There Is Only What There Is: Intuition and Intention in Art-as-Report

Gerhard Richter describes a quotation by Francis Bacon as “well-suited” to his practice: “I believe that art is recording; I think it’s reporting.” Richter’s series of paintings 18 October 1977 (the October cycle), created in 1988, consists of fifteen black-and-white works painted from newspaper and police photographs (Richter, Daily Practice of Painting 198). Taken together, they serve as a visual record of the events of the cycle’s titular date: the ostensible suicides of three members of the militant, left wing Red Army Faction in West Germany’s Stammheim Prison. The October cycle strips the RAF suicides of the ideological narrative imposed on them by both the militants themselves and  by the state they sought to destroy. The images, morbid yet bloodless, render the violence of Baader’s death senseless when removed from their political context; the report lacks a message. Meanwhile, Adrian Piper, a young, Black artist living in New York, explores the role of  the photograph in mediating political narratives in her 1976 work, This is Not a Documentation of a Performance. The work offers a tongue-in-cheek comment on the limits of the photograph to  depict reality with accuracy and compassion. By limiting her description of both the protest and  the work to an assertion of what they are “not,” she allows a fuller, yet more obscure, record of  “what is” to develop in the work’s negative space. In this paper, I analyze the role of intention and intuition in Richter’s and Piper’s respective practices in order to understand their works as permutations of a larger project of art-as-report. A work of report inhabits the asynchrony between action and reaction, challenging both art’s impotence and its agency by making a serious attempt to take account of the past. In report, there can be no invention; there is only the struggle to transmit life across time and against language. As Richter declares in a 1985 note:  “There is only what there is.” (127).  

In his 1962 book, The Shape of Time, George Kubler describes “actuality” as “the instant  between the ticks of the watch”: the continuous moment in which all human experience occurs,  yet which lies beyond documentation. Actuality cannot fit within the linear conventions through which we process history (Kubler 17). It inhabits the space between the signposts of events created by the mind to support an ever-unfurling narrative. In the context of Richter and Piper’s work, I use “actuality” to describe the past of which a work of report must take account. Both Record Player and This is Not a Documentation take specific political events as the subject of the work. Neither Richter nor Piper are photographers, nor do they reference works of fine art photography. Instead, they use functional, found images from news media. Which visual features are  subjective, aesthetic decisions and which should be taken as a face-value “clipping” of reality? I read the use of found images as a deliberate blurring, literal in Richter’s case, of the artist’s personal and political intentions. The extent of the ability of photography to dodge the subjective distortions that long have defined “art” remains a contested topic; Richter and Piper take  different positions on this question. 

For the October cycle, Richter paints from pre-existing documentations of October 18th  selected from journalistic photoarchives. The fifth work in the cycle, Record Player (1988), depicts a personal effect of militant Andreas Baader (Storr 29). Forms slur together, fading in intelligibility in the face of Richter’s feathered application of paint: a tangle of wires here, rigid black dials  there, all hovering above a scuffed floor with cracking moulding. An unidentifiable record sits on the platter, tonearm at rest beside it. The object, in its mundanity, suggests but fails to articulate a portrait of Baader, perhaps sitting in his cell listening to Eric Clapton on the record player in  which he hid the pistol he used to end his life. Richter’s treatment of the image renders the record player useless as a key to Baader’s psyche, attempting to elide the work’s inherent “political topicality” (Richter, “Notes” 178). Of the process of choosing images for the October cycle, Richter states: “I had a large quantity of photographs. It narrowed down all the time, and it became clearer and clearer what was really there to be painted” (178). Here, Richter declines to assert his own judgment by speaking of his selection of photographs in passive language (Richter, “Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker” 185). Instead, he allows an instinctive  way of seeing to guide him to the work; the artist becomes the excavator of an objective “there.” By working off an image in direct contact with the event, rather than an imagined visualization  of the theme, Richter tries circumvent both his and the viewer’s subjective perspectives on the  Baader suicide. Richter’s embrace of unconsciousness and ambiguity stems from his professed  desire to “achieve the same coherence or objectivity that a random slice of Nature (or a  Readymade) always possesses” (Richter, “Interview with Sabine Schütz” 216). For Richter, logic appears to prevent objectivity, whereas intuition, by virtue of its enduring mystery, proves more “coherent.” The crime scene photograph  is a discrete object with a practical function, altered and distorted by its elevation to “art object” through the (here disguised, though always implied) judgment of the artist. 

