equally “in” the painting. Understanding the table and the whorl as one form fundamentally calls into question the boundary between the figurative and the nonfigurative, as well as the boundary between the space of the surface and the space in the picture. This trouble between the sides is not treated as a threat to the functioning of the painting, but on the contrary exploited as a conceptual resource, perhaps taken to be its point. If this is how the first tension works for Richter, what is its 23

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traditional metaphysical makeup that his pragmatist reconception of form undertakes to transform? As already noted, the tension is based on a model of representation in which mimesis appears as external reference and performance as internal reference or self-reference of a picture, while reference in general is understood as the relation between signifier and signified: the surface as “carrier of the picture,” the depicted object as “content of the picture.”1 Modern painting is said to transform this priority of illusory three-dimensional space over the two-dimensional surface in a way that neither prevents nor resolves the opposition between the two, but instead allows it to persist in an inverse hierarchy.2 In image theory and literary theory, the same inversion presents itself when internal reference— in terms such as “the medium communicating itself,” “the logic of the signifier,” or simply “self-reflection”3— is treated as an antimetaphysical challenge to representation that, since it depends on that which it rejects, never actually abandons representation in the least. This model is now replaced by Richter with a model of form as reaction. Here, while depiction or mimesis continues to fulfill a function of representation, manifesting a painting’s reference to

Fig. 1. Gerhard Richter, Table (Tisch), 1962. Oil on canvas. Private collection. CR 1.

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the world, the painting does not therefore serve as a signifier of the depicted, does not stand for the depicted, in a derivative relation to it, but instead responds to the depicted as an independent act, a reality in its own right. Richter confronts a long Western tradition— one with roots in Plato’s double ontological gradation ranging from the ideal form to a mere appearance of this form to a mere representation of this appearance— with a conception that grants artistic depiction ontological primacy. The conception seeks to accomplish this not by denying, inverting, or deconstructing the hierarchy traditionally assumed to inhere in things, but by insisting on an advance in actuality that a form can claim in virtue of being the most recent performance in a series. Once conceived as reaction, form can still fulfill a representational role, which requires Richter to assume a priority of pragmatics over semantics: What a picture says is determined by what it does in so saying; its saying is a way to accomplish its doing. More generally, whatever we take art to say or to mean or to express, however much we value its ability to make a difference that has significance, art is— precisely for the sake of the achievement of such significance— first and foremost this act of a making, this putting into action of a difference, in which form, as Richter says, manifests itself. Our task now is to show how Richter dispenses with the inherited opposition between the two dimensions and reconfigures them into a conception that requires them both and finds in their troubled balance an eminent artistic resource. We can summarize this chapter by saying that Richter’s abandonment of the model of representation shifts the emphasis from what form represents to what form does. Performance: being at work Let us first look at this tension’s performative dimension, which takes its name from the ancient notion, rhetorical and otherwise, that the being of something consists in its taking place.4 This means that a picture can never manifest its mimetic function alone, for the manifesting involves an act in its own right; the depiction of something is itself something. Richter notes “that you can’t represent reality at all— that what you make represents nothing but itself, and therefore is itself reality.”5 As the reality of the picture is only one reality among many, so is the picture one object among many— an object that as such is not defined through a representational relation to something else, such as

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reference, meaning, or sense. “My pictures are devoid of objects; like objects, they are themselves objects. This means that they are devoid of content, significance or meaning, like objects or trees, animals, people or days, all of which are there without a reason, without an end and without an aim. This is the quality that counts.”6 The point here is not that these things don’t serve ends, but that we don’t look at them as, for example, signifiers of something else. Thus considered, art is not juxtaposed to the world as its other, located further down on the modal-ontological gradient as less real— an illusion, reflection, or significance— but is an integral part of the world, sharing in the world’s reality together with the other parts. Richter calls this thought “the crucial discovery that what counts is reality, not any world-view whatever. Since then, painting has never represented reality; it has itself been reality (generating itself).”7 In the German Wirklichkeit generally deployed by Richter— a term that is roughly equivalent to the Latin actualitas or the Greek enérgeia8— reality and actuality are indistinguishable. Translated as enactment or being at work, the term refers to that which is the case (real) insofar as it performs the activity of being (actuality). What a logic of representation would divide up between the three positions of effector, act of effecting, and effect (in semiotic terminology, the signifier, signifying act, and signified) here, in the order of performance, appears unified in a single integrated act. That the painting is “reality [ . . . ] generating itself” is to say that its genesis cannot be distinguished from its work and its result.9 Performance: form To describe this unity, Richter often speaks not of performance, but of form. (As we continue to consider the performance side, the mimesis side is included insofar as performance is the being at work of mimesis.) The production of form is not limited to painting but involves other arts, as Richter clarifies through examples drawn from music and dance10— even nonartistic reality, as we will see, has its own particular form. At the same time, however, Richter’s conception of form is specifically designed to serve his ability to paint and continue painting in the face of the challenges posed by the current situation, and his painting does not seek to promote or advertise a certain broader conception. At stake is a differential concept of form for the practice of painting. According to it, form is everything at work in a picture as a distinct something, as one articulation, a

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single difference in the medium of paint and thus the structural entity that allows one to speak about performance in terms of, for example, lines, shapes, proportions, rhythms, “areas, the passages and tonal sequences, the pictorial spaces, overlaps and interlockings,”11 the relief of the pictorial surface as well as the image as a whole. Which of these articulations in a given instance constitute a form is entirely determined by what counts as making a difference, working toward an end, fulfilling a function within the context that is taken as the relevant frame of reference. The “artist’s productive act” in which a form comes about simply concerns “what is to be made visible,”12 which, depending on the context, can mean anything from the act of an individual brushstroke to the act of making a whole picture to the act of making a series of pictures. Form is not part of a semiosis and resists juxtaposition with a content or a signified: “The issue of content is thus nonsense; that is, there is nothing but form. There is only ‘something’: there is only what there is.”13 This recursive “there is only what there is” indicates simply that both that form is (its factuality or taking place) and what it is (its articulation) in each case is only through the form’s actuality. This, then, is the formula of the new: not only does form not require authorization by something that exists before it, that inheres in it, or that is expressed through it, but its being enters the world anew each time. Form reveals nothing and doesn’t afford cognition of anything that already exists, and in this sense it leaves opaque the “something” that it is. Accordingly, it is not bound to the spatiotemporal order of the object depicted by it. It does not belong to the order of that object, but it precedes the order as the order’s coming about. Performance: articulation This implies first and foremost an “equalizing surface”14 that does not take part in any hierarchy between the depicted objects and their depiction but rather is pervasively and equally form. In order to make this dimension of form obvious even in figurative pictures— “so that no detail stands out as more important”15— Richter blurs the contours of the objects depicted, thus drawing attention to the picture’s surface.16 What gets blurred here are the marks of figuration but not form itself, and we must strictly differentiate between the two: “Pictures are [ . . . ] never blurred. What we regard as blurring is [ . . . ] different from the object represented. But, since pictures are not made for purposes

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of comparison with reality, they cannot be blurred, or imprecise, or different (different from what?). How can, say, paint on canvas be blurred?”17 So radically does Richter distinguish the performance side of a picture from its mimetic side that even the most elementary conditions of representation, the continua of space and time, are banished from the enactment of form: “Fading contours and blurring in order to abolish the logical constitution of space: Sheik, Chair, Elizabeth. Film about V. Bradke.”18 Form precedes the spatiotemporal order of the material world insofar as, for instance, the areas surrounding a figure in a picture (“Elizabeth”) stand in a nonaccidental relation to it— they work neither as a space freed from form as part of a depictive strategy, nor as a space serving dialectically as form’s negative exterior, functionally accessorizing it, nor as its background for the sake of perspective. The surroundings are as much form as the figure is, which does not stand out within them but is simply perceived as the articulation of a medium. This procedure, familiar from an artist like Paul Cézanne, suspends the ontological hierarchy between a substance (figure) and its accidents (surroundings) and thus establishes a prelogical— or, as Richter also says, “alogical”— articulation.19 This articulation does not merely constitute the nonfigurative core of the figurative (more about that in a moment), it is also at work in all abstraction:20 pure morphogenesis, the becoming of form as such, forma formans instead of forma formata,21 which, however, in its constitutive inconclusiveness— this much is indicated by the unity of effector, act of effecting, and effect— is in no way incomplete, but, on the contrary, obtains its distinction precisely from this activity. In deliberate contrast to Cézanne (or, for that matter, Jasper Johns), however, Richter seeks the distinction of form not in some “painterly” quality— in the creative brushstroke, with its virtuosity, materiality, and aura of authenticity— but rather in an orderliness and even serenity of presentation that makes no fuss over its coming about and negates any display of skill or craftsmanship in order to foreground the act of viewing, distinction, form itself.22 This can be observed particularly well in the 1966 short film Volker Bradke, which, by virtue of its very medium, precludes any sense of a “painterly” aura. From a figurative perspective, the film could be said to depict a moving human body whose contours are blurred to varying degrees through experimental manipulation of the camera lens. But

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approached from the perspective of performance, the happening is seen as such: articulated mimetically through active surfaces, fluctuating distributions of light and dark, and more defined lines versus less defined ones.23 Performance: spatiality The film shows that space and time, together with the embedded regularities of gravity and causality, are secondary to the performance of form by exhibiting how they emerge anew, again and again, from form’s prelogical opacity. One must fundamentally differentiate between the pure articulation of a form, which, by definition, can only be described as something— the threshold of a simple distinction or “articulation in general,” the becoming of something out of nothing— and the threshold of representation. With the latter, it is often still unclear whether or not one is observing an object. If an object is involved, that still leaves its distance to the viewer undefined because recognition of form as such structurally precedes the establishing of such differences. A distinction between concavity and convexity, for example, sheds no light on whether one is dealing with a close-up of a dark hollow or a fold opening up (concave) or with a long shot of a dark figure that is approaching out of light surroundings (convex). If out of pure articulation the features of a face suddenly appear, this is not to say that the face “emerges from the form,” for the face and the form are not two separate things. But it means that the form, without changing into the face and without relinquishing its pure being form, drives the face out of itself. While the film strip certainly has a top and a bottom, neither can be easily identified within the image itself, especially since the distorting softness of the figure’s movements precedes its falling and sinking within the framework of gravity. Space here is not consistent, homogeneous, and unchanged, but elastic and originating in each moment; tied to nothing, its elasticity stands in relation to nothing, and cannot be gauged using established coordinates, but is primary. Space is not a receptacle antecedent to corporeality “in which” the physical is located; rather, it establishes itself with and around the dark body of the figure, which carries, indents, and stretches the space in turn, redefining it again and again in terms of its distention and configuration. Thus, there is no geometric structure to the space, no measurable sizes, not even dimensionality, for the first dimension is not a dimension without the second, and the second

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Fig. 2. Gerhard Richter, screenshot from Volker Bradke (1966). Gerhard Richter Archiv

Dresden, 2010.

requires at least a surface and thus proportionality. A surface unfolds from the relations among at least three points, but where no distinction yet exists, we are in the predispersive, prerelational, and thus predimensional domain of pure form.24 Like this still pending twodimensionality— or dimensionality in general— the pending status of the third dimension can be observed directly in the film: compared to the original articulation, depth is already secondary, the distinction between the convex and concave is removed even further, relations in size are further away still, and, finally, the notion of a homogeneous space with a containerlike character is a complete abstraction. In other words, space in the usual sense does not appear at all in this register of form: “I know nothing about space in painting. [ . . . ] It simply doesn’t exist. It’s a false problem.”25 Performance: temporality The same holds for time. Like the spatiality of form, its temporality doesn’t manifest a continuum that could be encountered or described independently: time is not homogeneous, or linear, or relational. The film shows form on a threshold where progression and speed seem on the brink of emerging; over and over again, both remain unresolved, inextricably suspended in a state of allusion. Due to this sense of a threshold, slow and fast motion, as suggested— for example, in the sequence with the fluttering figure jumping rope— at best imply a relation to “real time.”

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Fig. 3. Gerhard Richter, screenshot from Volker Bradke (1966). Gerhard Richter Archiv

Dresden, 2010.

But there is no standard of comparison that could be used to firmly establish this relation. Here, slow motion and fast motion can be understood in the sense of extension and contraction, respectively, as neither term signifies events taking place “in” a previously or independently existing time. Instead, what happens in slow and fast motion happens to time itself, which is stretched and compressed; the specific relations of the events to each other are original manifestations of temporality. If the film nevertheless has a duration, this is the internal time of form that form requires for its performance— a time that, arising in and attached to fields of motion, could not exist outside of this intimate link to movement.26 If the logical time is the time of the depicted events— that is, the depicted time— then the time of form is the depicting time, the time of the depiction’s taking place. It is not a time that is necessary in order for something else to occur, nor can it join things together on its matrix, but rather it is a time that, stored in every occurrence, by virtue of the occurrence’s performance, is ultimately inseparable from that performance. Our use of the term performance is fully plausible only once form is understood in this way as an occurrence and activity. But perhaps speaking of time here at all is confusing, since the phenomenal aspect of form as such manifests a threshold status, indicating that the spatiotemporal order has always already begun, a commencement that is necessary for the activity of form to be perceptible. In any case, the fact that

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the picture moves in the film should not be mistaken as evidence that form is subject to temporality in a trivial sense. For while the performative character of form can be observed well in the medium of film— even the stillest of scenes is maintained technically through the process of projection, which seems to lend intuitive plausibility to form as something in the process of being effected— this character in no way depends on the moving picture. On the contrary, the picture has the tendency to disrupt its manifestation, since the performance of form risks being confused with the changes in the picture, while in fact the visual changes represent only one possible way this performance may occur. “Film is not for me,”27 says Richter succinctly, a position that reflects his awareness that to bring about the act of form, the medium of the moving picture is merely accidental, and perhaps even unsuitable to some extent. Performance: causality and gravity Because the continua of space and time are secondary in this sense, the same must hold for the laws of causality and gravity. Take, for example, the aforementioned sequence of the figure jumping rope, where shots in fast motion appear together with shots in slow motion, complicating any attempt to ascribe gravity to the scene: in fast motion, the figure’s movements are so lacking in inhibition and weight that they cannot possibly seem to belong to a physical body with mass; and in slow motion, they are hovering and suspended in their fall such that again they refuse the attribution of physical mass. The material presence of the body is further put into question in that the light figure is barely able to emancipate itself from its dark surroundings enough to make these surroundings identifiable as a background, just as the dark figure in turn appears eroded by the lightness around it, dissolving from its edges and already reclaimed by the lightness in the moment of the figure’s emergence. Even more basically, the physical haziness of most of the movements renders them unrecognizable and erases the distinction that might otherwise come with placing them in a context where bodies perform this or that activity. Out of such haziness grow the beginnings of causal relations and the practical localization of movement from one instance to the next, such as cutting bread or drinking from a glass. In the composition of the film, causality is already suspended given that the film not only lacks a narrative sequence, but features no coherent succession of scenes at all. There

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is no apparent order in the editing, nowhere a need for or even an expectation of continuity— only a lingering indeterminacy of the scenes’ progression, where nothing seems to require that which follows. Finally, causality is missing in an even more fundamental sense: the very notion of effect is attached to the idea of something, whereas form, while it contains articulation, cannot as a contextually determined something enter a relation with anything else. The forms in Volker Bradke are not the effects of a causing action— or, at least, cause and effect are indistinguishable in their performance— which confirms our observation that effector, act of effecting, and effect coincide in a form. Accordingly, all of the movements presented by Volker Bradke originate as insertions into the texture of a single surface. Here they are absorbed in equal measure by flickers, flares, vertical bands, and speckles of light and dark spots, as well as a wide range of variable gray tones. This is not a case of surface versus depicted form, for here the surface is the form, such that everything has the same initial status and works its way toward full articulation through a gradual emergence of spatiotemporal and causal relations. The determinacy of form is not suspended in this prelogical structure of enactment; it is in fact realized precisely and only through the staging of its enactment. This is also demonstrated, to give another example, by Richter’s overpainted photographs, such as 8.12.89 [St. Moritz] (1989).28 Where the sky should be in the photo, the Alpine landscape finds itself confronted by something completely different, something saturated in color that might be another landscape doubling the first— a lake, a forest, or some kind of pattern suspended on or magnetically repelled by the earth, or perhaps oozing weightlessly on the surface of the picture. Whatever it is, its presence fully fragments the figurative structure of the photograph. As the dominance of the figurative is suspended, what becomes visible instead is once again form in a nascent stage of space, time, causality, and gravity. The logical organization of the Alpine landscape in the photograph appears to be reassimilated into this genesis, the illusory space itself compromised by the happening that is form: the lower portion (with the landscape) appears, if not swallowed up by the upper portion, powerfully affected by it, and the representational character that we take for granted when viewing the photographed landscape has dissolved into a presentational surface that seems to insist on belonging

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Fig. 4. Gerhard Richter, 8.12.89 [St. Moritz] (12.8.89 [St. Moritz]), 1989. Oil on

photograph.

to the performative order of form. The mountainous landscape, no longer simply identifiable as figuration, fluctuates between pure form and the constitution of figure— thus allowing us to witness morphogenesis, the becoming of form. Mimesis: reference to the world Across from the performative dimension in the tension lies the mimetic dimension, which concerns a form’s reference to the world in the broadest sense— its reference to other forms (painterly and nonpainterly, artistic and nonartistic). According to Richter, a picture that has no connection with the reality outside it cannot interest us. That which reminds us of nothing, and has nothing to do with what we care about, by default doesn’t carry any relevance: “Anyway, pure painting is inanity, and a line is interesting only if it arouses interesting associations.”29 Richter’s quasi-programmatic attempts to grasp a reality beyond the picture are among the most distinctive parts of his work— the painting of photographs with documented subjects, locations, and dates. Take, for example, the 1977 photographs that provide the basis of his October cycle— images the political chargedness of which Richter uses to emphasize the factuality in the paintings that render them. The emphasis is heightened through the emphasis on factuality endo-

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genous to the medium of photography, whose reference to its subject matter encompasses elements of a purely physical reaction. Both emphases are now exploited for painting. If the act of painting from an original seems at first to manifest an extra mediating step— why doesn’t Richter paint directly from reality? why doesn’t he content himself with a photograph?— here it actually serves the opposite aim of a reduction of mediation: the painter no longer needs to decide on the composition, lighting, details, and so forth. The picture is, as it were, a “closer” one than it would be without this reduction.30 “A painting of a murder is of no interest whatever; but a photograph of a murder fascinates everyone. This is something that just has to be incorporated into painting.”31 Richter’s comments and notes reveal, however, that he is focused not on the introduction of an extraneous moment into painting, but on a sharpened attention to painting’s irreducible representational function. Painting draws on something given; it aims— thus a recurrent phrase— “to picture [ . . . ] what is going on.”32 The scope of this formulation is all-encompassing, and Richter goes so far as to claim that anything that can be represented in a picture at all must bear this index of factuality— every landscape, every table, and even every element in so-called abstract pictures. “Every aspect of them resembles something that’s real. [ . . . ] They always remind us of something— otherwise they wouldn’t be paintings.”33 Due to the central role ascribed to resemblance, a picture’s reference to the world is mimetic for Richter in a comprehensive sense that extends far beyond the imitation of figure. Such a comprehensive understanding of mimetic reference dispenses with several familiar distinctions. The first, as Table has already shown, is the difference between “figurative” and “abstract” pictures; dispensing with it seems by no means self-evident in the face of a tradition accustomed to equating the mimetic with the figurative.34 “I just don’t know what abstract is,”35 says Richter, who distinguishes between the two types of pictures only insofar as the viewer’s work to identify the painted object reaches its end in one case while continuing indefinitely in the other: “In an abstract painting, you can recognize only similarities, a special likeness to a tree, house or clouds— but you are not able to identify what you see.”36 “When we don’t find anything, we are frustrated and that keeps us aroused and interested until we have to turn away because we are bored. That’s how abstract painting works.”37 With

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this, Richter distances himself from modernist projects aiming at pure, nonmimetic abstraction, such as, say, the Square paintings of Kazimir Malevich. At the same time, he rejects notions according to which painterly abstraction is cerebralization— a commonplace that, for example, is expressed in Deleuze’s statement that “the Figure is the sensible form related to a sensation; it acts immediately upon the nervous system . . . whereas abstract form is addressed to the head and acts through the intermediary of the brain.”38 Finally, Richter dispenses with yet another widespread distinction, this time what one might refer to as the difference between denotation and connotation. He is not invested in the fact that one side of the distinction features historically identifiable individuals, situations, and facts, while the other side features content based on associative connections with a lesser degree of historical situatedness. For painting, what is relevant is simply that, in each case, the work must have something outside it to which it refers. Mimesis: conventionality This reference should not be understood to contain mimetic versus other elements, for example, symbolic ones. Rather, the entire picture is mimetic as an object— a function carried out by all its elements equally. Nothing here, not even the smallest spot of color, the faintest impression left by the paintbrush, or the most minute fiber in the canvas, escapes manifesting mimetic reference. The “equalizing surface” presents itself again, this time filled not only with performative activity but also with mimetic articulation; every point is at work, every point communicates. In comparison with the functioning of natural languages, one might say that for Richter, the semiotic element in the sense of arbitrary signification is excluded from the form. But it would be a mistake therefore to understand Richter’s mimetic procedure as a somehow naturalized, context-blind type of communication based on similarity, and to contrast it with another type of communication understood as conventional. After all, similarities do not fall outside the scope of convention. As what something appears to me and what I associate with it depend on the way I take it, guided by my boundness to a specific purpose within a specific practical context. That is why the distinction between the mimetic and symbolic function in painting is not to be mistaken for the distinction between perspective-free observation and observation tied to perspective. If the first kind

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of observation that involves access to an object in itself is never possible— a position-free observation lacks a position from which it could occur— tying observation to perspective still allows one to distinguish relations that work through sensory affinities from other relations lacking such a nexus. The mimetic is a distinction that always already lies within the conventional. But if the mimetic cannot be separated from conventionality in the broad sense of a practical boundness to context, this does not mean that it therefore belongs in the realm of conventionally agreed-upon signs. While representation, which is always conventional, can function through both sensory and symbolic references, the latter is secondary for Richter and not an integral constituent of painterly form. Only once something is sensually articulated— and for Richter, that means mimetically articulated— can it take on a symbolic function as well.39 Mimesis: formation and de-formation But what exactly happens in mimetic reference? As already noted, such reference is a matter of resemblance, of any kind of sensual similarity, and Richter leaves no doubt that for him, the mimetic achievement of nonfigurative pictures is superior to that of figurative ones. This superiority lies in the notion that the latter refer to their depicted objects in such a way that one can “identify” them,40 while nonfigurative reference remains indeterminate, facilitating a multiplicity of associations. Between these two extremes, Richter sees a broad scale with degrees of mimetic load to which correspond differences in gestural resolution, such that a higher resolution carries a higher load: first of all, gesturally overdetermined yet still easily identified motifs such as clouds, cityscapes, or lions; then, achieved through a reduction and dissipation of the gestural, pictures of oceans, forests, the Inpainting works with their intricate network of brushstrokes, or the more recent sequences for Patterns that in themselves perform a slow and thorough process of gestural dissolution.41 The next step goes even further, all the way to a programmatic avoidance of the gestural in works such as Silicate and Strontium, or the combinatorial mosaic of color panels in, for example, 4900 Colours— a heightening of the mimetic load not through dissipation, but through strict regularization. Finally, we encounter maximally mimetic pictures, such as those of Cage, where a radical avoidance of gesture goes along with a complete deregularization of form. If the scale features a progressive dissolution of

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not only the figurative, but also, reaching further, the gestural, this reveals a direct proportionality between such abstraction and the mimetic achievement of form. In terms proposed by Walter Benjamin, such proportionality relates de-formation (Entstaltung) and formation (Gestaltung) of form, if we allow these terms to refer not to the figurative alone but to gestural articulation at large.42 The example for this proportionality that Richter himself comments on in probably the greatest depth is that of the aforementioned “unsharp” pictures— Richter’s signature blur on portraits, objects, or landscapes— comparable to those sequences in Volker Bradke where a concomitance of formation and de-formation hints at the threshold of figurativity. Structurally, the lines of figuration and the lines of the blur— drawn by dragging paint or by stroking a brush along the paint’s surface— are at first strictly separated. This can be observed particularly well where the difference between them is small— for instance, in the slight skew of the hairs in Horst (which are not caught up in the horizontality of the blur), or in the finely scaled movements of Tiger. Where the lines of figuration and the blur coincide, however, the figure spills from its contours and is absorbed by the background in a sfumato effect, which, for example, leaves the bodies in Uncle Rudi or Ema seeming almost immaterial, even as, at the same time, the clarity of the material appearance is heightened and, indeed, made even more spectacular. Since the dissolution of the figure cannot be distinguished from its taking shape— “Rudi” assumes his figure neither in contrast to the wall behind him nor despite his extensive fusing into the background, but only through this fusing— the blur is an efficient technique to generate the bidirectional emergence of form according to formation and de-formation. Mirrors and panes of glass accomplish something similar, where the figure of the observer is rendered in such a way that its emergence simultaneously represents its withdrawal, detachment and, in fact, denial. What Richter’s mirroring surfaces— the simple glass panes, the layered or serial panes, the gray mirrors— thus accomplish is precisely not a perfect representation of figure, but rather the testimony of a coming to form, the staging of morphogenesis, as the latter is subjected to a visual and active analysis into its diverging components.43 Richter insists that referential blurriness constitutes no loss of informational content but, on the contrary, its increase. “When I dissolve demarcations and make transitions, this is not in order to

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destroy the representation, or to make it more artistic or less precise. The flowing transitions, the smooth, equalizing surface, clarify the content.”44 Precisely because the blurring of details minimizes individualizing information (the “abstracting” operation: “Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information”),45 the amount of mimetic information in the picture is increased. “I’ve never found anything to be lacking in a blurry canvas. Quite the contrary: you can see many more things in it than in a sharply focused image. A landscape painted with exactness forces you to see a determined number of clearly differentiated trees, while in a blurry canvas you can perceive as many trees as you want. The painting is more open.”46 This openness is directly applicable to the question of reality: “If we disregard the closed quality that every picture has to have— if it is not to be a random detail of something else, or just plain unfinished— then non-closure may perhaps be a positive quality, because it has more to do with our reality.”47 Where the picture’s reference to reality is not limited to something identifiable, there, we might say, its mimetic reference gets to grasp reality in a fuller and more concentrated way— a stronger reaction to the reality drawn on (mimesis) and also, as we will see, a stronger reality of the picture itself (performance). With this, Richter delivers a theory that not only explains why mimetic formation requires gestural de-formation but also identifies formation and de-formation as complementary dynamics of form. Mimesis: substrate Building further on such threshold pictures, fully developed abstraction constitutes an end stage in which form reaches maximum mimetic load. A conclusive identification of resemblances is no longer possible here, and the act of reception normally associated with it can continue indefinitely. That we “don’t find anything” keeps us “aroused and interested,” or, to refer back to an earlier quotation, “in an abstract painting, you can recognize only similarities, a special likeness to a tree, house or clouds— but you are not able to identify what you see.” “What you see” are formulas, sensory abbreviations beyond identifiability and individuality that mimetically offer themselves to be worked out in an open series of individualizing manifestations. Just as Aby Warburg understood his “pathos formula” as a type of expressive shorthand recurring across the most disparate times and contexts,48 the mimetic substrate of

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Fig. 5. Gerhard Richter, S. with Child (S. mit Kind), 1995. Oil on canvas. Hamburger

Kunsthalle, Hamburg. CR 827-4.

Richter’s abstract paintings— unlike Warburg’s strictly conventional and historical formula— is that which is not itself identifiable and precisely therefore serves as the mimetic nexus for multiple identifications, that is, as the articulation that is shared by the identifications and in virtue of which they are similar to one another. “You arrive at a distillation of the image’s essential qualities,” notes Robert Storr, a thought of which Richter explicitly approves.49 Here words like “distillation,” “substrate” and “essential qualities” should not be taken to refer to something not found in the picture itself; they refer to the sensory articulation of form that in its precision and clarity equals that of individualizing development. If we have already seen that Richter rejects abstraction as a theoretical term since it is meaningless in the face of form’s unbroken mimetic engagement, the term now appears doubly inappropriate to refer to articulations that are sensually perceptible even as they remain unidentifiable. Ulti-

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mately, heightened perceptibility and distinction rely not on gestural or expressive elements, but on higher degrees of articulatory dissolution with richer mimetic resonance.50 In fact, already mere reflexes of identifiability can severely disrupt the functional configuration of mimetic formulas: “The composition of different forms, colours, structures, proportions, harmonies, etc. comes out as an abstract system analogous to music. It is thus an artificial construct, as logical in its own terms as any natural one, except that it is not objective. This system draws its life from analogies with the appearance of nature, but it would instantly be destroyed if any object were identifiably represented within it. Not because the latter would make it too narrative, but because its explicitness would narrow the expression of content and reduce everything around it to mere staffage.”51 The traditional link between mimesis and depiction, according to which a picture’s reference to reality stands and falls with its figurative identifiability, is not simply dissolved here, but inverted: maximum mimetic strength lies in keeping maximum distance from depiction— a central intuition for Richter, the radicalization of which results, on the one hand, in pictures based on monochrome panels arranged by a random generator (4096 Colours, Cologne Cathedral Window) and, on the other, in the vibrating textures of Cage. Mimesis: pure articulation To be sure, the thought of a mimetic substrate is far from new. Richter repeatedly recalls Leonardo da Vinci’s canonical comments on the referential power of nonfigurative form,52 which I would like to include here as it promises to give plausibility to the not entirely simple notion that the world can be captured through its sensory abbreviation. Leonardo recommends to the painter a “way of looking” that occurs when you look at some walls that are covered in all kinds of spots, or stones of a mixed constitution. If you need to come up with some kind of situation, there you can see the resemblance of diverse landscapes decorated with mountains, rivers, cliffs, trees, great plains, valleys, and hills of all sorts. You can also see any number of battles, lively scenes of curiously exotic figures, facial expressions, garb, and an infinity of things that you can put into full and good form. What happens with walls and rocks like that is similar to what happens with the sound of a bell, when you can hear in the ringing any name or word imaginable. [ . . . ] May it not seem tedious to you to remain standing

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at times and to look at the spots on a wall or into the ashes from the fire, at the clouds, mud, or other such places; if you observe well, you will discover in them the most miraculous inventions. [ . . . ] For it is through indeterminate things that ingenuity awakens to new inventions.53

Two distinct levels of articulation are at play here: the articulation of individuality is understood as a kind of actualization and putting into practice of a nonfigurative formula (“an infinity of things that you can put into [ . . . ] form”), which as such refuses definitive identification. Leonardo postulates the latter articulation under the heading “Precepts of Painting” as a vital precondition for the production of the painted image— a mimetic substrate of reality, a substrate that the artist should appropriate and then use as desired as the core of a specific depiction: “A painter [ . . . ] should study at all times the immediacy of movements in the natural positions that people perform accidentally [ . . . ] and of this he should draw brief reminders in his sketchbook and use them afterward for his purposes.54 All depiction begins in the “breve ricordi” of pure articulation, shorthand for individualized reality. Such abbreviations operate in a logical and technical a priori that structurally precedes identifiability: “When you compose histories [istorie], do not immediately render those bodily contours within them in definite lines and with fine detail. [ . . . ] Painter, compose the limbs of your figures roughly and direct your attention first to their movements, [ . . . ] and attend to the beauty and quality of the limbs afterward.”55 Crucial for such a preparatory sketch is its unfinished quality, which is endorsed in Richter’s detail-reducing blurs and the constitutive indeterminacy of his forms. The lineaments are not yet subjected to individualizing “membrificazione” and are thus “private di perfezione”— in utter contrast to the “movimenti, o altre azioni.”56 Without a doubt these “movimenti” can be actualized in an open series of individual identities, transferred to always further contexts, and recombined at will. Everything possible is already contained in this pure articulation; as core mimetic material, it is for Leonardo the source of “invention” of nature, the human world, and even monstrosity, alike.57 As “istorie” (which here means the depicted events in particular, reference in general, and, ultimately, history or the historical world), they can all be generated through the same method. The same goes for the natural world, a preliminary sketch of which should be carried out

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such that “it not only seeks to address the works of nature, but, in fact, infinitely more than what nature brings forth.”58 The realm of “natural” articulation is transgressed toward a greater fullness, and simple mimesis is condensed to an allusive density of a higher order. Prelogical connection of mimesis and performance The dimensions of performance and mimesis discussed to this point do not cancel one another out, nor is either of them dispensable or preferable over the other, nor do they appear readily reconcilable. In the perspective of mimesis, painting refers to the world outside it; it deals with “what is going on,” and without such reference, it would have no way to connect to our other concerns. In the perspective of performance, in turn, painting is not about the outside word, but only about itself. Without this performative side, it would lack all specific quality, for it would assimilate not only to the logic of space and time, but also to the purposes, meanings, and ideologies of its surroundings, and as a consequence lose all distinction.59 This is why Richter hangs on to both dimensions simultaneously, and conceives of their tension such that mimesis avoids functioning unilaterally for performance and performance avoids functioning unilaterally for mimesis. Both are equiprimordial: “What fascinates me is the alogical, unreal, atemporal, meaningless happening of a happening [that is, the performative dimension] which is simultaneously so logical, so real, so timebound and so human [that is, the mimetic dimension] and for that reason so compelling. And I would like to represent it in such a way that this simultaneity is preserved.”60 Consider the unconventional formulation “happening of a happening” that Richter uses to emphasize the prelogical unity of execution and result, making clear that what happens here is the happening itself and nothing else. Conceptually, this means that the task of painting is to build both dimensions into one; indeed, that the poetic work of pictures must be understood as this work of unification: the dimensions of the depicted and of the act of depiction; the dimensions of the external (the photo, the associations, the world) and of the form; the mimetic and the performative dimensions. An example of such unification is the following reply to the question of spatiality when painting from photographs: “The photograph makes a statement about real space, but as a picture it has no space of its own. Like the photograph, I make a statement about real space,

