Daniel Richter and the Problem of Political Painting Today

David Hughes

Is there a left-wing consciousness in abstract painting today? Christopher Bannat, Ich male alles und rede mit jedem Again and again the talk is of politics vis--vis Daniel Richters gurative pictures. But is it politics, when topical, socially relevant content appears on the canvases alongside the thematization of art-historical discourses and pictorial questions? Beate Ermacora, ffentliche Bilder The political engagement that these themes suggest cannot be ascertained in Richters pictures. They deliver no commentary on their running chronicle of politics and violence. Fritz W. Kramer, In Heterotopia

Over the years, one question has irked critics of Daniel Richters work more than any other: are his paintings political? For a German artist who began his professional career producing abstract-expressive pictures in 1995, it seemed particularly hard to maintain a left-wing stance while working in a medium that belonged historically to the internationalist conformism of the 1950s, or else to the ideologically nullifying tradition of abstract works by namesake Gerhard Richter from the mid-1970s on. The younger Richters turn to guration
New German Critique 108, Vol. 36, No. 3, Fall 2009 DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2009-014 2009 by New German Critique, Inc.

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around 19992000, however, only compounded the problem: how dare he raise sensitive political issuesthe war in the Balkans, the move to the right in youth culture, vagrancy, the weakening of social relations under neoliberalism, mass unemployment, terrorist bombings, the war in Afghanistan, police drug busts, the plight of North Africans trying to reach Europe, the challenges facing Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wallwithout offering a coherent commentary on them? To make matters worse, Richters turn (Richters Wende, as Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen labeled it) increased the market value of his work to such an extent that the German Financial Times (of all newspapers) ran a piece in 2002 noting that Richter had been nominated a second time for the prestigious Preis der Nationalgaleriea.k.a. the German Turner Prizeand that of the 114 previously nominated candidates, only 4 had achieved this accolade, and their work had consequently skyrocketed in value.1 For a supposedly radical left-winger, it seemed, Richter was making quite a prot while systematically avoiding taking a clear stance on what purportedly mattered most to him. Consider, for instance, Why I Am Not a Conservative (Warum ich kein Konservativer bin, 2000), one of Richters better-known paintings shown in three major solo exhibitions in Germany between 2001 and 2003 (g. 1). In this large (225 145 cm) oil painting there are two gures in the bottom right quadrant, one naked, the other fully clothed, arms around each other. In the background, shady, indistinct gures look on from the top of some steps leading up to the entrance of a building overhung by a canopy studded with lights. One gure, completely in shadow, carries a multicolored umbrella, while a female on the left looks at something to the right of the picture frame. In the foreground a monkey in a frilly costume looks in the same direction. What any of this has to do with Richters professed lack of conservatism seems a mystery to begin with. What exactly is this strange and otherworldly scene depicting, and what can it have to do with our political reality? Who or what are these ghostlike gures, and what are they doing? Why is one of them naked, and is he or she locked in a comforting embrace or a violent struggle? What is the monkeys role, and what is drawing the gures attention beyond the picture frame? This seems a highly ambiguous work that does anything but make a clear political statement. Some light is shed on the painting by the source material that Richter decided to exhibit alongside his work from 2001 on. In the Billiards at Half Past Nine (Billard um halb zehn) exhibition that year, three magazine photographs were included that showed German field marshals tackling two
1. Judith Borowski, Sex, Angst Ohnmacht, Financial Times Deutschland, April 5, 2002.

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Figure 1. Why I Am Not a Conservative (Warum ich kein Konservativer bin, 2000). Oil on canvas, 225 145 cm. Courtesy of Contemporary Fine Arts. Photograph by Jochen Littkemann

people, one almost naked, at a military ceremony. In the background of the photographs, a woman holds an umbrella on which the words Abolish the German Army (Bundeswehr abschaffen) are legible. The bottom photograph in particular (g. 2) seems to have been an obvious inspiration for Why I Am Not a Conservative. The eld marshal intercepting the near-naked gure was surely the template for the couple in Richters picture; there are gures in the background, as well as a prominent umbrella; and the pose of the soldier about to give the address is replicated by the girl on the far left of Richters picture. Although Richter offered no commentary on the signicance of

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Figure 2. Photograph of an antimilitary protest in Berlin, July 1999, included in Richters Billiards at Half Past Nine (Billard um halb zehn) exhibition (2001). Courtesy of Contemporary Fine Arts

these photographs, which were distributed randomly throughout the exhibition, they in fact document a protest against the German militarys involvement in the Balkans, held in the Bendlerblock area of Berlin in July 1999. At the most solemn moment of a military ceremony attended by Federal chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, as recruits stepped forward to pledge their loyalty to the nation, two female antiwar protestors burst onto the scene almost naked, while a third opened the aforementioned umbrella. In total there were twelve protestors, one of whom produced another umbrella spelling out the words Tucholsky was right (Tucholsky hatte recht), referring to Kurt Tucholskys famous 1931 slogan Soldiers are murderers (Soldaten sind Mrder). Richters studio is located on Tucholskystrasse in Berlin, and his interpretation of the umbrellas in terms of the rainbow colors conventionally associated with peace movements probably expresses his antiwar sentimentSchroeders decision to intervene in Kosovo being interpreted as a right-wing act by an ostensibly left-wing chancellor. Drawing on magazine photographs and other artifacts of mass culture to make a political point is, of course, nothing new in ne art. Richters mentor at the Hochschule fr Bildende Knste in Hamburg, Werner Bttner, did

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it to excess in the 1980s along with Albert Oehlen (for whom Richter worked as an assistant) and the other Neuen Wilden, or new fauves. The idea then was that avant-garde prescriptions for what constituted cutting-edge art had run their course, leaving punk artists to draw indiscriminately on whatever images they felt like. On account of the severe economic recession and the missile crisis in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) at that time, this individualism was coupled with a deep mistrust of industrialism and technological progress. Many artists, accordingly, chose to look back to German expressionism for inspiration, bridging the fty-ve-year gap since the Nazis infamous degenerate art (entartete Kunst) exhibition. Richter, in his work, goes one stage farther. While incorporating all manner of imagery from his personal iconography into his paintings, his style evokes an even earlier moment in art historysymbolismas is evidenced primarily by the recurrence of masks, animals, carnivalesque imagery, and fantastical elements in his work. In a superb reading of James Ensors symbolist masterpiece The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889 (188889), Stefan Jonsson compares that epitome of symbolist painting to the plays of August Strindberg and comments: Strindberg and Ensor use the conicts they perceive in the social world as material for the construction of their own fantasy narratives. Restructuring society according to a new logic at once phantasmic and political, their work frees social events, persons, and collectives from the cognitive and ideological representations in which they are normally embedded.2 Precisely the same could be said of Richter in Why I Am Not a Conservative. Taking the antiwar protest at the Bendlerblock as source material, Richter uses fantasy in his painting to depict an afuent German society of the late 1990s in terms of the social conicts underlying it, rather than show its gleaming, polished surfaces. Anyone who has visited Berlin will recognize, for instance, that the painting reconstructs the glitzy facade of the Galeria Kaufhof department store on Alexanderplatz (g. 3). In terms of composition, the pictures entire top half draws our attention to that unmistakable canopy, confronting us with the historical irony of one of Germanys blue-chip companies smugly situated at the very heart of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Yet this is not the consumer paradise of the Galeria Kaufhof as we know it. The stores sign has been torn from its canopy; half the lights glow orange instead of yellow; and the scene as a whole has a haunting, nightmarish quality.
2. Stefan Jonsson, Society Degree Zero: Christ, Communism, and the Madness of Crowds in the Art of James Ensor, Representations, no. 75 (2001): 2.

