BLURRING: GERHARD RICHTER
from Blurred Visionary: Gerhard Richter's Photo-Paintings by Tom McCarthy, September 2011
"There's a tendency to discuss the art of the past hundred years in terms of binary oppositions: abstract versus figurative; conceptual versus craft-based; painting versus photography; and so on. Richter, who since the 1970s has been almost universally acknowledged as a late-modern master, reduces these binaries to rubble. Here's a painter whose work is inseparable from photography; a man so devoted to craft that he reportedly makes his students construct their own pallet-trolleys before allowing them to raise a brush in anger, yet indulges in Joseph Beuys-style performances in which he lounges on a staircase grasping a wire (as in the 1968 piece Cable Energy), or Debordian critiques of consumer culture in which he installs himself on pedestal-mounted furniture amid a soundscape of advertising slogans (as in the 1963 piece Living with Pop: A Demonstration of Capitalist Realism); who exhibits colour-charts alongside pastoral landscapes; places mirrors around his paintings; photographs a single grey brushstroke from 128 different angles and lays these out in a large grid; or projects a yellow one, massively enlarged, on to fresh canvas and repaints it as a giant 20-metre streak … I could go on and on: his versatility and scope are stunning.
What is a blur? It's a corruption of an image, an assault upon its clarity, one that turns transparent lenses into opaque shower curtains, gauzy veils. Richter painted a lot of curtains; he had a curtain-painting hanging in his Düsseldorf studio, beside the curtain. He had left his own past behind an iron one; many of the blurred snapshot-scenes he produced in the 60s were of relatives he'd never see again, childhood locations become inaccessible. Beyond reflecting his own situation, the blur serves as a perfect general metaphor for memory, its degradation, for the Ozymandian corrosion wrought by time. One blurred Richter painting reproduces badly taken tourist snaps of Egypt, in which pyramids and temples lose their shapes and scale and grandeur. "I blur to make everything equal, everything equally important and equally unimportant," he explained.
Flashbulbs, snapshots, reportage: above all else, the blur recalls camera movement and errors of printing. The vast majority of Richter's paintings aren't directly "of" the thing they purport to show, but rather of magazine or photo-album reproductions of it. He'll often hammer this point home by including surrounding text: captions and advertising copy, scrapbook annotations – which, of course, blur too. What Richter is at pains to foreground is the fact of mediation, the presence, at the very origin and base of every piece, of technologies of mass-production, of repetition. He not only overwrites our perceptual relation to the world by rerouting it through its glitch-ridden mediating screens; he also brings this logic to bear on the history of art."
Sphinx of Gizeh. Gerhard Richter. Oil on Canvas. 1964