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but when I do so I am painting; and this gives rise to a special kind of space that arises from the interpenetration and tension between the thing represented and the pictorial space.”61 With this “interpenetration and tension,” Richter reacts to the traditional oppositions of “the picture as transparent window onto the world” and “the picture as opaque object,”62 illusion versus the display of being fabricated,63 the showing of something versus the showing of oneself,64 or, more generally, external versus internal or self-reference. “The apparent contradiction involved [is] essential to the success of [ . . . ] all pictorial art,” notes Greenberg about the difference between pictorial surface and the space of representation,65 and Michael Polanyi sees the distinguishing mark of painting in a “flat depth” that results from “a fusion of contradictory features”— a distinction that locates artistic value in a painting’s capacity to transcend external reality not only gradually or quantitatively, but also structurally or qualitatively.66 Richter’s conception absorbs this tradition insofar as it insists on the same difference. But for him, the specific difference between a painting and other pictures is not one of a “fusion” of contradictions but a “tension” between the dissimilar, and this specific difference is constituted by the mimetic and the performative sides. It is obvious— if we recall the discussion of Table— that the inherited binary between surface and depth no longer works for Richter’s conception, given that the binary juxtaposes the three-dimensional space of “external reference” or representation, on the one hand, to the two-dimensional space of a “self-reference” that facilitates representation, on the other (a self-reference that, depending on the context, can also appear as a denial of representation, or even antirepresentation). To dispense with this internal dialectics of the picture, according to which its two dimensions correspond along a dividing line that logically sets them apart, Richter disengages not only from the fundamental distinction between representation and abstraction, but also from the inherited understanding of the very category of the image. The metaphysical concept of the image is not rescued by Richter, but it is replaced with a differential concept of form— and I would like to suggest that he speaks in his reflections of “image” or “picture [Bild]” precisely insofar as form appears specifically in light of its achievement of an “interpenetration” of mimesis and performance. Where this succeeds, the relation between the sides— with an explicit keeping up of the “tension”— loses all trace of binary

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exclusivity or dialectic unity. “Reproductive [mimetic] and immediate [performative] are therefore meaningless terms”67— that is, when they are understood as mutually exclusive alternatives. Reaction Now what is the basis for this integration of the mimetic and the performative dimension? How does Richter reconceive their mutual exclusivity? My argument is that Richter uses the model of a simple reaction, according to which the reality of form is a response to a preceding reality— that of an object, a photograph, another form in the process of painting, or something else. While the new reality refers to the old, it is not the old reality’s reduplication, reflection, signification, or some other derivation, but a new reality in its own right. In the primary relation between both, correspondence through essential agreement in which the new form inherently reflects the old, is replaced with coherence through contextual agreement in which the new form takes up the old such that other forms can in turn connect to it. The relation of representation is secondary, yet it is preserved in the sense of the specific appropriateness of the reference, as is the case for example in language when semantics works to fulfill the pragmatic aim of a communication. Wittgenstein is the first to explicitly formulate such a pragmatist model of interaction: “The origin and the primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop. Language— I want to say— is a refinement. ‘In the beginning was the deed.’”68 That is, whatever else language may do— through semiosis or its representational function— it is first and foremost this doing, which is why its pragmatic determination as a context of actions reacting to one another must structurally precede its semantic determination as a carrier of symbolic content. Form refers to other form with perfect pragmatic precision, and while in a general pragmatist model of interaction this reference is not bound to be mimetic, for Richter, as we have seen, it is inevitably mimetic. Primacy of the act In this context, Goethe’s “In the beginning was the deed,” also invoked by Richter,69 manifests the thought of form as origin, more specifically the requirement that form cannot be secondary to anything else— that it should be understood neither as the signifier of a signified external to the picture nor as otherwise derived from an idea or concept logically preceding it. This does not

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mean that the context of form, consisting of other forms, cannot also contain discursive forms and grant a leading role to ideas; what is decisive is only that form does not stand in a relation of correspondence with them. “The idea as a point of departure for the picture: that’s illustration. Conversely, acting and reacting in the absence of an idea leads to forms.” Form is primary, and if it has anything to do with ideas, this is only insofar as form “generates” ideas and never the other way around, leaving ideas as derivatives of and contingent upon form.70 This makes clear that the re- in “reacting” is meant not to express anything secondary, but a simple sequence in which every “reacting” is always both and first an “acting” that obeys the already noted observation that “you can’t represent reality at all— that what you make represents nothing but itself, and therefore is itself reality.” Accordingly, the process of painting is itself a reaction of form to form, of one original to another, without anything secondary coming into play: “Painting has nothing to do with thinking, because in painting thinking is painting. [ . . . ] Einstein did not think when he was calculating: he calculated— producing the next equation in reaction to the one that went before— just as in painting one form is a response to another, and so on.”71 Thus to replace a relation based on meaning with one based on a sequence is not to say that the picture no longer represents, but simply means that representation is a reaction sui generis. Because we are dealing with both a relation and the act of its execution, form’s reference to the world, as well as its internal reference, is preserved, which already shows how the model of reaction relates to the tension between mimesis and performance: both seamlessly come together in the same form, for the activity or reality of performance is nothing but the activity or reality of the reaction, and mimetic reference is nothing but the relation expressed in the re- of “reaction.” One could also say— and the discussion of Richter’s work up to now has prepared us for this— that in this way, what is depicted need not enter into competition with the act of depicting. On the contrary, only by virtue of its mimesis does form fulfill its performative function, and only by virtue of its performance does it fulfill its mimetic reference— and only in such interdependence of both is reaction fully realized. Sequentially heightened realities The model of reaction interlinks forms and realities to a sequence. During the painting of a photo-

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graph, the painterly form reacts to the form of the photo just as the photographic form reacts to the photographed object. If one initially looks only at the chain of reaction as such, one sees an analogy that is unaffected by the medium-specific differences in the reactions. (In that the paintings from photographs bear on both processes, Richter deprives physical immediacy— which has traditionally set apart the relation between photography and its object as categorically different from the process of painting— of its distinction-making function. More important, for him all production of form is reactive, and the reaction that is photography differs from the reaction that is painting only in the kind of its achievement.) In the chain, the newest reaction at any given point carries out in its reality a transformation of the previous realities. Form thus transforms what is given each time into a new form and, with that, a new reality. To understand form in this way— as transformation— means that it does not submit to any “objective” standard of “real reality”; its reaction is articulated merely in relation to the preceding reality in that particular case. The transformation therefore lies in the transition from the old reality to the new; form is a crossing in which something becomes something else. That is why Richter counters the suggestion that painting photographs is a translation of a translation of reality by saying, “I know nothing about the real reality. The only important thing for us is translation.”72 There is no “real reality” different from its copy, but only translations of reality into reality where everything is real, everything is form in equal measure, everything is unique and distinct. Where realities differ is in their degree. As reality is serial, the only basis for its comparison is its relation to other realities. While there is no “real reality” or “reality as it is,” there is always a last one in a given chain, and this last reality, Richter thinks, somehow exceeds the others: “It becomes more real because I know nothing about the real reality.”73 “It becomes more real” in the reaction because only the most recent reality is actual— an actuality that is nothing more than form’s performative dimension. Each form is a greater reality— not a superior one, but simply a more real one than that to which it reacts. (In chapter 4 we will see that Richter considers given reality as deficient and in need of further realization.) But an increase in the series is not brought about by actuality alone, for each form is also a new start. A sequential increase only ensues

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when, in addition to each advance in actuality, an increase through the structure of the picture itself comes into play: the painting “has more reality” than the photo to which it reacts and the cup that it depicts. “That gives [the painting] a reality of its own, which then as it were substitutes for the reality of the cup.”74 (And, on a different note: “Photography has almost no reality. [ . . . ] And painting always has reality.”)75 Compared to the cup and the photo, the painting manifests a specific difference through its display of the tension of mimesis and performance,76 and nothing keeps us from assuming that the increase could continue indefinitely within the realm of this tension, as form’s mimetic aggregation can be strengthened and condensed without limit. The inherited hierarchical conceptions that contrast superior “essential” or “true” or “real reality” with inferior and merely derived, apparent, or depicted reality— are replaced with a sequential, relational, and gradient conception: a series of realities reacting to and outdoing one another. Richter’s model of reaction is a model of outdoing. Precisely as the concept of reaction is at the core of a pragmatist model of interaction, however, it is not reserved exclusively for painting— every act is a reaction, a reality sui generis, an advance in actuality— and cannot fully qualify artistic form. Reconceiving the tension through reaction Yet the specifics of form in Richter, we hold, can only be expressed through this concept. It considers a painting’s advance in actuality in continuity with other realities or forms, whether these are artistic or belong to the world in general. From this perspective, a painting is a thing among other things, form in a context of forms, reaction linked to other reactions. This perspective provides art’s connection to everything else and its ability to concern us at all, the fact that its excess of reality is not an absolute but a relative one and entirely of this world, where, as we will see, art has something to achieve. Across from it we find the opposite perspective that considers a painting in discontinuity with all other forms and focuses on the specific pictorial features outlined above that result from an integration of the mimetic and the performative moment. This perspective ensures that art can achieve something special, a feat accomplishable by nothing else and irreducible to any other activity. Both perspectives locate a distinction in painting— a gradual one in the first case and a structural one in the second. But instead of therefore excluding one another, they both

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articulate the same thing. That this presents no fundamental problem is owed to the aforementioned assumption that the reality of reaction and performance (the execution and activity of form) as well as the reference of reaction and mimesis (form’s reference to the world) are the same in each case. On this assumption, form meets both conditions: its inclusion in the context of reactions where it functions like any other act does not prevent it from establishing its painterly difference in precisely this function. Put differently, the model of reaction lends itself to the formulation of the painterly difference insofar as the model distinguishes the most recent reaction in the chain through an advance in actuality. Through the inclusion of mimesis and performance, this distinction now receives the determination that is specific to artistic form. Conversely, Richter’s conception of painterly difference gains plausibility only once the reciprocal “interpenetration and tension” of mimesis and performance is developed through the model of reaction. The latter frees mimesis from the metaphysical obligation to correspond with that to which it refers and frees performance from the inferior ontological status of a merely derived reality. Through this the model of reaction abolishes the traditional dialectics of internal versus external reference or surface versus depth in favor of an original and prelogical tension between two entirely different dimensions that appears integrated in form. If a painting like Aunt Marianne surpasses the photograph on which it is based in terms of reality, it does so because it reacts to the photograph (and not the other way around) and can, in this trivial sense, claim an advance in actuality. The same, of course, holds for every reaction to the photo, perhaps even for the sequence established by different acts of its viewing. Beyond that, however, Aunt Marianne also has more reality than the photo because the depiction is mimetically enriched through, for instance, Richter’s technique of blurring (which produces a potentiation of mimetic load through de-formation); simplified contrast (which prohibits a restrictive focus on detail); strong overexposure of the figures (lending them an aura like that in old photographs); the casting of the scene smaller than life-size (which is reminiscent of a vignette or devotional image and, in a manner of speaking, makes the figures recede); and the pyramidal compositional scheme (inviting an association with the Madonna and child).77 Not only does Aunt Marianne, as a reaction, contain more information

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than the original photo, but it is also transposed to another level of reality through its structural distinction as a painting. Mimesis is performance Our example shows how the potential for escalation within the tension of mimesis and performance works: the two dimensions cannot be intensified or reduced independently of each other— either alteration concerns the tension as a whole. Because performance is nothing more than the enactment of mimesis, and mimesis is the articulation of performance, the mimetic enrichment in Aunt Marianne must directly be regarded as a heightening of its performance. Performance and mimesis do not intersect here and there; rather they “interpenetrate” each other completely and originally. Ultimately, within the structure of reaction, everything works toward— or at least this is my final argument in this regard— the mimetic substrate coinciding with the prelogical performance.

Fig. 6. Gerhard Richter, Aunt Marianne (Tante Marianne), 1965. Oil on canvas.

YAGEO Foundation, Taipei, Taiwan. CR 87.

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Form in its performative dimension is not in diminished contact with the world; rather, it communicates with the world, as it were, beyond logical, semantic, and even expressive reference in an initial realm of morphogenesis not structured by the continua of space and time, nor by meaning or signification, nor by any sense of something at all yet. As the mimetic-performative substrate of “what is going on,” form is not only “close” to the world, but it is— form among forms— the world coming into being. More precisely, it is the world coming into being each time, a singular transformation where something arises that was not there before. With this, form proves itself to be form in the making, its formation to be its de-formation, and its distinction a transitioning from the old to the new, from one reality to the next or, along with this, from the potential to the actual in each case. The latter transition casts the relation between the pure mimetic substrate and the gestures and figures stored in, obtained from, and developing from it in terms of the modal categories of potentiality and actuality (we keep reality as the general term translating German Wirklichkeit and use actuality in an explicitly modal sense for the exercise of a potential, a specific possibility). As shown by our discussion of Leonardo, said relation consists of a formula that is always already in the process of transitioning to its individuations, a potential actualization that pushes its way into a series of actual actualizations, functioning in this dynamic as both possibility and actuality at the same time, a transition in permanence: “Every point of [the paintings] resembles something [ . . . ], but the similarity only goes so far.”78 Only insofar as the mimetic referral is structurally incomplete, we remain in its act, and the form thus performed is not a result but a transition. What must be viewed as the fundamental activity of morphogenesis in all of Richter’s works takes on particular virulence in his abstract pictures, as those approximate the figureless and gestureless mimetic substrate as such, thus maximally heightening transition. In extreme mimetic resolution, the transition appears condensed to a referential activity that is effective in “every point.” If this transition is nothing but the actuality of form, here is what this means for the relation between the dimensions of mimesis and performance. If the possible normally exceeds the actual such that the actual represents a selection from the possible, then mimetic articulation, in the first instance, is precisely this selection, without which form would lack all distinction. But painterly mimesis also

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appears to compensate for the reduction that would normally play a role in selection, such that the latter retains a surplus of possibility: Not only does a potential turn actual, but it is actualized as a potential— or rather, as something inconclusive, in the process of transitioning from potentiality to actuality. To be sure, everything that is actual is necessarily also possible, as both a general and a determinate possibility, or otherwise it would not be. But the actualization of the possible as such through form is something else: The modal boundaries shift such that the difference between the actual and the possible recurs within the actual, and “every picture imaginable could appear.”79 Possibility appears actualized in its very inactuality; it turns, as possibility, form. As Richter’s pictures— especially the abstract ones— distinguish themselves through the fact that the specific power of transition appears wholly converted to actuality,80 they demonstrate that pure mimetic articulation of form bears greater power than gestural and figurative articulation. In the actualization of the potential as potential, the mimesis of the picture shows a perfect “interpenetration” with its performance, and we see why the two dimensions can only be increased through one another. The higher the mimetic load, the more powerful the performance, and the more powerful the performance, the higher the mimetic load. Modal analysis allows us to see why the performance of form, its actuality, is nothing but the mimetic substrate— its transitioning from potentiality to actuality— itself. Filtration, concentration, potentiation With this, the first of Richter’s fundamental tensions has generally been outlined, but this outline does not yet fully grasp what actually happens in the pictures. Upon closer inspection, what has, to this point, been called a heightening or escalation of form breaks into at least four complex poetic operations of amplification. They all apply equally to figurative and abstract pictures, although the latter are most relevant in the final stage of the process. These operations are filtration, compression, potentiation, and higher-order potentiation. 1. The described stage of filtering out the mimetic substrate through

an elimination of features or information. In an initial step, the figurative is deindividualized through blurring, gestural reduction, and simplification— an identification of this chair yields to the possibility

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of many chairs— and, in a second step, it is dissolved into pure form, that is, rendered completely unrecognizable through abstraction. In both cases, it is reduced to certain mimetically relevant features. Here the picture contains the mimetic substrate to the first power. 2. The stage (also characterized above) of compressing the substrate.

Because the nonfigurative picture doesn’t contain any less overall information as an identifiable depiction, but at the same time works only with articulations of the substrate, the information in it is more densely compacted— its formulas and abbreviations constitute, we might say, a tightly fastened packet of mimetic references. They surpass those of the figurative picture many times over, just as the actualization of the possible as such surpasses a merely selective actualization. This concentration constitutes the mimetic substrate to the second power. 3. The mimetic articulations joined in a picture relate as parts of the overall form. If things go well, they potentiate one another reciprocally through their resonance with each other, which Richter describes, for example, as follows: “The pictures are related to my [ . . . ] colour charts, in which a few examples [ . . . ] stand for the endless possibilities that can never be actualized.”81 This should be taken to mean that while an individual actualization of all of these possibilities is not feasible because it would be endless or indefinite, such indefiniteness can still be included through the mimetic resonances of form. Where the density is high and the composition effective, a merely additive connection of elements in the mimetic repository can turn into a connection through multiplicational amplification. This operation, which is exponentially augmentative in favorable cases, generates the mimetic substrate to the third power. 4. Finally, composition involves not only the resonance of individ-

ual articulations with each other, but this resonance also manifests larger and more complex articulations that in turn can resonate with each another, and so on. That is, the potentiation on the third stage describes higher levels of resonance as well— no matter how small (even in their microstructure, Richter’s pictures are highly resolved) or large (entire sections of a picture can resonate with each other, or even entire pictures in a sequence, such as Bach 1– 4 or Cage 1– 6)

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the articulations involved. This operation, which, in principle, can be performed on any number of levels or orders, manifests the fourth and ultimate power of the processing of the mimetic substrate. Specifics of painterly reality Such a multistage process of potentiation generates a reality that would be inaccessible otherwise, and that, in the specific intensity of both its mimetic and its performative dimension, not only surpasses all other (artistic and nonartistic) realities by said advance in actuality, but also— as the operations of amplification show— distinguishes painting from nonartistic realities. (Richter adds that the formal distinction of painting holds for other media as well, and for example draws on music to explain the functioning of abstract painting.)82 A table is not the same as a table painted by Richter— the latter has the reality of a higher order: “the dilemma that our sense of sight causes us to apprehend things, but at the same time restricts and partly precludes our apprehension of reality.”83 If the passage speaks of a simple reality rather than a series, it seems to refer to what reality can be at its maximum, in its highest articulation through form. Such articulation requires a pragmatist model of reaction because a sequential production of form is inconceivable from within the metaphysical model of representation. While in the latter, a form is ontologically inferior to that which it depicts and thus has a reality status below the “real reality” of the source, the model of reaction offers just the opposite: an advance in actuality with each performance, morphogenesis as an increase in reality. This surpassing of nonartistic reality (as well as of the preceding artistic reality each time) is, in a technical sense, the aim of Richter’s conception. He notes about abstract paintings, which are best suited for the task, that “they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe” due to the impossibility of individualizing all of their references; they can only be acted out for us in the mimetic density of form— that is, in the activity of referring. In that painterly form “deploys the utmost visual immediacy— all the resources of art— in order to depict ‘nothing,’” its realization, in a mimetic as well as performative sense, achieves everything.84

III

Poetological Question: Form as Judgment Underivability and rightness The second tension in Richter’s work runs between an emphasis on a painting’s independence from established standards or criteria and a simultaneous emphasis on its nonarbitrariness or commensurability. This is a poetological tension, for it concerns the question, How is form produced? More specifically, we are looking at the tension between the underivability and the rightness of form— as the dimensions are called in this case— which joins Richter’s insistence on the logical singularity of the painterly act, which can never be planned, controlled, or based on knowing how, with an equally determined adherence to the act’s binding power, communicability, and connectivity. Bringing together the binding power with an absence of rules is for Richter “the central problem in both abstract and figurative painting,” for “what reason is there, other than some stupid system or the rules of a game, for placing one thing next to another in any particular format, any particular colour, with any particular outline, with any particular likeness”?1 Against widespread interpretive attempts to label Richter’s art critical, skeptical, or ironic— declaring a distancing attitude its hallmark2— we hold that those attempts fundamentally fail to account for the basic poetological impulse driving Richter’s production of form. This is so not because these labels have nothing significant to say about Richter, but because they effectively capture only half of the picture, thus rendering the picture not half right, but entirely wrong. For those popular interpretations overlook the large extent 55

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to which Richter trusts the binding power of form and the fact that he uses the entire arsenal of available artistic practices to defend this binding power against the idea that “anything goes.” Nothing about the painterly form is dubious, undecided, or arbitrary— it is form only on the condition of its underivability from established ways and certainties. This means a radical relativism with respect to principled determinations, but not with regard to the determination that manifests the rightness of form in each particular case— a rightness that relies on said relativism to be conceivable in the first place. To see this, we consider again the metaphysical legacy at work in this tension, which is based on a traditional epistemological model according to which rightness and underivability are mutually exclusive. What can determinately be known or performed is not posited but derived from principle; it requires authorization through a transcendent substrate— be it God, Nature, Truth, Reason, World History, or the substance of a self. Metaphysical conceptions of form since at least Plato participate in this thought, according to which determinacy coincides with derivation. In its antimetaphysical inversion, since at least Nietzsche, the same thought appears emphasized, such that access to authorization through a transcendent substrate has been lost, and therefore to determinacy by derivation, which means that the arbitrariness of determination is the only thing left.3 Neither version of the inherited model allows for the thought of an immanent rightness incapable of being authorized further, for a structurally “human” knowledge, as Richter says. If Richter now replaces this model with a model of form as judgment, this involves a concept of a determination authorized not through principle, but independently in each case— a rightness underivable from a transcendent substrate, not such that the singular would come to figure as some sort of compromise to compensate for a missing principle, but such that singularity becomes a condition for rightness. The rightness of judgment does not simply accept its own underivability, it requires it and includes it. Richter neither mourns nor celebrates the dispensing with transcendent authority; it simply serves as a requirement for the painterly production of form. Only the singular articulation, its distinction newly decided, deserves the name of form. With this, rightness turns from a category of knowledge into a category of production. In the following, we undertake to show how Richter’s reformulation of the second tension leaves

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behind the metaphysical alternativity of its two dimensions in favor of their pragmatist balancing. The way this happens not only renders the tension indispensable for the production of form each time, but also, more specifically, brings the tension to function as the production’s generative core. This second part can be summarized by saying that Richter’s abandonment of the epistemological model shifts the emphasis from the grounding of form in principle to the fact of its singularity. Underivability: anthropological argument Let us again start from one of the sides, which means, in the context of this second tension, from Richter’s “pluralist”4 insistence on an equal availability of tendencies, techniques, and styles, and his unpredictability, which prevails throughout decades of work and allows his paintings to resist classification according to specific traditions or ideologies. We can speak of a pluralism in the sense that Richter not only accepts the premises of a progressive decentralization, ubiquity, and heterogenization of the art world (which enables and often promotes eclectic production)5 but also welcomes them, based on his general avoidance of ideological stances. An autobiographical explanation of Richter’s hostility toward ideology is known to relate to his studies, lasting until 1961, at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and his belief that painting was impossible for him under the dictates and restrictions of socialism.6 A corresponding anthropological explanation extends this belief into a general identification of ideology as a root of evil in history: “To have an ideology means having laws and guidelines; it means killing those who have different laws and guidelines. What is the good of that?”7 From this follows, for painting: “Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures.”8 Instead, the goal should be “pure pictures that wouldn’t be subject to ideological interpretation.”9 “Art can be truly relevant only when it isn’t directly employed to do a job.”10 These and similar thoughts result in a series of caveats that constitute for art an underivability from established criteria. First, Richter objects to the idea of a message, meaning, or sense immanent to the artwork. Second, he has no desire to belong to any movement, group, or trend. Third, he feels free to vary his painting styles, media, and techniques, and to work at the same time on pictures, books, and objects that are figurative or abstract; portraits or landscapes;

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photorealistic or defamiliarizing; mundane or sensational. And fourth, during the process of painting an individual picture he remains unpredictable, rejecting guidance by concepts, programs, or ideas. For Richter, these four desiderata are so inextricably bound to each other that usually he does not explicitly distinguish between them— just as, for example, nothing in a string of painterly virtues, such as “indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape,”11 gives away whether they refer to a metadiscursive rejection of a mission for art; a general disavowal of political posturing; a poetological rebuff of the concept of style; or a technical desideratum of avoiding decipherable elements. All of this is equally present: every form produced by Richter must meet the requirements posed by all four caveats at the same time. Underivability: poetological argument Besides this extrinsic and anthropological argument for the underivability of painterly form, we also find an intrinsic and poetological argument that explains the same underivability directly from the structure of form itself. But this argument, rooted in the context of performance, requires no separate list of caveats— we can simply take the four points above and reverse their order, beginning with the rejection of established criteria by the individual form. This rejection reprises the already noted statement that form “can’t represent reality at all” but instead is “itself reality” and therefore incapable of being an “illustration,” fulfillment, or signifier12 of a preceding plan, idea, stylistic impetus, or more generally intention: “I pursue no objectives, no system, no tendency; I have no program, no style, no direction. [ . . . ] I steer clear of definitions. I don’t know what I want. [ . . . ] I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.”13 Or, more concisely: “This making is something that I can’t grasp, or figure out and plan.”14 Richter’s early observation that “to paint, one must have lost art” brings together, and perhaps even equates, the anthropological with the poetological perspective on the underivability of form in that it can be understood not only diachronically as a diagnosis, bringing into perspective a now bygone age of painting where one could still find something resembling dominant standards, but also synchronically, as an articulation of the fact that the act of painting demands that the ability to paint, skill, knowing how be suspended in the process: “Art takes shape [ . . . ] always unexpectedly; art is never feasible.”15

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Far from considering such suspension a privation, Richter recognizes it as an opportunity, namely, as a way to let new potential enter the status quo: “When I paint an abstract picture (the problem is very much the same in other cases), I neither know in advance what it is meant to look like nor, during the painting process, what I am aiming at and what to do about getting there. [ . . . ] Viewed in this light, anything is possible in my pictures.”16 This particular version of “anything goes” has nothing to do with arbitrariness or a lack of discrimination, but on the contrary, it is a function of a distinction based on a specific choice. The potential thus emerging is what constitutes the adventure of painting for Richter, and the resource of innovation due to which a form is able to replace the prior reality to which it reacts, constituting itself as a new reality with an advance in actuality. Underivability: chance Even as painting is thus barred from implementing preconceived ideas, by no means should it be guided by spontaneous inspiration instead. For Richter, the execution of pictures based on established terms is just one of two main kinds of arbitrariness against which form must be defended. The second, no less destructive kind of arbitrariness is opposed to the first one in that it unleashes where the other binds: the idea or the topos of invention or creativity, of an unbound act productive out of itself. For even as invention, according to its semantics, can barely claim a reflective advance over the act of its realization, it is not this act itself. But painting consists entirely of this act. In order to ensure that possibility can be actualized in the absence of creativity, Richter turns to the category of chance, which conceptually occupies a place here that the aesthetic tradition calls je ne sais quoi, and that underwent elaboration in the aleatoric experiments of Cage and the Fluxus movement, resulting in the notion of a creation without invention. Chance instead of inspiration: this means “no invention”17 but “letting it come”18— a technique where the painter does not figure straightforwardly as an agent of innovation, but is tasked only with establishing the conditions needed for letting things happen.19 The painter is only a means, as it were, for “pictures which emerge, which result from the making.”20 As Richter asserts repeatedly, the potential thus set free surpasses by far anything that the painter could intentionally accomplish. “I’m often astonished to find how much better chance is

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than I am”21: “Letting a thing come, rather than creating it [ . . . ] in order to gain access to all that is genuine, richer, more alive: to what is beyond my understanding. [ . . . ] The abstract pictures: more and more clearly, a method of not having and planning the ‘motif’ but evolving it, letting it come.”22 This can be observed, for example, in the large-scale application of paint in the abstract pictures of Bach or Cage, which, as Storr describes in detail, is done with a squeegee dragged unpredictably over the surface, causing a removal, smoothing out, compression, or laceration of the paint layers;23 by replacing conceptual anticipation with process through the painting of photographs (the wish of “not having to invent anything anymore”);24 in the unconsciously sweeping brushwork in Inpainting; or in the aleatorics of the color plates of 4900 Colours or Cologne Cathedral Window, the arrangement of which into panels is determined by a random generator.25 The alternative at work here, which Richter also draws on to distinguish himself from the production of others, can at this level be described as a strategic difference between a permissive and a thetical moment, a letting and a positing: “to permit something simple to come about instead of positing it there. Baselitz posits his objects, Polke posits them, and that is another procedure.”26 Such repudiation of positing is amongst Richter’s most basic commitments— “I didn’t want to say: ‘It is thus and not otherwise’”27— in a comprehensive sense that extends from the definition of line and figure to questions of style and meaning, and even to ideological indifference: “I regarded fuzzy images and fluent transitions as a way of avoiding making certain statements about things.”28 All of this marks Richter as critically alert and striving for independence, but not as skeptically doubting the possibility of form, or cynically accepting its arbitrariness. The point is not to deny the production of form according to its possibility, but, on the contrary, to constitute and defend this possibility through a repudiation of arbitrary determinations. Such repudiation means that the transgression by which a form’s performance or actuality disrupts the status quo occurs first of all not as something that is done, but as something that happens. Rightness as criterion But this is only the first dimension of the tension. By itself, the chance-driven production of new articulation is insufficient to fulfill the requirement of form, because such

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articulation at this point— based on nothing but the repudiation of its derivability— can only be thought of as pure transgression. But transgression demands, if not principled determination, then at least determinacy in each case: “I want to have everything very clear, simple and unconditional, and I would rather make no art at all than just any indeterminate painting.”29 Thus Richter insists— this is the second dimension— on a formal criterion of commensurability, which he seems to view as in no way competing with the aforementioned “pluralist” premises. On the contrary, these premises provide the central motivation for his insistence: “Rightness [Richtigkeit], or rather binding power [Verbindlichkeit], in painting [ . . . ] seems to me important, in the face of a mindless, proliferating productivity that constantly becomes less and less binding.”30 The nonarbitrariness of painterly form is based on an ultimate criterion that Richter terms “rightness” or sometimes also “coherence [Stimmigkeit]”;31 it is, in fact, a metacriterion, or formal criterion, as it has no definite content but determines in each individual case what counts as the decisive difference this time. Only what is right is communicated, and there is no further guarantee for such communication, for while rightness is the criterion, for this very reason it cannot in turn be based on another criterion. Although its basic distinction lies in the fact that it turns out differently each time, which makes predictions about it impossible— “to get it right, somehow [ . . . ] I don’t know,”32 Richter says— this criterion is nevertheless capable of being specified further: the “right interconnection” of the forms in a painting is such that it “has a coherence that is the utter opposite of arbitrariness.”33 It should be no surprise at this point that the formal inventory of figurative and of abstract pictures is subject to the same criterion.34 Even as— or, in fact, precisely because— there is merely a formal, but no thematic, stylistic, medial, or other guiding criterion, we can determine whether a picture is a success or a failure, “good” or “bad”: “It’s actually the most fantastic cultural achievement, that we can distinguish between good and bad, [ . . . ] be it as viewers or producers.”35 Only such ability to decide separates Richter’s paintings from the dreaded “proliferating productivity”— “to see that one can come to an assessment, that one can see what is better and what is worse.”36 The act that Richter juxtaposes to chance because in it, rightness is constituted, is judgment: “to form judgments, prejudices even, to assign values and avoid running wild.”37 If this succeeds,

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then painting— thus the broad context— is a match for the challenges posed by the contemporary situation; it can assert its binding power not despite, but precisely because of its independence from established standards and criteria. Rightness: commensurability as communicability But what is this commensurability or binding power that is declared to be involved in the ability to distinguish between good and bad? For Richter, the insistence on the commensurability of a picture means, in general, that the picture must be able to communicate. This is not an accidental feature one might or might not consider as a painter, but is constitutive of one’s very activity: “The first impulse towards painting, or towards art in general, stems from the need to communicate,”38 which is driven by a “desire to move beyond the private. To go out into the public.”39 We address the latter thought later on, and for now ask what it is that is said to be communicated here, what is meant by the idea that form communicates. For pictures “claim nothing after all— they make no statement, so they can’t fool us.”40 But forms do communicate with other forms. And they do it such that rightness simultaneously concerns the relations between the forms in the picture and the relations between the picture and its context. Richter explicitly adheres to the notion that rightness as the internal coherence of a form stands in no opposition to its external communicability; on the contrary, both are one and the same thing: communicability determines form as the central motivation not only behind it— “the first impulse [ . . . ] stems from the need to communicate”— but also at the conceptual core of its constitution. Before anything else, this simply means that form within its practical context— that is, as it interacts with other forms, in the process of painting or between the painter and the audience— either does or does not function, and either is or is not successful in terms of its communicability. Rightness: communicability as connectivity Apparently the communicability of form consists in its aforementioned connectivity,41 that is, in the fact that it enables a further production of form and the chain of reactions can be continued. With paintings, this can take the shape of the painter himself continuing the chain (in the case of an intermediary step in production), or a different painter drawing on the work of the first, or even— and this is what Richter appears

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Fig. 7. Gerhard Richter, Drawing I (Zeichnung I), 2005. Graphite on paper. CR 2005.