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Why I Am Not a Conservative represents the perceived hell of bourgeois decadence. Its gures have a soulless, zombielike appearance (the one holding the umbrella being nothing more than a ghostly shadow). Those in the background seem to be behind bars, imprisoned in a Hades-like setting, looking on maliciously as another lost soul joins their ranks. The scene indeed creates the effect of a gateway to the underworld, making it no coincidence that Richter called another, extremely similar painting Zurberes (close to Zerberus, the German word for Cerberus, guardian of the portal to Hades in Greek mytholFigure 3. Galeria Kaufhof, Alexanderogy). Meanwhile, an Ensor-like skull platz, Berlin. Photograph by the author, lies at the top of the steps, and streaks June 2006 and drippings cover the surface, giving the impression less of a Pollock action painting than of some corrosive, downward inuence exacerbated by the slant of the scene from top left to bottom right. In effect, Why I Am Not a Conservative confronts us with a second n de sicle, replete with the same sense of decline that informed the rst, as well as an acute and terrifying sense of impending change, signied by whatever it is to the right of the picture frame that has mesmerized the gures on the left. The social order is breaking down, and carnivalotherwise a temporary suspension of that orderhas become the norm, as symbolized by the freely roaming circus monkey. The painting is a crystallization of discontinuity: the capturing of an interregnum that dees all attempts to order it, including those of conventional modes of representation, yielding a fantasy scenario in which all things are possible. Intertextuality and Contempt for Tradition Why I Am Not a Conservative is the kind of work that has continued to confound critics. Fritz W. Kramer, for example, plagued by the ambiguities in Richters paintings, could only conclude: Presumably the real message is contradiction. It is left to the spectator himself to discover in which situations he

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nds himself.3 Jan-Hendrik Wentrup went one stage farther by suspecting Richter of deliberately setting semantic traps for his unwitting viewer.4 Kinder critics like Julian Heynen, meanwhile, remained convinced that there must indeed be meaning beneath the euphoric excesses of Richters abstract work.5 Such responses are entirely understandable, given just a cursory glance at some of the titles of Richters paintings. Tuanus, for example, could refer to Frankfurts Taunus district; Phienox would seem an allusion to the mythical phoenix; and Zurberes may incline us to think of Cerberus. Yet there are slippages here: we read Tuanus and not Taunus, Phienox and not Phnix, Zurberes and not Zerberus. By the simple exchange of two vowels in each instance, any attempt to nd meaning in the titles is immediately complicated and perhaps frustrated altogether. Alternatively, the titles may appear arcane, as in Billiards at Half Past Nine or Verdigris (Grnspan), both of which doubled as titles of exhibitions by Richter in 20012 and are named after books that the viewer may or may not have read (the rst after Heinrich Blls famous story of 1959, the second after Detlevs Imitations Verdigris [Detlevs Imitationen Grnspan], a 1971 novel by the almost forgotten Hamburg author Hubert Fichte). The title of a 2003 exhibition, Brain (Hirn), similarly takes its name from a 1986 collection of essays on subculture by Rainald Gtz. Intertextuality is, and has always been, a core ingredient of Richters work. As Beate Ermacora notes in the catalog to Billiards at Half Past Nine, even the abstract paintings brim over with art-historical citations:
In tumbling, mind-blowing simultaneity, citational references push toward the innite possibilities of abstract painting on the picture surfaces; shreds of images and mnemonic form and color sequences in the style of informel, tachism, or CoBrA stand side by side; Gerhard Richter or Albert Oehlen style gestures are superimposed on decorative patterns and ornamentations that are familiar to us from tattoos or grafti.6

Abstract art, that erstwhile ahistorical realm of ideal forms (or so the modernists thought), now itself becomes historical and open to citationand not
3. Fritz W. Kramer, In Heterotopia, in Grnspan, ed. Julian Heynen (Bielefeld: Kerber, 2002), 7. All translations in this article are my own. 4. Jan-Hendrik Wentrup, Spinning the Wheel: Zur Dimension des Historischen im Werk von Daniel Richter, in Heynen, Grnspan, 17. 5. Julian Heynen, Grnspan oder Goldstaub, in Heynen, Grnspan, 21. 6. Beate Ermacora, ffentliche Bilder, in Billard um halbzehn, ed. Beate Ermacora (Kiel: Kunsthalle zu Kiel, 2001), 10411.

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just in its high forms based on the traditional ne arts. Richter is equally keen to incorporate grafti art, by painting spots of color bordered with contour strokes in the fashion of the grafti sprayer on house walls. Here, his origins in the Hamburg punk and squatter scene of the 1980s become evident, for this kind of grafti on both inside and outside walls was typical of the punk aesthetic, intended as it was to make art public by eliminating private space. We also nd psychedelic touches, drawn from 1960s subculture: the most obvious example is Fool on a Hill (1999), which looks something like the cover of the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour put through a blender (the painting takes its name from a song on that album). With Richters gurative work, the astonishing fullness of art-historical citation is extended, and critics have noted references to, among others, William Blake, Francisco de Goya, Thodore Gricault, Ilya Repin, Vasily Surikov, Arnold Bcklin, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Manet, Pablo Picasso, Ferdinand Hodler, James Ensor, Edvard Munch, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Philip Guston, Robert Crumb, Gerhard Richter, Jrg Immendorff, Martin Kippenberger, and Peter Doig. Kay Heymer, rather harshly, labeled Richters contrived mixing of styles bastard painting (Bastardmalerei). What bothered Heymer was Richters contempt for painterly tradition: His attitude is that of the angry spurner of every painting tradition to have preceded him. He takes what he needs, severing all connections in the process.7 But in fairness to Richter, he was entirely in line with Hans Beltings study The End of Art History? (1983) when he stated, All that is left in painting is its history, the constant reinterpretation of what one has already seen and revised in ones own work.8 Of course, such a philosophy of art arouses what one critic called the suspicion of historical kitsch,9 and Richter recognized this when he claimed that the more historical citations a painting contains, the more it requires its own originality, however much of a Romantic anachronism that may seem.10 (Though of course Gerhard Richters attempt to drive out style completely from his photopaintings, gray
7. Kay Heymer, Diebesgut, Texte zur Kunst 9 (1999): 215. 8. Quoted in Harald Fricke, Ein bisschen Horrorschau; Auf Augenhhe mit Realitt: Daniel Richter zeigt in Dsseldorf einen Raum gewordenen Bilderpastiche, in dem sich hundert Jahre Kunstikonographie mit aktuellen Medienbildern vermischen, Die Tageszeitung, October 11, 2002. 9. Stefan Heidenreich, Die Wahrheit ueber die Berliner Mauer, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 30, 2000. 10. Cited in Harald Fricke, Priester lehne ich ab; Weil das gemalte Bild nicht vorgibt, Wirklichkeit zu sein: Ein Gesprch mit dem Maler Daniel Richter ber Medien, Tradition, verschwindende Menschengruppen und gesammelte Muscheln, Die Tageszeitung, May 9, 2003.

