Melancholia and Richter's Subjectivity

While Warhol’s aggressive snapshots of the criminals highlight the mug shot's ability to erase the self-image in a moment of instantaneous snagging of time, Richter’s paintings highlight the absent nature of the artist’s voice in their reconfiguration of the subject. Both hold a nihilistic view of art in general in their attempts at diminishing individual subjectivity. However, Richter’s work and its historical and political implications make it appear much more morbid than the commercial glamour of Warhol’s prints. A degree of obedience to the gaze and the loss of individual expression can be found in the blurred portraiture side views of Richter’s subjects. This commodification lends itself to obedience of the subject to the hand of the dominant political force; while Warhol’s work is almost more appealing in the way it liberates it subjects from individuality. Richter’s chiaroscuro is oppressive in its melancholic determination to oppose separation from referring to what Buchloch interprets as expressive of the “collective submission for which German culture was famous for.” (81). If asked to be reproduced and diminished subjectively, I would prefer the piece assemblage of Warhol’s screenings to that of the absent nature of the Richter’s paintings.

The scientific nature of Richter’s work is sinisterly referential to Germany’s Nazi history. His work is problematic for me in what it attempts to produce within the realm of pictorial conventions. The politically charged nature of his work and its commentary on the distribution of power is highly provocative. At the bottom of 68 where Buchloch says, “It is well known by now, of course, that it was precisely the avoidance of a process of mourning and of historical insight that drove postwar Germans to an avid almost desperate reception of international, and for most part American, neo-avant-garde culture.” He seems to be justifying Richter’s work as a means of expressing the repression of representation on the half of the German public. The role of the artist has been lost within the social implications of art practices and the role of identity in an age of endless reproduction. In his own work, where Richter denies any formal rules he appears to suppressing the aims behind his own actions and any identification with the impulses that produced the aesthetic choices present in Two Sculptures for a Room by Paterno.