to have in mind most often— a viewer reacting with associations, thoughts, and ideas. While these reactions should not be avoided, the picture is not to contain them by means of semiotic (conventionally linguistic, symbolic, or iconographic) encoding as a legible message— in the same way that in tennis, one’s opponent’s shot is not to be decoded in search of what might be expressed by it, but is to be answered with a counter shot.42 At the same time, Richter’s repudiation of expressive and representational models in no way contradicts the assumption that painterly form can be reacted to with imaginative or intellectual form. “The idea as a point of departure for the picture: that’s illustration. Conversely, acting and reacting in the absence of

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an idea leads to forms that can be named and explained, and thus generates the idea.”43 Here an idea is a form in its own right insofar as it constitutes a reaction to another form and— in a different medium— possesses the same distinction and reality as this other form. But what matters for our purposes is simply that rightness is a pragmatic category that refers, roughly, to a functionally determined ability to carry on within a shared context of reaction-based relations. These relations constitute what we commonly call a practice; what Wittgenstein explores under the name of “language-game”44 or, more appropriate to Richter perhaps, “judgment game”;45 or what in its broadest, art-specific manifestation constitutes the art world as characterized by Danto. In the end, the world itself is nothing more than the largest practical context connecting all other contexts, the ultimate measure at work in every performance of a form. Rightness: form and the world The pragmatic character of rightness is especially apparent in the contrast between the rightness of the painting and the rightness of the world. Again and again, Richter returns to the idea that “the things that surround us are mostly true, right or even beautiful,”46 whereas artistic form is subject to the alternative of being either a success or a failure. Form in the world is neither more distinct, nor more real, nor more important than pictorial form— but it is infallible. This is equally true for figurative and for abstract pictures since both are based on the same mimetic process: RICHTER: Both types of pictures, that is, the nonfigurative and the figurative, follow the same model: reality. Figurative pictures adopt a snippet of reality on a one-to-one basis, so to speak, while abstract ones adopt more of the “operation” of taking an actual look at something and thus the proportions of color and structure, all of the many elements that come together to make the sight that is viewed. Just how coherent each of the real snippets is can be seen as soon as we reproduce such a scene— then everything suddenly looks wrong. An abstract picture must therefore have fundamentally the same rightness and coherence as any real sight. WILMES: Rightness? RICHTER: I think that is the right word for this fascinating fact, namely that every arbitrary sight with which reality reveals itself is always right. And that every picture that we produce of it is almost always wrong. And only with a

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great deal of artistry can we succeed in producing a picture that is reasonably attractive enough that it might be right and therefore good.47

A snippet of “reality” as such, however it is chosen, is encountered by us without fail within the contexts of the world, where it is fixed through pragmatic determinations that intersect in a number of ways. Even extremely improbable events experienced as a break with the world are still a part of it, and obtain their distinction from their contexts. If they were not embedded in such a way, we would no longer be dealing with something. Because this embeddedness belongs irreducibly to whatever it is we are dealing with, Richter can say that “any blot, by nature, is perfectly right.”48 Right, that is, insofar as it is subject to contextual determination, “by nature” presumably meaning in a relation with things as they are.49 The blot loses its rightness and turns arbitrary as soon as it is deprived of this determination, no longer held by its context. From this it follows that the painterly form, which gets added to the world as a novelty rather than always already being encountered within its contexts, has no distinction unless it constitutes a context of its own. As much as form reacts to a given, it must itself produce the conditions under which it can be discerned, deemed right, and accepted. With every form a full, novel setting is introduced; the established judgment game and, with it, the entire world in that specific instance is transformed, realigned, and internally rendered “coherent” in an unforeseeable way. Only in such transformation of the whole does the new form connect to the previous one and, in turn, constitute its own connectivity for subsequent forms. Thus, the rightness of reaction is not a fit with a preestablished measure of the world, but to match the world is to transform it— in a singular relation, produced each time, between form and world. Only once this relation is successfully established is form in tune with its contexts and determined by these contexts— the same way, Richter claims, as the snippets of reality are. Because a form cannot adopt its context but must produce it, any simple copying of the world is out of the question. In fact, form possesses connectivity precisely because it doesn’t reflect the world: “My work has so much to do with reality that I want it to have a similar exactness. That excludes painting in imitation.”50 Rightness: basic commensurability This connectivity is a precarious, two-sided issue for Richter. On the one hand, participation in

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one’s contexts is always already established, such that transforming the world can only be understood as a way of coinciding with it. Thus Richter’s note from the opening: “I see no sense in doing anything different. I never do see any sense. I think that one always does what is being done anyway (even when making something new), and that one is always making something new.” Newness appears strictly tied to the concept of one’s own time: “Every word, every line, every thought is prompted by the time we live in, with all its circumstances, its ties, its efforts, its past and present. It is impossible to act or think independently and arbitrarily.”51 We cannot resist being determined by our time because we are unable to claim a standpoint beyond it, the world as the totality of our contexts is not something we can encounter from an outside. On the other hand, the same participation in our contexts is a matter of right or wrong, success or failure, the transformation of the world can be achieved or missed. Failure occurs when form is arbitrary in the way described— that is, when it falls short of the required rightness, “coherence,” and “exactness”52 in its relation to its context. Here we recall that the thought of form matching its context does not collide with the thought of form transforming its context, but transformation is the way the matching is achieved. So we do not presume some established standard with which rightness must comply, but only note that rightness ultimately involves an accordance with the full context, whereas a failure in rightness must stand at odds with this context. But how are the two sides compatible? Perhaps we can say that on the first, basic level, in order for art to be possible at all, it must take part in its own time, the conditions of which— and this is the second level— then facilitate good or bad, right or wrong art. Only a basic participation in the time renders the distinction between good and bad possible in the first place; beyond such participation, there is only arbitrariness, and the distinction is rendered pointless— a thought that can draw support, for example, from Donald Davidson’s critique of skepticism, according to which we must assume that most of our judgments about the world are true, since otherwise the category of truth, and the true/false distinction, would have no meaning to begin with.53 As Wittgenstein condenses the thought, “In order to err, one must already judge in conformity with humanity.”54 Without basic commensurability in a painter’s communication with his time, there would not be anything on which to base decisions

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about rightness. Accordingly, a compatibility between the two sides has to draw a line between such painting that is distinctively good or bad— or in any case worthy of critique— and such other painting whose arbitrariness does not meet even the basic requirements of commensurability needed to be brought in the focus of that distinction. Generally speaking, however, Richter is interested not in what separates but in what connects us, which is why his emphasis on the ability to decide about the success or failure of a picture (the assumption of the aforementioned basic commensurability) is not about claiming that we agree in every such instance, or to what extent, but seeks to establish that such agreement is a possibility at all, that it is generally possible: “My support comes from the certainty that painting [ . . . ] has distinguishable, specific qualities of its own. For example, if a number of people are looking at a row of paintings and most of them agree as to which are the best and worst of the set, then that confirms to me that we all possess this as an ability— to recognize quality and to understand painting.”55 Judging: underivability and rightness As in the tension between mimesis and performance, in this second tension, between underivability and rightness, the opposing dimensions are equally required for form. Yet it is so far unclear how they can be integrated and how form emerges from such integration. How, specifically, is the reconception brought about that transforms the metaphysical alternative between underivability and rightness? I argue that this reconception is accomplished through judgment, an operation that on its pragmatist account links underivability with rightness such that the latter structurally presupposes the former.56 Richter’s understanding of judgment first distinguishes itself in that judgment, as we saw, corresponds with chance in the production of form. Chance derives from casus and is the given each time— that which falls to us (Zufall), that which is the case (Fall). The case is never good as it is: it makes the demand that something be done with it— it calls for work, transformation, decision. Just as a legal case has to be decided, Richter puts chance up for decision in the process of painting: it is that which must be decided at every point. (This completes the structural description of reaction provided earlier, according to which the latter— leaving behind the paradigm of representation— transforms

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the given each time into something else.) As the concept of chance presents us with an alternative of several (but at minimum, two) operations— a painting can be continued like this or like that— for Richter, the painterly act consists of bringing this ambiguity to an end and thus constituting the distinction that lies in this decision. We therefore need to further qualify our description of form as a singular articulation and difference: a form emerges wherever we make a distinction— that is, decide between possibilities. The production of rightness, Richter emphasizes, is an evaluative operation that excludes other possibilities.57 Form’s indifference to technique and medium To keep drawing a line in this or that way, to pull a squeegee till here or till there, to paint a section blue or red— from the initial decision for a certain format, motif, and technique to the microstructure of the picture’s surface, there is nothing about a picture that is not determined by acts of deciding like these. In short: deciding is distinction, and where there has been no decision, there is nothing to see. Thus, for Richter, “the artist’s productive act” proper is not the production of form as a technical procedure involving, say, the handling of color, but only the act of deciding: “Here, then, it’s more a question of being able to decide than to make something.”58 Or, in more detail: “The artist’s productive act cannot be negated. It’s just that it has nothing to do with the talent of ‘making by hand,’ only with the capacity to see and to decide what is to be made visible. How that then gets fabricated has nothing to do with art or with artistic abilities.”59 What can be taken as a programmatic abolition of the “painterly,” the virtuoso, or the auratic-authentic is but an implication of the structural indifference of form, understood as distinction, toward both technique and medium, an indifference due to which production and reception of a picture equally count as acts of form.60 It is the latter contrast, between the centrality of the decision performed in the act of seeing and the marginality of its technical or medial articulation, that establishes the differential concept of form for painting and that is condensed for Richter above all in the thought of the readymade. The readymade’s production consists in the act of identifying a found object as form, whereby the object is transformed into art without physical alteration, only through an act of taking-as or seeing-as. “That’s why Duchamp is so important: after all, his readymade is

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nothing but an act that foregrounds the basic skill at the heart of the matter: to be able to see something.”61 Seeing-as and seeing-in According to Wittgenstein, seeing-as refers to the structure of a simple distinction in which something is determinately seen as something and not something else— say, the duck/rabbit drawing is seen as a drawing of a duck and not of a rabbit.62 Since seeing-as (seeing something as something), as opposed to simply seeing (seeing something) involves an alternative (mutually independent views or aspects of the drawing), the distinction performed here directly manifests choice and decision— the basic structure of the act of judgment. Such act is the new form (duck) that reacts to the old form (duck/rabbit) by deciding it, and an aspect is a conceptually distinctive way of doing so; a way of establishing the form as a determinate something by taking it to work toward a specific purpose. Just as Wittgenstein’s drawing contains no information about the way it is to be taken, is not inherently determined in any way, for Richter the readymade demonstrates the abolition of essence from the work, the artistic distinction of which can only be determined pragmatically.63 What anything is is never preestablished; it can only be established by seeing it in a certain way— according to the purpose toward which the new form is supposed to make a difference within the respective context of reactions.64 At any point, seeing and painting can carry on this way or that way, and only in the reaction to this alternativity is the rightness produced that constitutes the determinate difference Richter calls form. The concept of seeing-as manifests the mimetic-performative double articulation of form by rendering the act of seeing constitutive of that which one sees, a thought we best understand when we consider an account that denies it. For Richard Wollheim, seeing-as is inadequate for describing art, because the concept does not directly express the specific double character of a picture— its tension between performance and mimesis. Wollheim therefore replaces seeing-as with seeing-in: a picture is not seen as a child, but rather a child is seen in the picture or on its surface. Or, as Martin Seel says, “I see something in something that I do not see as that which I see in it.”65 Seeing-in distinguishes between performance and mimesis, and simultaneously focuses on both— and thus accomplishes precisely what Richter calls the “tension” and

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“interpenetration” of the moments. But this does not mean that, as Wollheim argues, seeing-as is somehow replaced with seeing-in; rather, the act of the reaction (seeing-as) is simply determined further through the recognition of a referential relation (seeing-in). Seeingas and seeing-in do not exclude one another, they presuppose one another. Seeing-as is about pragmatics, the relation between the reaction and that to which it reacts. Seeing-in is about depiction, the relation between performance and mimesis in the reaction. For seeing-in to occur, something must always already be seen as a picture.66 The choice or decision about what is seen in the picture depends entirely on the decision about what the picture is seen as. For only by virtue of what and how the picture depicts does the picture fulfill its pragmatic function. The analysis of seeing-in thus demonstrates how the depictive dimension supports the pragmatic dimension. They are not symmetrical, for while the function depends on depiction for its fulfillment, depiction— this is what it means to replace a representational model with a model of reaction— serves the sole purpose of fulfilling the function. Form is not decided in two acts of seeing, but in a single act; reaction and the mimetic-performative substrate are one.67 Form as decision of chance Just as the readymade is a thing encountered through contingency— Duchamp says “indifference”68— or, indeed, an accident or coincidence that gets decided into form and endowed with rightness or coherence, we can say about Richter’s process that he lets something emerge or be encountered by chance, which thus becomes available as new material, as it were, and is brought into the right form through a discriminating act. “These accidents are only useful because they’ve been worked out— that means [ . . . ] brought into a form.”69 Thus the production of form presents itself as a two-stage procedure: first randomized production, then critical selection. The first (transgressive) stage is determined by aleatorics, while the second (commensurating) stage is determined by decision— the judgment that filters chance according to arbitrary and nonarbitrary elements. An entanglement of the stages is shown, for example, in the following asyndeton that in its hybridity alternates underivability and commensurability: “painting [ . . . ] aimless [ . . . ] right, logical, perfect and incomprehensible.”70 The tension at work in this formulation ultimately says one thing: in each form, chance

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is decided into rightness. For the production of 4900 Colours, the random generator produces an abundance of combinations from which Richter then chooses; with the large abstract paintings, the pull of the squeegee is aleatoric and the scraping and overpainting is the selection; for the art book War Cut, Richter selects from arbitrary combinations of one picture detail and one text fragment, respectively, as demanded by the rightness that is his goal.71 From this results as the structure of the reaction: what is right (the “selected” elements) is allowed to remain, while what is arbitrary (the “deselected” elements) gets overpainted, replaced with a new accident. The reaction is therefore— in accordance with Richter’s abandonment of the categories of invention and creativity, and generally the thetical— not a positive creation of new articulation, but a simple allowing to remain of what happens to fit. While all deviance and transgression of the status quo is left to chance, certain elements are allowed to remain each time, and the work as a whole becomes less arbitrary. Now, the question of whether the act of judgment proper consists in the distinction between what remains and what gets erased or in the act of a continuation that erases as it moves ahead— where what remains is effectively absorbed into the work’s formal inventory— cannot meaningfully be posed within the pragmatist framework developed by Richter. Separating the two things would involve understanding the act of making a distinction as a premise and, as it were, instruction for its painterly enactment— and we have seen that such instruction is precisely what Richter most vehemently denies, and in opposition to which he conceives form as a unity of effector, act of effecting, and effect. In a framework where form counts as form only as it makes a functional difference, there is no room for a splitting of judgment into the components “decision” and “implementation.” There is only one act that reacts to the situation: the decisive act of erasing and allowing to remain. Thus each reaction— mediated through a renewed use of chance involved in it— produces a situation for another reaction that connects to it. Evolution of form The process makes do with a simple binary structure: “Picture-making consists of a multitude of Yes decisions and No decisions, with a Yes decision at the end.”72 A more detailed description casts this process as a funnel-shaped reduction in contingency, with the picture manifesting maximum contingency at

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the outset. Because commensurability is established only by reaction, how one begins does not really matter; what is important is merely that one begins and produces the first situation, in response to which a reaction can then take place. “Every beginning is easy”73 and “it all starts out easy and unspecific”74— these are Richter’s formulas that free the beginning from its mythical guises as a problem, threshold, or even trauma by declaring it to be weightless, incidental, and important only according to its mere taking place. “Apart from a vague idea that indicates a direction for me, it almost does not matter how and with which color I put something on the white canvas. After that, the process becomes progressively less free.”75 The freedom of the beginning opens up a scale of always smaller degrees of freedom— each degree a separate act of form and decision— that corresponds to a decreasing arbitrariness of the picture’s form as a whole: “Gradually a context starts to take shape, and this has a coherence that is the utter opposite of arbitrariness.”76 This seems an almost literal endorsement of Niklas Luhmann’s analysis of the “small-scale evolution of the individual work,” which occurs through a two-stage process of random production and critical selection: “The first distinction, the one from which the artist starts out, [ . . . ] can only occur spontaneously— even though it implies a decision concerning the work’s type (whether it is to be a poem, a fugue, or a glass window) and perhaps an idea in the artist’s mind. Any further decision tightens the work, orienting itself toward what is already there, specifying the unoccupied sides of already established forms and restricting the freedom of further decisions. Once the distinctions [ . . . ] relate to one another recursively, what occurs is precisely what we expect from evolution: the artwork finds stability within itself.”77 But when is the work finished, the process complete? Like the earlier steps, the conclusion is not a thetical act. Richter considers it reached simply when there is nothing left to correct— that is, when the picture has ceased to be a situation for production and has turned into a situation for viewing. Here is Richter’s most recent description of the process in which all conceptual elements come together: RICHTER: When I first approach a canvas [ . . . ] I can smear anything I want on it. Then there is a condition I must react to by changing it or destroying it. There’s no concept. It’s not like a figurative painting with a template. Something happens spontaneously. Not by itself, but without plan or reason. [ . . . ]

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BUCHLOH: You paint without a plan but you know exactly when it’s right. So what’s the correlation between planlessness and making the judgment: “Now it’s a painting”? RICHTER: Each step forward is more difficult and I feel less and less free until I conclude there’s nothing left to do. When, according to my standard, nothing is wrong anymore, then I stop. Then it’s good. BUCHLOH: And what’s right and wrong? The wrong consciousness, material or process? RICHTER: It just doesn’t look good. Then it’s wrong. BUCHLOH: Can we dig deeper than looking good or bad? RICHTER: It’s extremely difficult. We’re all completely equal here. The producer and consumer, artist and observer, both must have one quality: to be able to see if it’s good or not. To make that judgment.78

Nonteleological process On the one hand, the fact that each act is underivable from the previous acts— the situation to which it reacts— ensures an independence of the process from preestablished content or criteria, and especially from teleological premises attached to those. In Richter’s emphasis that at issue is not the implementation of a “blueprint” or “template” but the fact that one must “react,” we once more see a quasi-programmatic replacement of representation with reaction. The final result is unforeseeable at the beginning; the process can never get ahead of itself, for its course is decided anew at every point. On the other hand, there is an evolution of the process as a whole— a progression toward “coherence” that corresponds to increased complexity: “I still have to get all that into the right context; a context that gets progressively harder the more advanced a picture is.”79 The judgment determining the process— its conception provides a positive and synthetic formulation of what is negatively manifest as the abolition of invention and method— is neither principled authorization nor unconstrained position, neither derivation nor arbitrariness. All we can say about judgment is that it grounds form through rightness. Richter’s falling silent on this point by no means reflects an inarticulateness

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or unwillingness to respond on his part, but is owed to the fact that judgment, by virtue of its underivability, cannot be explained further. Buchloh’s insistence (“And what’s right and wrong? The wrong consciousness, material or process?”) loses sight of the fact that formal rightness cannot draw for its authorization on something else, which is to say that “right” and “wrong” not only do not need further explanation or authorization, but, in fact, cannot allow for it if they are to be tenable as formal criteria. This is what Richter’s second tension reveals: that form can have rightness only by virtue of its underivability.80 Structure of connecting using the example of Cage Richter’s pragmatist conception of form thus integrates an emphasis on the underivability of art by established standards and criteria with an emphasis on its commensurability, and it does so by casting form simultaneously as letting and positing, chance and intervention, contingency and rightness. But what does this mean for the way Richter paints? To examine more closely how the deciding of chance proceeds— a process in which one form connects to another— let us look at Cage, Richter’s six-part series of abstract paintings (squares, the sides of which extend almost 3 meters) from 2006. These pictures lend themselves as an example not only due to their extreme (even by Richter’s standards) formal complexity and density, but also because the series has been made accessible to the viewer to an unusual extent through an associated book. Here, the microstructure of each of the paintings can be studied with the aid of detailed, full-size photographs. There is also a series of nine to ten dated photographs documenting preliminary stages or phases of each painting’s production process.81 These photos of discrete phases can be used by our analysis to stand in for the individual acts of form or decision that make up the process. At the same time, we take them to constitute scenarios of chance to be put to a decision, the situation that serves the subsequent act as a trigger. Naturally, we do not aim at an exhaustive account of the painterly chain of reactions, but focus on a series of contingently chosen snapshots from that chain, while we assume that the process could in fact be dissected into any number of such acts. Right away, we are struck by what is rather dramatically apparent in the connecting of the phases: the acts of form do not build constructively off each other. Reference of a phase to the one preceding it is neither

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reinforcing nor dialectic; already established articulations or elements are neither strengthened or developed further (the elaboration of a contour, the taking up of a proportion or color, the continuation of a movement, and so on), nor balanced or removed (the counteracting of light with dark, the intentional elimination of a line, and so on). What instead determines the connecting is reaction, the process of which we will now explore further by looking at the poetics of Cage in at least two ways: through a morphological as well as a pragmatic description of the change of phase. Morphological description of phase 1: destruction Every phase, Richter says, is a “destruction”82 of the previous one, which is why the series thwarts elements, motifs, and themes instead of developing them. To be sure, the painter must posit something at the outset to

Fig. 8. Gerhard Richter, Cage 5, 2006. Oil on canvas. Tate Modern, London; long-term

loan from a private collection. CR 897-5.

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establish a starting point, but everything else takes the shape of a series of structurally privative cancellations: “The only paradoxical thing is that I always set out with the intention of getting a closed picture [ . . . ] and then go to great lengths to destroy that intention, bit by bit, almost against my will. Until the picture is finished and has nothing left but openness.”83 This openness is but the potentiated allusive density of the mimetic substrate— we saw, for example, that the blurred picture is “more open”— produced through the abolishing of fixations obtained by reductive work (“I want to destroy”),84 a sharply articulatory and critically disruptive act. The new phase scrapes and scratches away, cuts and crushes, covers and obliterates, fragments and selects the formal inventory of the previous phase, and in every removal there lies, corresponding to the already discussed gestural reduction, an escalation of the mimetic-performative power of presentation: “Scraping off. For about a year now, I have been unable to do anything in my painting but scrape off, pile on and then remove again. In this process I don’t actually reveal what was beneath. [ . . . ] The process of applying, destroying and layering serves only to achieve a more varied technical repertoire in picturemaking.”85 The formula is thus: differentiation and complexification through reduction and destruction, or, more succinctly, “through destruction to construction.”86 As established by our discussion, form is neither temporally nor spatially continuous with that on which it draws; rather, it is an original production of temporality and spatiality each time— that is, a beginning where no matrix of a temporally defined process or spatially defined substrate holds together the phases, but the latter are merely reactively connected through the morphological activity as such. Storr, too, confirms that for Richter it is obliteration itself that sustains new form— a positive exploitation of the negativity gained by critical destruction: “With every cancellation, erasure, exclusion or suppression of an image another has come to the surface, even if it is only the positive manifestation of a negative reflex, the affirmation of the power to annul— and Richter has known, as no other artist of his generation, how to make that power felt.”87 Morphological description of phase 2: spreading It appears plausible to assume that the finished Cage pictures owe their mimetic and performative richness in large part to this process. If every form

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did constructively continue the previous one, this would lead to a homogeneity in the work’s formal inventory, which could also be described as an assimilation of all of the phases by the most recent in the series, which in turn would mean that the layering as such would barely contain internal tension. But by focusing on the opposite— emphasizing the formal proper value of each phase and a maximum separation between the phases— Richter spreads the material of form into a chord with considerable depth. In such spreading, the layers of paint, through the precision of their relating to each other, sharply contrast with one another— as is the case in Cage 4, for example, where the red penetrates powerfully through the gray without in any way bleeding into it.88 Storr captures this well: Depending on the quantity, consistency, and placement of the paint and the degree of pressure employed, the oily material will stick to, and for the most part conceal, the layer beneath with a uniform smoothness, mix with the preceding layer causing streaks and blooming chromatic and tonal fusions, fail to stick and leave little cavities and canyons that offer an unimpeded glimpse of the previous strata of paint such that the chromatic and tonal contrasts of each in combination with the others become a kind of vertical pointillism that the eye trips and caroms off as it descends toward the last homogeneous coat that is visible at the bottom, bedazzled along the way by clashing hot spots of vermillion and emerald, sapphire and orange, lavender and yellow embedded in sedimentary white, black and grey. The terminology is geological because the effects are.89

But we can describe even more precisely what happens formally in Cage. Every phase draws on the previous one by cutting or reusing it in places neither anticipated nor suggested by it. Which portion of the old phase will persist in the new is unforeseeable and not describable in already available terms; it is up to the complementarity of chance and decision. But because something always persists, the level of complexity increases as one goes through the series, something that can be observed in all six series. Not only is no phase derived from the previous one, but neither is the process as a whole derived from the beginning or the end; neither does the beginning already contain the germ of the series nor is the series directed toward and fulfilled by the end. If we follow Richter’s already quoted remarks, completion is a boundary of maximum complexity; it is reached once

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nothing more can be added— which must be determined in a final judgment. Morphological description of phase 3: exuberance and restriction That the unity marking completion is maximally complex is but one of the central dichotomies in the morphology of Cage. The other dichotomy is that of exuberance and restriction, which allows the structurally reductive character of Richter’s practice to be described in yet another way. Let us look first at exuberance. Because every phase involves a recasting of form that is independent of the preceding one, form is deposited in layers— but in such a way that complexity is neither a simple matter of adding layer upon layer nor merely the layers’ compression through an overlaying of all the phases on the same piece of canvas. Rather, we can also observe a mutual strengthening, if not potentiation, of the layers. As every phase takes up, incorporates, and reuses the previous ones, it stands in mutual resonance with them, as the discussion of mimetic potentiation has prepared us to understand. If for Richter the act of form (especially in abstract painting) is already in itself a bundling and heightening of a mimetic substrate, then we can extrapolate and use this same premise to account for the complexity of the phases in accordance with their quantity. Restriction then relates to such fullness and exuberance as follows: As each layer is vivisected, as it were, and reduced by the others, degraded to material for further acts of form and tautly restricted in what it is allowed to express, the layers serve, in a sense, to tightly corset one another. The picture acts as a choke point in which the phases or layers of form intersect and amplify, contract and densify each other until they reach some measure of grayness, which is in fact encountered to a substantial degree in the Cage pictures— less so in Cage 1 and 6; most so in 3. To be sure, this is not a dead or indifferent gray, but one that contains within itself the fullness of the potentiated activity of form, highly distinct in each instance— latently swelling in Cage 1, smeared thickly in 2, cemented over in 3, making a harsh crust in 4, seeping into the texture in 5, and acting as a color among colors in 6. Such gray arises as the density of synapses in the interconnections between the layers appears to exceed again and again the resolution into colors, or perhaps because the lines of intersection that separate and connect the layers of form at different levels contract in places to such a fine web that almost

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nothing can be perceived between the lines: intimations, nuances, premonitions, and reflexes, the work of which never stabilizes but instead must traverse an indefinite rerouting through constantly changing resonances— a rerouting that Richter already practices in his Inpainting pictures that consist entirely of loops of paint. Only corseting and graying, the Cage pictures seem to say, bring such density within reach. Together, for example, with Claude Monet’s paintings of water lilies or Mark Bradford’s large-scale works from after the turn of the century,90 Richter’s late abstract canvases are part of a small family of paintings that combine maximum figurative and gestural reduction with maximum mimetic emphasis. They belong to a late style in which, as in Beethoven’s late quartets or Hölderlin’s last hymns, extreme restriction becomes a condition of possibility for an otherwise unmatched compression and fullness. Richter joins a tradition that so tightly merges the reductive and the productive activity that both unfold their effect only through one another. Pragmatic description of phase 1: anamnesis There is yet another way in which Cage— and, indeed, the entire squeegee-based approach— is perhaps not only exemplary for Richter’s work as a whole, but also and more specifically expressive of the exuberance and restriction of a late style. Just as, for instance, the repertoire of poetic forms convened in Goethe’s Faust II reflects a large portion of the Western history of meter and genre,91 Richter’s abstract paintings— according to an intuition by Buchloh— might be taken to echo the history of abstraction. This is suggested by their “deeply anamnestic character, where these [pictures] seem, above all, to work through the history of abstraction itself: strategy by strategy, technique by technique, paradigm by paradigm. Thus, the lost history of (abstract) painting itself becomes an object and a process of painterly anamnesis, and all of the prohibitions that modernism had imposed on painting (no expression, no gesture, no depiction, no reference, no pathos, no experience of nature, no spirituality, no intoxication, no sublimation, no seduction) are inspected here anew.”92 If we map this layered appropriation of tradition onto the passage through the phases of Cage, we see with each phase a greater reduction in expressivity— of proportions, of colors, of the gestural, of dynamic imbalance, and of the pull that large-scale arrangements are able to generate. At the same time, however, we also see a paradoxical revi-

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sion of all of these prohibitions through an accumulation of mimetic reference, on the one hand, and a potentiation of performative power, on the other, amounting to a maximization of the achievement of artistic form that results from the escalation of both dimensions through one another. Pragmatic description of phase 2: similarity of way But what is the order or framework of such anamnesis? How does the picture communicate the different aspects of the “lost history of painting”? First of all, the phases are layers deposited on top of each other; but their order— in a sense different from that of, say, geology— is determined neither spatially nor temporally, but through the succession of reactions, and it is based not in a logical synthesis but in a pragmatics. There is no framework that binds the succession of phases to a common unity, essence or purpose— only the process that produces it. And there is no substrate of sensory similarities with a history of painting that might serve to guide the layering. However, the fact that mimesis in Richter’s sense operates conventionally and pragmatically does not dismiss Leonardo’s model of sensory similarities— at best it expands it and adds precision to it. A glance at Buchloh’s list of historical prohibitions— gestural, seductive, intoxicating, and so on— shows that they all refer to a picture’s sensory features. But those features are not gestural, seductive, or intoxicating in themselves; what a feature is must be determined by what it does in a particular context. This is not to say that a feature’s sensory distinction discloses its context, but it is in turn the context that constitutes the sensory distinction, as only within it can the feature be decided according to right and wrong. Thus the similarity, in which the layered phases communicate with the world and Richter’s abstract pictures work through the history of painting, is primarily a similarity of how things are done, and not one based on features. Nothing in such a picture must look like that to which it mimetically refers. While this reference is based on similarity, the latter is first of all a similarity of process— a quasi-adverbial similarity based on how rather than what. It lies in the way the acts react to each other.93 This may explain why, looking at the compression of Cage, it seems impossible for its mimetic inventory to be rendered sensually unambiguous. That inventory, however, is not therefore nonsensual, but it consists of an active relating among all the elements— or as

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we can now say: a relating not based on, but rather generating their mimetic quality. Pragmatic description of phase 3: expansion of formal inventory Underivability and rightness converge in the individual phase insofar as the latter must refer to the framework of the judgment game determined through previous phases and yet remain underivable from these phases— which constitutes a distinction that claims rightness without recourse to standards or criteria. Form must bear novelty and communicability, singularity and connectivity, contingency and rightness, and it thus manifests the structure of déjà vu, which joins familiarity with surprise. To be sure, in any given instance, by performing more or less closely to the expectable, an act can be more or less innovative and surprising; but the phases in Richter’s Cage pictures take the greatest conceivable distance from the expectable. Every phase is a move positioned to dissolve the previous moves. The sensual articulation of form is completely absorbed by its pragmatic one. Certainly every phase must avail itself of the previous phases, but in so doing, it neither positively follows what is suggested or implied by those previous ones, nor subjects itself to a dialectics of negation, but rather— this is the spreading mentioned earlier— proceeds through thoroughly distant associations. As the new phase draws on the old one as a material resource, it manifests a transposition in which the elements of the old phase are functionally redeployed. A line that in context A divides a surface to create a particular proportion, in context B becomes the connection between two fields; a blue dominating the foreground is transformed into a shading of the background; a node in the surface structure breaks open and turns into a burst of color. Although this can at first be understood as a restrictive operation, in the very abruptness of each move’s editing of the previous one and the resulting opening of a distance bridged, the game is augmented by an entire spectrum of possibility— incomparably more than could be the case if each move were more closely connected to its predecessor. Richter drives the game along the outer edge of its viability, just barely sustaining its functionality, and is rewarded for the daring of his undertaking with the formal fullness that the game thus accrues. The scope of what the Cage paintings enable their spectator to do, think, and imagine is tremendously wide without being in the slightest bit arbitrary; their

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transgressive and innovative edge in no way competes, as Richter says, with their “exactness.” Pragmatic description of phase 4: phase change as resistance to ideology Finally, an observation that at least preliminarily promises to clear Richter of the perhaps expectable accusation of a dogmatism of the antidogmatic— the self-contradiction of a principled prohibition of principle— a question to which we will return at the end of this book. His reductive process replaces genealogical models in which the new grows out of the old through development, elaboration, and maturation, with an evolutionary model in which the new is always already emancipated from the old through a complementarity between chance and selection. As each phase draws on the extant phases in a distinction that doesn’t keep shared terms with that which it leaves behind, the picture can neither arrive at an objective or principle nor be based on the premise of one, for each of its phases suspends both those dependences, and, in fact, the entire approach manifests a permanent suspension of any type of dependence. Now what we can thus describe as the dogma-resistance of Richter’s conception seems not itself dogmatically applied, as it involves no claim to authority beyond his own practice. This practice is not one more ideology that demands universal implementation, it shows no ambition to present itself as a movement, school, creed, or any other association one can join. It presents itself strictly in Richter’s own practice— as the work on form and through form, which in itself does not carry a claim to implementation in other cases. The consistency with which he follows this practice, however, has the character of a pragmatist program. It extends from the heterogeneity of his motifs, painterly strategies, materials, and genres to the extreme interpretive openness of the individual works, and on to the microdynamics of his abstract pictures, driven by high-frequency shifts in orientation, high-resolution change. Overall, there is a sense in which Richter’s practice consists of nothing else but such pragmatics of change: as often and as unpredictably as possible.