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paintings, and abstract work resulted, perversely, in some of the most instantly recognizable works in postwar art history.) It has been claimed that Daniel Richter cites history to narrate his own.11 After all, his personal iconography is hardly random or neutral. Very often it has to do with his own biography: with Schleswig-Holstein, where he grew up; with his afnity to punk rock; with contemporary social issues that concern him (e.g., asylum seekers, protest actions, street ghts, and civil wars); or with a lineage of sociocritical artists from Goya, Honor Daumier, and Gustave Courbet to Hodler, Ensor, and Dixnot to mention the more controversial socialist realism of the GDR, or communist sympathizers in the West, such as the Situationist International, CoBrA, HAP Grieshaber, or Immendorff (who, like Richter, now exhibits at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin). In 2003 Richters own take on his image archive was as follows: It is quite simply the material through which the world has avowed itself to me. I am my own assemblage movement. A party line no longer exists, but I dont infer from this that the party should be abolished; rather, I wonder how it could be improved.12 I know of nowhere else where Richters political leanings surface quite as explicitly as they do here. Twentieth-century communism may have collapsed with the Soviet Unions disintegration, but in Richter the spirit of left-wing radicalism lives on. Celebrity Radicals According to Johanna Drucker in her book Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (2005), Artwork termed political often serves a stabilizing function, helping to maintain the cultural status quo. Throughout the twentieth century, Drucker argues, the appearance of radicalism cloaked the careerism of many artists, but now the oppositional rhetoric of radicality in ne art and criticism has become formulaic and academic in the worst sense. Given that ne art has become inseparable from the world system in which it is embedded, Drucker calls for an admission of complicity, in which selfinterest plays a part, rather than a claim to resistance, or aloof separation, or distance.13 The debate about Daniel Richter ts well within this context, for self-interest is unquestionably a motivating factor in his aesthetic radicalism. Despite his origins in Hamburgs autonomist and punk scene, for example, his
11. Wentrup, Spinning the Wheel, 19. 12. Quoted in Fricke, Priester lehne ich ab. 13. Johanna Drucker, Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 3, 5, 11.

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art has brought him considerable wealth and prestige, prompting allegations in some quarters that he only ever seems to produce large-format paintings that cannot be bought for less than ten thousand dollars each.14 But while reproaches of hypocrisy against Richter are not uncommon, it is surely worth questioning whether personal gain and left-wing politics need be incompatible in a postmodern era when it is impossible for the artist to stand outside global capitalism. The case of Daniel Richter seems to suggest that the artist can indeed prot from the very system he or she would rather see overthrown. Besides, were not Richters predecessors, the new fauves, already celebrities in the 1980sthe darlings of the art market esteemed for their supposedly wild and spontaneous gestures both on and off the canvas? Was it not they who slaked that Hunger for Painting15 with their heroic return to the canvas following the dominance of photography, video, installation, minimalism, and conceptual art in the 1970s? And were they not an integral part of that new international style, neo-expressionism, that began in West Germany with Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer and soon appeared elsewhere: in Italy with the transavantgarde, including Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia, as well as in the United States with Julian Schnabel and David Salle? The simple answer is no: they were none of these clichs. For a start, the very term Neuen Wilden, coined by Wolfgang Becker in his 1980 exhibition at the Neue Galerie in Aachen, is hopelessly misleading. That exhibition pointed to the similarities between French expressionism of the early twentieth century and the expressive tendencies of contemporary art, almost as though modernism had come full circle (hence Heinrich Klotzs 1984 thesis of a second modernism in art).16 Yet the new fauves themselves, especially the Moritzplatz artists in Berlin (Rainer Fetting, Helmut Middendorf, Salom, Bernd Zimmer), invoked quite alternative role models to the French expressionists, such as the American expressionists Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, as well as the English loner Francis Bacon. Neuen Wilden was also problematic insofar as it suggested the expressiveness of the artists themselves rather than of their paintings (the topos of the wild artist being easily applied to the Hamburg artists for their excessive alcohol consumption and to the Berlin artists for their uninhibited erotic excesses). But in fact, these artists were not so much wild or untamed as they were fed up and disillusioned with the society in which they
14. An allegation made by the political fanzine 17 Grad, cited in Fricke, Ein bisschen Horrorschau. 15. The title of a 1982 exhibition of their work curated by Wolfgang Max Faust and Gerd de Vries. 16. First proposed in Heinrich Klotz, Moderne und Postmoderne: Architektur der Gegenwart, 19601980 (Wiesbaden: Vieweg und Sohn, 1984).

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liveda media society marked increasingly by cynical individualism and greed, in which art was appropriated and abused by the image-based politics of the Reagan-Thatcher era. Even these artists own work was not immune to such manipulation, not least because there never was any hunger for painting in West Germany, where many of the leading artists (Kiefer, Markus Lpertz, and Gerhard Richter, to name but a few obvious candidates) continued to paint dening works throughout the 1970s. That label was, rather, part of an aggressive marketing strategy created by art dealers and galleries to promote neoexpressionism, the style that never was. Oehlen recently made clear that the Italian transavantgarde did not inuence him and his Hamburg colleagues, as is often thought, and that there was little enough connecting expressive artists even within West Germany in the 1980s, where trends emerged regionally (the principal centers being Berlin, Hamburg, and Cologne): We never were a group, we never had a name for ourselves and never had our own publications, like a magazine or a manifesto. We wanted rather to confuse people.17 Mission accomplishedbut not for the reasons Oehlen and his contemporaries intended. Perversely, the art market created a group name and identity for a disparate range of artists, then made stars of those artists even though they wanted, as far as possible, to opt out of, or vehemently assert themselves against, capitalist society. The lesson here is instructive: artists do not choose the market value of their works, or the amount of attention they themselves command, or, indeed, how others interpret their works. This may explain why, in 1984, Bttner claimed not to give a hang for what spectators thought of his work,18 and why, judging by the title he gave to a solo exhibition at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, he felt powerless to change a topsy-turvy world: The world is upside down, you have to look at it inversely in order to see it properly. . . . Only fools will try to change it. . . . It always was the way it is. This verbose title was, in fact, a quotation from Baltasar Gracin, a seventeenthcentury Jesuit priest notorious for his cynical worldview. That Bttner should have identied with such a gure is telling, for it marks the main contrast between his work and the early German expressionism with which it is so often conated: whereas the Brcke artists and the Sturm circle in Berlin in the 1910s and 1920s never questioned the artists power to intervene in social relations, Bttner and his cohorts saw their only role as that of cynical witness. Their
17. Eric Banks, Albert Oehlen Talks to Eric Banks, Artforum, April 1, 2003, 18283. 18. I dont care if they understand the text, if they understand the illustrations, or if they create a link between the two and think they understand it, or if they understand nothing at all. It cant matter to me as a commonsense being, since I can no longer inuence it. T H E WOR K OF T H E A RT IST E N D S BE F O R E T H E AU DI E N C E A R R I V E S (Werner Bttner, La luta continua: Drei Beispiele [Cologne: Galerie Max Hetzler, 1984], 25).