Piper, unlike Richter, does not work with the photograph as a cornerstone of her practice.  Piper’s best-known works during this decade are the series of public performances known as  Catalysis I-VII, described by art historian Kobena Mercer as “action events.” Her relationship to photography, as it manifests in her 1976 work This is Not a Documentation of a Performance, exists within the context of her interest in the artist as an active subject (Kobena 103). Piper silkscreened a newspaper clipping about a demonstration against the pending eviction of 30 families from a Manhattan building. Beneath a headline reading, “‘Squatters’ fight eviction by church,” a halftone photograph depicts a group of five people bundled against the late January chill. They stand on the steps of a church, carrying signs with slogans written in thick, black marker. Piper makes a single intervention in the image, painting over the rightmost protestor’s sign and replacing it with the phrase “This not a performance.” The upright, alert protestors in the image  stand in sharp contrast to the stillness of Richter’s paintings (of objects and corpses) and his description of his process in the passive voice. Piper’s work, on the other hand, is active by nature and it keeps a critical eye on the rhetorical power of the photograph. She selects and represents an existing documentation of a specific event: the tenement eviction protests. In quoting a newspaper’s text and image simultaneously, she incorporates the text of the article into the  world of image and raises the significance of the picture within the picture. The heightened subjectivity of the statement on the edited sign draws attention to the assumed neutrality the  viewer projects onto “the news.” This rhetorical ethos separates it from Record Player, whose  critique of similar conventions takes the form of an attempt to transcend them entirely. For example, the original article in This is Not a Documentation appeared in a now-defunct Marxist  weekly called “The Guardian.” Piper selects a segment from a publication whose existence is ideologically anti-establishment, yet still reinforces the detachment between the consumers and the subjects of “news” (Cohen). The work disrupts the viewer’s disconnection from the protestors’ reality  by directing a piercing statement through the veil of objective report. Piper thus critiques the  conflation of protest and performance often present in public reaction to the former. The version of actuality experienced by the displaced families extends far beyond the sensationalized perception of the protest act. The distance afforded to the newspaper reader conditions him to view protest as performance, which may comment on social conditions but ultimately fails to transmit the reality that these conditions cause. At the same time, Piper paints over the protestor’s words in order to replace them with her message. The work, if read cynically, appears to indict the artist herself in the widespread distortion of life. Within this context, This is Not a Documentation’s titular declaration may also distinguish Piper’s performance art from protest. While similarly catalytic, protest and performance possess specific and disparate goals. Protest is  typically understood to be a visible action, undertaken in response to an intolerable social condition, in order to induce change. It is, by definition, the purview of the active subject, whereas Piper’s performance disrupts the relationship between actor and audience, to deliberately unpredictable effect. According to Mercer, she “unsettle[s] the dichotomies of  subject/object, active/passive, and visible/invisible,” inhabiting different roles in order to withdraw varied responses from her audience and transform passive states of being into active conductors of impulse. However, Piper’s performance work is often categorized as protest art (Mercer 119), simplifying her conceptual concerns in order to facilitate the extraction of an ideological  message. Mercer notes that the work of Black artists “has rarely been bestowed with the privilege of autonomy, being instead subjected to realist readings…as transparent documents of  social life.” These readings relegate Black artists to the position of documentarian, ignoring their autonomy as agents of catalysis (Mercer 106). This is Not a Documentation, in rejecting this false equivalency between protest and performance, reveals the multifaceted interplay between subject and object in the transmission of actuality and challenges the viewer’s perception of protest as content for consumption.

