3.8.06
Collectors and Fetishists...
The collector is a fetishist, the art of collecting an act of admission that the thing desired can never be possessed, never experienced fully ... only held in the limbo of one's limbic regard.
The artist Gerhard Richter is a fetishist. His work entices the viewer is to reach out and hold something but then slaps the hand in recompense. The viewer recoils .. forcing him or her to enter into a space where the beloved is belittled, where evocation first lures with promises of the sublime before quickly reeling in upon itself, in essence becoming a footnote to itself. The artist, sheared off from ever experiencing fully that beheld, collects mementoes instead, enchanting the viewer and then snatching back the thing proffered. For he himself can experience no satisfaction.
Richter denies the epiphany of a Casper David Friedrich or Hudson River School painter. So a landscape presents a horizon line drawn with a straight edge, plumber and truer than any horizon shall ever achieve .. it severs land from sea like a knife edge. The viewer rebounds from reverie and slams against an obdurate and sharp coldness. The same is true for two portraits of a roll of toilet paper painted to perfection, until one realizes the joke: not merely epistles of the everyday, the one rolls from the top, the other from the bottom. A perfect commentary on marital arrangements perhaps ... only the cynicism deters any solace taken in the brush strokes.
There are portraits both innocuous and somehow familiar/compelling of seven young women, taken perhaps from schoolbooks .. all professionally posed, poised on a brink before their lives unfold. No, not a yearbook but a newspaper -- their faces forever etched under the gaze of a greater public who first beheld them only after they had been slaughtered. Are the paint strokes expressive, sensitive? It barely matters only it does .. the generic surface treatment is somehow critical, softening their visages as if under snow. Is this meant to add distance? Again, these are lives once so brutallly violated can never be regained. A killer uses and destroys that which he can by no other means have. Does the artist's appropriation mirror this same act of appropriation? Are their portraits now merely the objects of collectors?
The artist Gerhard Richter is a fetishist. His work entices the viewer is to reach out and hold something but then slaps the hand in recompense. The viewer recoils .. forcing him or her to enter into a space where the beloved is belittled, where evocation first lures with promises of the sublime before quickly reeling in upon itself, in essence becoming a footnote to itself. The artist, sheared off from ever experiencing fully that beheld, collects mementoes instead, enchanting the viewer and then snatching back the thing proffered. For he himself can experience no satisfaction.
Richter denies the epiphany of a Casper David Friedrich or Hudson River School painter. So a landscape presents a horizon line drawn with a straight edge, plumber and truer than any horizon shall ever achieve .. it severs land from sea like a knife edge. The viewer rebounds from reverie and slams against an obdurate and sharp coldness. The same is true for two portraits of a roll of toilet paper painted to perfection, until one realizes the joke: not merely epistles of the everyday, the one rolls from the top, the other from the bottom. A perfect commentary on marital arrangements perhaps ... only the cynicism deters any solace taken in the brush strokes.
There are portraits both innocuous and somehow familiar/compelling of seven young women, taken perhaps from schoolbooks .. all professionally posed, poised on a brink before their lives unfold. No, not a yearbook but a newspaper -- their faces forever etched under the gaze of a greater public who first beheld them only after they had been slaughtered. Are the paint strokes expressive, sensitive? It barely matters only it does .. the generic surface treatment is somehow critical, softening their visages as if under snow. Is this meant to add distance? Again, these are lives once so brutallly violated can never be regained. A killer uses and destroys that which he can by no other means have. Does the artist's appropriation mirror this same act of appropriation? Are their portraits now merely the objects of collectors?