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work functioned as something like an existential seismograph, registering how their environment aficted them mentally in the form of obsessions, aggressions, fears, and neuroses. It made no pretension to change the world, and Bttner and Oehlenunlike, say, Grieshaber or Immendorffalways regarded themselves as artists rather than activists. Violence, Intervention, and Global Civil War Throughout his career Daniel Richter has held a consistent position on the relationship between art and politics: I insist on categorization. Politics remains politics, social action remains social action, and art remains art.19 There is no doubting Richters political bent: he was affected by the Walser-Bubis debate and the xenophobic campaign waged by Hessens minister-president, Roland Koch;20 he has spoken of his deep inner revulsion at central European politics and that repellent nationalist gibberish;21 and he has claimed not to identify with nations, states, or ideologies.22 But like his mentors Bttner and Oehlen, Richter sees himself primarily as a painter in an age where art no longer serves as a template for a better world. On the contrary, in his acceptance speech for the Otto Dix Prize in 1998, Richter described painting as nothing less than a form of slavery: For me, one of the biggest pleasures of not being a painter is freedom from slavery; the ability to enjoy my whole life instead of spending half of it lusting after a canvas and, immediately after daubing one, wishing I didnt have to.23 No sign here, then, of that prot-hungry pasticher of past styles propagated by certain elements of the art press. Richter paints what he, and not the market, wants to see,24 and nds nothing pleasurable in his task. The reason: art should, he holds, always be brought into connection with social reality rather than indulge in design and surface,25 and in his work, this reality appears as violent and nightmarish.
19. Wentrup, Spinning the Wheel, 19. 20. Cited in Kerstin Ehmer, Glhende Bilderlust, Stern, September 28, 2000. 21. Daniel Richter in conversation with Beate Ermacora, Berlin, March 30, 2001, quoted in Ermacora, ffentliche Bilder, 110. 22. Daniel Richter und Raymond Pettibon, taz, September 11, 2002. 23. Richard Rabensaat, Fr ein paar Bagger mehr; Erst die Wirklichkeit und dann die Arbeit: Was der Sicherheitsmann und ehemalige Betonfacharbeiter Horst Meyer und der Maler Daniel Richter miteinander gemein haben. Einige Bemerkungen zur Berlin-Biennale und ihrem schnen Schein, Die Tageszeitung, June 8, 2001. 24. I paint pictures that I myself want to see (quoted in Fricke, Ein bisschen Horrorschau). 25. It doesnt interest me when artists leave their ivory tower only to take up design. I just dont want to reproduce shiny surfaces in my work (quoted in Rabensaat, Fr ein paar Bagger mehr; see also Fricke, Ein bisschen Horrorschau).

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Figure 4. A City Called Authen (Eine Stadt namens Authen, 2001). Oil on canvas, 260 375 cm. Courtesy of Contemporary Fine Arts. Photograph by Jochen Littkemann

Consider A City Called Authen (Eine Stadt namens Authen, 2001; g. 4), which depicts ve gures in the foreground, four of whom appear to be advancing on the fth, about to push him off the cuboid structure on which they are standing. In the background loom a number of run-down tenement blocks, while down below, at ground level, a seminaked female stands beneath an oversize streetlight, two additional gures walk down the street clutching a boxshaped object, and a tall blue gure strides toward them, passing a garbage container. The paintings perspective draws our attention to the ght scene on the left, where two males in garishly colored shirts, plus two more in much darker outts, close in on their adversary, another male in gaudy red trousers, who brandishes a bottle, perhaps in self-defense. This is a kind of enforced close-up viewing that typies Richters work, whereby the spectator does not merely look at the painting in question but nds himself or herself right in the middle of the action as the space opens forward (a technique inherited from Beckmann). Seeing the actual painting itself, of course, the effect is all the more strikinginstead of a picture in a catalog, one faces a four-meter-wide canvas with all its materiality and gestural multiplicity. The experience is

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then totally direct, seeing as immediate confrontation with the picture exactly as it hangs in the exhibition.26 Thrust into the action, the spectator effectively turns participant, and in A City Called Authen the imperative to intervene is immediate. My own rst reaction to the painting was to register the sheer vulnerability of the victim, who, easily outnumbered and completely exposed on top of what could be a tall building, seems only moments away from a potentially fatal fall. Yet no sooner did I feel the desire to act than multiple ambivalences and peculiarities in the picture began to present themselves. Why, in an otherwise dark and sinister cityscape, are the combatants wearing Bermuda-style shirts and shorts, almost as though they were on a beach holiday? Why is one assailants raised hand open wide, as if in a sign of surrender? Is the man with the bottle actually the aggressor, winding up to hit his opponent? (In another of Richters paintings from 2001, Justice [Das Recht], a man dressed in exactly the same clothing looks as though he is about to bludgeon a terried horse to death.) Is the strange surface the men are standing on really a rooftop, or is it a dance oor in a nightclub (hence the bright clothing and the bottle)? Why is there a bikini-clad woman standing unresponsive and rigid down below? What are the two gures with the box up to, and why do they not intervene given that one of them seems to have spotted the altercation? Can I reach the combatants from where I am, and would I place myself in peril by doing so? Am I safe in the rst place in this semifamiliar yet bombed-out-looking environment? Then I notice dark gures in the windows of the tenement blocks have they noticed the ght, and, if so, have they reported it? There is a small child reading on top of a different building or three-dimensional blockwhat is he or she doing amid this commotion? For that matter, why am I here, watching this debacle? The spectator of A City Called Authen is called on, quite out of the blue, and without guidelines, to intervene in a potentially life-threatening yet highly enigmatic situation. For Sigmar Polke, the sine qua non of moral responsibility was always confusion, and Richter, too, assigns central importance to that concept in his motto Beauty through confusion, truth through collision. Stripped of their classical transcendence, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful must now pass through the immanent lters of confusion and violence. Long gone are the days of an Otto Dix, who still saw absolute categories of good and evil as the standards by which to shock and provoke his audience, as he turned his lacerating pen and brush on the corruption which he found endemic to Ger26. Quoted in Fricke, Priester lehne ich ab.

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man society (prostitution and the vices of the ruling class numbering among his most frequent subjects). Richter, in contrast, makes no attempt to enlighten his spectator by means of shock; although fear and violence pervade his paintings, there is no disturbingly graphic realismno blood and gore, war cripples, or disease-ridden brothels. Instead, the effect is one of creeping discomfort produced by innuendo and ambiguity: is an attack taking place in A City Called Authen, or is it just that ve young men are having a rooftop party? Are the ghostlike gures in Your Night Needs No Moon (Eure Nacht braucht keinen Mond, 2001) wading through an idyllic sea, or are they on the run? In Construct (in That Dream) (Konstruktion [in jenem Traum], 2001), are the ghostly beings in a tree against which a boy sleeps watching over him or theatening to abduct him? In Dog Planet (2002), is the group armed with helmets, sticks, and dogs the riot police or a band of savage thugs? In Duisen (2004), are the gures upraised arms a sign of celebration, protest, or surrender? Violence, or at least the threat of violence, haunts Richters work, yet it remains invisible and its perpetrators anonymous. In A City Called Authen we witness a tight, pressured scene full of seeming gestures of attack and defense, but we are unable to testify to a concrete act of brutality. Issues of victimhood and perpetration, which have plagued (West) German art since the early 1970s at least,27 evaporate here in a haze that obscures all possibility of moralizing about guilty parties or taking action to bring them to justice. We may recall the tragic fate of Catherine Genovese, the New Yorker who was murdered by repeated stabbings in the early hours of March 13, 1964, while numerous residents of a respectable street in Queens simply watched from their windows and did not call the police for at least an hour. The problem there, it has been argued,28 was diffusion of responsibility: everyone assumed that the call had already been made. In A City Called Authen not only responsibility appears nebulous (how many people have noticed the altercation and who has reported it?), so too does the crime itself, to the extent that it is hard to know whether an offense is even taking place. Similar is true of Tuanus (2000), which we might assume from the title depicts a police raid in Frankfurts Taunus Park, a place notorious for its drug trade. Yet none of the gures wears a police uniform, and one aggressor appears to be taking drugs. It is impossible to discern who the
27. For instance, Anselm Kiefer gives an intensely problematic portrayal of himself as victim when dealing with Nazi and Holocaust-related themes in such paintings as Jeder Mensch steht unter seinem eigenen Himmelskugel (1970) and Dem Unbekannten Maler (1981). 28. See Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History (London: Penguin, 2003), 41114.