IV

Eschatological Question: Form as Transformation Deficiency and redemption Richter’s third tension positions a painting between the dimensions of deficiency and redemption; between the need, pain, and terror to which it reacts, and that which is achieved in such reaction. This tension is eschatological, for it is concerned with a last thing— namely, the question of the extent to which painting, ultimately, is able to make a difference: What is achieved by form? Why painting? First, Richter’s position in a nutshell: “Form is all we have to help us cope with fundamentally chaotic facts and assaults. Formulating something is a great start. I trust form.”1 This passage and similar ones are expressive of a simple opposition on the basis of which the eschatological dimension unfolds, in which “the given, that which is; [ . . . ] the factual”2 is juxtaposed with its processing, transformation, or, to use Richter’s term, “formulation”3 in the artistic act. “The given” is not indifferent to the possibility of its transformation; rather, it carries a lack that calls for the latter. This means, more generally, that Richter diagnoses the world as we encounter it as insufficient, in need of transformation into form. Form is a response to the task posed by the deficiency of the world— a task we “have to come to terms with.”4 This belief can be extracted directly from Richter’s pragmatic concept of reaction insofar as it casts a succession of actions in terms of case and decision, chance and judgment. Just as a case requires a decision, “the given,” according to Richter, requires transformation into form in the act of decision. “We must always after all, no matter what it is that we 83

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encounter, give it a form, in order to be able to deal with it at all. For that which is real is so boundless and shapeless that we need to get a comprehensive grasp. And the more dramatic the events, the more important is form.”5 Regarding the motivation to paint the horror of the October cycle, Richter notes, “The doing [ . . . ] seeks to work this off— which I much prefer over doing nothing in response— when I am powerless.”6 A special challenge for our discussion of the third tension lies in the fact that Richter comments on it in rather sparse and tentative language, which means that here we can gather less from his own discourse than in the context of the other tensions; at the same time, our discussion has to rely more on language, because Richter’s eschatology of form is incomparably more difficult to demonstrate by direct observation of his works. (We will see, however, that we can achieve such an observation somewhat indirectly by making use of our discussion of tensions one and two.) Still, we hold that Richter’s notes and interviews provide sufficient evidence for a sustained discussion of the third tension. If, for example, “to formulate” seems to mean at once “to encounter,” “to come to terms with,” “to be able to deal with,” “to bring to fulfillment,” “to settle,”7 or “to cope with,”8 then, while this catalogue of meanings encompasses a wide semantic range, we can clearly identify the motif of redemption (Abgeltung) as common to all these meanings. According to its general provenance, the tension of deficiency and redemption derives, for example, from the opposition between sin and redemption in the Christian doctrine of salvation, or— if one thinks of eschatological models from philosophy of history— in the relation of a process, imperfect in each of its instances, to the fulfillment reached at its end. When we consider more specifically form itself, it appears— for example, in the context of figural interpretation— as the redemption of another form that refers to it as its counterpart, or, once more in Plato’s philosophy, as the eternal idea in which the transience of temporal appearances has its justification. These conceptions are metaphysical insofar as in them, redemption functions as a transcendent category— a final state reached by leaving behind the human world. They feature models of restitution insofar as such leaving behind is conceived either as the circular movement in which a state that one had intermittently abandoned is recuperated, or, more generally, as the definitive arrival at an

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original state. The mutual exclusion and hierarchy of the states is a precondition; it establishes the slope from which the model draws its dynamics and from which this dynamics draws its direction. Antimetaphysical rejections of the model, in turn, seek to show that such redemption is unobtainable; they derive a certain pathos and occasional delight from the conclusion that the singular and contingent can never be brought home from its arbitrariness. As Richter now replaces these models with a model of form as transformation, redemption is understood as no longer tending homeward, toward a conclusion, toward the same, but as turning into something else. The slope is preserved, but it appears altogether relocated to an immanence, such that it now extends between the world and the work, between an object and its artistic rendering, between form and form. Rather than dealing with a deficiency and its ultimate redemption, we are now dealing with a relatively “worse” and a relatively “better” state, which in turn can be redeemed to an even “better” state— we recall the succession of realities that in itself produces an enhancement— such that the circular movement appears replaced with a seriality in which the production of form arrives at a closure in each of its instances, while on the whole remaining open for always further transformation. Thus, whether a form is considered deficient or redemptive is not a matter of some inherent feature— the form’s essence— but is left to the context, which each time pragmatically determines whether something functions as a thing to be redeemed or as a redeeming thing. In Richter’s view, the specific achievement of artistic form in this context— but also, as we will see, its most important achievement overall— is to establish a participation and commonality that arises as form’s sensuous and pragmatic distinctions coincide. In order to understand Richter’s pragmatist reconception of the third tension, then, we must see how in his work the alternative of deficiency and redemption is turned into a balancing of these dimensions, and how from this he draws an eschatological argument about the purpose of form. We can summarize this third part as follows: Richter’s abandonment of the restitution model shifts the emphasis from a circularity of form to its seriality, from its ultimate and absolute meaning to its meaning each time. Deficiency: pain Within the realm of “the given,” Richter’s diagnosis distinguishes between two levels of deficiency: first, an affective

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and physical level of pain, hardship, and terror in the face of a deficient world; and second, a nonthematic or ontological level on which this being exposed, our relation to the world, itself appears deficient. As far as the first level is concerned, Richter’s description of it seems sweeping but clear: “Reality can be regarded as wholly inacceptable [ . . . ] as an unbroken string of cruelties. It pains, maltreats and kills us. It is unjust, pitiless, pointless and hopeless. We are at its mercy, and we are it.”9 One dimension of pain arises directly from the historical world: “Crime fills the world so absolutely that we could go insane out of sheer despair. (Not only in systems based on torture, and in concentration camps, in civilized countries, too, it goes on incessantly; the difference is merely quantitative. Every day, people are maltreated, raped, beaten, humiliated, tormented and murdered— cruel, inhuman, inconceivable.)”10 Another dimension of pain arises from the reflection about the world thus depicted, from the consciousness of a state of affairs in which “there is no central image of the world (world view) any longer: exposed as we are on some kind of garbage dump, with no center and no meaning, we must work out everything for ourselves, must cope with this progressive state of a previously unknown freedom.”11 These are carefully chosen buzzwords and clichés, in a mingling of existentialist and postmetaphysical motifs that keeps to the tone of distancing quotations— which, of course, is not to say that Richter here speaks with irony or, even less so, with cynicism. It means only that he considers such scenarios not to be the core of the problem for the painter, but rather sees them as discursive mediations, adaptations, linguistic epiphenomena of the primary fact of pain.12 Painting as reaction to pain is not in need of discursive mediation: “Art always had essentially to do with hardship, despair and helplessness”;13 it is a form of active, transformative “mourning” of the fact that “it is the way it is.”14 Such mourning keeps its distance from Freud’s conception of the work of mourning by being, as we might say, a more active undertaking. In Freud, mourning works toward making up for the negative accident of a break, a wound, a loss— toward restoring a normal state; it is thus an example of those metaphysical models that cast redemption as the recuperation of a lost state.15 Richter’s conception of mourning in turn is not an economical compensation model, but a model based on reaction and outdoing; it has nothing to do with restitution and everything to do with the fact that “the given,” showing the

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structure of a case rather than a wound, must be confronted in a noncircular and transformative way. To understand form as a part of the pragmatic context of actions reacting to one another implies that decision is reached not once and for all, but in the perspective of an open series of further redemptive acts. The point here is not to get rid of cathexis, the dependence on the object of mourning, but, on the contrary, to appropriate the object, through its transformation, for the first time.16 Deficiency: modal ontological slope Now, if painting is understood as a reaction to the deficiency of nonartistic reality, then what about those paintings by Richter that don’t seem to deal with deficiency in any obvious way? That is, paintings without a thematic connection to pain— the portrait, the landscape, but also the abstract picture, which programmatically evades thematic commitment. The more basic, ontological level in Richter’s diagnosis of deficiency concerns a lack in the way we encounter the world. Something about our being-in-the-world, to use Martin Heidegger’s term, is faulty and calls for work. Richter notes, first of all, the “despair prompted by the dilemma that our seeing lets us apprehend things, but at the same time restricts and partially precludes our apprehension of reality.”17 If one doesn’t want to take the sentence as an epistemological diagnosis of a problem— a Platonic platitude that would not occur in Richter— then it appears rather enigmatic: what is the difference between “apprehending things,” on the one hand, and “apprehension of reality,” on the other? Do the things we encounter not participate in reality? Somehow the normal seeing doesn’t already seem to render things in their ultimate reality. A chair, a person, a cloud— it appears that anything can turn into material for Richter once he happens to come across it: “Some photos lay around for years like something unredeemed, unfinished business.”18 In this sense, Richter’s Atlas, for example, can be regarded as a collection of items awaiting redemption, or, as has also been said, as an “anomic archive,”19 the disparate elements of which seek artistic elaboration in which they are brought to form. Here let us recall once more the advance in actuality of the latest reality over the other, antecedent realities, in reaction to which the latest reality arises: By virtue of its actuality or being at work, the form that is real at a given time manifests the modal primacy of

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the relatively highest reality. In comparison, everything else appears on an ontological slant of gradually diminishing reality. Richter’s thought here appears simple: If everything were all right with nonartistic reality, then we would obviously not be in need of art. Only because that reality, in each of its relevant moments— that is, in each of the moments in which it concerns us— presents itself as a case and a deficiency; it provokes our reaction. And only as it provokes our reaction do we enter into an exchange with it in the first place. (Such exchange requires no physical interference, as a pragmatic model includes any kind of engagement— an attention, a thought, a sentence— so long as it arises from the decision of an alternative.) It is then only because reality is deficient that art has to “make a picture of that which is going on.”20 This picture is all the more visible the greater its reality, which, in the morphological terms of the first tension, is nothing but its mimetic performance. Our discussion has shown that such a picture is not a duplication or confirmation of what we are already familiar with; it doesn’t bear the character of the additional, redundant, or merely optional. The point is, rather, with a stronger formulation by Richter, “to make a picture of that which is, to make it visible in the first place.”21 Painting is thus a way of seeing what cannot be seen otherwise, of rendering the world “visible in the first place.” The world— for the visibilization concerns not specific things here and there, but things on the whole, “that which is.” Relating both kinds of deficiency This second level in Richter’s diagnosis stands apart from the first insofar as the latter deals with pain and terror, whereas the former binds itself not to specific themes or motifs, but to an ontological gradient of reality that expands between, to one side, the “less real, or rather, deficient” (the case [Fall] or accident [Zufall] that solicits a reaction), and, to the other side, the “more real, or rather, sufficient” (the latest form each time). While the first deficiency concerns only a part of nonartistic reality— although perhaps the part that, as pars pro toto, sets the basic tonality for Richter’s whole diagnosis— the second deficiency concerns that reality at large. This second level of deficiency suffices as a rationale for painting. The necessity to counteract phenomena’s deficit in reality by giving them a form concerns not merely the thematically deficient aspects of the world, but all phenomena—

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including beautiful and perfect ones, such as the photograph that seems in harmony with itself— are “to be coped with in this way.”22 And this necessity concerns still more emphatically the pain and despair that Richter deems even more important to raise to the heightened reality of form than other aspects of reality that are deficient in a milder way. So then the deficiency thematically displayed in the picture is accidental with regard to the structure of its form insofar as everything in the world is deficient anyway, and there seems to be no need for this fact to be marked specifically. And yet, the marking sharpens the urgency as it exposes the conditions under which the modal deficiency of reality acquires special relevance. “Because here the subject matter is so important, the form too is all the more important. We simply need it more to be able to deal with the subject matter.”23 The formal achievement of a landscape painting or an abstract picture responds to the deficiency of reality structurally in the same way as the depiction of National Socialist themes (Bombers, Uncle Rudi), of the dead RAF-inmates (October cycle), or of the burning World Trade Center (September). Yet in these paintings the task to make things “visible in the first place” acquires an additional urgency, as more seems to be at stake than merely to capture things in their maximum reality. We will see why it is of particular importance to Richter to counter reality with form when this reality is terrifying. Mandate of art Before we pursue further form’s confrontation of deficiency, a remark seems in order. For doesn’t the model outlined here manifest a rather reductive understanding of art, according to which art is supposed to serve as a compensation for the deficits of nonartistic reality? Indeed, from an economical perspective, we are dealing with the balancing of a deficit, a transformation of a lack in reality into a coming to terms with it. And yet nothing seems more alien to Richter than a compensatory or therapeutic model: “Anyone who is in trouble or has a screw loose had better go to a psychiatrist, but not paint. Painting is strictly for the healthy.”24 A coming to terms with reality is only achievable by way of an excess and escalation of performance, identified in our discussion of the first tension as the specifics of painterly form. Accordingly, Richter’s own interpretation of the economy in question appears as a commitment to an eschatological program aimed at pushing reality to its

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achievable maximum each time, rather than keeping it at zero level. It is an exaggeration, perhaps, “to believe that one may transform humanity through painting. But when one is free of this passion then there is nothing left to do.”25 It is clear, then, that not only must art have something “to do” with the world and in the world— it has to carry out a functional task— but also that this doing is an outdoing that always already goes beyond said zero level where form would align with a given status quo. Thus the traditional restitution model appears replaced not with a compensation model, but with a transformation and transgression model. Only from here can we recognize the full extent of the tension in which Richter positions his work with the world. On the one hand, painting is rendered impossible in an instant once ideological, thematic, or stylistic presuppositions— the established norms, rules, patterns that determine the status quo— furnish it with a mandate. On the other hand, Richter disapproves of the slogan art for art’s sake 26 because for him a painting that doesn’t aim to transform the world would be inconceivable and in fact impossible to justify. Richter seeks to functionally embed painting in the world, for if it didn’t fulfill a particular exigency each time, didn’t play a role in the economy of human purposes, then it could also not be about anything, it could bear no stakes, no relevance whatsoever.27 And if this were the case, then one wouldn’t even ever start making art, and if one nevertheless tried, the outcome would be utterly arbitrary. Now, of course, these perspectives don’t have to be conceived as conflicting; it is possible to conceive of a functional mandate bound to a purpose each time that remains free from a principled or metaphysical mandate— or, to put this in the discussion of the second tension, Richter submits his production to the criterion of underivable rightness. Only if we compare both sides in such a way that the rejection of a mandate appears in direct competition with the requirement of a mandate do they appear irreconcilable. But if, instead, we understand the rejection of presuppositions as a structural condition that painting needs to fulfill in order to be able to go about its functional mandate in the first place, then there is no problem with the integration of the sides. In fact, it is precisely the impossibility of ideologically committing Richter’s paintings that allows for something to be at stake in them and unleashes their transformative power: “Art can be truly relevant only if it is free of this direct mandate.”28 Obvi-

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ously, Richter’s dispensing with principledness can be understood as a contemporary interpretation of the aesthetic difference by virtue of which traditional aesthetics declares art exempt from a commitment to external purposes. But this comes with the particular twist demanded by pragmatist premises that art, precisely as it is formally bound to a purpose, must refuse to bind itself to principled purposes. Only the fact that artistic form— unlike the kinds of innovation produced in most other practices— is not at the service of this or that program, but instead manifests something like a pure innovation, constitutes form’s emphatic belonging to the context of the world and— to finally return to our discussion— its productive confrontation of deficiency. Assimilation of deficiency through form The relation between deficiency and form is complex, for only on the one hand does it concern the nonartistic reality in reaction to which formal production gets triggered and established as a further link of the chain. On the other hand, however, the relation concerns just as much the reality of form itself— its immanent structure made up of the components mimesis and performance— such that form as a whole carries within it the deficiency insofar as it mimetically assimilates it, binds it, and, in the activity of such mimesis, transforms it into a new reality. Herein, the theme- or motif-based variant of deficiency (which is sometimes at issue) specifically corresponds to the mimetic component, for the point is to depict something— whereby mimesis, of course, does not in turn remain limited to thematic reference. The modal-ontological variant (which is always at issue) corresponds to the performative component of form, for the point is the production of a new reality. We saw in detail how both orders work together and depend on one another, not despite but because of their being in tension with each other. Richter’s own formulations of this working together with regard to deficiency, however, pose interpretive challenges insofar as they terminologically refer, as noted, to the mimetic dimension of form as “content,” and its performative dimension as “form”: “Art has always been basically about agony, desperation and helplessness. [ . . . ] The fact is that content does not have a form (like a dress that you can change): it is form (which cannot be changed). Agony, desperation and helplessness cannot be depicted except aesthetically, because their source is the violation of beauty (perfec-

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tion).”29 The fact that imperfection can have to do with form only by mimetically migrating into the latter’s act explains for Richter why there is nothing external to form— a thing that form represents but that might as well take on a different form— “like a dress that you can change.” Already the mere referencing of the category of perfection— here negatively as the “violation” of perfection— implies a specific competence of the artistic act. Only aesthetic presentation can react at all to imperfection, in contrast to nonaesthetic ways of reacting, nonaesthetic here meaning outside the realm of the aesthetic, not, aesthetically failed. Only it can dispose of the resources of heightened reality that are needed to “counter” the problem of imperfection.30 Achievement of form But how does form achieve such countering? Insofar as imperfection mimetically enters form and constitutes its engagement with the world, form takes part in imperfection. At the same time, however, form, according to its performance side, cannot be imperfect, because it constitutes a fact in its own right and an ultimate reality each time. Where it fails to do so, we don’t speak of form at all, or we speak of form gone wrong. Form is always the successful form: “For me, beauty was always a criterion for the quality of artworks, regardless of their kind and era. [ . . . ] Viewed simply, beauty is first of all the opposite of destruction and disintegration and damage, which means it can’t be separated from form, without which nothing can be produced.”31 Since for Richter beauty and perfection are the same, we can say that form is the perfect representation of imperfection, which holds even for cases where, due to higher degrees of abstraction, no represented thing is identifiable and we are dealing with a pure mimetic substrate. This is not some magic trick that puts perfection in the place of imperfection, but an operation that structurally unifies both as dimensions of a single articulation (mimesis and performance). Perfection and imperfection constitute one and the same form: “the issue of content is thus nonsense; that is, there is nothing but form. There is only ‘something’: there is only what there is.” There can never be a perfection of the thing represented (there would be no need for the representation), or an imperfection of the representation (it would not be representation, but a failure of form). In short: art arises from the deficiency and negativity of the world, but as successful form, as the opera-

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tion that fulfills the concept of form, it can only be positivity and affirmation. Deficiency and redemption, pleasure and pain In view of such unity of perfection and imperfection, we should add that the form cannot be thought to invert pain into pleasure and ugliness into beauty. To be sure, form is that which makes pain appear beautiful, but it does so without therefore rendering it any less painful. Richter’s paintings show pain “beautifully,” but one would be mistaken to call them euphemistic. On the contrary, the deficiency appears sharpened, as the painting— unlike, say, the photograph on which it is based— carries a mimetic emphasis that makes the depicted thing appear in heightened factuality. This emphasizing of pain in the form, however, is but the flip side of the latter’s beauty, and if imperfection and perfection are traditionally correlated with pain and pleasure, respectively, then form bears an affective tension in which both sides draw apart and at the same time reinforce one another. Richter, who thinks nothing of expressivity and hardly ever comments on the affective composition of his paintings, still expects the spectator to be gripped— which we are to understand not (or at least not primarily) figuratively, in the sense of an emotional reaction, but literally, as being seized. His analysis of the structure by which an effective picture is “gripping” shows a clear similarity with the tension described here: “What fascinates me is the alogical, unreal, atemporal, meaningless happening of a happening [that is, the performative perfection of form] which is simultaneously so logical, so real, so timebound and so human [that is, the imperfection absorbed by it] and for that reason so compelling. And I would like to represent it in such a way that this simultaneity is preserved.” In the prelogical and timeless articulation of form, the human finitude of nonartistic reality, manifested in the conditionedness of the happening by the logical continuum of time, appears transformed into the “happening of a happening”— the act of an incorruptible affirmation and potentiated reality. Thus “unreal” here doesn’t mean “without reality,” but “different from mere reality”; it refers to that which sets apart a “happening of a happening” from a “happening.” Form’s achievement of unifying deficiency and redemption deserves special emphasis because this “simultaneity” marks Richter’s distance from those metaphysical models in which redemption is cast as restitution, fulfillment, or salvation, and thus

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eradicating the lack, putting itself in its stead, and replacing imperfection with perfection. Richter’s production aims at holding out the tension between both. Because form is reaction but not the result of a reaction, and thus needs for its performative sustenance that to which it reacts, the coming to terms with deficiency must retain the latter in the mimetic reference of the form. Content without sentimentality The fact that pleasure and pain belong to form itself and not to a message conveyed by it— which is why they never appear separately but always in the described tension and mutual reinforcement— determines considerably the conception of being “gripped”: “I want content without sentimentality, but as human as possible.”32 As parts of the structure of form, pleasure and pain cannot be tracked through decipherable affective valences in Richter’s paintings, just as the latter’s intense formal elaboration is not in the least concerned with an expressivity of feeling or a rhetoric of passions in any traditional sense. If we recall how a picture produces its mimetic substrate— disjointing, selecting, bundling, combining, compressing, and potentiating (and all this in an open series of orders)— we can understand why there is nothing left here of an affective naturalism. At the same time, however, the idea of a (de-)coding of affect seems abandoned as well, as Richter’s use of mimesis doesn’t bind the latter to a semiotics of affect, be it the natural or the conventional kind (while mimetic reference is conventional, it is not therefore symbolically encoded). The point is not an expression of affects, but what becomes of them as they go through formulation and get transformed and potentiated to form’s own reality. The desideratum of a “content without sentimentality” refers to nothing but this reality of pleasure and pain, enhanced by artistic means, compared to which any decipherable feeling must appear as a “cheap effect,” which is why Richter tries to avoid them at all costs. It would be a mistake, therefore, to read into his paintings an attitude of cool or even cynical indifference. Those paintings don’t want to— and, indeed, cannot be allowed to— convey an attitude; they don’t seek to express or transmit involvement, because they themselves are involvement and reaction, intervention and transformation. Only once this is clear and one stops looking for expressivity does a genuine possibility of “being gripped” open up. If the latter has to do with “sentimentality” at all, then only a reactive one— one that is

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in turn a reaction to the formal inventory of the picture. We are not, then, dealing with an affect contained in the picture or expressed by it, but on the contrary with one that is triggered by it, and that thus confirms its connectivity. Distinction The eschatological tension of form absorbs not only the structural inventory of the first, morphological tension— a heightening of reality— but also the further conceptual development of that tension in light of the second, poetological tension— a heightening of distinction that is owed to the fact that the specifics of rightness appears emphasized by an increase in activity. If the first tension contains a mimetic performance of form (the activity in which the space of depicting and the depicted space become indistinguishable), then the second tension is about form’s pragmatic distinction (the clarity or magnitude of its functional difference, in the sense of the importance of this difference). We have repeatedly seen that the “coming to terms”33 with a defective reality in which the latter is turned into a novel, more articulated, and more “visible” reality has nothing to do with the metaphysical procedure of casting a content into a new form. The new and the old distinction— the table painted by Richter and its model— do not manifest different degrees of approximation to a “true” distinction that grounds them both; they rather present two entirely separate distinctions, the second of which is greater than the first. The new distinction is a better expression of the old one not in any sense of showing what the latter “actually” is, but at best insofar as in reacting to the old one, it produces something of a quantitative excess. Keeping in mind our finding that the act of form is first of all a decision, we can perhaps understand this excess as follows: just as judgment decides the case, so form decides “the given” each time, turning it into its novel reality. And the way the case is still contained in its decision— without allowing either that the decision turns into the form of a content that also might be expressed in a different way, or that the relation between case and decision is arbitrary or vague in the least— is the same way the old distinction relates to the new. But what does this quantitative difference consist of? Certainly not of the fact that form features the object more clearly, for this would exclude abstract as well as blurred paintings— whereas these, on the contrary, have maximum pragmatic distinction. More promising is the structure of the case: a case is always that which

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is still undecided, marked by a lack of distinction; that which, in a certain respect, is not yet determined and actualized. As such, of course, the case possesses distinction, but this distinction works to point out the need for a further distinction. To give it a form is to remedy the lack— to introduce distinction in the decisive respect and, in so doing, to turn it into something else. When this succeeds, paintings such as Ravine, Chair, or Ema are more clearly and distinctively effective— wirklich, actual— than their photographic models, or a painting from Cage outperforms other sections of our reality in articulation and relevance, or, as we may also say, in formulation. That is why for Richter form is “all we have to help us cope with fundamentally chaotic facts and assaults. Formulating something is a great start.” The serenity by virtue of which form counteracts chaos may not yet be a sufficient explanation of the “coming to terms” expected of it, but, as we will see, it is the latter’s indispensable ingredient. Where decision is performed, there ambivalence ceases and every process— the deliberation and hesitation during painting, the strategies of letting chance unfold— is, for the moment, disrupted; a difference is produced; a form is executed and brought to its end in itself. Eschatology of each-time This is the eschatological thought in Richter more narrowly understood: that the act of painterly formulation carries something to its most extreme, its ultimate state. The painter is to “push” the depicted things “to a point where they turn good-looking and one feels a desire to behold them.”34 And such beholding, as we saw, is no luxury that one might also do without, for it is only through it that things become accessible in their reality (we can now also say: decidedness, distinction) in the first place. To cast something in a form means to place it in its eschatological perspective. It also means that we are not dealing with the same thing anymore, for a form doesn’t render an eschatology of something other but only brings itself to its end, carries to completion itself.35 If we said that form is the transformation of one reality to another reality, this same operation now appears as the transformation of a modal ontological deficiency through a decision that mimetically assimilates and, at the same time, performatively transcends the latter; of a lack in reality to a maximum in reality; of an incompletion or openness or exigency to a conclusion that is a completion or “perfection” insofar

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as it is the reality of form itself that for this time cannot be exceeded (this is possible only through a new form that reacts to the present one). Such transformation, Richter appears to say, is necessary always and everywhere. It manifests the conception of an immanent eschatology, dispensing with metaphysical outlooks that locate the end of the world structurally in a beyond. A conception, that is, on which there is no end to the whole, but the world arrives at its end in each of its forms; on which such end must be produced each time specifically, such that it constitutes a singular reality and cannot hold for other forms as well; on which this production each time is left entirely to us and can only be achieved by us; and on which the end of things lies within reach, with the concretion and proximity of the doable. This confirms again that we must not mistake Richter’s eschatology for the belief that somehow the world might be redeemed by art. That is out of the question. Painting is not the ultimate transformation of the world, but the ultimate transformation this time, for the time being, and its actuality is not a transcendence of the world, but the world brought to its most recent state in the here and now. The next time This thought manifests itself directly in Richter’s theory of hope. The latter extends from the basic remark that “[w]e have a lot of problems in this world, and paintings can make a big difference”36 to the more comprehensive claim that “art is the highest form of hope.”37 What at first may sound like vague utopianism is in fact supported by an elaborate argument: “a claim of the relevance of art and of the enormous importance [ . . . ] attached to it; and the fact that art today gets made and consumed on a scale never known before— this surely already shows a wholly irrational desire for art, an almost religious yearning. And if art were ever in a position to wholly satisfy this yearning, then that would be a great gain. Art would be something like a ‘pure faith’ that would protect us from flying off after false faiths, religions and ideologies.”38 The latter is “a luxury that we can no longer afford on this endangered globe.”39 In contrast to the promises made by “religions and ideologies,” the eschatology of form provides us not with a single truth, but with a truth each time and a truth in series, which we don’t encounter but produce. “Because there is no absolute rightness and truth, we always aim at the [ . . . ] human truth. We evaluate and produce a truth that excludes other truths” insofar as for this time it is deter-

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mined and concluded, but that will be challenged by the truth that is next. Richter doesn’t want art as metaphysics but art instead of metaphysics, with the “pluralization” that is enforced by the eachtime character of form: “Now that there are no priests or philosophers left, artists are the most important people in the world.”40 A “pure faith” bears this name because its content coincides with its act and participates in the latter’s singularity in such a way that it turns out differently each time. While ideological belief is belief in something that can generally be distinguished from its act, “pure faith” is produced with form and indistinguishable from this production. Since form as such doesn’t have content or meaning, such faith is form, or, rather, the act of formulation, which is to say, it is neither an extraneous authority informing form (an intention, a law, a desire) nor an inherent essence we ascribe to form (a meaning, a sense, a signified). One can believe without believing in something, and thus enjoy the profit without carrying the risk. One can counter the deficiency of reality with a belief that according to Richter has the power to “redeem” it like any other belief, but that is unlike any other belief in that it doesn’t come at the cost of having to commit to an ideology. Because formulation is an underivable act that involves a dispensing with prior commitments, “pure faith” (as the name for such dispensing) is not added on to the “coming to terms” as a welcome but accidental fact, but is precisely that which makes it possible in the first place. At stake is not a conception of art as a display of some utopian pluralism, a symbolic role in which art would serve as a hope-bearer for society or even humanity at large. If Richter’s hope is directed at “surviving the knowledge of horror,”41 then such “surviving” refers not to a projected future, but to something maximally concrete and actual, performed with each painterly act. But if form can achieve a “coming to terms,” why doesn’t Richter speak, for instance, of a general coping with the world through art? Why does he merely speak of hope? Quite simply, it is because in this regard, nothing can be known. After all, form “comes to terms” with the world only by way of not submitting to the generality of a principle, which means that there is nothing in general to say or to know about it. We can only hope that form, in each particular case, turns out right and is able to “come to terms” with the world, and, what is more, there is even a certain sense in which we can expect it, for as we saw, success must generally speaking be assumed. But in

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no particular case can we know or predict that it had to come thus. With each case, uncertainty— and therefore hope— is renewed. Such hope doesn’t aim at a long shot of destiny or the whole world, which is why it doesn’t lie in an idea or a utopia, but rather lies in form that is seizable and doable each time. If the things in which hope is found aren’t necessarily small, they certainly are always singular and of a time and place. That is why Richter’s determination of hope as the hope of being able to carry on painting 42 is not a quirk of the master painter who smugly mistakes his own ambition for the destiny of the world; for him, hope lies strictly in the everyday act of making and continuing to make. Such hope makes it possible to believe in art— it even comes with “the greatest possible faith and optimism”43— but it does so without requiring a special pathos, as it has the serene concretion of artistic success. With this, finally, we also see why hope is not a mitigation that takes the edge off the “horror,” for only in recognition of the latter does hope ignite itself and become necessary in the first place. But also in terms of that at which it aims, hope is concerned less with a mitigation than with a coming to terms— just as we saw that form doesn’t extinguish the pain but formulates it by absorbing it and retaining it within itself. Nonaims While we thus established how Richter’s third tension, too, replaces a metaphysical conception with a pragmatic one— an eschatology of the singular, redemption without salvation, serial transgression rather than circular restitution— we still lack the answer to the question of why any of this should be relevant to begin with. It is easy to say where not to seek that relevance, especially since Richter explicitly reflects on several of the desiderata possible here. To be sure, he is invested in “retina art,”44 the obtaining of “beauty” with the qualifications we discussed, but the aim of such production is not ultimately hedonistic.45 Similarly, his reflection on painterly rightness at times turns to rightness as such, which Richter here and there calls “truth,” but for the artistic production itself, an epistemological goal is excluded for the reasons discussed.46 Other remarks revolve around the question of art as a replacement of religion— but this, too, is ultimately limited to the immanent context of faith.47 Finally— and here we recall Richter’s rejection of a programmatic mandate for art— the point is not ethical betterment, critical intervention in current affairs, or pedagogical impact, say, to awaken us to the reality of

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pain and terror. On this last concern Neo Rauch notes, very much in accordance with Richter, “We don’t have to be shaken up, I simply don’t believe it. We have the TV. It serves us streams of blood and pus onto the dinner table, day by day. If I believe I have to compete with that by means of painting, then I haven’t understood what art is about. It is precisely and specifically about finding a composure, a frame [Fassung] for all that— one that can be a frame for us in our lack of composure [Fassungslosigkeit].”48 Perhaps to find a composure means “formulating” something in Richter’s sense. But what does formulation do that should interest us? Modal distinction is pragmatic distinction Here it is helpful to return to the structure of the deficiency to which form reacts. The deficit in reality that doesn’t let one “see” things fully, we said, is their lack in decidedness; they still persist in the indistinction of the case. We thus note a convergence of the modal element of reality or actuality (largely discussed in terms of performance/mimesis) with the pragmatic element of purpose-boundness (largely discussed in terms of rightness/underivability). Distinction according to reality coincides with distinction according to the fulfillment of some purpose within a context, which means that the extent to which a thing fulfills its purpose and thus possesses pragmatic distinction is the extent to which it can also be said to possess distinction according to reality. Thus, what renders those not fully seen things unreal is that their lack in decidedness manifests a lack of purpose, which implies a lack in contextualization, commensurability, and ultimately communicability. Through a new formulation, in turn, placement in a new context of reactions is achieved and together with it a renewed connection to purpose, such that the production of form can be seen as a pragmatic bringing-into-focus that ensures form’s communicability. According to its reality alone, the distinction of form can be described as an abundance of “most direct perceptibility [Anschaulichkeit, also “sensuality” or “materiality”],” which yields a maximum density of mimetic reference.49 Equally, though, and at the same time, the performance is the convocation of a context of reactions within which a form is communicable and connectible, and fixated by possible interaction with other forms. Both descriptions are interdependent, for the latter fixation binds the “perceptibility” of form to its pragmatics, just as form fulfills its function within the context

