Abstract
Gerhard Richter's books Text – a collection of painter's verbal statements about his artistic method – and Atlas – 783 sheets with images, mainly photographs and visual notations – are two archives that complement the understanding of his diverse artistic practice. The paper presents a textual model that experimentally simulates a possible ordering principle for archives. Richter's statements in the book Text are cut up and used as short quotations. Those that relate to multiple aspects of the painter's oeuvre are identified as hubs in the semantic network. The hubs are organized paratactically, as an array of different themes. The paper presents a methodological hypothesis and an experimental model that aim to connect the research of real networks with the paradigms of humanistic interpretation. We have to bear in mind that the network is a result of the researcher's interpretative approach, which is added to the initial archive included in the book Text. The breaking up of Richter's poetics into atoms of quotations is an experimental proposal of a new textuality in art history and humanities, which has its own history. In comparison to digital archives with complex interfaces that often tend to obscure the content, the elements in our experiment appear as specific configurations of the semantic network and are presented in a limited number of linear texts. The method of listing of quotations gathers the fragments into a potential “whole”, i.e. a narrativized gateway to an archive according to the researcher's interpretation.
Highlights
The paper scrutinizes two connected archives, an archive of images and an archive of texts written by the author of the images about his own work
The relation between the two archives – at first glance straightforward, as one would expect the textual archive to be an explanation of the archive of images – is a complicated one, because neither of the archives is a simple, unambiguous narrative
The book Text (2008, English 2009) is a collection of Richter's verbal statements, notes and interviews about his artistic method since 1962 till 2007, while the book Atlas (2006) comprises 783 sheets with images, mainly photographs and visual notations, that Richter collected since 1962 and through the years tried to organize in a meaningful way
Summary
The paper scrutinizes two connected archives, an archive of images and an archive of texts written by the author of the images about his own work. If we compare these categories with the pages in Atlas, i.e. reproductions of panels with ordered photographs – for example Atlas sheet number 11 from 1963 that contains newspaper and album photos – we can see that Richter was considering quite diverse motives on the same panel or at the same time, and did not differentiate the pictures according to these categories, especially in the early photo-paintings.
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