Gerhard Richter, Betty - Humanities, Arts Video Lecture - Humanities/Arts

(lighthearted music)
Voiceover: We're looking
at a German artist, Gerhard
Richter's painting "Betty".
Voiceover: This is a painting?
Voiceover: Yeah, this is not a photograph.
Voiceover: It was done by a human being?
Voiceover: (laughs) Yes, a
living contemporary artist.
Voiceover: This is interesting;
I know we've talked about
the camera coming along
in the mid-19th century,
and artists started to reflect on
what they are and what their role is,
and now this guy shows up and
makes a completely photo-real-
Voiceover: Right, we've been
dealing with all these questions
about what it means to
make legitimate art,
and the death of painting,
and art having transcended
the need to be representative,
and then Richter comes along
Well, he begins, actually, as a pop artist
and adopts a whole series
of abstract styles,
but also these intensely
naturalistic renderings.
Voiceover: Just trying to put
my art historian hat here,
or maybe my art critic hat,
because this is fairly recent.
My reactions are I'm amazed
by the technique required
to produce something so real, but
after all of what we've talked about,
it's just cool painting;
it doesn't seem to be
pivotal in the history of
art, but tell me otherwise.
Voiceover: I actually
have a lot of respect
for what Richter has done, but again,
you can't take the single
image in isolation;
but, maybe we can begin
with the single image.
We have this intensely
naturalistic rending,
that by the way, does
come from a photopraph,
but Betty is facing away
from us, so we don't see her.
We want to see her, and he's
given us the promise of seeing her
with this really hyper,
specific, naturalistic rendering,
and yet, then there's also this refusal.
She's not gonna let us see her face.
Voiceover: But, why couldn't
have this just been a photograph?
Voiceover: I think that's
a really interesting issue.
Painting is about, in the 20th century
and in the 21st century to some extent,
it is about an evolution of styles.
Some very few artists, like Picasso,
will work in multiple
styles simultaneously;
but, Richter takes that on as a task,
and he works in a kind of pure abstraction
and a hyper-naturalism at the same moment,
as well as other kinds
of historical styles,
in a sense, leveling them,
destroying this notion
that one evolves from the next,
that one responds to the next.
That style, he begins
to suggest, is actually
a function in the late
20th century of the market.
It's almost a kind of artistic branding.
Voiceover: Everything
we've been talking about
is how painters have
pushed thinking forward,
or at least changed thinking, and
that's why it was interesting,
and what I think I'm hearing
here is Gerhard Richter
is saying, "I'm gonna
break free of that cycle
"of painters continuing trying to
just push the style of the time."
Voiceover: Do we live in a moment?
A kind of post-historical
moment when we have access
to all of these different histories,
and what does it mean to, in the sense,
own all of those simultaneously?
Voiceover: At least on
the paint on canvas,
every permutation has been done.
He's saying two things:
Why pretend like you're
doing a new permutation,
but at the same time, that's a little sad.
Voiceover: Well, I think that's right.
Is that power that we have
a kind of loss, in fact?
Voiceover: I'm starting to
buy what you all were saying,
it's all about context,
because outside of context
it's like, "Wow! Someone painted
that? That's really cool."
Voiceover: Gerhard Richter
grew up outside of Dresden,
and he was a child when Dresden
was firebombed by the Allies
during the second World
War, so as you know,
that city was almost completely destroyed;
he grew up, however, not
in a Nazi Germany, then,
but in an East Germany, a culture
that is moving from a visual ideology
that looks to a heroic classicism as
the Nazis had, to of Soviet realism.
He went to art school, and
there was indoctrination,
the state telling him, as an
artist, this was his responsibility
to move the state forward with a
kind of naturalistic rendering.
He moved to the West just before
the Berlin wall was finished,
and there he entered into a
very different visual culture,
one that was all about advertising.
But that was another kind
of indoctrination, he felt,
advertising visual culture
that now was speaking
to capitalist culture, so he
moved from Nazi visual ideology,
to Soviet visual ideology, to
capitalist visual ideology,
and he didn't want to own any of it.
He wanted to transcend it.
How does style, now in our
world, speak to ideologies,
speak to vested interests,
and was it important
to sort of distance yourself
from that, and in a sense,
disempower the ideologies of style?
Voiceover: Yeah, I think I'll have
to think about this a little bit.
Voiceover: I think that
Richter has succeeded
if he has given you the opportunity
to really think that through,
and to question how much we are
products of our historical ideology?
Voiceover: Fascinating.
(lighthearted music)