Two Essays

I realize its not very blog-ish to put two ten page essays in one post, but Im just so thrilled that they're done; and I have no more essays to write for atleast four months. So here's two essays, one for english class and one for contemporary art history class. They're pretty convoluted and sometimes dry and academic, but Im still proud of them. The second one should be more interesting because I made a lot of links to the images I'm discussing. I also want to add that although I quote sources that might illuminate the subject matter, I don't necessarily believe in those schools of thought.

On the Integrity of the Narrator in The Lover and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
Using a two-dimensional spectrum of opposite qualities can be a helpful, though simplified way of categorizing the world. Things can be either wet or dry, acid or base, cold or hot, light or dark. The Lover, by Marguerite Duras, and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, by Thomas Keneally, speak at opposite ends of a spectrum of voices. The Lover speaks from an autobiographical point of view; but The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith tells its story mostly from the point of view of a protagonist radically different from that of the author, the author is white, writing in the early 1970’s, and his protagonist is an Aborigine in the early 1900’s. What these two books have in common is that they both purport to tell suppressed stories, traumatic stories that have been left untold or avoided, but which are still problematic and liable to suppression and distortion in these books because the stories are being told by narrators who are likely biased. Although some may consider these books suspect, they are still good and compelling stories.

The Lover is inadequate as a biography, but compelling as a portrayal of an old woman remembering her life: the narrator may be deliberately or mistakenly omitting or skewing details, but this is part of the story. The narrator forthrightly admits that she can’t remember her family clearly now that they are dead, and that this forgetfulness makes it easy to write about them (Duras, 28). It becomes apparent as details surface that because her family is dead, she now has more freedom to write about them, but this is a freedom both to lie and omit as well as to tell the untold truth. If it is not fiction, it is a serious matter. She is plainly accusing her elder brother of murder, strongly hinting that he sexually abused her, and that her mother should have done more to prevent it all. She could not possibly write this while her family was alive without a tumultuous legal conflict, or worse, if her brother really was that bad. On the other hand, if her mother and brother were terrible, but not insane and murderous, then she has the motive, and now the freedom, to revenge herself and her younger brother by exaggerating their guilt and her innocence, without them retaliating. She has the freedom to modify the details of her trysts with the unnamed lover, because he is unnamed, and because the fact that she was underage at the time, and that he is now married, make it unlikely that he will speak up about it. The unfolding details in the narrative develop the characters within the narrative, but also at the same time make the narrator a complex and ambiguous character.

The Lover makes an interesting case study of how memories and language can be distorted by traumatic events. Gabriele Schwab outlines the theory of “cryptonymy,” developed by Nicholas Abram and Maria Torok, and based on Freud’s “Morning and Melancholia,” which is pertinent to this case (Schwab, 99). When a person experiences traumatic loss, she writes, the person entombs her memories of the lost object deep in her psyche, in a “crypt” (99). The trauma can be caused by a loss of a place, a loss of community, a loss of ideals, or, in the case of rape, torture, or severe humiliation or rejection, a loss of self (99). The encrypted lost self and the traumatized self enter into conflict, and this conflict puts stress on the body and shatters language. “The body can abandon itself and speak the trauma of disrupted care; it can hurt itself to speak the pain; it can waste away to speak the wish to die.” Ordinary language, meanwhile, becomes fragmented, distorted, and elided (99). The tangential, sometimes vague writing style of The Lover fits this description, as does the narrator’s description of her aging face. “Something occurred when I was eighteen to make this face happen” (Duras, 7). This would be a short while after leaving her lover and the land of her birth, but this could not be the sole cause of her trauma; the death of her father when she was four years old, poverty, isolation, her mother’s daily bouts of despondency and depression, the advances of older men when she is thirteen years old, the prospect of becoming a prostitute, abuse from her mother and elder brother, frustrated desire for Helen Lagonelle, would all have contributed to her trauma. After she left, her older brother kills her younger brother and later robs her or all her savings, and her husband is deported by the Nazis. One can see why the narrator treasures the image of herself crossing the river in her hat and gold lamé shoes, it is an image of her lost self at peace, hidden in her “crypt,” unearthed now in order to complete the process of mourning. Or perhaps it is the other way around, perhaps she has always remembered this image, polishing it over time and using it as a screen to block out the memories of the traumatic events which she is only now reluctantly admitting into her story. Perhaps her experiences with her lover were worse than what she described, and she is still afraid to admit her vulnerability. In any case she claims her life is a “mystery” and a “closed door,” both then and now (25).