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good actors are and who are the badis the gure on the right, for example, frisking his suspect, or is he committing sexual assault? Into this incredibly sinister environment, meanwhile, stumbles a backpackerperhaps a student, perhaps a picnicker. What should I do? How should I save her? Richter asks rhetorically.29 Violence in A City Called Authen may be anonymous, but it seems ubiquitous because of the catastrophic backdrop of burned-out buildings, looters, and an overowing garbage container. Civil war could be breaking out (much of Richters source material included in the Billiards at Half Past Nine exhibition involved images of civil war), yet somehow everything seems horribly familiar, even banal, because we are used to such images from the media. In Richters own words, The paintings may brutally attack the spectator, but they reproduce a reality that is present daily in the news whenever there are racially motivated attacks on foreigners somewhere in Germany again.30 There are shades of Tom Holert and Mark Terkessidiss book War as Mass Culture in the Twenty-rst Century (Krieg als Massenkultur im 21. Jahrhundert, 2002) here: war is no longer just an instrument in the arsenal of the state, but has diffused down into social life via mass culture (one critic accordingly drew a parallel between Richters work and Michel Foucaults theorization of the passage from disciplinary society to the society of control).31 Richter has indeed been interested in the relationship between war and culture since 1997 at least, when he showed images of war alongside his abstract paintings in the catalog for Seventeen Years of Nosebleeds (Siebzehn Jahre Nasenbluten). This may have been a comment on the growing complicity of culture with warfare (in what has become known as full spectrum dominance), as well as on the increasingly violent tendencies of culture itself, which were, in the eyes of Ulrike Rdiger, already manifest in his own work: The pictures that Richter leaves on the canvas after meticulous close combat are battle elds of colors, forms, styles.32 Violence is everywhere in Richters work, then, for the artist himself is keen for us to recognize the mounting anarchy: Everything is running out of the rudder. Lets not kid ourselves.33 The contrast between this attitude and the general tone of West German art before reunication could hardly be more
29. Quoted in Ehmer, Glhende Bilderlust. 30. Quoted in Rabensaat, Fr ein paar Bagger mehr. 31. Wentrup, Spinning the Wheel, 18. 32. Ulrike Rdiger, ed., Otto-Dix-Preis 98 (Frankfurt an der Oder: Kunstsammlung Gera, 1998), 4. 33. Quoted in Fricke, Priester lehne ich ab.

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pronounced. Following the war crimes and genocidal barbarism of the Hitler years, the prevailing consensus in the FRG until the early 1980s at least was that violent currents were to be marginalized or preferably expunged from West German art. Of course, there were exceptions: among others, Baselitz and Eugen Schnebeck sought to violate the national taboo on violent and obscene imagery with their pathetic realism in the early 1960s; Wolf Vostell conceived of the Happening to liberate repressed impulses including those that might lead to barbarism;34 and in the early 1970s the critical realists in Berlin held up the alternative reality of torture and brutality from Vietnam and South America to the pinup clichs of pop and photorealism. But by and large, the rst three decades of the FRG produced art that was averse to dealing with violence, even despite the terrorist atrocities committed by the Rote Armee Fraktion and Baader-Meinhof Gruppe during the 1970s. It took seven years, indeed, before the Stammheim suicide pact was thematized by artists, rst in Gustav Kluges Stammheim Duet (Stammheimer Duett, 1984) and Olaf Metzels wall installation Stammheim (1984), and then in Gerhard Richters more famous work 18. Oktober 1977 (1988). And although Fetting, Helmut Middendorf, and Bernd Zimmer earned the tag violent painting (heftige Malerei) for their work via an exhibition of that name in 1980 shown in the Haus am Waldsee in Berlin, that epithet applied more to their vehement painting gestures than their subject matter itself. Richter hates it when his paintings are reduced to situations of violence,35 and he does not mean to glorify conict. But he does want the Left, and the German Left especially, to open its eyes to the mounting chaos of an increasingly deregulated, unpredictable, and globalized world. The old mantra of marginalizing violence is not just ineffective today, it is positively crippling, because it fails to recognize the unruly energies that govern every level of social reality. Wicked entertainment was how one critic described Richters work,36 whose characters are subject to any number of forces beyond their control. In paintings such as Gedion (2002) and Punktum (2003), for example, they stand paralyzed by fear, gazing in terried awe at an unknown source outside the picture frame. In other works, like Billiards at Half Past Nine (Billard um halbzehn, 2001) and Through the Forest toward Loneliness (Zur
34. Vostell once claimed that by releasing hidden impulses, the Happening also releases those that tend toward barbarism (quoted in Karin Thomas, Deutsche Kunst seit 1945 [Cologne: DuMont Literatur und Kunst Verlag, 2002], 149). 35. Cited in Fricke, Priester lehne ich ab. 36. Stephen Mueller, review of Daniel Richter: The Morning After (2004), www.artcritical .com/mueller/SMRichter.htm (accessed July 1, 2009).

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Einheit durch den Wald, 2001), they are driven like demoniacs by a kind of hyperkinetic nervous energy. Or in Tarifa (2001) and Flash (2002) they nd themselves hopelessly exposed to the elements, set adrift on the ocean in the black of night with nothing but a rubber dinghy or overturned lifeboat for protection. These scenes are striking for their laconicism: Richter makes barely any comment on the plight of his characters; he shows no sympathy, outrage, or other strong emotion, but rather presents the characters agonized state simply as it is. There is no didacticism or hope of redemption in these pictures, no rallying call to arms against the burgeoning social inequalities generated by late capitalismnone of the attributes, in other words, traditionally ascribed to left-wing artists. If anything, Richter can seem cruel and merciless toward his charactersbut only because of the unforgiving nature of the world system that infuses his every scenario. The Politics of Citation: Democracy versus Technocracy Typical of Richters oeuvre, A City Called Authen brings together all manner of source material. The paintings milieu was lifted from a photograph of East German Plattenbauten (buildings made with precast concrete slabs), while the postures of the aggressive male gures come from a photograph of hooligans clashing with riot police. There are stylistic nods toward expressionism (in the bold colors), constructivism (in the cool straight outlines of the buildings), surrealism (the female gure beneath a disproportionately tall street light), abstract expressionism (the drippings and streaks that cover the surface), minimalism (the white cube-shaped structure), and pop art (the Jasper Johnsstyle targets on the blue shirt). Popular culture also enters the frame via the grimacing face on the back of the blue gure in the bottom right corner, which appears to have been taken from John Carpenters horror movie They Live (1988), although it could just as easily be seen as a reference to Munchs Scream (1893). In terms of composition, there are surprising similarities with Jesus Drives the Merchants Away from the Temple, an early Renaissance painting by the Florentine artist Giotto di Bondone (12671337), whom Richter has listed among his art-historical inuences. The gestures of attack and defense in the center of Giottos picture, as well as the group of men on the left-hand side, the large building in the background, and the cuboid structure at the front are all replicated in Richters painting. In a postmodern age where styles and images of all kinds are being recycled faster and more aggressively than ever, Richters citational cornucopia constitutes an entirely appropriate mode of representation. Yet as far as politically engaged art is concerned, the effect of excessive citation can seem derogatory. For example, one critic drew a parallel between