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of reactions only by means of its material articulation. (There can be no purely mental substrate of form because form must be able to communicate itself, whatever the medium or material. We may call a drawing, a dance movement, or a melody a “thought,” perhaps referring to its conceptual articulation. But insofar as it is form, it must already be actual, since a singularity, we saw, cannot be the actualization of independently available terms.) Perhaps this is Richter’s deepest intuition regarding form: its perceptibility and its communicability are fundamentally the same. The material relating of forms in a composition— think of the phases of Cage— is the context cast by singular acts of decision reacting to one another. And just as the articulation of a form doesn’t possess functional value in itself, so the deficiency of things doesn’t consist of them bearing an essential lack; rather, it has to do with the fact that they are insufficiently bound by such a context, or, in other words, that we don’t relate to them in shared agreement or disagreement. The more we agree or disagree about them, the more they gain in distinction and reality. Establishing community As form convokes the context in question, agreement or disagreement becomes possible where there was none before. The deficiency takes on form by becoming communicable through a shared participation in form. Such sharedness is not grounded in an already established commonality or community, but is produced by the very performance of form. For we saw that form is not unilaterally determined by its context but in turn has a part in determining it. This operation is not something that form, among other things, also does. Rather, form constitutes its structural precondition as well as its end. It is not by chance that even before his avowal of pragmatism that was our opening quote, Richter begins his collected writings with the following remark: “The first impulse toward painting, or toward art in general, stems from the need to communicate”;50 it is fed by “our deepest desire not to be private. To be public, open to the world.”51 This latter quotation is more recent, demonstrating the consistency of the conception over at least forty years: form takes as its point of departure something that we either don’t have in common, or don’t have sufficiently in common— nothing else is meant by the deficit in reality— and transforms it to a higher level of sharedness, integrating it into the context of a practice and thus rendering it commonly available.52 The basic pragmatic

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model of interaction developed here must always hold, whether we speak of form in painting, music, or dance, or outside of art. “And what I consider the most important aspect: that it is only form that makes it possible to understand things and thus to build a community. The opposite would be authentic murmur, and that is just antisocial.”53 Because “only form [ . . . ] is able to found community,” and the need for doing so is ubiquitous, Richter arrives at the conclusion that “art serves to establish community [Vergemeinschaftung, literally “communification”]. It links us with others, and with the things around, in a shared vision and effort.”54 In light of this, what we identified as the inseparability of the modal and the pragmatic perspectives suggests that community building is the last aim of art. Community building is Richter’s answer to the question of the eschatology of form. It is the concept that concludes his reconception of the third tension, a concept that is necessary in order to see what is ultimately at stake in his emphasis on transformation. Commonality But what exactly enters community through form? Certainly us, the spectators, insofar as we have something in common in our shared reference to form. And also form itself, in that its performance is shared and its mimetic substrate is thus turned into something common. With both answers Richter joins a philosophical tradition that goes back to Kant’s account of universal communicability, which says that aesthetic form must be able to communicate itself equally to every participant in a community of judges that ultimately consists of all of humanity.55 Yet the formulation Richter gives to this thought is not a transcendental but a pragmatist one, one that, in order to conceive that communication can take place at all, presupposes a context within which actions react to one another, and authorize one another in such reacting. Thinking of form neither as arbitrary and incommunicable, nor as universally communicable, Richter assumes instead that form communicates generally, that it can generally receive authorization by other forms connecting to it. While it is subject to the alternative of failure or success in every single instance, it must generally— thus the basic commensurability requirement noted by Davidson— be assumed to succeed, to receive authorization by a context of connections, because such a context needs to be presupposed for the alternative to arise in the first place. That which is merely arbitrary can as such not even be called

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“wrong”; it is fully indifferent, void of pragmatic distinction. This is why it is “impossible . . . to act or think independently” of such a context.56 Here originates Richter’s trust that we can arrive at an agreement about right and wrong, and that therefore in rightness something common is realized each time (strictly speaking, in both rightness and wrongness, but the latter cannot be the rule and thus is of no concern here). He is attached to this possibility, and considers it by no means trivial, but an end to be pursued, bearing the risk of failure, anew in every single case. But, of course, the form of a painting is not just any form, such that our account of the communicative achievement of form in general needs to be expanded by an account of the specific achievement of artistic form. Aspect change To outline what such an account might involve, we need, in addition to the quantitative separation of artistic and nonartistic form due to the former’s heightened reality and distinction, a functional separation. What Richter seems to propose here can be understood as a pragmatist adaptation of the conception of an external purposelessness of art, to the Kantian formulation of which it belongs that aesthetic communicability is less about the communication of a content than about the ability to communicate, that therefore its central achievement is the communication of communicability— such that the communication of the ability is the actualization of the ability through that very communication.57 For the spectator this means that artistic form doesn’t demand participation toward some end other than itself: participation is itself the end of such form. A pragmatist reformulation of this theorem can return to Wittgenstein’s notion of aspect change and his suggestion that we understand artistic form as a peculiar performance of such a change. Such form does not, like other form, decide between the aspects, but instead is aimed at their change as the end of the performance. Instead of disambiguating competing aspects, the form presents them in their irresolvable ambiguity and therefore performs their change for its own sake.58 This is what distinguishes artistic from nonartistic form— where the change itself bears the functional charge, there we speak of artistic form.59 A certain drawing, for instance, is to appear not as showing either this or that, but as first showing one thing and then another, across a caesura of the reorientation of a full pragmatic context. As Richter says, such refusal to disambiguate aims at an

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“innumerability of aspects”60 that opens up only through frequent changes, changes that ultimately— thus at least is understood in the doctrines of enérgeia or ékphrasis from ancient rhetoric— appear altogether stabilized and held in tension with each other in a simultaneity of heterogeneous aspects. To avoid misunderstandings, we recall that our discussion drew on the concept of aspect to explain how pragmatic distinction is produced by deciding an ambiguity through seeing-as (seeing something as something and not something else)— a decision without criteria, underivable from established terms. While that discussion cast artistic form as a whole as the articulation of an aspect, we now consider how such form, according to its internal makeup, features the articulation of nondisambiguated aspects. As shown by our account of Richter’s process, we can understand such sublevel aspects as the discrete acts of form that go into the articulation of an overall form. Such nondisambiguation of the aspects must still, as such, be articulated without ambiguity, which is why the distinction of artistic form and the distinction of its aspects need to be kept apart conceptually, precisely as both are one and the same performance. As much as the overall form depends for its artistic distinction on the aspect change it internally articulates, so the internal articulation depends for its distinction as form on the overall articulation. Now, how are we as spectators set in touch with each other by a form’s simultaneity of aspects? While normal form in the fundamental case avoids ambiguity and thus allows only for a limited number of ways to be taken up, artistic form, through nondisambiguation of its aspects, offers itself to multiple connections. If generally a performer’s context decides whether they are positioned to engage with a form, artistic form presents itself such that it can be engaged from a multiplicity of different contexts. None of the forms that take up an artistic form connect with each other (or the form) on shared terms, but as reactions in their own right, they intersect insofar as they are fellow performers of the form. You engage with a painting now, I engage with it later, and though we do not act together, we are now connected by the shared actuality of our participation in its form. This mutual drawing on its form is all that our actions have in common; in every other regard they are different performances. The ultimate point of form is the relating thus produced, which allows us to understand Richter’s assumption that a heightened number of

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aspects implies a heightened connectivity: Because of a painting’s extraordinary ability to make itself available to connection— which means, as it were, that it communicates on multiple frequencies at once— it is able to connect its viewers, even in cases where their perspectives are so unrelated that they would otherwise never enter communication. We thus established a sense in which the modal and the pragmatic dimension of form directly manifest a “social” dimension. As artistic production is geared toward aspect change, a canvas from the Cage series, for example, with its explosive unfolding of heterogeneous perspectives, appears as a highly efficient communitybuilding machine. No substrate of form But how is it conceivable that different spectators, who take form in different perspectives and to different ends, should nevertheless be dealing with one and the same artistic form throughout? Doesn’t the determination of a form inevitably lie in its boundness to a particular perspective? Don’t we here venture dangerously close to an essentialism of givenness that would postulate a substrate of form that is independent of form’s boundness to an aspect each time? The latter pitfall can be avoided if we recall the example of the drawing that can be taken this way or that way, but that doesn’t therefore present a substrate of its aspects; the drawing doesn’t contain a clue as to which way it is to be taken, that is, what is essentially at stake in it. Likewise, artistic form is not an invariant foundation of the forms that connect to it, but a case to be decided by these forms. Its distinction as a case for connecting forms consists precisely in its multiple decidability— which reformulates our previous observation that form realizes the possible as such. Artistic form is a more complex case than nonartistic form, more highly resolved into aspects— a case pregnant with specific possibilities that nevertheless refuses to privilege any of them, since what a form is factually taken as is not up to the form itself. Its indeterminacy in this regard is genuine: none of its aspects, its possible ways of being taken, is inherently given preference over the others; preference is a matter of the actuality of another performer drawing on it. With this we reject the common prejudice that “sender” and “receiver” have to take or understand a form in the same way. In fact, all that counts is that the “receiver” can react, connect, and do something with the form such that the doing already constitutes the new form— to which

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the “sender” then must be able to react in turn. Thus “receiving” and “sending” are one and the same act here: the (actual) form as decision of the (given) form. This means that there is no shared form, but only one that communicates itself; each form is singular without therefore breaking out of the pragmatic context. Each belongs to the context by virtue of its connectivity; it is singular as a coincidence of its aspects. If artistic form can be taken in multiple ways, this means only that in it a structural feature of form in general appears exposed; it does not mean that it needs to be connected to in a way fundamentally different from other form. But of course, while normal form affords us relatively little latitude, artistic form is accessible from the most diverse directions and perspectives. Nondiscursive sharedness For a form to function, it is not required that we all see the same in it or seek to do the same with it, but only that we are “gripped” by it (in an act that is our reaction to it), that it communicates its distinction and rightness— in short, that we have to do with it at all and thus find ourselves in a shared context. While form appears from the most heterogeneous directions and to the most diverse purposes, the latter all coincide in the focus of a formulation that, precisely as it consists of this heterogeneity, no difference in perspective can relativize. Richter thinks that we can concur about something being right; but what that something means, what we discursively make of it— this is an entirely different question that doesn’t concern form proper, a question that must have different answers in different circumstances.61 This varies Kant’s claim that while we can concur about the beauty of a form, we cannot say what kind of thing it is we are dealing with. Form refuses discursive identification— it is, as Kant puts it, without a concept.62 For Richter, too, the formal concurring about rightness is structurally uncoupled from discursive identification and interpretation, but not such that we couldn’t say what form is, for we always take it as something in a certain respect, take it to be relevant in a specific way. Unlike relating to rightness, however, the latter dimension in our relating to a form cannot be immediately shared; it doesn’t belong to our being “gripped.” Still, the two dimensions don’t amount to fundamentally different kinds of pragmatics; rather, the pragmatics of form relates to the pragmatics of its interpretation as a nonsemantic judgment game, that is, one in which form is constituted by the valences of

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the painterly elements in their interplay— line, color, proportion, rhythm, contrast, surface articulation, resolution, brightness, and so on— instead of being constituted by the symbolic valences of a linguistic context, even as the latter valences of course may well belong to the pragmatic context of a form. Therefore, even a linguistic form comparable to the painterly form— say, a metaphor, a pun, a poem— no matter how indisputably such a form operates through semantics, is not constitutively semantic, but only accidentally so. This doesn’t mean that it might be possible to reproduce the same form in a different medium (a form can never be reproduced anyway), but is only to say that the pragmatic structure of form as such is indifferent with regard to its medium. Conceptually, the various ways we involve ourselves with form converge invariably in the act of judgment, which, according to Richter, needs to be performed by the painter and the spectator alike. All the participants are thus “equalized,” set in relation, in communication: “There of course we are fully equal. There is the producer and the consumer, the beholder and the maker— they have a quality they cannot do without: to see whether that’s good or not— and to judge.”63 Nonessential sharedness Given Richter’s emphasis on the underivability and singularity of form, the goal cannot be to establish such communities once and for all. Rather, what is at stake is their production each time, their always transient realization in a judgment. With this, we conceive a type of community to which no essential content— no mark of class, gender, race, culture, language, or destiny— pertains, and which therefore is immune to ideological justification. Its participants are not joined by a common identity based on some quality inherent to all of them; who or what they are is irrelevant, and neither a shared past nor a shared future is part of the initial bond. Most significantly, perhaps, what is dispensed with here is the traditional Western model of community as the parousia of a lost unity, nature, or identity.64 Instead, all that counts is what the participants do. At the same time, that such community is built on action shouldn’t mislead one to include established practice, convention, tradition, and the like in its foundation. The production of form cannot appeal to the authority of such content, and, what is more, it is destroyed by any attempt at doing so. In the context of form reacting to form, we cannot say in established terms what

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the reacting is about, for this is different each time. There can be no general condition of belonging except the fact of participation itself, of reacting with a form that can, in turn, be reacted to. Finally, then, we must also exclude all such models that conceive of community based on a criterion of sympathy with the perspectives and priorities of others by empathy or reflection. A world in common arises not from sympathetically taking part in the lives of others, but from doing something together— one doing at a time. It is here that Richter’s desideratum of “contentfulness without sentimentality” has its pragmatic motivation: there can be no immediacy of emotional participation for, based on the model of interaction, an exchange of sentimentality is a structural impossibility. Participants connect to each other not because their actions reflect one another appropriately, but, on the contrary, because each connecting action is something different and novel. Its appropriateness is a fitting together of that which is different. The action is not a representation, but a reaction, which has nothing in common with the other actions beyond its taking part in the same context. Whatever may be involved in reacting in a way that is in turn connectible— and certainly empathy and reflection do occasionally belong to this— in the register of generality we can say nothing about this. So Richter’s concept of community has a negative definition insofar as, in a fundamental asymmetry, it relies not on an inclusion but merely on an exclusion of determinations from form.65 Yet this negative definition establishes not a negative form of community and belonging, but a nonessentialist one. In fact, the reality constituted by form each time is entirely unforeseeable: It is not a reality that was already established but could only be insufficiently shared, but rather one that, when compared to the other reality to which it reacts, appears heightened— it cannot be said, considering this relation, to have been established all along. It is, as we’ve seen, not an approximation of a highest, “proper,” or “real” reality by metamorphosis of a substrate shared by all forms, but a new reality in its own right. Sharedness as performance The aim is a factuality of performance in which we behold a painting together, or at least have in common the beholding of the painting: a nonsymbolic and nondialectical reference to a material object, a presence of this reference, as Richter says, “in the most direct perceptibility.” As already indicated, in such

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circularity— participation constitutes belonging— the community in question is not essentialist but performative. Likewise, the fact that community building is the structural condition as well as the aim of form reflects nothing but the familiar unity of effector, act of effecting, and effect. To be sure, form functions to the end of community building, but it doesn’t produce the latter as a result separate from itself; rather, it fully is the fulfillment of this end. This is important because a community in its performative constitution cannot be based on a shared substrate (and is thus immune to ideological appropriation), and also because it itself cannot be interpreted as an ideological position. For Richter, ideals of community, especially the liberal humanistic ideal of a global community, are maximally discredited,66 and thus his paintings neither presuppose nor project them. But also from a structural perspective, community cannot serve artistic production as its aim if it doesn’t want to counteract the latter’s underivability, and thus impede it. Richter’s way out of this dilemma, as usual, leads through form itself: community doesn’t have to be hypostatized, the self-contradiction of a program of community under the premise of a repudiation of the programmatic is avoided, and what is more, the functioning of form is not in need of a conception of community at all. For the latter consists of nothing but the belonging that is produced in the context of reactions each time anew. After all, we are speaking only of the structural condition of practice as such, the condition generally required if communication is to come about. And this condition is a category of performance— not a meaning ascribed to form from the outside, and not a result of form, but its taking place. As far as such taking place is concerned, we cannot distinguish between community and form. Specifics of the painterly formulation But why does the painting constitute community, while the photograph on which it is based does not? The difference between a photo and its “redeeming” transformation into a painting, according to Richter, is the following: The photo “reports”67 about a particular situation from a single perspective. It is indexicalized spatially and temporally in at least three ways: first, it is a record taken from a particular point in time and space; second, this record involves a component of immediate physical correspondence, as the light gets directly from the object onto the film; third, the pragmatic determination commits the photo

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to its status as a report, produced in order to document the situation by virtue of the characteristics just described. To see something in the photo requires to assess the situation correctly, to regard the photo in the right perspective with the right relevances and priorities. To the extent to which one fails to take part in this perspective, the photo, as a “report,” becomes unreadable.68 This is different from the painting, the formal distinction of which not only remains untouched by the heterogeneity of the spectator’s perspectives— as these perspectives converge in its formal quality— but also realizes its specific communal space only in this convergence of the heterogeneous. “Being painted,” Richter says about his photographic models, “they no longer report on a particular situation. [ . . . ] As a painting, it carries different meaning, different information.”69 To be sure, a painted roll of toilet paper retains its status as an image— both photo and painting show the toilet paper roll— but unlike the photo, the painting is no longer just about the roll here and now— in this situation and perspective— but rather about a form that, by virtue of its emphatic actuality, can be taken in all kinds of ways.70 While the photo insists on its physical as well as pragmatic one-dimensionality, the painting is “the unmanageable, the illogical, the meaningless. It demonstrates the innumerability of aspects.”71 Even though it may at first seem so, this is not an argument based on the notions of authenticity or aura,72 but a strictly pragmatist one. The difference between the photo and the painting lies in an amplification of the space of association and community opened up by the painting. The photo already has its own rightness, without which one would not be able to connect to it, but it claims this rightness within a narrower context; its distinction and reality are relatively limited and await formulation. Those who behold the painting can see more in it than in the photo and do more with that; the diversity of aspects means that the painting allows for more perspectives— that it can be taken in more ways and can thus be transformed in more directions. This pragmatic effect of the image that has the most diverse perspectives converge in its form is, on a technical level, affected first of all by the procedures we described in our analysis of the first tension by which the mimetic import as well as the performative yield of form appear maximized.73 In this context we should mention what Polanyi describes as the difference between a normal view, which receives a perspectival determination according to the spectator’s

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standpoint, and the view of a painted canvas, which seems resistant to this alteration. Only a painted image, that is, can be regarded from any angle without suffering a distortion of perspective— which Polanyi explains with an image-specific intertwinement of “plane” and “depth” that structurally accounts for a special independence from such distortion. Just as stereoscopic vision, by joining together two heterogeneous perspectives, generates its own proper object that was not given in either of those perspectives, so too does the “flat depth” of the painted image produce, by means of an intertwinement of heterogeneous elements, a specific distance from the normal view. If this can be related to the nonmetaphysical intertwinement of performance and mimesis in form, the point cannot be the construction of a spatial perspective, as such a perspective has no place in the abstract paintings and, more generally, doesn’t belong to form at all; but neither can we separate the physical perspective from the pragmatic one, for only the latter determines what something is seen as, and whether we see something to begin with; neither, finally, can we assume that the heterogeneity of the spectators’ perspectives in a form coincide in such a way that we all see the same. The last thought, to be sure, might be sustained with some modifications insofar as we— assuming a continued heterogeneity of our perspectives— discern in a form the same formal quality and rightness; that is, we don’t see the same in it, but only agree about the rightness and can jointly connect to the form. At the same time, in fact, it is only in the coincidence of its aspects or perspectives that form can constitute itself— it doesn’t harmonize, counteract, or eradicate the aspects’ heterogeneity; on the contrary, it consists entirely of this heterogeneity and obtains from it its mimetic-performative power. There is, then, no inherent or principled priority of the painting over the photo, only a pragmatic one, which consists of the fact that the painting— due to its mimetic-performative superiority achieved by, for example, operations of gestural reduction and compression— is more highly shareable and connectible, and therefore brings with it a greater degree of community building. “Photography has almost no reality”— we now understand better why this is so— “and painting always has reality.”74 The same difference holds generally for any reality about which, for whatever reason, we don’t sufficiently concur and which therefore is insufficiently formulated. This is Richter’s demand of painterly form— that its unity of material

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execution and functional commensurability “pushes” something to its most extreme, its ultimate state, without therefore assuming a metaphysical special status. While thus every difference between insufficient and formulated reality is dissolved into the pragmatic continuum of a quantitative difference, Richter retains a special status for form insofar as the latter— in its intertwinement of mimesis and performance— receives an additional distinction that significantly increases its transformative power, and thus its undertaking, even in the most difficult of cases. In this sense, form has to fulfill an eschatological special task that involves no other aim but community building itself. While the effect of photos is exhausted by their function to document or “report,” and thus to work toward this or that aim, a painting’s only aim, ultimately, is to gather us around it. For if redemption is supposed to be the ultimate aim of artistic form, then form is not there for something else, but is itself that for the sake of which everything else takes place. Lack of reality as a problem Now, certainly, any reality— a table, a nude, a landscape— can be brought to its ultimate potency (for this time) through the advance in actuality gained by a new formulation. This advance structurally guarantees that a next maximization is always possible and a redemption of the reality deficit is always pending. (Which is why artistic form can be transformed by further formulation— say, in the copying of paintings, in the overpainting of photos of paintings, and so on.) But the task of a “fulfillment” or a “coming to terms” is greater if we are dealing with the bombing of Dresden, the death of young RAF inmates, or the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. For, as Richter notes about his treatment of the Second Gulf War in War Cut, “here in this case the factual is of course so overpowering that we need to undertake many more attempts at formulation than elsewhere. Because here the subject matter is so important, the form too is all the more important. We simply need it more to be able to deal with the subject matter.”75 Where the most deficient, the most painful matters are at stake, community building is both more difficult and more urgent, as our everyday perception doesn’t seem to be able to grasp the reality of these matters straightforwardly. There is something elusive about their reality, something that defies our ability to imagine and communicate, an indistinction of the images that coincides with an indistinction

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of our dealing with them. Richter here abstains from the expectable recourse to psychoanalytic terms such as repression or trauma, and keeps to the basic terms of modal ontological analysis. The places in question elude actuality such that we treat them in the mode of a perpetual not yet or not anymore: either we are still in the before of an approximation of the place, or already in the after, where the place is assumed familiar and taken for granted; either it lies ahead of us as something (still) unreal, or behind us as something (already) realized, without giving us a chance to encounter it in the actuality of its being grasped— in a unity of effector, act of effecting, and effect— which always remains elusive to one side or the other. The possible participation of others means that a happening, in its new formulation, possesses more reality; it also means that the community building

Fig. 9. Gerhard Richter, Toilet Paper (Klorolle),1966. Oil on canvas. CR 75-3.

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overcomes the obstacle of something that, because of its deficit in reality, resists an integration into the practical contexts of shared reality. Richter undertakes neither a psychological nor a philosophical treatment of this deficit, but a painterly one, and in his notes he takes care that the specifics of painterly eschatology don’t get compromised by being translated into other categories. The private, the spectacular What, then, are those most unreal, deficient, and painful things, according to Richter’s own understanding? The deficiency of events, their lack of reality, consists of two kinds of arbitrariness that correspond to the not yet and the not anymore, respectively: either in their boundness to an individual reach or validity— that is, an arbitrariness of the merely particular— or in its certain expectability, that is, an arbitrariness of commonplace or empty generality that is opposed to the first one. That which doesn’t convoke commonality because it is only individually valid doesn’t possess reality, and neither does that which doesn’t convoke commonality because it is valid for everyone indiscriminately. In the first case, no communication is possible by definition, whereas in the second case, there is a devaluation of communication by inflation, which eliminates the informational content of communication to the point of the latter’s complete indistinction. Richter terms these extremes the private and the spectacular, and it is among the most pointed observations in his reconception of form that these extremes not only manifest types of deficiency, but at the same time correspond to that which is most important for us, the deficiency of which therefore is most troubling and painful, and which for this reason qualifies as the prime object of painterly redemption. Thus, the portraits of relatives (Horst with Dog, Betty), the nudes (Ema, Student) or the scenes of motherhood (S. with Child) are owed to the immediate relevance of the intimate and private,76 whereas the paintings of historical events receive their relevance from reference to that which always already concerns and interests many, and, without fail, in its presentation unfolds a spectacular dimension.77 As little as the painterly production can avoid either extreme— on the contrary, it has to seek out the extremes emphatically and unfolds its greatest ambition where it takes them as its point of departure— so much it in turn has to take care to “counter” the private and the spectacular through form in such a way that their arbitrariness appears not only

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neutralized, but also transformed into the resource of a new nonarbitrariness and “communication”: RICHTER: [ . . . ] I’ve always shied away from so-called political themes, and from anything spectacular. THORN-PRIKKER: But this whole cycle [October] lives off the spectacular nature of the events concerned. RICHTER: 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. [ . . . ] THORN-PRIKKER: Do you see a private dimension? RICHTER: 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. THORN-PRIKKER: But you try nevertheless. RICHTER: 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.78

Community building as redemption That “[w]ithout form communication ceases” means that without form we not only deal with insufficient realities, but in fact cannot be sure whether we share these realities at all. Consider September. The painting undertakes to give form to the attack on the World Trade Center and thus to constitute an actuality that is not about the production of an iconography of circulable images, but about the possibility that that which we see can be seen by others as well. Whatever 9/11 involves for us— the vocabulary choices, attitudes, images, and impressions connected with it are utterly heterogeneous— the event has an extremely polarizing effect; we don’t share the same reality. To be sure, most of us can agree on an inventory of basic facts: the explosion of the

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airplanes in the towers, the collapse of the towers, the dead. But even if we leave aside all the doubtlessly different things that are implied here for each of us, already the imaginary of the event, in the simple sense of its visual dimension, is not shared. The reason for this lack is the pragmatic structure of the images available— all photographs that report but don’t formulate. We have seen what this means for Richter: fixed to a certain perspective, a photo discloses itself only to those who happen to be able to take precisely this perspective. It communicates to those who share the same perspective anyway; rather than generating new commonality, it invokes already established commonality and doesn’t dispose of a sufficient capacity to break out of this one-dimensionality. Its low communicative power stands in remarkable contrast to the enormous facility of its circulation. Thus it is often precisely that which is generally relevant and reported in many perspectives about which we can agree least, as it eludes being brought into a pictorial focus. That is, not through a lack of images, but precisely through excessive circulation and availability of spectacular images that effect the contrary of what they— in their documenting, illustrating, or dramatizing ways, at any rate emphatically— pretend to do: to cast the event into an image. Whether there are images and in what number thus seems to offer little indication as to whether we indeed share an event. In the case of 9/11 we have countless images, but we don’t reach agreement about them, and a look into the vast archives of Google Images and YouTube demonstrates that even the assumption of a collective imaginary in the shape of a commonly accessible pool of photographic images doesn’t produce a distinction here. The event appears dispersed by its imaginary centrifugal power; its unity involves “all this”— which, however, in its pragmatic indistinction, is available only as a low-level, deficient reality. Its pictorial lack consists of the fact that it cannot be viewed together. Singularity Richter’s September manifests the ambition of bringing us together in our viewing. A somewhat partial ambition, for surely the aim is not to bind all of the imaginary of 9/11 into an image. Rather, the aim is to bring us together at all. What counts, according to an eschatology of the singular, is the accordance in this case, the production of a single shared image. It is not more than that, but neither is it less. In turn, seeking to grasp the events of 9/11 in their

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Fig. 10. Gerhard Richter, September, 2005. Oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Art

(MoMA), New York; gift of the artist and Joe Hage. CR 891-5.

totality would be an unanswerable challenge, a presumption, and sheer impossibility— at least for Richter, who insists on the perspectival boundness of things and therefore could not accept that any one of the possible images of an event would be regarded as the essential one, the only one that counts, or the one that involves all the others. Even the most elaborate “iconography” would have to suppress most of those other images in order to arrive at an identifiable representation. Thus the image aimed at is not an icon— a symbolic image in the meaning of which a community reflects its identity— but rather an image that fulfills its end in being shared. For Richter, the work is not representation but reaction by formulation; his image doesn’t undertake to reveal the “real reality” of the event— the point is not a superior reality of that kind— but it sets out to transform the communication about the event to a wholly new level of binding power. The aim of formulation is not to concur about all the possible facets of an event, but, on the contrary, to concur about one of them as comprehensively as possible. In other words, if reality is constituted only in the moment of shareability— and, what is more, if it is defined as that which is shareable— then what matters most is its depth, as it were, in contrast to its breadth. Of course, a single image is not

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capable of bundling, homogenizing, or transforming everything that separates us. But, again, what counts is not what separates us, but what connects us— that there is a connection at all and that it is as deep as possible. Richter’s painting— at least this is its ambition— connects our heterogeneous perspectives in the actuality produced by its form. It renders them as something shared or at least shareable, in all its precision and perceptibility— not as an icon or idea or utopia, but as a painting made in oil on canvas; for the beholder, “most direct perceptibility,” for the painter, “that which one really and tangibly accomplished.”79 Innerclimactic work The example of September shows in detail by virtue of what features of form such community building in Richter is supposed to be brought about. From the start, the title doesn’t allow for an exact dating of an event, which corresponds to the fact that one doesn’t easily recognize the image as an image of something.80 Its articulations mingle fields of blue and gray-brown, bound together by particles of white that cover the painting all over. Even as one has, through a considerable work of discerning, recognized the figure and identified it as the known event— flight UA175 has crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, the fire is perhaps intimated by the light orange that is enclosed in the graybrown of the tower— both fields remain contaminated by one another, by cloudlike transitions as well as color harshly scraped about with a knife, smears of blue in the brown and brown in the blue. “Viewers must,” writes Storr, “reconstitute a likeness that is in effect disintegrating before their eyes.”81 Not only are the gray-brown towers set off against the blue sky and vice versa, but the offset occurs through the mingling, the boundaries persist by virtue of their permeability— a powerful example of the complementary relation between formation and de-formation we described as characteristic of Richter’s work. What seems to matter here is not the scene of the crash with the towers, airplanes, sky, fire, and explosion in its spatiotemporal determination, but rather that realm of morphogenesis in which form is prefigurative, largely prelogical, and inconclusive in the act of its becoming. Neither spatial depth nor temporal sequence are developed— of both, the image presents at best a blueprint or a possibility. We see the becoming before we see that which becomes— or the former together with the latter— and we see it not as a nar-

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rative genesis of the catastrophe, featuring that which preceded the latter in space and time, but as a becoming of the form of the image: becoming-towers, becoming-sky, becoming-catastrophe.82 Unlike what is suggested by its common interpretation, for which Richter himself provides a template— “a perfectly harmless picture, small, and not at all sensational”83— September is by no means anticlimactic84, but rather innerclimactic. How so? First of all, it doesn’t show the failure of the medium of painting with respect to the representation of certain events and cannot therefore be associated with Richter’s own claim that it is impossible to paint the crimes committed in German concentration camps.85 If he considered the event impossible to paint, he would not have painted it, and if he painted it, then this attempt— unless it fails according to its form— hardly testifies to a failure of painting. But neither can the painting, we contend, be considered a critical exploration of the limit of paintability by means of destruction, erasure, dispersion, or blurriness.86 Richter himself notes: “The little picture of the two towers was very colorful to start with, with the garish explosion beneath the wonderful blue sky and the flying rubble. That couldn’t work; only when I destroyed it, so to speak, scratched it off, was it fit to be seen.”87 We saw that precisely these are Richter’s preferred procedures, by which September doesn’t so much distinguish itself from other paintings as it joins their family as a typical exemplar. They are all united by their form, allowing for a deep insight into morphogenesis. This, however, in the specific case of September, appears increased to the point of an innerclimactic quality, which is produced by the fact that the painting shows the taking place of a catastrophe, and fully merges it with the taking place of its own (the painting’s) form such that the formal work of de-formation and destruction is assimilated to the thematic de-formation and destruction. Akin to Townscape Paris or Iceberg in Mist (even as the subject matter of these paintings is much less precarious), in September the morphogenetic double dynamics of formation and de-formation appear matched by the figurative level: the figure and its genesis are indistinguishable.88 The extreme erosion of outlines, the cloudlike dislocation of paint, the mutual interpenetration of color fields, and so on— all this, in September, corresponds to a presentation of the subject matter in its figurative detail. The painting is more literal, as it were, and at the same time more artificial than most other paint-

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ings by Richter. The work of its formulation, however, should thus be considered not fundamentally different, but, at best, especially effective. Form’s resistance to pictorial lack It is this work of formulation by which a painting pushes back against the flood of photographic representations and thus turns itself into an act of resistance against the unreality and pictorial lack that pertain to the event. It counters the pragmatic one-dimensionality of the photo, which, being a report, doesn’t involve a convocation of heterogeneous perspectives— the “innumerability of aspects” that brings about such a convocation as it can be connected to in so many more ways. Precisely as it doesn’t report but formulates, it becomes a shared reference point for our imaginary. We have an image of the event. Richter calls the end of painting, repeatedly, “to make oneself an image” (which, in the original German, bears the connotations of “to see what’s going on” and “to articulate a viewpoint”).89 The painting doesn’t share the sensational value, the richness in figurative detail, or the perspectival determination of the photo.90 This is not because all that couldn’t be painted, but because a painting thus composed would have abdicated its formal specificity with respect to the photo. A painting such as September performs a work that is prior to the photographic realm insofar as it shows that which cannot be photographed or filmed, because it is the activity of becoming form of, among other things, photo or film itself. It insists on the latters’ images as the morphogenetic premise of their taking place, a premise that as such cannot be exposed in them, even or precisely as all representation is empowered and effected by it. One reason, then, why September is unsuited for circulation as an icon is that it is always still in the process of being completed, because it perpetually transcends the possibility of its articulatory conclusion toward the internal work of becoming-image. Stage directions 1: choreography of the associative charge What does this mean for the abstract paintings? Do they too perform community building? How does the fact that their mimeticperformative effect has proven to be superior to the effect of figurative paintings square with the other fact that they register no determinate things, persons, or events about which one may come to an agreement with any degree of detail? It is important in this context that Richter