This psychological “decryption” of the text goes against the grain of many overt details, but the narrator herself admits her own reasons for writing this story in a completely subjective way. She gives examples of how not to write and how not to live. After she leaves for France her brother writes to her only once in ten years, writing “everything is fine,” without mentioning the depredations of World War II or the brutal aggression of their older brother (56). The literary discussions hosted by Marie Claude Carpenter and Betty Fernandez are an “empty nightmare.” Sartre never came to these parties, because they are classic examples of existential bad faith, where discussions require no consequences or obligations, and personal connections are averted by conversations about literature, practical details, politics and fashion (64-69). In contrast, the narrator’s purpose and outlook now is that “if writing isn’t, all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it’s nothing. That if it’s not, each time, all things confounded into one through some inexpressible essence, then writing is nothing but advertisement” (8). She evokes an “inexpressible essence” with confounded contrary details. She had skirted around the events of her life in her previous novels, but still does in this novel: “What I am doing now is both different and the same” (8). She doesn’t love her family, and doesn’t remember if she ever did (28); but she admits that she loved her mother , “loved her beyond love” (55); she regrets loosing her family (34); and of course she loves her younger brother. While he was alive she loved him and forgot about death (106), but after he died she forgets about her love for him (28). Other significant contradictions also epitomise the ineffable. The image of the girl in the gold lamé shoes and fedora, on the ferry, is an imaginary photograph taken by no one and seen by no one, except God. But if God doesn’t exist, the image doesn’t exist, either. It represents the absolute, the void (10). However it is apparent that this image is precisely what her lover sees when they first meet. Moreover, in her hat and shoes, she has been attracting men since she was thirteen (17), “available to all, available to all eyes, in circulation for cities, journeys, desire” (13). Her trysts with the lover are pleasurable, like “the sea, formless, simply beyond compare” (38), but they also make her feel sad; the sadness however is also somehow comforting because it fulfills her mother’s pessimistic pronouncements of her daughter’s fate (45). Together the girl and her lover feel terror, tears, despair and happiness (101).

The narrator constantly compares her love to death, or to being near death, or “unto death,” a play on the French expression for orgasm, la petite mort, “the little death” ( “Mort,” def. 1a). This brings us to another of the narrator’s motives for writing. In her old age she is preparing for her death, perhaps entertaining the possibility of meeting God, the “inexpressible essence.” Like her mother, and like the natives, who have themselves photographed in preparation for dying (96-97), she is creating a rejuvenated image of herself with which she can confront eternity. At the outset of the book she admits that she has been afraid of God (7), but she presents the image of the girl on the ferry, seen by God, and the trysts with her lover, which increase her knowledge of God (74), as redeeming moments of her life. The narrator seems to present these moments in two ways, as moments which justify her to God, and as moments when God justifies himself to her, to balance the outrage of the death of her younger brother (104-106). These moments are “all things confounded into one through some inexpressible essence.” They justify Duras writing The Lover.

Thomas Keneally’s novel, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, like Duras’ the Lover, has a problematic narrator, but it is still a good story, and there are a few things which exonerate it to some extent.
The problem is whether Keneally, who is white, has the right to tell a story from the point of view of, or on behalf of, an Aborigine, as he does in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Addressing this problem is not a straightforward task. It is apparent that any non-Aborigine, especially a white person, who criticises Keneally risks hypocrisy, because in doing so that person also presumes to speak on behalf of Aborigines. Some theorists however have made some informed and insightful criticisms of how indigenous people are portrayed in western literature. Although Keneally writes a sympathetic portrayal of an Aborigine protagonist, Jimmie Blacksmith, he still places him in categories from European imperial discourse, what Edward Said calls “standard commodities” used to represent all indigenous peoples (Goldie, 235). The first two commodities, which are often paired together, are sex and violence. The indigenous woman is a sex object, the indigenous man is a threatening, attacking warrior. “They are emotional signs, semiotic embodiments of primal responses” (235). The Aborigine women in Keneally’s novel are depicted as promiscuous sexual temptresses, at the Verona camp for example; and Jimmie Blacksmith, his brother Mort, his uncle Jackie Smolders, and another Aborigine, Harry Edwards, all attack and kill whites. The other three linked commodities that Said lists are orality, mysticism, and the prehistoric. Orality, or culture that is non-writing, is assumed to mark an indigene as understanding completely different epistemes, and possessing completely different “dimensions of consciousness” (236), having access to mystical, oracular power, either good or evil. These also mark the indigene as a historical artefact, a remnant of a prehistoric culture that is unchanging and pure, or ought to be (236). Examples of these commodities in the novel are Jimmie’s circumcision ceremony, the chants he and his relatives sing, the ceremonial grounds Jimmie and Mort visit, and especially the many contrasts and comparisons of the souls of Jimmie, who is half white, and his half-brother Mort who is not.