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Richters stylistic pluralism and that of Dix, noting that the art historian Carl Einstein once branded Dix a painting reactionary on the Left for producing a stream of reportage whose arresting motifs had grown banal and kitschy.37 Along similar lines, another commentator noted the apparent disjunction between form and content in Richters gurative work, which he characterized in terms of a garish expressionist style that is at odds with its subject matter, as if the artist were completely oblivious to the drama at hand.38 Certainly, it does seem remarkable to treat such issues as xenophobia and antisocial behavior, or terrorism and civil war, as Richter does, using a playful postmodern citational art that is inscrutable and sometimes verging on the hokey. But to some extent, Richters approach simply mirrors todays culture, in which news broadcasts about civil unrest, war, and catastrophe are interspliced with swimwear commercials, trailers for horror movies, and other pop-culture images. Moreover, kitsch need not necessarily be a bad thing, as it can make artworks more accessible to a wider audience than even, say, Immendorffs barricade slogans, which he had hoped would be comprehensible to everyone. Richter thus described the diverse elements of A City Called Authen as things that even my cleaning lady could begin to make sense of,39 a sentiment in keeping with his mandate of producing art that is completely open and inclusive: Above all . . . the goal should be to overcome hierarchies in communication. I am primarily engaged in painting and less with the allures of the various hipster clans. Or to put it quite bluntly: I talk with everyone.40 Richter is the sampler supreme, employing an expansive archive of found images that include reproductions of artworks, book covers, lm stills, newspaper clippings, comics, magazines, news broadcasts, and record album covers. Critics have read Richters sampling, rightly, as a comment on the neverending ood of images in contemporary society. Harald Fricke saw Richters work in Benjaminian terms, as testifying to the catastrophe unerringly piling up as an image archive;41 Liebs saw its numerous citations as components of a now virulent image arsenal;42 and both commentators recognized the violence with which image production now operates. Richter, for his part,
37. Olaf Peters, Der malende Reaktionr am linken Motiv? Zu einigen Werken Daniel Richters, in Heynen, Grnspan, 11. 38. Robert Rigney, Daniel Richter at Contemporary Fine Arts, Art in America 89, no. 2 (2001): 152. 39. Quoted in Rabensaat, Fr ein paar Bagger mehr. 40. Quoted in Christopher Bannat, Ich male alles und rede mit jedem, taz, October 21, 1998. 41. Fricke, Ein bisschen Horrorschau. 42. Holger Liebs, Grner Star; Daniel Richter malt die Welt, wie sie ihm missfllteine Ausstellung in Dsseldorf, Sddeutsche Zeitung, October 10, 2002.

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spoke out in 1998 about what he regarded as the technocratic manipulation of images:
Society does not analyse images, it self-evidently deals with images in a very manipulative way. . . . While everything socially operates more and more via images and de-historicized contexts, ofcial, pragmatic discussion is only ever about the technocratic improvement of tempo, acceleration, etc., which I indeed try to reect in my work. But the disparity between the volume of information and actually being informed is paradoxical.43

It is not difcult to see where Richter acquired his attitude toward image propagation. Bttner, too, voiced dismay at the debasement of images through their mass reproduction and circulation: I nd there are so many images, more than one can nd pleasant, that we dont need to keep inventing new ones. Rather, as a true friend of the essence of the image, one should worry about the misery that the accumulation of images has caused and show that they contain nothing apart from what is used in glossy magazines, adverts, etc.44 Richter rose to Bttners challenge, transplanting everyday imagery into new contexts in the attempt to make it speak the language of the Left. A drab newspaper photograph of an East German tenement block is transformed into the image of civil war raging everywhere and nowhere (A City Called Authen). The Clashs White Riot album cover becomes part of an all-too-sinister police drug bust (Tuanus). The horror house from Alfred Hitchcocks Psycho is merged with a photograph of a center for asylum seekers to yield the eerily compelling backdrop to Billiards at Half Past Nine. Signicantly, these references are not meant to be arcane, since Richter makes his picture archive public in his exhibitions and cataloga very different proposition from, say, Gerhard Richters Atlas (1962), which compiles some of the absent source material for the artists photo-paintings as a separate, experimental work in and of itself. Daniel Richter does not fetishize the absent cause; he wants us to have some idea of his point of departure, although the haphazard and laconic arrangement of source material in the exhibitions ensures that we do not read too much into it. Figurative Painting and the Legacy of Socialist Realism Richters antitechnocratic attitude was perhaps also a partial reaction to the dominance of photographic art in Germany in the early 1990s. Trained by
43. Quoted in Bannat, Ich male alles und rede mit jedem. 44. Quoted in Uta Grosenick, ed., Werner Bttner (Cologne: Taschen, 2003), 26.

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Hans and Hilla Becher, photographers such as Andreas Gursky, Candida Hfer, Axel Htte, and Thomas Ruff enjoyed great success during that period, much as Dieter Appelt, Jrgen Klauke, Ulrike Rosenbach, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Gerry Schum, and others garnered considerable acclaim for their photographic and video art in the late 1970s. Then, it was Bttner, Kippenberger, Oehlen, and others who helped shift the emphasis back to painting; in the mid-1990s, the same feat was achieved by a new generation of painters including Franz Ackermann, Michael Majerus, Martin Gerwers, Corinne Wasmuht, Katharina Grosse, and, of course, Daniel Richter. As exemplied by the 1994 exhibition The Broken Mirror (Der zerbrochene Spiegel) at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, much of this new painting limited itself to a purely formal investigation of its own possibilities, ceding the task of representation to the image media. In 1998, indeed, Richter still thought that photography and lm were more appropriate for depicting people than painting,45 and he displayed full awareness of paintings limitations when claiming: Painting is the most lethargic, slowest and most tradition-burdened medium and the hardest to expand. There, the challenge is greatest.46 On the other hand, of course, painting has always found ways to respond to technological advances in the visual media ever since Paul Delaroche famously pronounced it dead in 1850 in response to the invention of photography. In fact, that death warrant was periodically reissued throughout the twentieth century: by Marcel Duchamp in 191213 in response to the crisis of referentiality in painting; by the constructivists in 192021 after heroic abstraction had culminated in Kazimir Malevichs White on White (1918) and Alexander Rodtschenkos Black on Black (1919); by minimal artists around 196062 following a second round of monochrome canvases by Robert Rauschenberg, Yves Klein, and Ad Reinhardt; and again by art critics in the early 1980s in response to photographys hegemony the previous decade (Photography may have been invented in 1839, but it was only discovered in the 1970s).47 Despite all this doom mongering, however, painting continues to thrive because, in the context of art history since the 1970s, it constitutes a political act as a deliberate rejection of the ideology of technological progress. This is why Richter took
45. See Bannat, Ich male alles und rede mit jedem. 46. Daniel Richter, Der Status quo deprimiert mich, in Melancholie und Eros in der Kunst der Gegenwart, ed. Axel Murken and Christa Murken (Cologne: Sammlung Murken, 1997). 47. Douglas Crimp, The End of Painting, October 16 (1981): 76. We might also think of Benjamin Buchlohs reproval of Kiefers paintings as displaying retardation and regression (Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting, October, no. 16 [1981]: 3968).

