Časopis ARS 43 (2010) 1

Jana GERŽOVÁ

O závislostiach maľby. Fotografia v maľbe 60. a 90. rokov 20. storočia
[About Dependences of Painting. Photography in the Painting of the 1960s and 1990s]

(Resumé)

The study focuses on the analysis of the specific relationship between painting and photography in the 1960s and 1990s. It is a partial result of the author’s research at the Division of Visual and Culture Studies of the Research Centre of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. Contrary to the controversial relationship between these two media, which has tinged different historical phases of art history, beginning with the invention of photography, through the discovery of non-iconic, non-imaging art, to the late 1970s, when, in the context of the rising post-modern art, both media repeatedly defined themselves negatively against each other, the presented study emphasises the analysis of the painters’ artwork, which not only took notice of the existence of photography, but became, in a certain way, dependent on it. It is a type of painting, which, despite the fact that it bears some traces of reality, does not originate from the directly visible, because there has been a technical filter – a photograph – put between the world and the image reflecting it.

Through the works of model artists from the 1960s and 1990s – Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), Ri¬chard Hamilton (b. 1922), Franz Gertsch (b. 1930), Georg Shaw (b. 1966), Peter Doig (b. 1959), Elizabeth Peyton (b. 1965) and Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) –, the author compares two fundamentally different approaches to reality, which projected into different concepts of image, and relate, on the one hand to the change in the regime of vision, and on the other hand to the so-called Pictorial Turn.

The first part of the paper focuses on changes that occurred in the second half of the 20th century in the approach to the perception of reality. The author focuses on the reflections by Wolfgang Welsch, primarily referring to his lecture Artificial Paradises? Considering the World of Electronic Media and Other Worlds, in which the author contemplates the “essential constructivist nature of our perception of reality” and “virtualisation or de-realisation of our conception of reality”. Geržová offers a short historical excurse to this paradigmatic shift with an emphasis on the investigation of the role played by apparatuses (camera, recorder) as the technical extensions of the human eye in this process of the new vision of reality. She begins with a reference to Walter Benjamin and his Short History of Photography (1931), continues with the thesis by philosopher and media expert Vilém Flusser (Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie. Göttingen 1983), and concludes with the reflections by French philosopher Paul Virilio (La machine de vision. Paris 1988), who was one of the first to point out the fact that the lack of trust in the direct vision of the world grew proportionally to the slave-like dependency on the view mediated by the objective of a camera.

She pays special attention to the photograph, which has, since its invention, been interpreted as a paradoxical image, created mechanically as a record made with a technical apparatus, while this image has been, since the very beginning, attributed with the characteristics of an index. It was understood as a direct imprint of reality, like an imprint of a foot in the sand, of a finger on a glass or a mask removed from the face of a deceased. Despite this paradox, until the middle of the 20th century, there was a prevailing thesis that a photograph, contrary to a traditional image (painting), has in its relationship to reality maintained a higher degree of objectivity and veracity. Geržová further draws attention to the first “cracks” in this generally accepted view (World Expo in Paris, 1855), where a precedent for a whole range of later strategies was created. On the one hand, they are represented by the manipulated art photography using different interventions into both the negative and positive, and on the other hand, by the misuse of photography within authoritative police regimes. The author closes this line of gradual questioning of the “presumption of veracity in photographs” (Hubert Damisch) with references to the paradigmatic shift that relates to the invention of new digital technologies, which, contrary to traditional photography, can originate as the result of a computer program even without relating the digitally produced and distributed image to the reality as its starting point.

In the next part of the study, the author deals with the analysis of three model artists from the 1960s – Gerhard Richter, Richard Hamilton and Franz Gertsch, for whom photography was the immediate starting point of their paintings. She refers to their authentic contemporary statements, which document certain relative formulations, explaining what photography meant to them not only in relation to their pictures, but also to how they looked at reality through a photograph. “In the 1950s, we became more aware of the possibility of seeing the whole world at once through the great visual matrix that surrounded us, through a synthetic ‘instant’ view.” (Richard Hamilton) “I had come to understand that in this day and age reality can only be captured by camera because… we have got used to considering photographed reality as the highest possible rendering of reality.” (Franz Gertsch) Geržová has raised the question as to why these artists, who rejected abstract expressionism and shifted their interest to the day-to-day, often banal reality, did not begin with their own experiences, from their immediate and initial vision, but rather reached out for a second-hand reality. One of the possible answers relates to the fact that they did so because they did not trust reality, its immediate and initial vision. These doubts are most markedly articulated by Gerhard Richter, who repeatedly appraised photography for its ability to offer a more authentic and reliable picture of the world than direct vision and other imaging media do, including painting. Therefore, the author asks whether Richter’s paintings are based upon a photograph. She starts out from the well-known interpretation of B. H. D. Buchloh, who defined Richter’s paintings created in the 1960s as photo-paintings and compared them to Duchamp’s ready-mades. Since for Richter paining is a tool to examine both the overlapping media, Geržová inclines toward the view that while photography maintains its character of a ready-made, the act of paining is analogous to a translation from one language to another, while there is a concurrent change in the status of both, photograph and the painting. On the one hand, the primary information value of the photograph weakens in favour of its specific visual signs which Richter transfers into the picture (black-and-white colours, blurring achieved by interventions into wet painting), and on the other hand, painting, which was generally pushed out by the photograph into the area of artificial, acquires its lost direct connection to reality.