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doesn’t let the associative charge carried by his paintings unfold in an uncontrolled manner, but that he shapes it, divides it up, gives it direction and boundaries. For this means no less than a proactive modeling of the communities produced in the process. “The paintings don’t just stand for themselves,” as Diedrich Diederichsen notes, but they function as “stage directions for the viewing of other paintings.”91 If the paintings serve the aim of “treating” the pain and terror of the world, then Richter apparently doesn’t consider it sufficiently explicit to let the beholder associate the deficiency of the world, as would probably be the case in an undirected interaction with abstract paintings. To be sure, the abstract paintings, too, choreograph their viewing, just as the sheer fact of their formal distinction means that they exclude some things from our associative engagement while offering other things up for it. But they cannot show the fragility of an act such as Ema. The figurative paintings— especially those of the Dresden bomber planes, the Nazi uncle, the young inmates, or the burning World Trade Center— in their historical deixis as well as their dolorous beauty, serve in turn as markings and guides that direct our associative engagement emphatically toward the painful. Figurative as well as abstract paintings seem needed for Richter, since both of them carry a deficit: the abstract paintings effect the mimeticperformative release of associative charge of any magnitude, but they are limited in their ability to deictically direct this charge, and thus stand in a broad yet not sufficiently focused relation with the reality of the world to which they react. The figurative paintings manifest a maximally direct and unambiguous reference to pain, a reference that cannot get sidestepped or ignored, but at the price of an associative potential that is lower than that of the abstract paintings, a comparatively reduced performative achievement. In their mutual complementation, which happens in every larger exhibit of Richter’s work, each type of painting makes up for the other’s disadvantage, and their ensemble accomplishes the full eschatological program: maximum performative effect with maximum emphasis of pain in their reference to the world. Stage directions 2: association in War Cut Something similar occurs when Richter, in his book War Cut, juxtaposes text and image; 216 photographic details from Abstract Painting Nr. 648-2 (1987) are combined with an equal number of textual segments taken from the

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Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of March 20 and 21, 2003— the first days of the Iraq War. Here the modeling of the associative charge is not left to the image alone. Guido Meincke notes that Richter “with his book undertook to subject one of his Abstract Paintings to an exemplary inquiry regarding its contemporary historical valences.”92 Meincke explains: “In confronting [the images] with the texts on the Iraq War, the texts’ projective potential appears, first of all, placed under certain restrictive conditions, by which the multiplicity of possible associations is confined and channeled. The newspaper articles evoke recollections of photos and TV images that, with the medial coverage of the war, have imprinted themselves in our memory, and whose afterimages now flow into the prepared images in order to merge with the visible color streaks and thus to actualize themselves. This reveals illustrative evidences and possible interpretive valences that Nr. 648-2, under different circumstances of its reception, could hardly have developed.”93 Of course, this steering of mimetic power meets the counter-power of painterly performance that cannot be disciplined but supports mimesis only to the extent that mimesis is at its service in the ways we described— through filtering, compression, recombination, and potentiation. The image-text correlations produced in a reading of War Cut allow for “no permanent stabilization”;94 rather, they remain in flux and are promptly reinjected into the process of successive production of form as directives for association of a second and higher order. Such assimilation of the text through the image is due to a characteristic asymmetry that arises as War Cut combines its image details not with, say, literary texts— as is the case, for instance, with the photographs in December, which correspond to narratives by Alexander Kluge 95— but with ordinary ones, such that we witness an intertwinement of the extremely high innovation level of the production of abstract paintings with the average innovation level of newspaper writing. Stage directions 3: abstract modeling of community The abstract paintings don’t have us converge in the image of an identifiable subject matter, but, like the representational paintings, they are the referencing of one reality to which they react, of a singular moment that can have a variable referential breadth and density, and can manifest itself as a mimetic substrate or cluster of associations. Here is how a painting achieves an active modeling of the respective

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community of beholders: in a targeted effort, it convenes all those beholders to whom the singular articulation— be it said aspect of the mimetic substrate, or be it the motif Two Pairs of Lovers— happens to address itself, who “get” something about that articulation. On the one hand, this doesn’t exclude anyone, and, on the other hand, it doesn’t rely on the participation of everyone; it establishes a core community based on shared relevance. For this, it is not necessary that everyone brings the same perspectives and criteria for relevance, but it is necessary that the different relevances are able to intersect in the singular articulation. So the motif Lovers, or equally a rhythm or a certain sequence of contrasts, may be relevant in many contexts and in many different ways. If we have to imagine the context of reactions as characterized by such pragmatic connections, then it appears to be possible to effectively control the microstructure of community building through the criterion of relevance. In fact, such control appears as a task to be fulfilled in production at all times: one doesn’t produce just any commonality, but a specific one, that is, one that matters in a certain respect— a task that cannot be sidestepped but, on the contrary, demands development toward higher degrees of refinement, as it is undertaken, for example, in the highly resolved articulations of the late squeegee paintings. Perhaps the latter thus present us with a sustained effort to endow maximal inclusiveness with such an excess of features— only the vacuous and trivial, in the opposite extreme, might be equally inclusive— that no one asks for a semantics anymore. As the criterion of relevance can attach itself to any element of a picture, such community building is more precise than the one achieved by figurative paintings— after all, there is no limit to the subtlety with which associations can be directed. Moreover, it is open to surprises, as the most remote and least expected connections become possible. It seems not possible, however, that those connections might ever turn vague, that they might disengage from the formal precision of their determination through the painting. Determination here means exclusion of arbitrariness: of course a painting or an element cannot control how one connects to it— at best it can suggest preferences— but the fact that a particular mimetic element allows for different associations, and perhaps even for an open-ended series of associations, doesn’t render this element arbitrary. We have thus not only demonstrated the capability of the abstract paintings for community building and indicated that the lat-

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ter is achieved in a specific and formally controlled way, but, finally, have also shown that these paintings connect their viewers in excess mode, as it were— with a heightened degree of precision, daringness, surprise. Contemporaneity as desideratum The ultimate aim of form is the shared reality achieved through the unity of its perceptible and its pragmatic articulation. As Rauch, with respect to pain and deficiency, emphasizes the importance of “finding a composure, a frame for all that— one that can be a frame for us in our lack of composure,” so too for Richter form is a framing, binding enclosure, an articulating grasp of reality, and, at the same time, our own (the viewer’s, the painter’s) composure, attitude, stance— both not only suggested by the German term Fassung, but also indistinguishable in the operation of community building. In community building, “the individual is bound and as it were taken care of by the common time.”96 Because the reality of form doesn’t precede form but in turn is constituted by it, the “common time” is probably less a medium external to form than it is the time produced in form, the temporality of form itself. Its contemporaneity is the relation of a form to the other forms of the context of reactions, and therefore, at once, the relation between the participants reacting to one another. We see how time here turns into a pragmatic category— after all, it is nothing but the context of forms in their concatenation that is based neither in chronology nor in synchrony, but only in reaction. With this, as Stefan Germer notes, contemporaneity is not a category of historic simultaneity, but a category having to do with judgment and relevance: The “contemporaneous” doesn’t fit into the teleological narratives of history. Instead of a well-behaved “one thing after the other,” it performs the most adventurous leaps ahead and back. What is “contemporaneous” is not decided by checking the calendar. The term is not a temporal index but an indicator that measures the relevance of an artistic work for present things— be it artistic or theoretical production. Whether a work is rated “contemporaneous” is decided not by the date of its production but by its connectivity. That is: The assessment doesn’t concern fixed qualities, but ways of viewing. Which is why we are not to take it as a value judgment, but rather as an utterly compressed description of a viewing

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situation. In order to understand what is involved here, the assessment “contemporaneous” would actually have to be complemented by the location, the presuppositions and position of those who judge, that is, it would have to be embedded in the social system “art,” to which belong artists, critics, gallerists, collectors, museums, and so on.97

First of all, it appears that these terms of contemporaneity can be adopted for all times and ages, precisely because of their declared independence of history. In that they don’t “concern fixed qualities” of form, but solely concern connectivity in a context determined by the judgments of all participants, they are utterly pragmatic. Second, contemporaneity— and this is neither said nor likely to be implied by Germer— is a certain condition for production in which “the social system ‘art’” is set up in such a way that form cannot be produced in accordance with established standards and relevances, but can only arise from their new negotiation each time. In this second sense, contemporaneity is a fundamental condition of production, according to which formal distinction based on established patterns and principled commitments becomes impossible. Third, contemporaneity in the second sense— this, again, is not captured by Germer’s terms, yet it constitutes an assumption that has informed our discussion all along— must be regarded as the condition of production specific to our present. Never before has art that fails to live up to its contemporaneity in the first sense been so radically discredited as is the case today: Either form is strictly contemporaneous, contemporaneous to the point, or we cannot actually speak of form. In Richter’s conception of contemporaneity, all three components appear unified. Contemporaneity as affirmation With this, contemporaneity becomes a desideratum aimed at each time, emphatically always still to be aimed at: that the transformation of “the given” through judgment be right, that the form be connectible. But how does this square with Richter’s other remarks that describe contemporaneity as something inevitable, a matter of course? We recall: “Every word, every line, every thought is prompted by the time we live in, with all its circumstances, its ties, its efforts, its past and present. It is impossible to act or think independently and arbitrarily.” The appearance of a contradiction can easily be resolved. For Richter says not that the time instructs our doing and thinking, and precedes

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those forms as their principled foundation, but that those forms’ “being given” by the time is such that they, after all, are always triggered by some “given,” that they can be determined only in this respect and therefore can never be “independent and arbitrary.” The “time” is the broadest context of reactions, the world according to its most recent update— not a substrate on which this context is based and from which one might distance oneself through acting. All possible distancing is reaction and thus in need of that to which it reacts. For a more radical distancing, however, we lack a vantage point; it would only be conceivable from a transcendent standpoint (from which, indeed, the world has time and again been distanced and denounced— examples being Platonism or Christianity). Richter considers an independence from the time thus conceived not only “impossible,” but also undesirable, as outside of our commitment to the time, all attempts at formulation are discredited by arbitrariness as they belong to the realm of dream, of madness, of “authentic murmur” or “babbling by oneself”— in any case to the “antisocial.” For him, only that which connects us is binding, which is why he wants to want what everyone wants and draws the by now familiar conclusion: “I want to be like everyone. To think that which everyone thinks, to do that which is done anyway. I see no sense in doing anything different. [ . . . ] I think that one always does what is done anyway (even when making something new), and that one is always making something new.”98 That such art doesn’t end up as a zero-sum game— in that it extracts from its time the expectable, average, commonplace and feeds it back into that time— is ensured by the differential, ontological, and “social” excess value of form. In turn, hanging on to conceptions that cast art as revolutionary, anarchic, madness-bound, prophetic, utopian, dreamlike-solipsistic, or transcendent-epiphanic testifies not, as is often thought, to a radicalizing enhancement of form’s transformative power, but, on the contrary, to an underestimation of the latter’s radicality, as all of these determinations assume that form, to be effective, stands in need of some nonimmanent foundation. Art, depending on the occasion, may as well be any of the things listed here— or, rather, it may have been it throughout the metaphysical age— but today, at least according to Richter, it can be these things only in a structurally secondary perspective that becomes articulable only in the horizon of its contemporaneity. Which is to say that con-

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temporaneity by no means leads to conformism and temperance— “art can just as well be made in harmony with the circumstances of its making as in defiance of them”99— but, on the contrary, it opens up the radicality of choice in the first place. The apparent contradiction between an inevitable contemporaneity and one that is always still to be constituted disappears. For a pragmatist conception of form, both hold at the same time. This is the point of Richter’s notion of contemporaneity: As his production turns itself over to the time, the time is in turn affected by its impact. Affirmation is transformation, deciding the time into its ultimate form each time.

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Form as Paradigm? The discussion so far has outlined a pragmatist conception of artistic form. My claim was that this conception responds productively to a particular contemporary challenge: the sterile alternative between pursuing art either according to the assumption of an inherent essence, or according to the rejection of such an assumption. Richter’s work, I have shown, undertakes to sidestep the impasse posed by the alternative, as it engages the alternative not on the latter’s terms, but rather on its own, pragmatist terms. This means that the conception allows for art to continue in the face of the challenge, turning an inherited impasse into a starting point for something new. The project of continuation cannot be separated from the question of why to make art— a question that began to take shape in the discussion of the third tension— for without a sense of art’s purpose, there can also be no sense of why one should seek a reaction to the impasse in the first place. We thus need an inquiry for which the point of art and the point of its pragmatist conception fall in one. Such an inquiry involves, first of all, the distinction between artistic and nonartistic form, for as long as this distinction has not been drawn, one is not talking about art— in fact, it is unclear what one would be talking about. Such an inquiry also calls for a consideration of the authority of the account itself, of the conceptual premises from which the account giving occurs, as well as the plausibility of its claim to contemporary relevance. 129

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In conclusion, then, we broaden our focus to pursue said inquiry in the shape of three questions: What is the point of a general pragmatist conception of form? What, specifically, is the point of a pragmatist conception of artistic form? What would be involved in claiming such a conception to have paradigmatic status for our present? The point of a general pragmatist account of form Richter’s conception of art can be described, first of all, in terms of a general pragmatist account of form. Such a general account doesn’t yet address the specifics of artistic form, but the latter is included in it according to its broad conceptual outline. Here, form is a difference that functionally draws its distinction from the fact that it makes a difference for its context. This difference, as we have seen, can be described either as a reaction in which form is freed from correspondence with other, independently established forms for which traditionally it had to serve as a representation, container, or expression (first tension); or as a choice between alternatives or aspects that we described as an act of taking-as, the decision of a case through judgment, by which the structural underivability of form from an established context is emphasized together with its rightness (second tension); or, finally, as a horizontal transformation in an open series of transformations in which form is absolved from the obligation to redeem, fulfill, or realize an essence or substrate— that is, to bring something to its definitive and ultimate reality (third tension). Within the scenario in which Richter develops his artistic pragmatism, the very fact of his holding onto the category of form already marks a distinctive commitment that, under today’s circumstances, is all but to be expected. Take, for example, Hans Belting’s description of the current situation— a diagnosis that bears a similarity to Danto’s diagnosis we encountered earlier: “Art on a global scale does not imply an inherent aesthetic quality, which could be identified as such, nor a global concept of what has to be regarded as art.”1 Art is “global” insofar as it doesn’t submit to essentialist criteria (“an inherent aesthetic quality”); it is not bound by a specific context, and therefore can work in all contexts. This description, however, appears in contrast not only to modern art, but also to the concept of form as such: “Modern art at the time was distinguished as ‘modern

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form’ in art, which could even mean ‘only form’ without any subject matter, when abstraction in the 1950s was recognized as a universal style; a ‘world language,’ to use the rhetoric of those years. The difference of global art, given this background, is all too obvious, for it lacks any common idiom in terms of style and no longer insists on form as a primary or independent goal. Rather, art is distinguished by new proof of professionalism such as contemporary subject matter and a contemporary performance, usually a mixture of film, video, and documentary materials.”2 Now, we may well grant that the contemporary mixture of certain media (“film, video”), genres (“documentary”), and themes (“subject matter”)— a mixture that today’s art allegedly requires— features qualifications other than the aesthetic qualifications of modern art. But it is quite obvious that Belting’s diagnosis, as it seeks to dispense with a qualification based on certain determinate features of art, reintroduces precisely such a qualification. Because together with the aesthetic features of modernism it rejects the concept of form itself, it has to posit new features without which speaking of art would not be based on anything whatsoever. Quite differently, Richter, who like Belting refuses all qualification, at the same time not only holds onto the concept of form, but also obtains from it the very conceptual possibility of such a refusal. However modern Richter’s emphasis on form may at times seem, such a label would mischaracterize it completely. For form— distinction as such— is simply what remains when one dispenses with all default qualification. Art is feasible today not by abolishing the concept of form, but only by reconceiving it productively. By turning the generalized lack of principledness of artistic production into its positive starting point, Richter outlines a model that can account for art even if it looks utterly different and runs on utterly different cultural, thematic, stylistic, and medial premises than his own.3 Now, if we can ascribe a paradigmatic character to Richter’s production— we entertain this as a question and a hypothetical— this is due to the peculiar fact that while the production is not meta-art whose task it is to reflect on other art or on art as such, it articulates, by way of a proposal, the specific conditions under which the production of form is possible today. According to its pragmatist premises, it is only one possibility among others; but according to its performance— in an immense diversity and consistency of production— it is the realiza-

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tion of precisely that formal precondition without which no such possibilities would exist. Distancing of transcendence This is so because the differential model that treats form as the act of a distinction and accounts for it in terms of reaction, judgment, and transformation frees it from its traditional dependence on the concepts content, matter, and essence— a series that runs not parallel but orthogonal to the former series, to which it used to be seen as complementary.4 On the account offered here, while any particular form may or may not continue to be associated with these complementary concepts— if authorized by the context, there is nothing wrong with talking of the content, the matter, or the essence of a form— these concepts must be considered secondary to form’s differential character, and merely accidental, as they have no part in constituting form as form. Distancing of content A detachment of the concept of form from the complementary concept of content or meaning is manifest in Richter’s replacement of representation with reaction. By this, form becomes independent of anything that it is supposed to reflect, to express, to convey. Richter explicitly states that a form is not to be understood as the appearance of a content that might as well appear in a different form. “The question about content is nonsense, that is, there is only form. There is only ‘something,’ there is only what there is.” The correspondence with a content is replaced with the rightness of the connection, and the theoretical context of reflection is replaced with the practical context of reaction. Such a form can be produced and communicated under conditions that render it open whether and how its communication may be semanticized or interpreted; conditions where the content of the communication appears marginalized in favor of a focus on, say, the materiality of the signifier, grammatical structure, prosodic features, rhythm, or other transsemantic parameters; conditions where it continues to function without inherent meaning or ideal significance. We concur with T. J. Clark’s contention that “a theory of form is weak to the extent that it does not address form’s semantic” side,5 yet our pragmatist account is not a sidestepping of semantics, but the only way to properly account for it— that is, through an explanatory priority of pragmatics over semantics, such that whatever form means must be understood

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in terms of what it does. In this vein, the metaphysical dualism of meaning and matter, in terms of which form is traditionally often cast, appears abandoned in Richter, by which form is freed not only of the concept of meaning, but also of a correlative dependence on the concept of matter. Distancing of matter Now, of course, matter is not irrelevant to differential form, but its role is reconceived. While form still requires a medium in which it is articulated— for example, “the medium of painting” or “the medium of this canvas”— it is not bound to any particular medium. This is why form is conceivable even under conditions of extremely reduced or questionable materiality, say, of virtual or electronic media. Internet art can possess form, as can installations based on sound, video, or light; action art, with its characteristic transience, may manifest it, as may conceptual art, with its characteristic material elusiveness; and— this too belongs to the question of mediality— reception must be considered form, as production must. Only in this way can we understand Richter’s claim that “the act of artistic production” consists solely in “the ability to see and to decide” or “to judge”— an ability for which not only the medium plays no role, but for which also, as we saw, “the producer and the consumer, the viewer and the painter are utterly the same.” This is why from a difference-theoretical perspective, the act of making a painting and the act of viewing it are equally a production of form— a production, to be sure, that varies hugely according to the conditions involved, but one that is invariably about a singular form that is to be established each time in a separate effort. This also clarifies that Richter’s decision to paint is not a part of his pragmatist program; the latter would be equally feasible in entirely different media, such as music, dance, or poetry. The change from the oil painting to the glass panel, from the pencil drawing or sculpture (Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo, Sphere I–III) to the photograph or book (Forest, December) or architectural element (glass panels, Cologne Cathedral Window) is accidental for Richter in the sense that it marks no internal break of his program.6 Distancing of essence Richter dispenses with the dependence of form on essence insofar as he refuses to bind form to a certain established reality, truth, or purpose. We saw that this holds both for

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form’s static commitment to the project of epistemology in which it embodies a principled truth, and for its dynamic commitment to a teleology of restoration in which form is to reach its “actual” or “true” nature. The epistemological equation of authorization and foundation is replaced with the underivable rightness of judgment, while the restorative identification of the end with a transcendence is replaced with a transformative eschatology of the singular, in which the end is each time and next time. Accordingly, a shared taking part in form doesn’t demand of the participants a common essence— the “real reality” of an alignment of ideas or circumstance, based in a shared mark of class, gender, race, culture, or destiny— but requires only a taking part in the context. Because such a nonessential community isn’t constituted by principled criteria for inclusion and exclusion, any work with the right sort of pragmatic connectivity can facilitate it. Thus freed from the boundness to established criteria, the specifics of form as such are by no means compromised; on the contrary, it is constituted properly for the first time or, at least, rendered viable under the contemporary conditions. This doesn’t mean that every form, in its effective communicative reach, is universal— that is, that it can be received and connected to everywhere and beyond the constraints of specific contexts. But it does mean that all obstacles that keep a form from such communicative reach are accidental and bound to a particular performance. The structure of form doesn’t decree who does what, where, and when; every work can be described according to its distinction, and where this is not possible, there is no form and there can be no talk of art. As form is nothing but the act of distinction, an absence of form is fully indiscernible, and we are not dealing with something, with anything at all. Some specifications Before we move on, let us address some concerns that perhaps predictably may arise at this point. First of all, the dispensing with representation doesn’t abolish a form’s relating to the totality of forms we called the world, as a form that has nothing to do with the world is an impossibility from a pragmatist standpoint. On the contrary, it is only the pragmatist model that guarantees the relating to the world, for while representation structurally needs to keep a distance from that which it refers to, reaction is triggered only as it makes contact with the latter— it absorbs the latter and, in doing so, is its transformation. This is how Richter can

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hold onto the eschatological program of a redemption that doesn’t risk turning into the utopia of a salvation of the world through art, and that precisely therefore promises to be capable of transforming the world in every moment. Clark affirms such replacement of representation with transformation, even as he exchanges Richter’s notion of rightness with the more commonly used notion of truth: “Form aims at truth. Truth is to be understood as an operation on the world, not a set of equivalents to a world in place. Formalists and functionalists have, up to now, too often seen the characteristic shapes taken by artifacts as responses to a world (duplications of certain of the world’s aspects, and/or adaptations to a task or threat); the point is that form [ . . . ] is change.”7 Moreover, in the programmatic refusal to commit to a standpoint, method, or style, the historical specificity of a painting is not called into question. On the contrary, it appears maximally guaranteed through the singular boundness of form to its context that precludes a form from returning in a different context. In contrast to the popular idea of a quasi-universal availability of all images and pictorial vocabularies that brings with it the latter’s commonplace character in the sense of a spacelessness and timelessness, Richter’s images insist emphatically on their historical boundness, their manifesting of history, which we also described as their manifesting of factuality— think of the factuality constituted in the singular sharedness of the picture of 9/11 in September. The form and the historicity of the picture are one and the same. Not only is an accounting for painterly practice in terms of form not at odds with the account’s historical specificity, but, on the contrary, it is only through a focus on form that a work appears in its full historical situatedness— as is confirmed, for example, by Yve-Alain Bois: “it is certainly because I am interested in the historical signification of works of art [ . . . ] that I confer a preeminent importance on close formal analyses in my own work.”8 Finally, in its rejection of principledness, Richter’s conception by no means leads to a general arbitrariness or relativity of form, but, on the contrary, it makes available the very possibility to claim rightness emphatically for form. A rightness to be determined in each case in a separate effort, one whose universality is of one time and place. As a pragmatist focus on form has such rightness at its conceptual core, it doesn’t manifest a further blurring of the concept of

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that which can “globally” be understood as art, but, on the contrary, shows its consolidation. It is only through form that the concept of art comes determinately into reach. In a situation in which we might otherwise not at all be able to tell what art is supposed to be— or, at least, not without following Belting in taking refuge in talk of “contemporary themes and media” or the like— Richter’s model of form offers an answer that responds successfully to the contemporary challenge precisely as it allows for a strong, internally differentiated conception of art. The special point of artistic form So much for art in its basic description in terms of a general pragmatist account of form. As we now turn to its specifics, which set it apart as artistic form, we recall from our discussion that its distinguishing feature is a functional valuation of aspect change. Unlike normal form, artistic form is not about performing this or that aspect, or performing aspect change to some purpose; rather, its distinguishing feature is this— that the purpose is the change of aspect as such. (To the extent to which activities such as dance, sports, cooking, or gardening undergo such a functional shift, they too must be regarded as artistic forms.)9 Aspect change for its own sake means that form— in continuity with the Kantian thought that identifies the aesthetic as a purposiveness without purpose— doesn’t operate at the service of something beyond itself, but rather invests in its own distinction and reality without performing these to any further end. Now this functional characterization should by no means be understood as, say, an “intrinsic” determination of art that might be juxtaposed with its “extrinsic” determination through the contexts of the art world— the way, for instance, a sociological account of aesthetic judgment has been juxtaposed with its transcendental account— but both constitute two sides of one and the same thing; after all, functionality is nothing but determination within a context, a practice, a game. The functional specificity of artistic form, at least in Richter’s work, shows a strongly quantifying inflection. This is so because of the richness of reference of form to its context. Aspect change for its own sake, where form doesn’t disambiguate between competing aspects but sustains them in their simultaneity, potentiates a form’s accessibility or connectivity, as these aspects provide mutually independent ways in which the form can be taken by other forms

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that react to it (within a painting or by spectators). We can express the same thought by saying that instead of presenting itself under a stable aspect, as one would expect of normal form, an artistic form presents various aspects such that the end is not this or that aspect, but a change of aspect— and thus presents the spectator with the task of dealing with change as such. While, strictly speaking, a single aspect change performed for its own sake is sufficient to establish a form as artistic, Richter’s appropriation of a long tradition that extends from Aristotle to Baumgarten, Kant, and beyond involves the assumption of an increase in distinction and reality of artistic form with respect to normal form.10 Only artistic form features, as Richter says, an “innumerability of the aspects.” If art is the practice that is functionally geared toward maximizing the distinction and reality of its forms, the point is heightened communication. In turn, the more aspects a form provides to communicate with its context in said way, the greater its artistic achievement. Here we arrive at the ultimate aim of artistic form. Given that such form’s increase in distinction and reality is based on its richness in reference, and richness in reference means communicability, and communicability means participation (potential as well as actual) of performers in the form, the form brings about an increase in community building, an increase in sharedness of our performances. As that which can be seen and has been actualized to a higher degree, artistic form is more “perceptible,” more shared and more real than normal form. In Richter, this distinction of art with respect to nonart showed itself to be such that, while the second is about participation to whatever purpose the performance works, the first is about participation as such, a performance the purpose of which is to perform. That is, we are dealing with a practice the end of which is fulfilled by participating or belonging (in a sense that is qualified by the particular makeup of a form that determines, say, what the shared image is about), beyond which form has nothing else to bring about. The sole reason a painting is more real than its photographic model— thus at least Richter’s claim— is that the latter is subject to a pragmatics of the report that more strictly regulates the viewer’s perspective and therefore allows for fewer aspects to be in play, whereas the former more effectively establishes community, as its connectivity corresponds directly to the larger number of aspects that communicate the form with its context.

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This, we recall, is the basic problem to which art, according to Richter, responds: the world is insufficiently shared. Form structurally departs from a situation that we don’t sufficiently have in common or don’t have in common at all, and which therefore possesses a deficient reality (Wirklichkeit), and it transforms this situation to a higher level of sharedness, which is also a higher level of reality and distinction. Appropriating a term coined by Richter’s fellow pragmatist Heidegger, we might describe such a deficit as poorness in world (Weltarmut). Heidegger’s complementary concept of world making or world formation (Weltbildung) would then correspond to what Richter calls formulation, emphasizing the operation’s inevitability:11 “We must always after all, no matter what it is that we encounter, give it a form, in order to be able to deal with it at all.” If, according to Richter, the deficiency of the world lies in the fact that it is insufficiently shared, then our account of artistic form’s functional specificity shows why such form should be expected to remedy the deficiency more powerfully than nonartistic form, since it is able to establish community where the latter is not. More directly, we can recast the difference between nonartistic and artistic form not only as the difference between a lesser and a greater ability to remedy deficiency, but also in terms of a lesser and greater degree of sharedness. In fact, the deficit itself can be characterized as a lack from the side of nonartistic form to establish community, such that the reality deficit consisting of the pragmatic one-dimensionality of nonartistic reality is perceived to constitute a general condition. Richter speaks of “the dilemma that our seeing [normal seeing, in contrast to seeing-as] lets us apprehend things [it presents them under a certain aspect], but at the same time restricts and partially precludes our apprehension of reality [the seeing of a multiplicity of aspects].” Performative convocation This implies a juxtaposition of a pragmatism of normal form and a pragmatism of artistic form. A pragmatism of nonartistic practices seeks to dispense with traditional metaphysics in such a way that what used to be the place of the structural transcendence of a principled determination of form now comes to be occupied by the immanence of form’s authorization by a practical context that articulates the conventions (norms) of a community. Any performance of a form has these conventions as its standard, a standard that is logically independent of the performance and, in

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this sense, precedes the performance as its condition. Even where the standard is thought to be transformed by the performances that draw on it, there is still a sense that performance requires the standard for its authorization. In this vein, classical pragmatists— from James to Dewey, Wittgenstein, or Rorty— regard form as a “tool” that makes a difference to a certain end. The metaphor says everything about these conceptions’ ability to remedy the deficiency of reality diagnosed by Richter: form is tied to whatever end toward which it is performed, and to the context of which this end is a part, and it can only be shared insofar as this context is already shared. Even Davidson’s account, which holds that authorization is not a matter of convention, but must holistically draw on a liminal ability of “knowing our way around in the world generally,” still presupposes a shared context on which authorization depends.12 This means that through normal form, an established community is at best accidentally expanded, by whoever happens to share in the end of the form. The standard of performance remains untouched; there is no conceptual expansion of the community. Rather than providing a remedy, then, such form appears to manifest further the deficiency. Against this scenario, Richter’s account of artistic form holds that reference to the standard inherent in convention cannot account for the making of a difference, as in any given case the standard is unable to indicate what to do next. A decision here and now cannot be derived from past decisions. If the underivability of form is taken seriously, then its production cannot be thought to rely on an established practice or community; on the contrary, community is established with each performance. A form is authorized not by the community that precedes it, but by the community that it in turn convenes. Even a reliance merely on the thinnest totality of established context that Davidson calls “the world generally” will not do. In a marked distancing of the classical pragmatists, then, Richter dispenses with the thought that form is a tool, as this implies its functioning toward an established end. On his alternative account, it cannot be clear from the outset what form is supposed to do, which is why it has to be articulated, as it were, without knowledge of what it is that one is doing. We are not already part of a practice or community, nor do we already have clarity about what to do, but we have to figure it out in every single case. Such form doesn’t depend on a convergence of the participants’ ways, but serves as a basis for such

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convergence. As the account dispenses with the givenness of both transcendent and immanent standards, what remains as the origin of form is performance itself. This is what we called the priority of the act in Richter: form strictly coincides with its own taking place, and the practice it initiates is a performative convocation that is subject to no other standard but the participation in this taking place. The conception’s ability to remedy the deficiency of reality lies in form’s refusal to disambiguate its aspects, thus offering mutually independent ways in which it can be taken, such that it establishes community by facilitating participation. Pragmatist form as paradigm? Finally, let us return to the question of the viability of this conception. If Richter presents a program, the conceptual core of which is a dispensing with authority, what then about the authority of this program? In taking the program as more than a random account, we assumed such authority all along; we explicitly suggested such authority in those formulations that treated Richter’s work and program as paradigmatic for our contemporary, and we said that the work articulates, by way of a proposal, the specific conditions under which the production of form is possible today. But from where might such a consideration of form as paradigm draw its plausibility? Does Richter’s principle of unprincipledness not contradict itself in an obvious way?13 The concept of paradigm does not appear to pose a problem here.14 According to Thomas Kuhn, who popularized the concept, a paradigm is not grounded in principle but rather forms the pretheoretical pragmatic framework that can generate principles and rules without in turn depending on them.15 This means that there can be a paradigm of unprincipledness, one that not only makes do without principles, but that consists of there being no principles— including a principle that prohibits principles. Now, does Richter subscribe to such unprincipled unprincipledness, or is he trapped in the selfcontradiction of a principled prohibition of principle? While it seems obvious that Richter’s artistic program is really a program and includes explicit bans of principle, it seems equally obvious that this program concerns his own production and makes no demand for universal implementation. He does not position his work by appeal to universal relevance, but leaves its relevance entirely to exemplarity. By showing itself, Richter’s painted and

form as paradigm?

written work proposes the conditions under which the making of form is possible today: true to its poetological premises, it claims to be only one among an indefinite number of possibilities; at the same time, though, it gives reality to the very formal preconditions without which there can be no such indefinite number of possibilities. Whether this counts as evading the trap of self-contradiction depends on the concept of exemplarity one deploys. According to a metaphysical interpretation that takes the example to be the demonstration or representation of a universal, exemplification is always and inevitably a universalization. In this tradition, Giorgio Agamben calls the example an “exclusion by inclusion,” because, precisely in exhibiting itself as an exemplar, it transgresses its status of exemplar; its particularity is fundamentally— from the origin— corrupted.16 If Richter’s work were to offer itself as an example in this way, it would stand in opposition to its own program, since its explicit denunciations of principle would appear universalized, despite the fact that it contains no claim for universalization. This interpretation, however, contrasts sharply with a pragmatist account of exemplarity. While Richter does not formulate such an account himself, it follows in an unforced way from the premises of his work. Here, the example constitutes itself not by universalization, but by connection. In taking Richter as an example, I make him the example of something that emerges only in my taking. Without taking there can be no example, because only the taking of something as something determines for what it is an example. The universal— the respect in which Richter and I are comparable— is not a preexisting entity, but gets constituted in the act of taking; it is needed, but is secondary to the act. It is in this sense that Aristotle defines the example as neither the move from the particular to the universal (induction), nor the move from the universal to the particular (deduction), but as the move from the particular to the particular— in the way that “one is better known than the other.”17 Both relate as analogy through a genus or tertium that forms the respect in which they are comparable; yet the “vertical” relation found in deduction and induction appears shifted to a “horizontal” relation, where the genus does not rule the comparison, but instead gets constituted in its very act. It can now be explained how we get from the example to the paradigm: by “horizontal” connections. Every time we take some-

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thing as an example, we confirm its exemplarity and thereby increase its paradigmatic validity— it gets, with Aristotle’s expression, “better known.” The new paradigm constitutes itself by others following the example, according to Kant’s distinction between “imitation” (Nachahmung) and “succession” (Nachfolge): I don’t contribute to the formation of the paradigm by painting or talking like the example, but only by reacting to it and carrying the relation forth through my acts (which means that rejection may contribute to the formation of a paradigm as well).18 Kuhn’s own divergent usages of the concept paradigm, at times referring to “example,” at times to “disciplinary matrix,”19 confirm a structural continuity according to which the example is the paradigm, the consensus of a disciplinary matrix growing out of and ultimately becoming indistinguishable from agreement on paradigms-as-exemplars20— a continuity that involves only movements from the particular to the particular, for which universalization is operative but not constitutive. If Richter is a paradigmatic artist, he is one by presenting something that, when taken up in multiple ways, can become a paradigm. Far from exhibiting its own universality, and thus avoiding the trap of self-contradiction, his example then would be paradigmatic in the sense of a specific possibility. What does this possibility look like? That something is “better known” indicates its increased availability; the better known is the more powerful and influential, it offers itself for connection, and in the chorus of forms to be taken up, it occupies, as it were, a place in the foreground. To what extent it gets in fact taken up remains contingent, but it has a relatively higher chance of being taken, suggesting itself by an amplified connectivity, distinction, reality. To the extent to which Richter’s work achieves this, it can count as paradigmatic. And it can claim this ambition without undermining its premises.