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up the gauntlet of painting in a world assailed by technologically produced imagesthough his astounding inventiveness had some surprising origins. The real breakthrough in Richters career came, as we know, with his turn to gurative painting in 19992000, a move that confounded the critics. Consider, for example, Ermacoras interpretation of Richters work: To evade the naturalist trap, Daniel Richter moves right on the border between still recognizable guration and free painting.48 This is what artists were undertaking thirty or forty years ago, not todayjust take Baselitz with his upside-down paintings of classical genre motifs that gave abstract form to still recognizable gures, or Lpertzs dithyrambic paintings that gave concrete form to an abstract concept. In the eyes of Robert Rigney: Richters stylistic transformation is in many ways a capitulation to traditional painting. He has stopped playing postmodern games with painterly modes and has nally allowed meaning, however ambiguous, to triumph.49 As I have shown, this is not true: the postmodern citation of styles and motifs ourishes in Richters gurative work. Stefan Heidenreich sees Richters gurative work as a development of his abstract work but fails to explain how,50 and although Alexander Tolnay rightly identies the gradual appearance of gurative motifs in Richters abstract work and residual abstract elements in the gurative work, his claim that Richter sought to take a more political stance in the latter is belied by the punk aesthetic that Richter brought to the former.51 Perhaps it would be easier, then, to let Richter himself do the talking: The break with abstract painting came from the need to get closer to a reality that I experience as unsavory. My need to express myself as a social entity was so strong that I wanted to convey it to others. Ive always thought the same about the world.52 Figurative painting, then, as a way to express socialitybut was not that painting driven out decades ago by the triumphant march of abstract expressionism and informel, to be forever barred from returning by a lingering mistrust of that outmoded bourgeois ideology, representation? So Western critics of Cold War art history would like us to believe. Yet in the wake of that great conict, and now that the visceral retrospective debates about the moral integrity of East German art have passed in the FRG,53 a new generation of East German painters is achieving widespread recognition for its innovative con48. Ermacora, ffentliche Bilder, 110. 49. Rigney, Daniel Richter at Contemporary Fine Arts. 50. Heidenreich, Die Wahrheit ueber die Berliner Mauer. 51. Alexander Tolnay, Vorwort, in Hirn, ed. Alexander Tolnay (Ostldern-Ruit: Cantz, 2003), 5. 52. Quoted in Wentrup, Spinning the Wheel, 14. 53. See Thomas, Deutsche Kunst seit 1945, 151.

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frontation with the old and much-maligned model of socialist realism. Eberhard Havekost, Franz Nitzsche, Neo Rauch, and Thomas Scheibitz are perhaps the best-known names, but it is also conspicuous that painters like Matthias Weischer and Thomas Henninger, who grew up in the West, chose to study traditional painting forms at academies in the GDR. Richter was not one of these painters, but the inuence of socialist realism on his work is undeniable. For example, when Fricke pointed out to him that there are rarely individuals depicted on his canvases, only ever groups, he responded with unusual animation: Thats the legacy of GDR painting! In postwar modernism the topos of human beings as groups was abolished, it no longer existed, at best with Guttuso or Immendorff. And in the GDR it was the norm for the working class, which marched into the promises of socialism under the leadership of Will Stoph.54 For Richter, socialist realism was superior to Western art in at least one key respect: it treated people as social creatures, much as early modern painting didat the beginning of modernity, pictures were full of human beings!55 Richter was dismayed at the failure of a social welfare committee established to promote the integration of East Germany and West Germany after reunication,56 and his works read as attempts to encourage the same integration in artistic terms, an enterprise long since undertaken by the likes of HAP Grieshaber, Immendorff, and A. R. Penck.57 It is no surprise, for instance, that he models his paintings on such settings as Alexanderplatz in East Berlin (Zurberes, Why I Am Not a Conservative), an asylum center that was burned to the ground in East Germany (Billiards at Half Past Nine), or some run-down East German tenement blocks (A City Called Authen). Nor is it any wonder that he draws on a long tradition of group painters, ranging from Giotto and Caravaggio, through Repin and Surikov, to Dix and Picasso. Let There Be Night I want to conclude with a brief look at one of the most remarkable and unsettling of all Richters gurative paintings, which also happens to be his rst. Phienox (g. 5) shows two dozen or so ill-dened gures gathered around a wall or barricade beneath a dramatic blood-red sky. In the center, a gure
54. Fricke, Priester lehne ich ab. 55. Ibid. 56. See Bannat, Ich male alles und rede mit jedem. 57. Grieshaber made sure that his Totentanz (Death Dance) series (196566) was printed in Leipzig and published in both the FRG and the GDR. Immendorff and Penck tried to build bridges between East and West German artists at a time when inter-German relations had more or less frozen because of the Cold War.

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Figure 5. Phienox (19992000). Oil on canvas, 252 368 cm. Courtesy of Contemporary Fine Arts. Photograph by Jochen Littkemann

rendered in glaring yellows and pinks is being lowered over the wall by two other brightly hued characters, while dark faces with bright eyes and contorted expressions look on aghast from the background. The top-left to bottomright movement that typies Richters gurative work is especially pronounced here in the form of the arch made by the gures in the foreground. But this time the downward motion is not just compositional, it is also a metaphor for the descent of man, who devolves from being a clothed, upright gure with negroid features to become a hunched, club-wielding life form and nally a low-down creature with apelike visage set in front of a gorilla-like outline painted on the wall behind. The ery volcanic sky indeed suggests something primal about this scene, in which the blurry, indistinct characters merge together like creatures from the swamp, robbed of the comforts of civilization and forced to survive in a terrifyingly hostile environment. Despite Richters aversion to technology, there is no primitivizing impulse here, as there was with early German expressionism and even (though to a far lesser extent) the new fauves. This is, rather, atavism of an apocalyptic, or postapocalyptic, avor: alpha and omega, with temporality having fallen out completely. The strange title Phienox, for example, resembles the Latin at nox (let there be night) rather than at lux

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(let there be light). Crucix shapes on the far left of the picture evoke Calvary, while the glowing yellow form being pulled over the wall brings to mind the limp body of Christ being held by Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea at the Deposition. The mood of Richters paintings has certainly grown darker over time. His early abstract paintings, like Frankie and Mike (1997) and 20th Century Girl (1998), were light and playful, brimming over with color and a poplike cheerfulness. In subsequent abstract works such as Fool on a Hill and To Err Human? (Irrenmenschlich? 1999), dark outlines pick out much thinner streaks of color. Tripartite (Dreigeteilt, 1999) appears drained of color, Blackand-White Scam (Schwarz-Weissbeschiss, 19992000) is mostly black, and the gurative pictures have taken us to thoroughly unpleasant, dismal places that are increasingly without hope. In Phienox, the gures skull-like faces exude a sense of terror, but it is unclear what they are afraid ofa trait that derives from Egon Schieles work. But whereas Schiele and his contemporaries painted with a sense of imminent cataclysm before the Great War, here the violence is low-level and ongoing. Be it the primitive cudgel, the possible burned trees and gas masks reminiscent of Verdun, or the irradiant glow of postnuclear catastrophe, there seems to be no beginning or end in sight to human destructiveness. Nor is there any escape from it,
for the horizon [remains] closed. The space does not open out. There are no perspectives, no vistas, not even accessible paths. It is neither a place for sweeping movements nor for a sovereign view that imparts a foothold and orientation. All indications of a third dimension only strengthen the feeling that there is no room to move; the more we pursue the illusion of abstract geometric space, the more clearly the setting turns out to be a heterotopia, a place of a different order.58

A heterotopia: a place in which multiple spatialities coexist, a place without depth or perspectivea place with no way out. Who should stand in the middle of such a place but the artist himself? Like the backpacker in Tuanus who nds himself in a place he would rather not be, an ethereal image of Richter at the center of Phienox placidly observes the surrounding chaos. Everyone in this society lives out his or her differentiations, its an undeviating system of individualizations, Richter once explained. I stand in the middle of it and observe, because this condition interests me. In the end, everything is echoed in my painting as fascinated paranoia.59 Not just the artist but also
58. Kramer, In Heterotopia, 6. 59. Cited in Fricke, Priester lehne ich ab.