To his credit, Keneally’s characters don’t always fit neatly in to these categories, and to balance the picture, his white characters fall into some of these categories, too. Jimmie, for example, is ambitious and literate even to the point of recognizing that the word sic in square brackets can express a writer’s superior mockery for the person he is quoting (Keneally, 128), but one of his white employers can’t read or write (23). Jimmie and the other Aborigines kill whites, but in reaction to white aggression and unfairness; the white Constable Farrell, on the other hand, acts out of a perverse habit and even from “tradition” when he rapes and kills his Aboriginal prisoner (43).

The criticism of Keneally assumes that authors ought to speak with an authentic voice. If writers create characters that are different from themselves, the writers are guilty of imperialistic ventriloquism, and the characters are assumed to be misrepresentations of the characters’ race, gender, class or culture. Feelings of solidarity with a group is not enough, as Margery Fee writes about New Zealand authors, “I may feel Maori, I may think I am writing as one, and be completely deluded” (244).

“Authenticity,” however, is elusive, even for whites writing about whites, and indigenes writing about indigenes. People and cultures change. The preface to the 2001 edition of his novel claims that if Keneally were to write the story again, he would write it from the point of view of one of the white characters. But would this solve the problem? Representing an Aborigine from an outside point of view is still problematic, the “standard commodities” can still circulate. Furthermore, if he were to write “authentically” from a white point of view from 1900, (if he could), the representation of the Aborigines would be worse, not any better, if we are to extrapolate from what we see of the white characters he shows us. Keneally should rather be given credit for writing a novel that was progressive for the time it was written, for portraying an Aborigine as a tragic hero, and pointing out white injustices that taint the founding of the Australian federation, which ought not to be perpetuated. His situation is similar to New Zealand writers, of which Margery Fee writes, “Rewriting the dominant ideology is not easy, since the difference between Pakeha and Maori has been written into existence by the dominant discourse, and thus the process of rewriting this ideology is the work of the whole New Zealand community, rather than any one writer” (245).

Despite its problems, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith is a good story because it can resonate with anyone whose ambitions have been hindered by others who discriminate them, unfairly, for whatever difference divides them. Both Keneally and
Duras write as complex, if problematic, narrators, to tell us compelling stories about multifaceted characters.

Bibliography


Duras, Marguerite. The Lover. trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998.

Fee, Margery. “Who can Write as Other?”. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. ed. Bill Ashcroft et al. London: Routledge, 1997. 242-245

Goldie, Terry. “The Representation of the Indigene”. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. ed. Bill Ashcroft et al. London: Routledge, 1997. 232 – 236

Keneally, Thomas. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Sydney: A & R Classics, 2001.

“Mort.” Collins Robert French-English Dictionary. 5th ed. Scarborough, Canada: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998.

Schwab, Gabriele. “Writing Against Memory and Forgetting” Literature and Medicine 25, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 95-121. John Hopkins University Press, 2006.




Kantian and Postmodern Aesthetics in the Work of Gerhard Richter

When Picasso began to paint in a neo-classical style after his cubist breakthroughs with Braque, avant-garde critics saw it as a betrayal. “Can’t you see? the results are the same!” Picasso flatly declared, and left behind all the “salon cubists” in Paris to eat his dust (Foster, 163). Later in that century, in the wake of American-dominated Abstract Expressionism, the post-war German artist Gerhard Richter would make similar claims for his heterogeneous body of work, which includes monochromatic grey paintings, wild, colourful gestural abstractions, photo-based paintings derived from amateur snapshots and banal news clippings, panes of glass, as well as landscapes and still-lifes which hearken back to pre-Modernist periods of art history. “For me there is no difference between a landscape and an abstract painting [...] I refuse to limit myself to one option- to an external resemblance or a unity of style that can never exist [...] A colour table can only be differentiated from a small green landscape from the outside. They both reflect the same basic position. It is this position that is important” (Antoine, 54). Rejecting dogmatic Modernist refinements, Richter creates images that recall examples of “the beautiful” and “the sublime” discussed in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement; and these images, together with Richter’s other paintings, also recall postmodern reassessments of Kant’s philosophy and aesthetics.

