Comments on: Two shows in London, Richter and Messager

By: Andy

Andy — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:23:24 +0000

Your final paragraph summed it up perfectly for me. For all the stuff you read about him, and all the stuff he has said himself about remaining at a distance, it is this sensitivity and warmth which actually pushes the painting into the realm greatness and timelessness. In terms of him faling to escape from the confines of ideology, he actually talks about this in his later writings and talks about the impossibility of escaping ideology.

By: Andy

Andy — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:17:18 +0000

Hello Emma
Thanks for the post. By talking about the female rhythm I’m talking about it as an abstract concept, when you speak about movement as in the female rhythm, it is made into a literal physical expression, although movement has a big part to play in her making of the work and thus her realising the of the female rhythm it is only a part of a greater whole. By using Laura Nyro as an example, i think i made the rhythm appear literal, and in terms of music I believe it can be understood in these terms. This is because music is the art form that has the shortest route to the emotional centre (it speaks most directly to us), with visual art, the route to our emotional core is more complex and involves entangling itself within our conscious, intellectualizing self. Having said all this, there are pieces in Messager’s retrospective which have a great sense of musicality, and this can be treated as a way in to feeling the abstract nature of the female rhythm. However, they can to be read alongside everything else to create a full understanding of what I am trying to explain; so, for example (I’ll have to apologise here because i’m terrible at remembering the names of things) the photo’s of mens crotches can be understood alongside the installation with the billowing red sheet. The red sheet was a very musical piece in that it was rhythmical, with crescendo’s and lulls in the action, during the crescendo, my mind was taken to the photo’s of the crotches, because it spoke to me of an aggressive longing sexuality, something uncontainable, powerful and dominant. Then when the objects hung from the roof descended to the point where they gently caressed the billowing sheet, at once being supported by the sheet and at the same time pinning the sheet down, it spoke of a completely different relationship that women have with sex. In the intervening minutes these opposing relationships would then be corrupted and all the grey areas inbetween would be explored. This, to me, spoke profoundly about the feminine relationship to sex, and more than that, to their relationship with touch and how they come to understand the world.

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 16:06:46 +0000

The Richter show was excellent, went myself on Friday.

I felt like I finally started to understand the reason for the depth and range of his influence and importance to so many painters since the 1970’s.

Your comment on the range of chords struck in his owrks of similar themes seems accurate. It is justification to a process which looks to discover its subject and contant within the act, rather than preconceiving an idea, or projecting an agenda and ideology onto a constructed motif. Its as if Richters sytemmatic detachment to his subject matter leads to a total divorce of that subject from any preeixsting content. By emptying so much of this out he is then able to find a new something within the act of painting, something which then fills and houses itself within the boundaries of the image he works with. The image is merely a pliant receptical to the discovery of content.

Richter seems to be most seismic in the manner in which he dismnisses previous modes of constructed a whole agenda, a whole personal and universal iconography, which we decode on reading the work. Yet having said this his very destruction of aush ca process and of ideology in general, is itself a parallel form of ideology. Richters choice, for instance, to use found images, is something we decode, analyse, find reason with and look for meaning, in the same manner we might attempt an iconological deconstruction of the existence of certain motifs in past painters.

What most surprsied me was the hseer painterliness of Richters work. His range of mark making and surfaces was both broad and hugely accumplished. He is not just a painter of incredible technical ability, but also one full of romantic warmth, poetic lucidity and human understanding. These are all idealised visions of the painters innate ability, and the delights of the lingusitics of paint, which we might not assocaite with the apparently more cold, cynical and objective approach of Richter. Yet I sense delicacy and tenderness in his approach, or at the last a range of human variety, which is anything but coldly scientific and analytical.

By: Emma

Emma — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 15:02:38 +0000

It is interesting you refer to the female rhythm, it’s something I have not really come across before, or maybe I have but not been able to verbalise it. You talk of the female rhythm as an idea and use Laura Nyro’s music as a literal example, however Messager often uses rhythmatic physical movement in her work, and whilst I believe this is something different to the concept of the female rhythm which you talk about, the two seem to be interlinked..? I would be interested to hear more about your thoughts on this…. What role does movement play in reviewing the female rhythm, if any…?