The found images in both This is Not a Documentation and Record Player are distorted  and complicated by the artists’ particular intentions. As Richter tells critic Sabine Schütz: “All  the different pictures at different times do have one consistent foundation; and that’s me, my  attitude, and my intention.” The impacts of Richter’s sensibilities are visible in the features that set Record Player apart from its reference (Richter, “Interview with Sabine Schütz” 210). He drains all color from the original photograph; his distinctive blurred forms obscure detail, such as the identity of the record on the turntable (Storr 28). These features are emblematic of the vital role that chance plays in Richter’s process. Much as in  his selection of subject, Richter allows his intuition to govern the execution of the work. The departures from the reference image are not symbols designed to communicate a specific emotion or idea (Richter, “Notes, 1985” 121). In his pursuit of an objective report on the RAF suicides, Richter creates works that communicate nothing besides themselves. He declares that the fifteen pieces that compose the October cycle “make no statement at all,” reflecting his well-documented distaste for all strains of ideology. In fact, Richter outright avoids encoding symbols in his work, using intuition as a tool to disguise his intentions from himself (Richter, “Interview with Sabine Schütz” 215). His pursuit of a painting with “no statement” thus begins from form rather than from content (216). He writes of a reverence for “chance as theme and as method,” both visible in the October cycle. The series revolves around the senselessness of death, the tragedy of which is heightened by the failure of the RAF’s revolutionary convictions to induce the societal transformation they sought (Richter, “Notes 1985” 178). Richter’s rejection of formal aesthetic frameworks, while explicit, remains non-rhetorical (Richter, “Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker” 193). His critique of ideology occurs not through commentary, but through an ongoing project to envision an autonomous way  of living and seeing. For Richter, instinct is the artist’s best and only tool for approximating the effects of true chance and thereby overcoming the compulsion towards narrative (Ricther, “Interview with Benjamin H.D. Buchloh” 150). The objective world possesses a disorder without words. In the face of its senselessness, works of report like Record Player represent the hope that the artist may one day begin to not only see, but show, what really exists. Richter’s “anti-artistic, factual” way of seeing serves as a survival strategy for  the thankless task of navigating the world without the comfort of certainty (Nietzsche 182; Richter, “Notes” 178). 

This is Not a Documentation of a Performance also addresses the tension between an  artist’s intuition and intention. As a self-defined Conceptualist, Piper’s desires and tactics for  processing reality often contradict those employed by Richter in his fight against ideology. In a  1967 essay, she writes: “Any kind of objectivity—whether in the formulation of a concretized  system, a rational decision-making method, conceptual clarity—can serve only to facilitate the  final emergence, in as pure a form as possible, of the artistic idea, which is almost always  basically intuitive in nature.” For Piper, logic and language form a path towards the realization of the chance-idea (Piper, 37). While she acknowledges that these systems of thought are human creations, she rejects the assertion that a rational approach to art is culpable in distorting or disrupting the  pure form of the ideas it investigates. The artistic idea becomes a formless absolute which may be approximated and excavated through processes of varying efficacy (37). The significance of the  intuitive idea to the conceptualist mirrors that of Kubler’s actuality to the historian. For Kubler, “past events may be regarded as categorical commotions of varying magnitudes…The present  interpretation of any past event is of course only another stage in the perpetuation of the original impulse” (Kubler 20) Piper’s work is similarly a perpetuation of an unconscious, beyond-linguistic impulse. All attempts to create a record of a past event are therefore inherently connected not  only to the event itself, but to all its past transmissions. In This is Not a Documentation, Piper embraces these multi-layered permutations of actuality, placing rhetorical and conceptual concerns about the conventions of report alongside those regarding overt social dynamics. The work is not a documentation and the protest is not a performance; both are manifestations of an absolute commotion that possess an autonomy beyond that conventionally afforded to “art object” and “demonstration.” The title mirrors and expands upon the phrase embedded in the  work, but leaves a key question unanswered: What, then, is it? The declaration uses negation to lead the viewer to a more intuitive conception of “what is” than an affirmative definition could  ever achieve. This decision displays Piper’s confidence in the capacity of the idea to persevere, in all its inexplicable and intuitive complexity, through the almost-incidental trappings of form. In short, Piper views her creative and philosophical processes as the means to an idea, whereas Richter’s means serve as the idea.  