In Kant’s Critique of Judgement, published in 1790, the beautiful is defined in four related ways, first, the purely beautiful is that which arouses “disinterested pleasure,” in other words, that which pleases without arousing or gratifying the senses and appetites, and which pleases without fulfilling any utilitarian purpose (Kant 42); secondly, the beautiful is that which appears subjectively to please everybody, without a concept, that is, without any epistemological concerns (51); thirdly, the beautiful is that which appears to have order or design without a purpose (66); fourthly, the beautiful always appears as the object of a necessary delight (71).

What is important for an art-critical point of view are the examples Kant gives, even though Kant was reputed to be poorly acquainted with any significant art from the past or his own day. (Kant, xvii) Birds, marine crustacea, wild flowers, and “designs a la grecque,” “have no intrinsic meaning, they represent nothing- no object under a determinate concept- and are free beauties” (60). Women are more beautiful than men because men are presumably more utilitarian; buildings and tools, though they may be decorated, are not purely beautiful because they serve a purpose (60). Colour is not beautiful because it is only supplemental to form, and gratifies the senses (57). Ornamentation that is not intrinsic to the form of an object, or what Kant calls parerga, such as the frames of pictures, draperies on nude statues, and colonnades in palaces, can be beautiful in form if it enters into the form of the composition of the object, i.e. the lines and angles of an enclosing frame; but if ornamentation is added onto the object merely to gratify the senses, such as gilding on a picture frame, it is not purely beautiful. (57).

Some of Richter’s works follow in the tradition of this kind of imagery, as a kind of elegy to beautiful images; they are mournful because they posit the complete subjectivity of beauty as an unsteady projection onto the image. Ema (Nude on a Staircase) (1966), Betty (1988), Flowers (1992), Small Bather (1994) and Meadowland (1985) are examples that fall in this category. “Any beauty we see in the landscape,” says Richter, “any enchanting colour, peaceable mood, soft delineation of grand spaces, or whatever, is our own projection, one we can also interrupt so as to see only the terrifying ugliness and hideousness” (Antoine, 82). Richter points out that unlike the Romantic painters, he cannot sense the presence of God in nature, but rather senses emptiness in everything, “and yet the paintings are still there, they speak to us. We continue to love them, to use them and to need them” (82). Jacques Lacan’s theory on the function of beauty in tragedy is applicable here. Beauty is a psychological barrier that stops the subject from confronting his or her death instinct, “the unnameable field of radical desire inasmuch as it is the field of absolute destruction” (Swenson, 87). What Lacan describes is an involuntary psychological mechanism, but Richter deliberately stages it, simultaneously enchanting and horrifying the viewer. Youth Portrait (1988), the first in the series October 18, 1977, is a good example of this. A pretty, conventional, “bourgeois” portrait, Youth Portrait it is in fact the portrait of a social activist who later founded a radical terrorist group, the Baader-Meinhoff Band, that carried out lethal bombings, bank robberies, and jail breaks (Storr, 216-217, 244). The portrait is the first in a series of paintings showing the gang’s capture by the police, their incarceration, and the images of their bodies after they were found dead in their cells, allegedly suicides. The beauty masks and bars access to a horrible desire, but also invites the viewer into it by indicating the direction in which it lies (Swenson, 88).

In his reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgement, Vivasvan Soni describes a projective experience similar to the one just described, that also explains the projective character of Richter’s “beautiful” paintings. Reflective aesthetic contemplation is an experience first of “communal narcosis,” followed by “sublime withdrawal” (Soni 29). What the viewer projects onto the image is the sense that the image is beautiful for everyone who would look at it (Kant, 42, 70). The viewer imagines for moment a utopian community where everyone feels serene, disinterested pleasure in the same beautiful objects; this is comforting, but false- a “communal narcosis.” When the viewer becomes aware of this illusion, realizing that there is no disputing in matters of taste, he or she experiences “sublime withdrawal,” as Soni puts it, “The aesthetic judgements of the other is infinitely beyond my own in its absolute incontestability, reminding me that the other is infinitely beyond me” (21). The effect of Richter’s “beautiful” works viewed in the context of his heterogeneous oeuvre violate previous dogmas of stylistic or conceptual consistency- jarring the viewer into seeing his or her own projections, expectations, desires, and the isolation that these imply.