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the spectator is trapped in this total space: several gures look right at us, denying us any distance from their plight, and in other works, such as Jawohl und Gomorrha, the same device is used to make it seem as though the spectator had caught the characters in some seedy and illicit act. The ethereal appearance of Richter in the middle of the heterotopia in Phienox also evokes Ensors painting The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889. As Mark Leonard and Louise Lippincott have shown in an article about their recent restoration of The Entry, the central gure of Christ in the painting in fact appears to be a self-portrait of Ensor himself and would have glowed a brilliant chrome yellow when rst executed.60 According to Jonsson, Ensors Christ is a utopian pathbreaker who enables a new world of freedom to come into being: He enters the drama not so much as a sovereign individual but as part of the multitude, acting as a mediatory representative of a social system as yet without any mechanisms of political representation and hence also aesthetically unrepresentable.61 The revolutionary signicance of Ensors painting is undeniable, postdated as it was in 1889, the centennial of the French Revolution and the inaugural year of the Second International. When Ensor produced The Entry in 1888, the situation in his native Belgium resembled the one in France in 1871, following widespread civil unrest in the country in 1886 after anarchists in Lige marched to commemorate the anniversary of the Paris Commune and the military responded by killing several demonstrators. Ensor never publicly proclaimed his political views, but he associated with anarchists from the beginning of his career and was a founding member of the anarchist group Les XX. His anarchist beliefs are reected in The Entry:
In everything, from the sheer dimensions of the canvas to the juxtaposition of various crowds, to the stark contrasts of colors and the different ways in which the paint is appliedby brush, knife, ngertips, drippings, cloth, or tube openingEnsor maximizes the contrasts and oppositions of the visual plane, as though exploring how much heterogeneity a limited piece of twodimensional space can tolerate before it disintegrates. This lack of organizing structure corresponds to the absence of any authority in the social drama itself.62

More or less the same could be said of Phienox, which, like so much of Richters work, incorporates all manner of painting techniques, from thin washes
60. Mark Leonard and Louise Lippincott, James Ensors Christs Entry into Brussels in 1889: Technical Analysis, Restoration, and Reinterpretation, Art Journal 54, no. 2 (1995): 21. 61. Jonsson, Society Degree Zero, 25. 62. Ibid., 10.

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to elaborately decorative impastos to loose, broad brushstrokes. As a heterotopia, Phienox also stretches two-dimensional space to the breaking point, while it further alludes to The Entry via the peculiar monochromatic elds in the lower left corner of the canvasseemingly unnished areas that elicit the impression that the image represents a society in the process of rebuilding itself.63 Richters heterotopias blur the boundary between the urban and the natural. In Phienox, for example, primal nature is copresent with what looks like the Berlin Wall; Billiards at Half Past Nine shows an asylum center and the gestures of neo-Nazi ravers in the midst of a wild natural environment; and in Justice (2001), ofce storage boxes appear haphazardly stacked in the middle of the woods. Richters nature is a nonplace, his city too64and in this respect, his work marks a departure from the fascination with the big city exhibited by his predecessors, for instance, the Moritzplatz artists in Berlin in the 1980s (especially Fetting and Middendorf) and their teacher Karl Horst Hdicke or, originally, Dix, Grosz, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Wherever Richters paintings take us, however, the atmosphere is always oppressive and menacing. Breaking with the long-standing Romantic topos of nature as refuge from the urban environment and place in which to experience unity with the world, these works are always aficted by a frightening sense of dislocation. Richters sea paintings, for instance, show none of the Romantic desire for adventure or the will to pit heroic man against the primal forces of the ocean. Rather, in works like Tarifa and Flash, the gures appear hopelessly isolated, afraid and exposed to swirling black maelstroms. In other paintings, such as Junas and Tuanus, German forest painting is demythologized with similar ruthlessness: no inspiration or identity is to be found here, just clandestine acts of brutality. Phienox can be read in terms of the Deposition, of the beginning and end of history, and of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But a more surprising interpretation presents itself when we discover that the painting was based on a press photograph of the bombing of the U.S. embassy in the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam on July 7, 1998. Twelve people were killed and eightyve wounded (almost all the injured were African civilians), and their bodies had to be pulled over a wall surrounding the embassy site. The attack may have brought Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda to international attention for the rst time, but for Richter it bore relation to the events of October 9, 1989: The events in Tanzania and Berlin were each about the erosion of seeming absolute structures. I believe that the structural decay that symbolically set
63. Ibid., 15. 64. Borowski, Sex, Angst Ohnmacht.

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Daniel Richter and Political Painting

in with the fall of the Berlin Wall was a condition for the attacks on the U.S. embassy.65 Both events were symptoms of the globalization of capitalism, a process that tendentially interconnects all places in the world, exposing us to the effects of actions taken in many places simultaneously. So what is more real in Richters work: allegory and myth (apocalypse and the Deposition), or history (the fall of the Berlin Wall and the bombing in Dar es Salaam)? The answer, perhaps, is neither, for the Real here vanishes in a sea of citation, or, as Heynen put it, The Real appears in the double of a dream sequence, and fantasy becomes graspable as media reality.66 Numerous critics, indeed, have remarked on the dreamlike quality of Richters paintings,67 in which it is impossible to tell which reality, or level of reality, we are looking at. Are the gures in paintings like Phienox human beings, for example, or are they ghosts, zombies, and/or supernatural entities? Their uorescent, psychedelic, almost astral glow certainly lends them a paranormal, otherworldly quality. On the other hand, they can also give the impression of being viewed through heat-sensing surveillance equipment or night-vision goggles, like criminals about to be intercepted by police in a nighttime raid. Either way, these gures are robbed of individual identity; their physiognomies remain virtually unrecognizable, and it is often unclear whether they are meant to be men, women, or androgynes. Their bodies tend to fuse together and become hardly recognizable as such, melding into an inchoate mass of color and form. As one critic remarked: Its a chromatic riot of high-key violet, blue, green, orange, yellow and red shapes. Colors eat into the contours of neighbouring shapes like sulfuric acid poured onto Styrofoam.68 Through this manipulation of color chemistry, many of the gures look as though they have achieved but a momentary existence, ickering and shimmering like a ame about to be extinguished any second. Their existence is a precarious one as they move between different realities exposed to unforeseen perils. Emerging anonymously from the shadows, these wretched gures form no part of the social order they threaten to reconstitute.

65. Wentrup, Spinning the Wheel, 17. 66. Heynen, Grnspan oder Goldstaub, 23. 67. Heynen was reminded of synesthetic intense experiences in dreams, trances or rushes (Grnspan oder Goldstaub, 22); Ermacora described Richters gures as uncanny dream gures moving through the unreality of the picture spaces (ffentliche Bilder, 110); and Liebs characterized Richters paintings in terms of a middle zone . . . between dream and reality (Grner Star). 68. Raphael Rubinstein, Allegories of Anarchy, Art in America, December 2004, 12023.