Acknowledgments For conversations about Richter large and small, I thank María Acosta Lopez, Robert Buch, Michel Chaouli, Anthony Cheung, Whitney Davis, Rachel Dwan, Philipp Ekardt, Caroline Jones, Abhishek Kaicker, Noreen Khawaja, Joseph Leo Koerner, Tobias Lehmkuhl, Barry Mazur, Maya Nguyen, Yi-Ping Ong, Elaine Scarry, Andy Strominger, Rahel Villinger, and Winnie Wong.

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Notes Chapter I

1. Gerhard Richter, Gerhard Richter: Writings, 1961– 2007, ed. Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2009), 14– 15. Unless otherwise noted, all page citations refer to this work. Throughout, the translation is modified by me, F. K. The English edition of Richter’s writings features a heterogeneous pool of translators of very uneven quality. I allow myself to modify it in order to maintain the high conceptual consistency of Richter’s original text as it manifests itself through his choice of words and expressions, punctuation, and characteristic tone. For the German reference text, see Gerhard Richter, Text 1961 bis 2007; Schriften, Interviews, Briefe, ed. Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2008). 2. Richter, Writings, 14. 3. Florian Klinger, Urteilen (Zürich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2011). The thought of form as a singular act of distinction that is underivable from established terms is not argued for by the present book; it presupposes the conception of such an act. 4. The pragmatist desiderata we highlighted in Richter’s comments have their philosophical correspondence, broadly understood, in texts such as these: William James, “Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking,” in Writings, 1902– 1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987); John Dewey, Art as Experience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations, 3d ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Malden: Blackwell, 2001); Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). The present book is an essay about Richter, not a discussion of pragmatist aesthetics

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as such. It only selectively engages the classical pragmatists listed above, and gives little or no room to related work on aesthetics by Martin Heidegger, Nelson Goodman, Donald Davidson, Stanley Cavell, Richard Shusterman, Martin Seel, or Christoph Menke. While there is some proximity to Niklas Luhmann’s work, Richter’s act-theoretical pragmatism runs on different premises than Luhmann’s system-theoretical functionalism. 5. My use of “art world” follows Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (1964), but it excludes Danto’s teleological connotations. For a sociological application of the concept (this time in the plural), see Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); for an overview of usages of the term and associated phenomena, see Charlotte Bydler, The Global ArtWorld, Inc.: On the Globalization of Contemporary Art (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2004). 6. See, e.g., Bydler, Global ArtWorld, Inc., 240– 41. 7. As representative examples of the philosophical debate— already influenced by Wittgenstein’s pragmatism— over the determination of the essence of art, see (contra) Morris Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15, no. 1 (1956); (pro, with restrictions) George Dickie, “Defining Art,” American Philosophical Quarterly 6, no. 3 (1969). 8. This is why it is only consistent if Greenberg’s account of the modern determination of the essence of painting feeds into his own propagation of two-dimensionality as belonging to its ultimate nature. See Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957– 1969 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 9. For a nuanced discussion of Greenberg’s theory of modernity, see, e.g., Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 10. Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 89: “By being exhibited . . . [these norms] are tested for their indispensability.” As Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 346, summarizes, Greenberg understands “the history of modernist painting as the progressive reduction of the conventions of pictorial art to flatness. Modernism was, thus, an experimental laboratory where for almost a century the essence of art was tested.” Arthur C. Danto, “The End of Art,” in The Death of Art, ed. Berel Lang (New York: Haven, 1984), describes the successive avant-garde movements of the twentieth century as art’s

notes to pages 5–7

search for its own identity (30): “Each movement raised the question afresh, offering itself as a possible final answer.” 11. De Duve, Kant after Duchamp, 155. First in Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 85. 12. Andy Warhol in Gene R. Swenson, “What Is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters,” Art News 64 (1963): 26. For diagnoses that generalize this state as distinctive for the age, compare Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) (argument for the end of the grand narratives); Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (sketch of a postmetaphysical culture); Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992) (argument for liberal democracy as an ideological final state). 13. De Duve, Kant after Duchamp, 341. On the question of the arbitrariness of modern art, see chap. 6. 14. De Duve, Kant after Duchamp, 347: “The readymade doesn’t tell us what the essence of art is, but for that matter it doesn’t tell us that art has no essence.” 15. Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 89– 90. 16. De Duve describes both in Kant after Duchamp, 332– 33. 17. Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 47. Danto offers a chronological tour through these eras— “The End of Art.” On different approaches to the modern topos of the end of art, see Eva Geulen, Das Ende der Kunst: Lesarten eines Gerüchts nach Hegel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2002). 18. Danto, After the End of Art, 10. Danto also refers to this endpoint as “contemporary.” On the change from “modern art” to “contemporary art,” also see Hans Belting, “Was bitte heißt ‘contemporary’?” Die Zeit, May 20, 2010. For more detail, see Hans Belting, Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte: Eine Revision nach zehn Jahren (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1995). 19. Danto, After the End of Art, 44. 20. This argument has resonated strongly up to the present— see, e.g., Martha Buskirk, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 11: “The daunting situation faced by the artist of the early twenty-first century is one in which all choices seem possible. If art from the early phase of postmodernism in the 1960s and 1970s

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could still be understood according to certain movements or categories, a second phase predominant in the 1980s and 1990s has been characterized by artists who have felt free to pick and choose among the entire range of possibilities established since the late 1950s, pulling apart and recombining elements associated with many different movements.” 21. I develop the philosophical premises of this undertaking— how is it possible to replace the metaphysical-antimetaphysical alternative with a pragmatist conception of judgment?— in my book Urteilen, which treats this alternative, among other things, as a traditional opposition between dogmatism and skepticism. While the alternative cannot be left behind on its own terms, I argue there, it can lose relevance. 22. Richter, Writings, 175. 23. Richter, Writings, 15. 24. Richter sometimes refers to art in the singular and with the definite article (die Kunst), which, in the original German, has an essentializing ring (as opposed to simply Kunst). But Richter avoids imbuing the term with a specific meaning, so that instead of identifying a common essence among the dissimilar, it functions as a kind of placeholder suspending any determination of art’s nature— thus creating the possibility of defining art anew each time. 25. Richter, Writings, 92. 26. The ingredients for such a concept can be found in Wittgenstein, Nelson Goodman, or Rorty. Perhaps Niklas Luhmann takes it the furthest in Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), but Richter’s pragmatism begins, as we will see, not with the system, but with act, activity, morphogenesis itself. 27. Julia Gelshorn, “Geschichtsrezeption und Rezeptionsgeschichte: Zur Zeitgenossenschaft Gerhart Richters,” in Sechs Vorträge über Gerhard Richter, ed. Dietmar Elger and Jürgen Müller (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007), 75– 80. 28. Richter, Writings, 104. 29. Richter, Writings, 510. 30. Richter, Writings, 510. 31. This model of a judgment-based appropriation of tradition offers a conceptual alternative to models that integrate breaks dialectically and thus relate the old and the new on shared terms. See, e.g., Clement Greenberg, “Necessity of ‘Formalism,’” in “Modernism and Postmodernism: Inquiries, Reflections, and Speculations,” special issue, New Literary History 3, no. 1 (1971).

notes to pages 17–18

32. In Buchloh’s characterization of this position— see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History (New York: City University of New York, 1994), 165— Richter becomes “the quintessentially cynical, post-modernist painter, whose entire oeuvre consists of a continuous operation of paraphrase and quotation, the apogee of inauthenticity.” 33. For an invective against Richter the postmodernist, see Jed Perl, “Saint Gerhard of the Sorrows of Painting,” New Republic, April 2002. For a celebration of Richter as a modernist, see Michael Kimmelman, “Gerhard Richter: An Artist beyond Isms,” New York Times Magazine, January 2002. 34. E.g., Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Divided Memory and Post-Traditional Identity: Gerhard Richter’s Work of Mourning,” in Gerhard Richter, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, October Files 8 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 71– 72: “Gerhard Richter’s art can be seen as an extraordinary succession of painterly strategies by which what has always been thought of as mutually exclusive cultural and historical demands have been successfully, if paradoxically, integrated. In the register of the historical, such a coexistence turns on the claims made for a post-national artistic identity versus those of a specifically German position within the context of West German neo-avant-garde practices; at the level of the cultural, the values of a quasi-modernist structure of self-reference operate strangely in tandem with a typically postmodern dismantling of the traditional categories of painting (for example, the age-old dichotomy Clement Greenberg referred to as ‘abstract, representational, and so forth’).” More specifically on the abstract paintings, see Buchloh, Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History, 190– 91: “Richter’s work questions the credibility of all of his strategies from within, confronting each category with its opponent (e.g., pure abstraction with Neo-Classical figuration, the monochrome with the floral still life), each convention with the one that denies its validity, each pictorial cancellation with its proper reinstitution, each prohibition with its critical negation.” 35. I will cite from examples of both types of studies in what follows. 36. Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting (New York: Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002), e.g., 88: “Richter’s identity is manifest throughout his work [ . . . ] as a force field whose powerful, shifting, and precariously balanced centrifugal and centripetal forces have proven capable of holding together the [ . . . ] fragments of modern experience and consciousness.” 37. Richter, Writings, 276 (emphasis mine). 38. Richter, Writings, 178.

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39. Richter, Writings, 274. 40. Dieter Schwarz, “The Turn of the Screw— New Works of Gerhard Richter,” in Paintings from 2003– 2005, by Gerhard Richter (New York: Marian Goodman Gallery, 2005), 109: “If one looks back over the work of Gerhard Richter it is impossible to talk in terms of its ‘sum total,’ or of its painterly or thematic essence.” This does not speak against formal unity. 41. Richter, Writings, 185. 42. Richter, Writings, 15: “Not knowing where one is going— being lost, being a loser— reveals the greatest possible faith and optimism, as against collective security and collective significance. To believe, one must have lost God; to paint, one must have lost art.” 43. Richter, Writings, 169. 44. Richter, Writings, 34. 45. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 15. 46. Just how naturally Richter claims such an effect for himself is displayed graphically in the 1998 print Overview, a synopsis of innovators from the Western tradition. Under the category of “Art” in the modern age, he lists, among other names, his own. For a discussion of Richter’s selfpositioning, see Julia Gelshorn, “Der Künstler spricht— Vom Umgang mit den Texten Gerhard Richters,” in Legitimationen: Künstlerinnen und Künstler als Autoritäten der Gegenwartskunst, Kunstgeschichten der Gegenwart 5, ed. Julia Gelshorn (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), 133. Chapter II

1. Buchloh speaks of an “apparent antagonism within painting, between the functions of depiction and self-reflection” (Richter, Writings, 174); while Astrid Kasper, Gerhard Richter: Malerei als Thema der Malerei (Berlin: Reimer Verlag, 2003) (translation mine), contrasts the “materiality of the picture” with the “semantics of the picture.” 2. Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 87: “The Old Masters had sensed that it was necessary to preserve what is called the integrity of the picture plane: that is, to signify the enduring presence of flatness underneath and above the most vivid illusion of three-dimensional space. The apparent contradiction involved was essential to the success of their art, as it is indeed to the success of all pictorial art. The Modernists have neither avoided nor resolved this contradiction; rather they have reversed its terms. One is made aware of the flatness of their

notes to pages 24–26

pictures before, instead of after, being made aware of what the flatness contains. Whereas one tends to see what is in an Old Master before one sees the picture itself, one sees a Modernist picture as a picture first.” And then Greenberg makes clear that he himself belongs to this modernism: “This is, of course, the best way of seeing any kind of picture, Old Master or Modernist, but Modernism imposes it as the only and necessary way.” 3. See, e.g., Gottfried Boehm, “Die Bilderfrage,” in Was ist ein Bild?, ed. Gottfried Boehm (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1994), 332. 4. Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, vol. 1, Books 1– 2, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 2.18.1, p. 397. For a conceptual relating of performance to pragmatism, see Andrea Kern, “The Concept of the Performative: Between Pragmatism and Deconstruction,” in Privacies: Yearbook of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, ed. Mieke Bal et al. (Amsterdam: ASCA Press, 2000). 5. Richter, Writings, 59. 6. Richter, Writings, 132. 7. Richter, Writings, 247. 8. Aristotle, Metaphysics, vol. 1, Books 1– 9, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), book IX; Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric, trans. J. H. Freese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), book III.11. 9. Given the form as act, we view as superfluous the question of “whether autonomous activity can indeed be ascribed to images in themselves, or if this is only permissible in relation to the emotional, intellectual and physical responses of those engaging with them.” Horst Bredekamp, Image Acts: A Systematic Approach to Visual Agency, chap. 3.A (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017). Neither is the case. Form is the simple act of distinction, which must be completed for every interaction and is equally at work in painting and viewing. Bredekamp’s argument for a “pictorially active latency,” according to which viewing an image actualizes its latent potential, is not challenged by this, since the argument escapes the abovementioned alternative by virtue of the fact that actualization takes place not in the picture, but in the act of viewing it. See Horst Bredekamp, “Die Latenz des Objekts als Modus des Bildakts,” in Latenz: Blinde Passagiere in den Geisteswissenschaften, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Florian Klinger (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011). 10. Richter interviewed by Serota in Gerhard Richter: Panorama, ed. Godfrey and Serota, 15.

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11. Richter, Writings, 33. 12. Richter, Writings, 169. 13. Richter, Writings, 160. 14. Richter, Writings, 33. 15. Richter, Writings, 53. 16. Richter, Writings, 33 and 53: “The flowing transitions, the smooth, equalizing surface”; “usually mechanically wipe-blurred horizontally so that no detail stands out and everything remains in motion: Tiger.” 17. Richter, Writings, 60. On the first photograph of an atom, 525– 26: “I was fascinated by the motif, because while imaging technology in microscopes has advanced to the point where you can really see an atom, you can never see it sharp. I find that important, because it sets a limit. [ . . . ] One can’t go any further; there’s really an end-point, simply because there’s nothing there that can be seen. A new quality starts there. That’s fascinating in itself! And as a fact, this event shows itself quite simply as lack of sharpness, as a little out-of-focus photo.” 18. Richter, Writings, 53. 19. Richter, Writings, 33. 20. Gottfried Boehm, “Indeterminacy: On the Logic of the Image,” in Dynamics and Performativity of Imagination: The Image between the Visible and the Invisible, ed. Bernd Hüppauf and Christoph Wulf (New York: Routledge, 2009), 220, asserts that “unsharpness, or more precisely indeterminacy, is a quality of images in general”— whether they display sharp contours or not. For more on the example of Cézanne, see 220 and following. 21. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing, trans. Philip Armstrong (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 21. 22. Richter, Writings, 167– 68; Richter interviewed by Serota, in Gerhard Richter: Panorama, ed. Godfrey and Serota, 15. Also see Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, 73. 23. See Hubertus Butin, Gerhard Richters Film “Volker Bradke” und das Prinzip der Unschärfe (Cologne: DuMont Literatur & Kunst Verlag, 2010; packaged with Gerhard Richter, Volker Bradke [Germany, 1966], DVD), 21. 24. This, then, is not about reducing all representation to a constitutive flatness, which for Greenberg (for example) defines the mid-century “period style.” See Clement Greenberg, “Our Period Style,” in The Collected

notes to pages 30–37

Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, vol. 2, Arrogant Purpose, 1945– 1949 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 324– 25. 25. Richter, Writings, 81. 26. Thus, belonging to form is a dimensionality in the sense of Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 242, 248– 49. Here dimension is understood as a “stretch” or “extension” of the singular “now.” But not such that it must be measured against an external time— rather, it itself, as an individual distinction in its morphogenesis, is the source of temporality. 27. Richter, Writings, 321. 28. Also see the cycle of overpainted photographs in Gerhard Richter, Sils (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2002). 29. Richter, Writings, 140. 30. See Richter, Writings, 32. 31. Richter, Writings, 45. 32. Richter, Writings, 96. 33. Richter, Writings, 352– 53. 34. See Danto again, After the End of Art, 8. 35. Richter, Writings, 65. 36. Richter, Writings, 373. 37. Richter, Writings, 426. A little further on in the interview (also 426): “Even those paintings that are supposed to be nothing but a monochrome surface are looked at in that searching manner. The effect of these paintings depends on that mechanism. I don’t even know how it could work otherwise.” 38. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. and introd. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 31. 39. This contradicts Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), 5: “A picture, to represent an object, must be a symbol for it, stand for it, refer to it; and [ . . . ] no degree of resemblance is sufficient to establish the requisite relationship of reference. Nor is resemblance necessary for reference; almost anything may stand for almost anything else. A picture that represents— like a passage that describes— an object refers to and, more particularly, denotes it. Denotation is the core of representation

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and is independent of resemblance.” Certainly, resemblance does not replace convention. But convention, to argue against Goodman, cannot be equated with the symbolic, or the realm of the picture with that of language. (On Goodman’s “language theory of pictures,” see Nelson Goodman, “The Way the World Is,” in Problems and Projects [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972].) See all the conventional contexts in which interaction is established but no symbols agreed upon. This does not refute Goodman’s premise (“a picture . . .”), but proves the representationalist assumptions on which it is based useless for getting into focus the question of reference. 40. Richter, Writings, 373. 41. Gerhard Richter, Patterns: Divided— Mirrored— Repeated (London: Heni Publishing, 2011). 42. In his short essay “Imagination,” Benjamin notes that “[w]e might [ . . . ] describe the manifestations of the imagination as the de-formation [ . . . ] of what has been formed. It is characteristic of all imagination that it plays a game of dissolution with its forms. [ . . . ] The manifestations of the imagination arise in that region of the form in which the latter dissolves itself. [ . . . ] [The imaginative de-formation of objects] immortalizes the doom it brings about in an unending series of transitions” and shows “the world caught up in the process of unending dissolution; and this means eternal ephemerality.” Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, vol. 1, 1913– 1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996), 280– 81. 43. This runs counter to Birgit Pelzer, “There Is No There: Gerhard Richter at the Carré d’Art in Nîmes,” in Hans Ulrich Obrist et al., Gerhard Richter: 100 Pictures (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 1996), 135, who uncovers a primarily representational activity in the mirror as opposed to a painting. 44. Richter, Writings, 33. 45. Richter, Writings, 33. 46. Richter, Writings, 81. A similarly radical “opening” of possibilities is offered by the combinatorial color mosaic in Cologne Cathedral Window: “This colour-chart system is potentially representational due to the fact that the infinite number of ways of arranging the squares contains the possibility of a picture appearing. In theory, every picture imaginable could appear eventually.” Richter in Corinna Belz, Gerhard Richter: Das Kölner Domfenster (Dresden: Gerhard Richter Archiv Dresden, 2008), DVD, English taken from subtitles. 47. Richter, Writings, 183.

notes to pages 39–43

48. First introduced in Aby Warburg, “Dürer und die italienische Antike,” in Werke in einem Band, ed. Martin Treml, Sigrid Weigel, and Perdita Ladwig (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2010), 177. On the affinities captured in the concept, see the panels in Aby Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Ulrich Pfisterer et al., vol. II.1, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, ed. Martin Warnke and Claudia Brink (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008). 49. Richter, Writings, 417. 50. Richter, Writings, 33: “All that interests me is the grey areas, the passages and tonal sequences, the pictorial spaces, overlaps and interlockings.” 51. Richter, Writings, 119. 52. Ulrich Wilmes and Gerhard Richter, “Abstrakte Bilder müssen eine Richtigkeit haben: Gerhard Richter im Gespräch mit Ulrich Wilmes,” in Gerhard Richter: Zur Entstehung der abstrakten Bilder, ed. Ulrich Wilmes (Dresden: Gerhard Richter Archiv, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 2009), 51. Or see Richter, Writings, 426: “We only find paintings interesting because we always search for something that looks familiar to us. I see something and in my head I compare it and try to find out what it relates to. [ . . . ] That’s how abstract painting works. That was my argument with Buchloh because I said that’s how Malevich and Ryman work as well. And only like that. You can interpret the Black Square of Malevich as much as you like, but it remains a provocation; you are compelled to look for an object and to come up with one. [ . . . ] [Storr:] Leonardo da Vinci talked about looking at patterns on the ceiling and finding faces . . . [Richter:] Most artists have tried to avoid that. And still they cannot escape this mechanism. Even those paintings that are supposed to be nothing but a monochrome surface are looked at in that searching manner. The effect of these paintings depends on that mechanism. I don’t even know how it could work otherwise.” 53. Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato della pittura (Rome: Nella Stamperia de Romanis, 1817), 60– 61 (translation mine). For an English translation that only remotely renders the original, see Leonardo da Vinci, A Treatise on Painting (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005), 62, 149– 50. 54. Leonardo, Trattato, 87 (emphasis added). 55. Leonardo, Trattato, 113. 56. Leonardo, Trattato, 113. 57. As for the latter, see Leonardo, Trattato, 61. 58. Leonardo, Trattato, 89.

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notes to pages 43–47

59. Richter, Writings, 132: “[My pictures] are devoid of content, significance or meaning, like objects or trees, animals, people or days, all of which are there without a reason, without a function and without a purpose. This is the quality that counts.” 60. Richter, Writings, 33– 34. For a variation on this, see p. 46: “I am fascinated by the human, temporal, real, logical side of an occurrence which is simultaneously so unreal, so incomprehensible and so atemporal. And I would like to represent it in such a way that this contradiction is preserved.” 61. Richter, Writings, 34 (emphasis mine). 62. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richters ‘Acht Grau’: Zwischen Vorschein und Glanz,” in Gerhard Richter, Gerhard Richter: Acht Grau (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2002), 14 (here translated from German— F. K.). On the topos of the picture as window, see Leon Battista Alberti, Della pittura, ed. Luigi Mallé (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1950), I.19. 63. Gottfried Boehm, “Die Wiederkehr der Bilder,” in Was ist ein Bild? ed. Gottfried Boehm (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1994), 35. 64. Gottfried Boehm, “Die Hintergründigkeit des Zeigens: Deiktische Wurzeln des Bildes,” in Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen: Die Macht des Zeigens (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2007), 19. 65. Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 87. 66. Michael Polanyi, “What Is a Painting?” American Scholar 39, no. 4 (1970). 67. Richter, Writings, 32. 68. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Cause and Effect: Intuitive Awareness,” in Philosophical Occasions, 1912– 1951, ed. James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1993), 395 (emphasis mine). 69. Richter, Writings, 159. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: A Tragedy; Interpretive Notes, Contexts, Modern Criticism, 2d ed., trans. Walter Arndt, ed. Cyrus Hamlin (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), line 1237, p. 34. 70. Richter, Writings, 159 (emphasis mine). 71. Richter, Writings, 15 (emphasis mine). 72. Richter, Writings, 109. 73. Richter, Writings, 109 (emphasis mine).

notes to pages 48–52

74. Richter, Writings, 284. 75. Richter, Writings, 273. 76. It is this juxtaposition in which Gadamer, too, locates the specificity of the painting with respect to that which it depicts. “The picture is an event of being” (134) in the sense of an enérgeia as the unity of effector, act of effecting, and effect, and its distinction from that which it depicts is a constitutive “increase in being” (132). Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d rev. ed., translation rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), Digital Editions PDF, chap. 2. 77. The effect of this composition is achieved and strengthened through the technique of blurring. See, e.g., Christine Mehring, “East or West, Home Is Best: Friends, Family and Design in Richter’s Early Years,” in Gerhard Richter: Panorama, 33: “Richter’s blur labours towards an emotional sense of belonging. Especially in paintings like Aunt Marianne with its overdetermined motif of caretaking and protection, the blur ties back to the thematics of home: it enwraps, quite literally but also figuratively, and creates a visual enclosure consistent with the etymology of the German term Haus (home or house): its old German roots in Gehäuse (enclosure or shell) and Haut (skin).” Schreiber cites Richter himself on Aunt Marianne— “she looks like a Madonna”— and then notes, “Accordingly, his portrait of her would be a devotional image.” Jürgen Schreiber, Ein Maler aus Deutschland: Gerhard Richter; Das Drama einer Familie (Munich: Pendo Verlag, 2005), 57 (translation mine). 78. Richter, Writings, 352. 79. Richter in Belz, Gerhard Richter: Das Kölner Domfenster. 80. Nancy, Pleasure in Drawing, describes form generally as a “field where act and force [ . . . ] are combined” (1) and calls it in particular “a being of power, an energeia of dunamis in Aristotle’s words, the reality of an impetus, of birth, of beginning” (38). On the enérgeia of the picture as an identification of “enactment” and “perfected being,” see Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Bildkunst und Wortkunst,” in Was ist ein Bild? 102– 3 (translation mine). Also see Boehm, “Indeterminacy,” 227: If “even perception [as actuality] reaches its conclusions through a relationship with the indeterminate [as the potentiality surrounding it]”— a “synthesis of the visible and invisible, of the thematically identifiable and the non-thematic horizon”— then in contrast, in a picture we are dealing with a direct “implication of the invisible in the visible. [ . . . ] We will never reach the backs of represented people or objects or enter a Dutch intérieur through the door in the background. [ . . . ] The indeterminacy [ . . . ] now wanders” from the “back [of the object] into the background

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notes to pages 53–57

of the representation itself.” There it can be manipulated in different ways and leads with Cézanne, for example, to a striking “intensification of iconic potentiality” (220). 81. Richter, Writings, 70– 71. 82. The analogy between music and abstract painting poses no problem as far as the shared absence of semantics is concerned. For those troubled by a characterization of music in terms of mimetic reference, it may help to recall that the conception of music closest to Richter is that of Cage, who programmatically draws his material from the sounds of the world. 83. Richter, Writings, 57. 84. Richter, Writings, 121. Chapter III

1. Richter, Writings, 93. 2. An insistence on the “critical” quality of Richter’s work informs most of Buchloh’s essays and interviews. An escalation from the critical to the skeptical is then found in a range of works, a representative taste of which is offered by Jürgen Müller, “Vom Denken in Bildern,” in Sechs Vorträge über Gerhard Richter, ed. Dietmar Elger and Jürgen Müller (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007), 9 (translation mine): “Regardless which work by Gerhard Richter is examined, what fundamentally shapes his thinking are irony and skepticism. Doubt in a comprehensive sense stands at the center of his works. [ . . . ] Truths fluctuate: this is true, but so is that.” 3. A recent example of the tradition that insists on an epistemological model is the Frankfurt School, particularly Adorno, for whom art is to fulfill a critical and enlightening function. But art’s ability to do this is conditioned on its structural brokenness, negativity, and dialectic selfcancellation, which, in an inverse modus, replicates the very claims at absoluteness it wants to overcome. 4. Richter, Writings, 421. 5. As Richter himself says, “This plausible theory, that my abstract paintings evolve their motifs as the work proceeds, is a timely one, because there is no central image of the world (world view) any longer: exposed as we are on some kind of garbage dump, with no center and no meaning, we must work out everything for ourselves, must cope with this progressive state of a previously unknown freedom” (Richter, Writings, 161). 6. E.g., Richter, Writings, 66.

notes to pages 57–60

7. Richter, Writings, 34– 35. 8. Richter, Writings, 32. 9. Richter, Writings, 63. 10. Richter, Writings, 66. 11. Richter, Writings, 92. 12. Richter, Writings, 35: “For an artist there must be no names: not table for table, not house for house, not Christmas Eve for 24 December, not even 24 December for 24 December. We have no business knowing such nonsense. Nor must we have views or opinions. Leave that to others.” 13. Richter, Writings, 46. 14. Richter, Writings, 31. Also see 135: “To me it’s quite clear that a constant is a continual variable. And the sum of these variables yields the constant quality of my work.” Or 140: “I have no motif, only motivation.” And 247: “Any thoughts on my part about the ‘construction’ of a picture are false, and if the execution works, this is only because I partly destroy it, or because it works in spite of everything— by not detracting and by not looking the way I planned.” 15. Richter, Writings, 248. 16. Richter, Writings, 142. 17. Richter, Writings, 142. 18. Richter, Writings, 141. 19. Richter, Writings, 214: “Chance as theme and as method.” “It’s never blind chance: it’s a chance that is always planned, but also always surprising” (182). Paintings created in such a way are “almost perversely wrong or nonsensical in the way they’re laid out, without a governing idea, in the manner of a disoriented gambler who stakes a vast amount on a random card” (248). 20. Richter, Writings, 71. 21. Richter, Writings, 182. 22. Richter, Writings, 140– 41. 23. See Robert Storr, Cage: 6 Paintings by Gerhard Richter (London: Tate Publishing, 2009), 69. 24. Richter, Writings, 31. 25. On the role of chance in these pictures, see Birgit Pelzer, “Der Zufall als Partner: Gerhard Richters Farbfelder 2007,” as well as Pelzer, “Die

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Asymptote des Zufalls: 4900 Farben von Gerhard Richter— Version II— in der Serpentine Gallery in London,” both in Gerhard Richter: Texte zu “4900 Farben,” ed. Dietmar Elger (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2009). 26. Richter, Writings, 344. 27. Richter, Writings, 67. 28. Richter, Writings, 87. 29. Richter, Writings, 32. 30. Richter, Writings, 92 (emphasis mine). 31. Richter, Writings, 179. “Truth” is Richter’s most general term for commensurability, and “rightness” is its technical manifestation in a picture. Normally, he doesn’t seem to assign a semantic surplus value to “truth” over “rightness,” and the terms often appear interchangeable. On rightness as a philosophical category, see Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1978), 132, 138– 40; Nelson Goodman and Catherine Z. Elgin, “A Reconception of Philosophy,” in Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1988). 32. Richter, Writings, 111 (ellipsis in original). 33. Richter, Writings, 179. Compare Richter’s explicit establishment of the term rightness as the final criterion for success, in Ulrich Wilmes and Gerhard Richter, “Abstrakte Bilder müssen eine Richtigkeit haben: Gerhard Richter im Gespräch mit Ulrich Wilmes,” in Gerhard Richter: Zur Entstehung der abstrakten Bilder, by Ulrich Wilmes (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2009), 52. 34. See Richter in Wilmes, Gerhard Richter: Zur Entstehung der abstrakten Bilder, 52. 35. Richter as interviewed by Serota, in Gerhard Richter: Panorama, ed. Godfrey and Serota, 16. 36. Richter, Writings, 343. The passage is missing in the English translation. It is found in Richter, Text 1961 bis 2007, 351. 37. Richter, Writings, 369. 38. Richter, Writings, 14. 39. Richter, Writings, 392. 40. Richter, Writings, 255.

notes to pages 62–68

41. On Luhmann’s use of this concept, see, e.g., Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 49. 42. Richter, Writings, 32– 33. 43. Richter, Writings, 159. 44. Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations, part I, p. 7 and following. 45. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Über Gewissheit/On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972), §131, p. 19. 46. Richter, Writings, 306. 47. Wilmes, Gerhard Richter: Zur Entstehung der abstrakten Bilder, 52 (translation mine). 48. Richter, Writings, 143. 49. Richter, Writings, 192: “When I look out of the window, then truth for me is the way nature shows itself in its various tones, colours and proportions. That’s a truth and has its own correctness. This little slice of nature, and in fact any given piece of nature, represents to me an ongoing challenge, and is a model for my paintings.” 50. Richter, Writings, 198. 51. Richter, Writings, 14. 52. Richter, Writings, 81. 53. E.g., Donald Davidson, “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). 54. Wittgenstein, Über Gewissheit/On Certainty, §156, p. 23 (translation mine). 55. Richter, Writings, 139. 56. See Klinger, Urteilen, especially chaps. 2– 4. On the trajectory of judgment as a category in art history, see David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 57. Richter, Writings, 15. 58. Richter, Writings, 342. 59. Richter, Writings, 169.