Richter’s paintings are also emblematic of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Kant’s Critique of Judgement. In his book, The Truth in Painting, Derrida seizes upon Kant’s brief mention of parerga, those ornamental elements of a beautiful object which border and supplement it, but which are not intrinsically part of it- that which is not on the inside, but not on the outside either. Derrida consistently avoids making any plain statement of fact but constantly qualifies his statements, deliberately deferring meaning, so that they appear as parerga, not as writing on painting, but “around painting” (Derrida, 9). Derrida borrows Kant’s distinction between the parergon and the ergon, but claims that the ergon of any work of art has no definite stable existence or meaning, that it is deferred, it is framed but also framing, a parergon of other parerga. Frames, titles, signatures, gallery walls, legends, commentaries, markets, and intellectual milieus are parerga. “The parergon inscribes something which comes as an extra, exterior to the proper field [...] but whose transcendent exteriority [...] intervenes in the inside only to the extent that the inside is lacking” (56). “And this lack would be constitutive of the very unity of the ergon” (59). Context is a conceptual parerga, framing a lack in the work. In an interview in April of 2001, Richter and Robert Storr discuss how Richter’s paintings, in the initial context in which they were shown, lacked verification for viewers’ expectations (Storr, 179), lacked in conviction (181) and authorial presence (182).

The installation of Richter’s work at Documenta IX in 1992 likewise tangles up the hierarchies of the ergon and parergon in art history, exposing a lack within Modernist abstraction. The room was filled with abstract paintings mounted on walls covered in decorative wood panelling. At one end of the room in the upper corner, was a small floral still life, Flowers (1992), and across from it hung Gray Mirror (1992). The “beautiful” floral painting casts doubt on the abstracts and vice versa, each frames the other’s lack of any specific spiritual or political referent (Buchloh, Documenta, 49, 50). In 19th century salons, flower paintings were traditionally placed highest up un the wall, least visible, a kind of parergon for grander stuff like figurative and history painting (12); Richter does the same, but the “ergon” evades easy detection, the abstract paintings blend in with the wood panelling, and seem at first glance to be merely ornamental panels, allegorically enacting, according to Buchloh, “the failure and decorative misuse” of late abstract paining, such as in the work of Frank Stella (11, 49).

Like Picasso in the 1920’s Richter revives classical, Kantian beauty in his Ema (Nude on a Staircase), (1966). This painting can be added to the lineage of what Griselda Pollock calls “avant-garde gambits” (Foster, 67). Such a gambit is made when an artist creates a work with reference, deference, and difference with respect to previous works by other artists, centring on the female nude as subject matter. For example, in Olympia, Manet makes reference to Titian and defers respect to his status as an artistic master by copying his composition and subject matter to some extent, but also, in a gesture of Oedipal aggression, makes the work different in order to outdo Titian and assume the mantle of Modern Master of Painting. Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, and Kirchner likewise repeat the cycle, staking a claim on the female body and asserting their differences by appropriating Polynesian, North African, Negro, and Japanese styles, respectively, in their depictions of the female nude (Foster, 67-68).

Similarly, Richter’s Ema trumps Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, and defies Neo-Dadaism, Pop, and Abstract Expressionism (Storr, 57); the differences
Richter uses in this case are the classical style, which is beautiful in a conventional, Kantian sense, and in his methods, combining painting and photography, which are parerga to each other and introduce an intrinsic lack to the work. Richter’s method, which had been first developed in the 1860’s, is to use an overhead projector to project the photographic image onto the canvas, then to trace it in pencil and paint over it with oils (Antoine, 63). In this process the indexical, physical trace of the actual object, which exists on the photographic film, is lost in the final product (63). The layer of paint becomes a parergon to the image, covering and revealing its lack of the indexical trace. The contours of the projected image, on the other hand, pre-empt the artist’s hand and eye (60), becoming a parergon to the layer of paint, framing its lack of authorial trace, or expressive, signature brushstrokes.


Richter’s oeuvre also includes images of another theme of Kant’s Critique of Judgement, namely the sublime. The sublime is that in which everything compared to it is small, and which sets the mind in motion to imagine infinite size or power (Kant 80-81, 88). Since the mind cannot imagine or picture infinity and can only represent it symbolically, an experience of the sublime elevates the mind to dwell on the suprasensible ideas of reason, i.e. one’s highest principles of ethical behaviour (92). Mountains, storms, the sea, and war are all sublime, according to Kant. Mustang Squadron (1964), Uncle Rudi (1965), Phantom Interceptors (1964), and Bridge: February 14, 1945 (2000-2001) are images of war; Seascape (Cloudy)(1969), Eagle (1972), and Iceberg in Fog (1982) are images of the sublime in nature; and First Look at the Inside of an Atom (2000) is sublime because it sets the mind to imagine potentially infinite magnification and atomic power.