The prologue to the final part of the study, in which the author analyses the painting strategies of model artists from the 1990s, is the section examining the phenomenon of the Pictorial Turn. She starts out from the central work of W. J. T. Mitchell, who contrary to structuralism and post-structuralism, philosophical schools that relied on linguistic methods and worked with the model of the world as a written text, returned to examining images playing an increasingly important role in the current postmodern world and visual culture. Although Mitchell emphasised that the shift from language to image is in the history of culture and philosophy considered a paradigmatic shift, it is not the case of “a return to a naive mimesis, copy or correspondence theories of representation... it is rather a post-linguistic, post-semiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality.” Therefore the Pictorial Turn cannot be a simple return to the traditional picture or even painting, because, contrary to the modernistic idea of purity, today all media are mixed media.

The author further examines the phenomenon of the Pictorial Turn in the context of the reflections of Vilém Flusser, who in his essential texts (Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie. Göttingen 1983) pointed out the fact that prior to the era of linear history, which began with the invention of script, when our capability of conceptual thinking was articulated, there was a magic time, which was represented by old pictures of the world. According to him, the first shift in the paradigm, caused by the invention of script, was the shift from magic to history, from picture to text. Flusser related the second shift in the paradigm to the invention of photography, when the proportion between the two modalities of representation reversed again. At first sight, it might seem that it was a simple movement of a pendulum, from the text back to the picture. However, the historical picture and technical picture are essentially different types of images, and even if Flusser relates them to the phenomenon of magic, it is exactly this aspect, which at the same time differentiates them.

In the next part of the study, Geržová focuses on the analysis of model artists of the 1990s, who did not base their paintings (having signs of traditional hanging pictures and painters’ genres such as portrait or landscape) upon direct vision and immediate experience with reality, but they created them after a master – a photograph or other technical picture. The melancholic paintings of George Shaw, representing the country of the painter’s childhood, as it was at the time he left it, became a model example for the author. The painter, who works with the phenomenon of memory and recollections while creating these pictures, had not relied on his own memories, but on a photograph. The paradox is that the photographs, which he used as a master for his paintings, were not from the family album of the artist, as we might expect, but were taken in the present. Shaw, who looks upon the reality surrounding him through a camera, does not record its current status, but focuses on the past. According to Geržová, due to the consonance of the painting and technical picture, Shaw’s paintings have an effluence encoded, to which we could apply Benjamin’s more than seventy years old definition of aura, offered in his Short History of Photography (1931) and later in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935/1936). Because there is a technical filter (a photograph) put between the painted picture and reality, it indicates that it is not a traditional auratic painting. The aura is not the a priori component of the authenticity of the work of art, it does not reflect its Here and Now, but enters it in a mediated way. We could even state that Shaw’s pictures have an aura exactly because they were created based on a photograph and not on reality.

Geržová points out a different aspect of the relation between contemporary painting and photography by comparing the commentaries of two other contemporary painters – Peter Doig, a British artist, and Elizabeth Peyton, an American artist. Neither of the two artists selects representative photographs, but rather amateur shots, the vagueness of which creates room for the painter’s invention. Thus, they work with a special, magic space which occurs between reality and the photograph.

In the conclusion, Geržová states that if we compared the generation of painters who began working with photography in the 1960s with contemporary painters, we could say that the statement of Douglas Crimp applies to both generations: “While it once seemed that pictures had the function of interpreting reality, it now seems that they have usurped it. We only experience reality through the pictures we make of it.” The difference is that the first generation appears to believe what Vilém Flusser said – it trusts the photograph more than its own eyes. The second generation reacts rather to a different, at first glance contradictory statement of Flusser, namely that the objectivity of technical pictures is a delusion. This difference appears to be logical if we realise that the first generation experienced the change of vision affected by the dominance of medial images as a paradigmatic shift with a certain existential seriousness. The second generation already grew up in a world contaminated by medial images and accepted the contradiction between reality and its appearance, between the world and its representation, as a fact. It identified itself with the view that we live in a post-natural world, in which the artist is affected or even tyrannized by human culture more than by the nature. Therefore, it is not asking direct question like “Where is the truth?” anymore. Its existential anxiety is manifested rather subconsciously, in the nostalgic atmosphere of the pictures as such. The author analyses this phenomenon by using Luc Tuymans’s paintings, originated as a transcription from technical pictures and referred to by their author as “authentic forgeries”, as an example.

English translation by A. Antalová