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notes to pages 68–70

60. Richter, Writings, 257: “To see whether what one is doing is any good or not [ . . . ] that’s the only thing that counts. [ . . . ] What counts isn’t being able to do a thing; it’s seeing what it is. Seeing is the decisive act, and ultimately it places the maker and the viewer on the same level.” 61. Richter, Writings, 476. This interpretation is both selective and simplistic. On the complex history of Duchamp’s readymade and the impossibility of characterizing it through a simple formula, see, e.g., de Duve, Kant after Duchamp, chap. 2. Or, for a broader summary, see Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon, eds., The Duchamp Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 62. Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations, part II, §xi, 165– 66. 63. According to de Duve, Kant after Duchamp, 347– 48, the readymade tells us “that art is not of the order of seeing and knowing but rather of that of judging, not of the order of the descriptive but of the prescriptive. [ . . . ] In art there is precisely nothing but judgment. To make is to judge.” And “to make is to choose and always to choose” (394, emphasis in original). Unfortunately, de Duve’s development of this claim is based on a conventional reading of Kant’s judgment of taste that cannot satisfy the requirements of a pragmatist theory of judgment. 64. See Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 66– 67: “A thing may function as a work of art at some times and not at others. [ . . . ] The real question is not ‘What objects are (permanently) works of art?’ but ‘When is an object a work of art?’” 65. Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, trans. John Farrell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 179. See also a detailed discussion in Richard Wollheim, “Seeing-as, Seeing-in, and Pictorial Representation,” in Art and Its Objects, 2d ed., with 6 supplementary essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 66. As Wollheim himself acknowledges (“Seeing-as, Seeing-in, and Pictorial Representation,” 226)— though he then continues with “if [ . . . ] seeing-in rests upon seeing-as, what the representation is seen as is never the same as what is seen in the representation.” This applies when, for example, one sees a picture of a child as a picture and then in a separate act sees a child in the picture. But pragmatically, the picture functions as a picture of a child all along. 67. A great emphasis on the “as” is also given by Christoph Asmuth, Bilder über Bilder, Bilder ohne Bilder: Eine neue Theorie der Bildlichkeit

notes to pages 70–72

(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2011), “but not as a core element of a pragmatist model of reaction, but metaphysically as a common foundation of symbol and picture” (136, translation mine). 68. Duchamp himself emphasizes the “indifferent” choice of object as the goal of his project: Marcel Duchamp, “Apropos of ‘Readymades,’” in Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Marchand du sel), ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 141– 42. Originally a talk at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1961, first published in Art and Artists 1, no. 4 (1966). 69. Richter, Writings, 531– 32. 70. Richter, Writings, 142. 71. The production of War Cut follows Richter’s usual process: with the elimination of the “creative act,” more or less randomly generated material— the collection of picture and text fragments— is subjected to selection through judgment. In every step, the material serves as a starting point for a “readymade,” as it were, by which the latter becomes for Richter the operation performed by each such painterly act. 72. Richter, Writings, 247. See Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 193: “Every operation— whether the artist’s or the beholder’s— must decide whether a given form does or does not fit, whether it can be integrated into the emerging work (or into the work one is about to inspect) in ways that secure connectivity. Every observation places the detail it indicates into the recursive network of further distinctions and, from this viewpoint, makes a judgment about the success or failure of this detail. [ . . . ] This is how a binary code works.” 73. In Wilmes, Gerhard Richter: Zur Entstehung der abstrakten Bilder, 54 (translation mine). 74. Richter, Writings, 179. 75. In Wilmes, Gerhard Richter: Zur Entstehung der abstrakten Bilder, 54 (translation mine). 76. Richter, Writings, 179. In the process, every step converts a contingent openness into an instance of fitting, which is why Luhmann can also say that in the “small-scale revolution of the individual work,” “chance events are [ . . . ] transformed into necessities” (Art as a Social System, 216). This is so as the code (185– 86) “fits/does not fit” (195) (also “beautiful”/“ugly” [191] or “positive/negative” [204]) determines each individual operation. On Luhmann’s general concept of evolution as a triad of variation, selection, and stabilization, see, e.g., Niklas Luhmann,

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Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991), 549 and following. 77. Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 215– 16. 78. Interview with Buchloh, in Corinna Belz, Gerhard Richter Painting (Berlin: Zero One Film, 2011) (English taken from subtitles). 79. Richter, Writings, 179. 80. As judgment, form is the decision of a case, which in the systemstheoretical perspective figures as the contingent production from which the system selects to retroactively determine what counts as form. See Klinger, Urteilen, chap. 7. Since there is a final rightness for Richter, a concluding judgment, he prioritizes the perspective of judgment over the systems-theoretical perspective. 81. Storr, Cage. Additionally, several of the preliminary stages are also found in Wilmes, Gerhard Richter: Zur Entstehung der abstrakten Bilder. These are supplemented by an equally illuminating series of ten preliminary stages for Red (821) from 1994. 82. Richter, Writings, 67. 83. Richter, Writings, 183. 84. Richter, Writings, 211. Also see 198: “I always have to cancel out the image.” 85. Richter, Writings, 278. 86. Richter, Writings, 67. Also see 532: “Destroying and building up, and wrecking again and so on. That’s effectively a prerequisite— otherwise nothing will result.” 87. Storr, Cage, 85. 88. Storr, Cage, 84. 89. Storr, Cage, 69. 90. Christopher Bedford, ed., Mark Bradford (Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, 2010). 91. David E. Wellbery, “Faust and the Dialectic of Modernity,” in A New History of German Literature, ed. David E. Wellbery and Judith Ryan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 548. 92. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Die Malerei am Ende des Sujets,” in Gerhard Richter, vol. 2, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Peter Gidal, and Birgit Pelzer (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 1993), 77 (translation mine). For

notes to pages 80–86

a more detailed explanation, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Richter’s Abstractions: Silences, Voids, and Evacuations,” in Gerhard Richter, Gerhard Richter: Paintings from 2003– 2005 (New York: Marian Goodman Gallery, 2005). 93. See the canonical analogical framework of the correspondence of relationships— e.g., Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, 174: “One visual appearance is similar to another if both can be analyzed sortally in the same way. [ . . . ] ‘Sortally analyzable’ means that we can distinguish [ . . . ] a relation of parts in this object, just as we can in the corresponding real object. The relationship of similarity that is sought consists in a more or less far-reaching sameness of form relations.” There is no further thought here, however (in the sense of an acttheoretical pragmatism), that in comparing characteristics, we are dealing with acts. Chapter IV

1. Richter, Writings, 461. 2. Richter, Writings, 462. 3. Richter, Writings, 461. For Richter’s characteristic use of “formulation,” see the original German text of the interview in Richter, Text, 470. 4. Richter, Writings, 161. 5. Richter, Writings, 461. Again, the full passage appears only in the German text in Richter, Text, 470. 6. Belz, Gerhard Richter Painting (my translation). 7. Richter, Writings, 226. 8. Richter, Writings, 14, 31, 462. 9. Richter, Writings, 203. 10. Richter, Writings, 159. 11. Richter, Writings, 161. 12. The situation to which Richter’s production reacts is not discourse but pain as such— which means not that Richter, in an essentialism of pain, identifies the latter as the “proper” reality, but that painting primarily engages the pain. 13. Richter, Writings, 129. 14. Richter, Writings, 236.

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15. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 14 (London: Hogarth Press, 1914– 16). 16. Buchloh draws a complex account of mourning in Richter from a detailed analysis of Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo, as well as the 48 Portraits. See Buchloh, “Divided Memory and Post-Traditional Identity.” 17. Richter, Writings, 57. 18. Richter, Writings, 226. 19. Gerhard Richter, Atlas (Cologne: Helmut Friedel, 2011); Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive,” October 88 (Spring 1999): 117– 45. 20. Richter, Writings, 93. 21. Richter, Writings, 98. 22. Richter, Writings, 31. For example Richter notes at times that “the things that surround us are usually true, right or even beautiful” ( 306). 23. Richter, Writings, 462. See also 22: “For me there really exists a hierarchy of pictorial themes. A mangelwurzel [beet] and a Madonna are not of equal value, even as art objects.” 24. Richter, Writings, 44. 25. Richter, Writings, 70. 26. Richter, Writings, 14, 66. 27. Richter, Writings, 233– 34. 28. Richter, Writings, 66. 29. Richter, Writings, 129. 30. Richter, Writings, 191: “The grey paintings, for example, a painted grey surface, completely monochromatic— they come from a motivation, or result from a state, that was very negative. It has a lot to do with hopelessness, depression and such things. But it has to be turned on its head in the end, and has to come to a form where these paintings possess beauty.” 31. Richter, Writings, 505– 6. 32. Richter, Writings, 119. 33. Richter, Writings, 14.

notes to pages 96–101

34. Richter, Writings, 307. 35. Alexander García Düttmann, “Entkunstung,” in Kunstende: Drei ästhetische Studien (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), reinterprets the topos of the end of art as an eschatology of the single work, such that in each artwork art begins anew and newly arrives at its end. 36. Richter, Writings, 209. 37. Richter, Writings, 121. 38. Richter, Writings, 254. 39. Richter, Writings, 254. 40. Richter, Writings, 46. 41. Richter, Writings, 203. See also 129: “hope” connected to form as a reaction to “agony.” 42. Richter, Writings, 393. 43. Richter, Writings, 15. 44. Richter interviewed by Serota, in Gerhard Richter: Panorama, ed. Godfrey and Serota, 23. 45. Richter interviewed by Serota, in Gerhard Richter: Panorama, ed. Godfrey and Serota, 307. 46. Richter interviewed by Serota, in Gerhard Richter: Panorama, ed. Godfrey and Serota, 15, 307, 463; as well as interviewed by Buchloh, in Belz, Gerhard Richter Painting. 47. Richter interviewed by Serota, in Gerhard Richter: Panorama, ed. Godfrey and Serota, 34, 254. See also 80: “Redemption is no longer possible. It would require a general consensus, everyone aiming at the same goal. Only Hitler was able to accomplish that in our era. Everyone knows what the results were!” Butin characterizes Richter’s landscape painting, in comparison with Caspar David Friedrich’s, by ascribing to it a lack of transcendence. Hubertus Butin, “Romantic Landscapes as ‘Cuckoo’s Eggs,’” in Dietmar Elger, Hubertus Butin, and Gerhard Richter, Landscapes (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011), 126– 27. 48. From the interview film by Rudij Bergmann, Neo Rauch— Ein deutscher Maler (2007) (translation mine). 49. On “life” and “vividness” of form— another enérgeia topos of ancient rhetoric— see Richter, Writings, 15, 281– 82. 50. Richter, Writings, 14.

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notes to pages 101–107

51. Richter, Writings, 392. 52. On such sharedness see Richter, Writings, 234: “What counts is that the pictures then become universal. They are there to show themselves. [ . . . ] That’s why form is so important— [ . . . ] because without form communication stops.” 53. Richter, Writings, 506. 54. Richter, Writings, 15. 55. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (London: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §9, §40. 56. Richter, Writings, 14. 57. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §9. 58. “In aesthetics isn’t it essential that a picture or a piece of music, etc., can change its aspect for me?” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, §634, in The Collected Works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, electronic edition: www.nlx.com /collections /121. 59. For an elaboration of this claim see Klinger, Urteilen, chap. 7, especially the section titled “Hochfrequenzwechsel.” 60. Richter, Writings, 33. 61. This difference shows in remarks such as, “Painting has nothing to do with thinking, because [ . . . ] thinking is language— record-keeping— and has to take place before and after.” Richter, Writings, 15. 62. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §6. 63. The actualization (production) by the painter and the actualization (viewing) by the public are the same, according to their pragmatic structure. In a scene from Gerhard Richter Painting, Richter compares an exhibit of his pictures with the staging of an opera, which is first produced as a score but then requires actualization in a separate act. See also Richter’s comment in Wilmes, Gerhard Richter. Zur Entstehung der abstrakten Bilder, 46: “Pictures after all also need staging; on the right wall, with the right lighting, painting can come about.” 64. For community in a tension between essentialism and singularity, see Jean-Luc Nancy, “La Comparution/ The Compearance: From the Existence of ‘Communism’ to the Community of ‘Existence,’” Political Theory 20, no. 3 (August 1992): 371– 98; Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).

notes to pages 108–118

65. See Kant’s— again transcendental— foundation of common sense through an elimination of “private conditions” from the aesthetic judgment. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §40. 66. As Buchloh, “Divided Memory,” 88, notes, a “breakdown of this fiction of a transnational, liberal-humanist community” belongs to the irreducible premises of Richter’s production. 67. Richter, Writings, 34; see also 30: “A photo is taken in order to report about an occurrence.” 68. Compare Ullrich’s claim that stock photos say nothing as they are context-free images, whereas Richter’s pictures that show such photos are not in need of additional contextualization (beyond their contextualization as pictures) because they fulfill their function and context-specificity precisely in allowing to be connected to in multiple contexts. Wolfgang Ullrich, “‘Stock Photography’: Wie macht man Bilder allkompatibel?— die reinsten Bilder— Gerhard Richter als Joker für Reiche,” in Bilder auf Weltreise: Eine Globalisierungskritik (Berlin: Wagenbach, 2006). 69. Richter, Writings, 30. 70. Elger notes that in Richter’s landscape paintings, blur and reduced informational content work to render the subject matter “generalized,” freed from its attachment to a particular place or event. Dietmar Elger, “Landscape as a Model,” in Elger, Butin, and Richter, Landscapes, 26. 71. Richter, Writings, 32– 33. 72. For such an argument see Wolfgang Ullrich, Die Geschichte der Unschärfe (Berlin: Wagenbach, 2009), chap. “Bildreflexion.” 73. Richter, Writings, 31: “If my paintings differ from the originals, this is [ . . . ] a matter of [ . . . ] technique.” 74. Richter, Writings, 273. 75. Richter, Writings, 462. 76. Richter interviewed by Serota, in Gerhard Richter: Panorama, ed. Godfrey and Serota, 27. 77. Gerhard Richter: Panorama, ed. Godfrey and Serota, 26. 78. Richter, Writings, 233– 35. 79. Richter, Writings, 353. Art “has the measure of all the infathomable, senseless things, the incessant ruthlessness of our world”— a measure that is commensurability as it is always already shared. Richter

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notes to pages 118–120

interviewed by Serota, in Gerhard Richter: Panorama, ed. Godfrey and Serota, 24. 80. Robert Storr, September. A History Painting by Gerhard Richter (London: Tate Publishing, 2010), 48. 81. Storr, September, 48. 82. For this formulation, see “Literature and Life,” in Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical (London: Verso, 1998), 1. 83. Richter, Writings, 527. 84. For different versions of this interpretation, see Storr, September; Benjamin Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s New Abstractions: Infinite and Infinitesimal,” in Gerhard Richter, Abstract Paintings (Paris, 2008); Dorothée Brill, “That’s as Far as It Goes,” in Gerhard Richter: Panorama, ed. Godfrey and Serota. 85. Richter, Writings, 223– 24, 226. Storr, September, 58: “When first confronted by the problems of the ‘unpaintable’ nature of certain images to which he was nevertheless drawn, Richter’s strategy was to paint them and then destroy or cancel out the images, or else to give them a trial run as altered photography and then refrain from painting them.” 86. For example, Storr, September, 58. See also 52: “[For Richter,] the decision not to paint what ‘cannot be painted,’ is the principal means of critique.” 87. Richter, Writings, 527. 88. The coming to form of Chair or Ema, as blur, is different from the figure in the picture— at best, we have an occasional confluence of blur lines and figural lines. Where there is no such difference, however— as in Inpainting, Silicate, or Cage, where the movement of morphogenesis is indistinguishable from the work of representing— we are not dealing with the representation of something. The greatest affinity to September is shown in paintings such as Seascape, Moonscape, and Clouds, in which the things represented and their representation appear to approximate one another. 89. Richter, Writings, 122, see also 93, 96, 98. 90. Storr, September, 52: “Richter’s blurring of the explosion in the South Tower places gratification of any desire to see and thereby seize death pictorially beyond the viewer’s reach. It is painting’s rejoinder to a photographic myth; painting’s discretion counteracting the camera’s voyeurism.” The aim: “To paint that image in such a manner as to shortcircuit its sensational charge and deny voyeuristic gratification.”

notes to pages 121–130

91. Diedrich Diederichsen, Isabelle Graw, Tom Holert, Jutta Koether, and Felix Reidenbach, “Richterrunde,” Texte zur Kunst 4, no. 13 (March 1994): 124. See also I. Michael Danoff, “Heterogeneity: An Introduction to the Work of Gerhard Richter,” in Gerhard Richter. Paintings, ed. Roald Nasgaard, I. Michael Danoff, and Terry Neff (London, 1988), 10. Similarly Schwarz, “The Turn of the Screw,” 109: “A single movement runs through this body of work, for every picture is in essence a representation of every other picture; no single work in the catalogue raisonné stands alone.” Or Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, 16, on Richter: “appreciation of any given aspect of his production is contingent on an awareness of its overall multiplicity of aspects.” I owe my own attention to this point to a conversation with Joseph Leo Koerner. 92. Guido Meincke, “Gerhard Richter: WAR CUT: Zum Verhältnis von Malerei und massenmedialer Kriegsberichterstattung,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 72, no. 2 (2009) (my translation). It belongs to the premises of this “inquiry” that it draws on a painting from 1987 the articulations of which— rendered wholly unrecognizable through the fragmentation process of War Cut— allow to be interpreted as the outlines of the Twin Towers. This is argued by Caroline A. Jones, “Doubt Fear,” Art Papers (January– February 2005). 93. Meincke, “Richter: WAR CUT,” 258. 94. Meincke, “Richter: WAR CUT,” 258. 95. Gerhard Richter and Alexander Kluge, December (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 96. Richter, Writings, 14. 97. Stefan Germer, “Die schwierigen Zeitgenossen: Über die Probleme der Historisierung aktueller Kunst,” in Germeriana: Unveröffentlichte oder übersetzte Schriften von Stefan Germer, ed. Julia Bernard, Jahresring: Jahrbuch für moderne Kunst 46 (Cologne, 1999), 219– 20 (my translation). 98. For a rich discussion of the question of Richter’s contemporaneity, see Gelshorn, “Geschichtsrezeption und Rezeptionsgeschichte.” 99. Richter, Writings, 14. Chapter V

1. Hans Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art: A Critical Estimate,” in The Global Art World, ed. Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2009), 40.

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notes to pages 131–136

2. Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art,” 53. 3. For a historical situating of this position, see de Duve, Kant after Duchamp, 375: “Something unprecedented in the whole history of art surfaced in the sixties: it had become legitimate to be an artist without being either a painter, or a poet, or a musician, or a sculptor, novelist, architect, photographer, choreographer, filmmaker, etc. A new category of art appeared— art in general, or art at large— that was no longer absorbed in the traditional disciplines.” To this category of art corresponds a conception of judging going back to Duchamp’s readymade: The traditional “this is beautiful” turns into “this is art.” The judgment is to be rendered without general criteria and strictly from case to case; “all a priori knowledge ha[s] withdrawn from the word art,” 377. 4. Niklas Luhmann, “Die Paradoxie der Form,” in Kalkül der Form, ed. Dirk Baecker (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993). See also Luhmann, Art as a Social System, chap. 3. While our conception doesn’t subscribe to Luhmann’s system-theoretical premises, his account of form is helpful to understand some core implications of a differential conception of form. 5. T. J. Clark, “More Theses on Feuerbach,” Representations 104, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 5. Clark’s understanding of the nonsemantic, following a Kantian tradition, is parergonal “meaninglessness,” purposiveness without purpose. For the struggles resulting from this distinction, see also Derrida’s Parergon, in Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 6. For a refutation of Danto, according to which the distinction between art and nonart can be drawn neither phenomenally nor theoretically, but only pragmatically, see Martin Seel, Ästhetik des Erscheinens (Munich and Vienna, 2000), 192– 97. 7. Clark, “More Theses on Feuerbach,” 7. 8. Yve-Alain Bois, “Whose Formalism?” Art Bulletin 78, no. 1 (March 1996): 12. Bois continues: “I have no bigger qualm about the enemies of formalism than their casual dismissal of the formal singularity of the artworks they wish to analyze. This dismissal produces, more often than not in the name of difference, a generic discourse that for all its grand claims leaves us ignorant and deskilled as to what to look for in any work of art and as to how to determine the questions it raises in particular.” 9. Insofar as cooking doesn’t work to make us full but to the end of an increase in distinction, it must indeed be regarded as art. See Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, §5. The tradition of an aesthetics

notes to pages 137–141

of nature, in turn, cannot be attributed a set of specifics by a pragmatist model of art, because the observation of natural scenarios or products is structurally nothing other than the practice of the readymade. So while the viability of the distinction between normal and aesthetic form (or normal judgment and aesthetic judgment) doesn’t appear diminished on the premises introduced here, the same does not hold for the other distinction between aesthetic form and aesthetic form in art. Martin Seel, “Zur ästhetischen Praxis der Kunst,” in Ethisch-ästhetische Studien (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), 126, for example, claims that it is “pointless to declare the aesthetic practice of art in a methodical or normative sense the model of aesthetic practice in general.” The latter distinction collapses aesthetic practice grows indifferent to the qualification of its subject matter. An aesthetics of nature can still exist (Martin Seel, Eine Ästhetik der Natur [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991]), but it does not possess a pragmatic distinction that sets it apart from a dealing with artafacts. 10. In chapter 7 of Urteilen, I show how such a model of form can be understood as a contemporary taking up of the tradition determined by the theorem of a functionally bound fullness of features or aspects— a tradition that includes Alexander Baumgarten’s concept of vividitas, Kant’s concept of aesthetic idea, and Roman Jakobson’s concept of poeticity. 11. While for Heidegger these terms serve the purpose of distinguishing the human from the animal, the underlying concern, I think, relates to the pragmatist worry that world is subject to a more or less. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeil and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), part II. 12. Donald Davidson, A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs, in Davidson, Truth, Language, and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 107. 13. It deserves to be noted that the possibility of a paradigm of pragmatic form does not depend on Richter himself being consistent, but only on such consistency being a possibility. 14. This last section is adapted from Florian Klinger, “To Make That Judgment: The Pragmatism of Gerhard Richter,” in Judgment and Action: Fragments toward a History, ed. Vivasvan Soni and Thomas Pfau (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018). 15. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 16. Giorgio Agamben, What Is a Paradigm? lecture at European Graduate School, August 2002.

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notes to pages 141–142

17. Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric, 1357b; Prior Analytics, 69a17. 18. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §47, translation modified. 19. Thomas Kuhn, “Second Thoughts on Paradigms,” in The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 293– 319. 20. Kuhn himself, Structure, 208– 9, applies “the notion of a paradigm as a concrete achievement, an exemplar” to the arts, simplying a shift from vertical determination by principle to horizontal determination by example (operating through connecting acts): “some of the notorious difficulties [ . . . ] may vanish if paintings can be seen to be modeled on one another rather than produced in conformity to some abstracted canons of style.”

Index of Names Adorno, Theodor, 158n3 Agamben, Giorgio, 141, 168n64, 173n16 Alberti, Leon Battista, 156n62 Aristotle, 137, 141, 151n8, 157n80, 174n17 Asmuth, Christoph, 162n67 Baselitz, Georg, 60 Baumgarten, Alexander, 137, 173n10 Becker, Howard, 146n5 Beethoven, Ludwig, 79 Belting, Hans, 130– 31, 136, 147n18, 171n1 Belz, Corinna, 154n46, 157n79, 164n78, 165n6 Benjamin, Walter, 38, 154n42 Bergmann, Rudij, 167n48 Beuys, Joseph, 5 Boehm, Gottfried, 151n3, 152n20, 156nn63– 64, 157n80 Bois, Yves-Alain, 135, 172n8 Bradford, Mark, 79 Bredekamp, Horst, 151n9 Brill, Dorothée, 170n84 Buchloh, Benjamin, 17, 73– 74, 79, 80, 149n32, 149n34, 150n1, 155n55, 156n62, 158n2, 164n78, 164n92, 166n16,

166n19, 167n46, 169n66, 170n84 Buskirk, Martha, 147n20, 162n61 Butin, Hubertus, 152n23, 167n47, 169n70 Bydler, Charlotte, 146n5 Cage, John, 2, 59, 158n82 Cavell, Stanley, 146n4 Cézanne, Paul, 6, 28, 152n20, 158n80 Clark, T. J., 132, 135, 172n5 Danoff, I. Michael, 171n91 Danto, Arthur, 6– 8, 64, 130, 146n5, 146n10, 147nn17– 19, 153n34, 172n6 Davidson, Donald, 66, 102, 139, 146n4, 161n53, 173n12 de Duve, Thierry, 5, 6, 146n10, 147n11, 147nn13– 14, 162n61, 162n63, 172n3 Deleuze, Gilles, 36, 153n38, 170n82 Derrida, Jacques, 172n5 Dewey, John, 2, 139, 145n4 Dickie, George, 146n7 Diederichsen, Diedrich, 121, 171n91 Duchamp, Marcel, 2, 5, 6, 9, 20, 68, 70, 147nn13– 14, 162n61, 163n68, 172n3

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index of names

Düttmann, Alexander García, 167n35 Einstein, Albert, 46 Elger, Dietmar, 145n1, 148n27, 158n2, 160n25, 165n3, 167n47, 169n70 Elgin, Catherine Z., 160n31 Freud, Sigmund, 86, 166n15 Friedrich, Caspar David, 167n47 Fukuyama, Francis, 147n12 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 157n76, 157n80 Gelshorn, Julia, 10, 148n27, 150n46, 171n98 Germer, Stefan, 124– 25, 171n97 Geulen, Eva, 147n17 Goethe, Wolfgang, 45, 79, 156n69 Goodman, Nelson, 146n4, 148n26, 153– 54n39, 160n31, 162n64, 165n92 Greenberg, Clement, 4– 6, 8, 44, 146nn8– 10, 148n31, 149n34, 150– 51n2, 152n24, 156n65 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 20, 150n45 Heidegger, Martin, 87, 138, 146n4, 153n26, 173n11 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 79 Jakobson, Roman, 173n10 James, William, 2, 139, 145n4 Jones, Caroline E., 146n9, 171n92 Kandinsky, Wassily, 6 Kant, Immanuel, 102, 103, 106, 136, 137, 142, 162n63, 168n55, 169n65, 172n5, 172n9, 173n10, 174n18 Kasper, Astrid, 150n1 Kern, Andrea, 151n4 Kimmelman, Michael, 149n33

Klinger, Florian, 145n3, 151n9, 164n80, 168n59, 173n14 Kluge, Alexander, 122, 171n95 Koerner, Joseph Leo, 171n91 Kuhn, Thomas, 140, 142, 173n15, 174nn19– 20 Leonardo da Vinci, 41– 43, 51, 80, 155nn52– 53 Luhmann, Niklas, 72, 146n4, 148n26, 161n41, 163n72, 163n76, 164n77, 172n4 Lyotard, Jean-François, 147n12 Malevich, Kazimir, 36, 155n52 Mehring, Christine, 157n77 Meincke, Guido, 122, 171n92 Menke, Christoph, 146n4 Monet, Claude, 79 Müller, Jürgen, 148n27, 158n2 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 152n21, 157n80, 168n62 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8, 56 Pelzer, Birgit, 154n43, 159n25, 164n92 Perl, Jed, 149n33 Plato, 25, 56, 84, 87, 126 Polanyi, Michael, 44, 110– 11, 156n66 Polke, Sigmar, 60 Quintilian, 151n4 Rauch, Neo, 100, 124, 167n48 Rorty, Richard, 2, 8, 139, 145n4, 147n12, 148n26 Ryman, Robert, 155n52 Schreiber, Jürgen, 157n77 Schwarz, Dieter, 150n40, 171n91 Seel, Martin, 69, 146n4, 162n65, 165n93, 172n6, 173n9

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Serota, Nicholas, 151n10, 152n22, 160n35, 167nn44– 47, 169n76, 170n84 Shusterman, Richard, 146n4 Storr, Robert, 17, 40, 60, 76, 77, 118, 149n36, 152n22, 155n52, 159n23, 164n81, 170nn84– 86, 170n90, 171n91 Summers, David, 161n56 Thorn-Prikker, Johan, 115 Ullrich, Wolfgang, 169n68, 169n72

Warburg, Aby, 39– 40, 155n48 Warhol, Andy, 2, 5, 9, 20, 147n12 Weitz, Morris, 146n7 Wellbery, David, 164n91 Wilmes, Ulrich, 64, 155n52, 160nn33– 34, 161n47, 163n73, 164n81, 168n63 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2, 45, 64, 66, 69– 70, 103, 139, 145n4, 146n7, 148n26, 156n68, 161nn44– 45, 162n62, 168n58 Wollheim, Richard, 69– 70, 162nn65– 66

Index of Works by Gerhard Richter Abstract Painting (Abstraktes Bild, 1987; oil on canvas; CR 648-2), 121– 22, 171n92 Aunt Marianne (Tante Marianne, 1965; oil on canvas; CR 87), 49– 50, 157n77 Bach 1– 4 (1992; oil on canvas; CR 785– 788), 53, 60 Betty (1977; oil on canvas; CR 4254, 425-5), 114 Bombers (Bomber, 1963; oil on canvas; CR 13), 89, 121 Cage 1– 6 (2006; oil on canvas; CR 897/1– 6), 18, 37, 41, 53, 60, 74– 82, 96, 101, 105, 159n23, 170n88 Clouds (Grey) (Wolken (grau), 1969; oil on canvas; CR 231-1), 170n88 Cologne Cathedral Window (Kölner Domfenster, 2007; antique glass, mouth-blown; CR 900), 41, 60, 133, 154n46 December: 39 Stories (Dezember. 39 Geschichten, 2010; artist’s book, with Alexander Kluge), 122, 133, 171n95

Drawing I (Zeichnung I, 2005; graphite on paper; CR 2005), 63 8.12.89 [St. Moritz] (12.8.89 [St. Moritz], 1989; oil on photograph), 33– 34 Elizabeth I– II (1966; offset print on lightweight card; CR 7, 8), 28 Ema (Nude on a Staircase) (Ema (Akt auf einer Treppe), 1966; oil on canvas; CR 134), 38, 96, 114, 121, 170n88 Forest (Wald, 2008; artist’s book), 133 48 Portraits (1971/72; oil on canvas; CR 324/1– 48), 166n16 4900 Colours (4900 Farben, 2007; spray-painted enamel on AluDibond; CR 901), 37, 60, 71, 160n25 4096 Colours (4096 Farben, 1974; lacquer on canvas; CR 359), 41 Horst with Dog (Horst mit Hund, 1965; oil on canvas; CR 94), 38, 114, 121

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180

index of works by gerhard richter

Iceberg in Mist (Eisberg im Nebel, 1982; oil on canvas; CR 496-1), 119 Inpainting (Vermalung, 1972; oil on canvas; CR 326), 37, 60, 79, 170n88 Kitchen Chair (Küchenstuhl, 1965; oil on canvas; CR 97), 28, 52, 87, 96, 170n88 Moonscape I– II (Mondlandschaft I– II, 1968; oil on canvas; CR 190, 191), 170n88 October 18, 1977 (18. Oktober, 1977, 1988; oil on canvas; CR 667– 674), 34, 84, 89, 112, 115, 121 Patterns: Divided— Mirrored— Repeated (2011; artist’s book; CR 149), 37, 154n41 Ravine (Schlucht, 1996; oil on canvas; CR 837-1), 96 Seascape (Seestück, 1968; oil on canvas; CR 194-23), 170n88 September (2005; oil on canvas; CR 891-5), 89, 112, 115– 20, 121, 135, 170n85, 170n88 Sheik with his Wife (Scheich mit Frau, 1966; oil on canvas; CR 127), 28 Silicate (Silikat, 2003; oil on canvas; CR 885), 37, 170n88

Sphere I– III (Kugel I– III, 1989– 92; stainless steel, polished; CR 70, 76, 77), 133 Strontium (2004; C-Print; CR 888), 37 Student (Studentin, 1967; oil on canvas; CR 149), 114 S. with Child (S. mit Kind, 1995; oil on canvas; CR 827-4), 40, 114 Table (Tisch, 1962; oil on canvas; CR 1), 23– 24, 35, 44, 54, 95, 112 Tiger (Tiger, 1965; oil on canvas; CR 78), 38, 152n16 Toilet Paper (Klorolle, 1966; oil on canvas; CR 75-3), 110, 113 Townscape Paris (Stadtbild Paris, 1968; oil on canvas; CR 175), 37, 119 Two Pairs of Lovers (Zwei Liebespaare, 1966; oil on canvas; CR 128), 123 Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo (Zwei Skulpturen für einen Raum von Palermo, 1971; plaster, oil painted grey, on wooden bases; CR 297), 133, 166n16 Uncle Rudi (Onkel Rudi, 1965; oil on canvas; CR 85), 38, 89 Volker Bradke (1966; 16 mm blackand-white film; Gerhard Richter Archiv Dresden, 2010), 28– 33, 38 War Cut (2013; artist’s book), 71, 112, 121– 22, 163n71, 171n92