It is noteworthy that so much of what Kant considered sublime was championed by the Nazis as appropriate subject matter for Aryan art, for example, all the icy Nordic and Alpine imagery. Richter revisits this imagery and questions its role in an individual’s or a nation’s conscience, much like how Jacques Lacan exposes the perverse implications of Kant’s philosophy. According to Kant, sublime displays magnitude and power in nature overwhelm us so that we regard as insignificant the things we normally care about, such as “worldly goods, health and life” and to regard our highest ethical principles as more important than these (Kant, 92). Lacan points out however, that a person’s highest principles, besides which goods, health and life appear insignificant, can be psychotic and sadistic. Kant’s analysis of conscience and the Categorical Imperative, the moral law that is not valid in any case if it is not valid in every case (Lacan 647), is, according to Lacan, consistent with and fulfilled by the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom (645), particularly the severe maxim found in it which states categorically, “ ‘I have a right to enjoy your body,’ anyone can say to me, ‘and I will exercise this right without any limit to the capriciousness of the exactitude I may wish to satiate with your body’” (648). This maxim is more honest than Kant’s formulation because it unmasks the split in the subject which is usually covered up, a split that constrains the subject not merely to make another to consent to this declaration, but to pronounce it in his place: “...any man can say to me...” (650). The tormentor’s jouissance, so thrilled by itself, is so sublime that the tormentor experiences it as separate from himself, like a voice on the radio or the voice of conscience, as a psychosis (651).

Richter, in his Atlas, similarly suggests a link between evil, the sublime, and sex. The first ten panels show family snapshots, banal magazine and newspaper clippings, and tourist postcards that show “sublime” mountains and lakes. Panel eleven shows mostly images of nature, including a “sublime” pair of fighting stags and a waterfall, which are abruptly punctuated by a photo of emaciated Holocaust victims strewn across the ground in a Nazi death camp (Richter, 11). Subsequent panels are taken up entirely by more images from the death camps, and these in turn are morbidly juxtaposed with panels showing awkward and garish hard-core porn (16-23). Further on in the Atlas, images of immense and barren mountain ranges and glaciers are shown beside plates showing press photos of Hitler in uniform greeting and saluting supporters and diplomats; these are followed by newspaper photos of a pair of lions in a zoo mauling a tourist (125-133). To his credit, Richter humbly claims that images of the Holocaust are “unpaintable” (Storr, 44), but in the context of his Atlas, among the images of mass consumption and stereotypes of the sublime, these photos puncture “the collective lack of affect, the psychic armour with which the Germans of the postwar period protected themselves against historical insight” (Buchloh, Atlas, 141). One of the things these images point out is that although the sublime can evoke one’s highest principles, these principles are still arbitrary and can even be evil.

Much more could be written about Richter’s protean genius, his diverse themes and strategies. Much of his work is a retrospective re-enactment of Modernist methodology (Buchloh, Documenta, 48), but this essay shows how some of his work
looks deeper into history, revives and deconstructs Kantian aesthetics, and resonates with postmodern reassessments of Kant’s philosophy.


Bibliography

Antoine, Jean-Philippe. “Photography, Painting, and the Real: The Question of Landscape in the Painting of Gerhard Richter.” trans. Warren Niesluchowski. Gerhard Richter. Paris: Éditions Disvoir, 1995.

Buchloh, Benjamin H.. Gerhard Richter: Documenta IX, 1992; Marian Goodman
Gallery, 1993. New York: Marian Goodman Gallery, 1993.
-“Gerhard Richter’s ‘Atlas’: The Anomic Archive.” October, vol. 88.(Spring, 1999), 117-145.

Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. trans. Geoff Bannington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Foster, Hal, et al. Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. New
York: Thames & Hudson, 2004.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2007.

Lacan, Jacques. “Kant with Sade.” Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. 645-688.

Richter, Gerhard. Atlas of the photographs, collages and sketches. ed. Helmut Freidel and Ulrich Wilmes. New York: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 1997

Soni, Vivasvan. “Communal Narcosis and Sublime Withdrawal: The Problem of Community in Kant’s ‘Critique of Judgement’.” Cultural Critique, vol.64. (Fall 2006).1-39.

Storr, Robert. Gerhard Richter: Doubt and Belief in Painting. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2003.

Swenson, James B., Jr.. “Annotations to ‘Kant with Sade’” October, vol.51. (Winter, 1989). 76-104.