Both Richter and Piper seek to escape the conventions and expectations placed on art and  the artist. In “Flying,” a 1987 essay, Piper describes a reoccurring dream in which she breaks out of  an enclosed room and takes to the sky, pursued by a faceless horde that attempts to drag her back to earth. For Piper, objectivity and philosophy provide a means of transcending the limits, narratives, and prejudices imposed on her by the socially-codified idea of art (24-25). Piper stages an escape from the conventions of form from within the form itself (25-26), employing typical tools of documentation—reproduction and photography—to create an anti-documentation. Richter’s  work confronts a similar paradox in his chosen medium: painting. Historian Johannes Meinhardt writes that, instead of taking painting’s historical associations as cause to abandon it, Richter liberates the form “from a corset of conventional expectations and meanings rooted in the concept of the artist as a genuine, original creator, one who sought to express himself in painting” (Meinhardt 135). Piper shares Richter’s distaste for the assumption that art is necessarily subjective, reflective, or emotive. Both artists de-center the authorial self in their respective pursuits of actuality and pure form. Piper writes that the artist’s creative evolution is best served not by indulging in self-expression, but by “allow[ing] his intuitions as full an actualization as possible—unhampered by ultimately unavoidable limitations of personality and material” (Piper, “A Defense of the Conceptual Process” 37). She believes idea and intuition to be generally synonymous, imbuing the former with the capacity to  contain beyond-linguistic nuance. While she sees art itself as fundamentally intuitive,  conceptualism and rational analysis serve as the means to realize the chance-idea and free herself  from the expectations placed upon the social role of the artist (37). 

The self gains new autonomy in the world envisioned by the conceptualist. Of the artist’s  purpose, Piper states: “One reason for making and exhibiting a work is to induce a reaction or  change in the viewer… The work is a catalytic agent, in that it promotes a change in another  entity (the viewer) without undergoing any permanent change itself” (Piper, “Contrapositional Becomings” 116). This statement communicates a clear and active intention for her work, exemplified in the aptly named Catalysis series. Richter shares this fervent desire to produce an effect on the world through his work, but  remains unconvinced of his ability to actualize it. Part of the reason he works from photograph is because he believes its effects, as he tells Jan Thorn Prikker, to be “more direct… more  immediate” than those of painting; the photograph is “almost Nature” (Richter, “Notes” 176-177). However, the medium of paint is not an obstacle to the production of effect; it merely alters the type of effect possible (Richter, “Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker” 187). In the case of October 18th, Richter explains that “the photograph provokes horror, and the painting—with the same motif—something more like grief” (189). He states that the provocation of grief “comes very close to what he intended” the work to achieve, but the fullness of his ambition remains deliberately obscure, including to himself (189). He acknowledges the existence of a subjective motive but accepts his inability to explain or control it, declaring that the “transposition into paint” goes “against his will” (195) This incapacity, which he takes as a point of pride, reasserts his conviction that human will, in the form of systematized thought, is an obstacle to an objective way of seeing. Art, as an action, becomes the destruction of intention (Richter, “Interview with Sabine Schütz” 208. By contrast, Piper situates herself as the catalytic actor in her own work. Her will controls the deliberate process of probing, delineating, and executing her artistic intention, even as the core of  the idea itself remains unconscious. With exacting conviction, she wields rational thought as method. For Piper, “a greater total of involvement in one’s work is possible when one attempts to  be objective than when one does not” (Piper, “A Defense of the Conceptual Process” 37). She does not declare herself capable of perfect objectivity, but views her systematized attempts to achieve it as the most effective means of inscribing the idealized, intuitive idea into the work (36-37). Further, Piper is less interested in evoking specific emotional and intellectual responses than in observing whatever reaction her work produces. For her, a work’s quality is measured by its efficacy in generating the strongest possible response (Mercer 116). The accuracy of the report is secondary to its potency, whereas Richter assesses his work on its ability to imbue the viewer with a certain emotion or perspective, specifically one that approximates, to the greatest extent possible, the actuality of the moment depicted in the image (116). Here, the locus of the tension between the artist’s intuition and intention comes into focus. By asserting the active potential of rational thought, Piper unsettles the  conventional dynamics of action and reaction. This is Not a Documentation, produced in part as  a reaction to a past event, simultaneously possesses a degree of agency that Richter might  attribute only to Nature.The project of art-as-report dismantles the convention of the artist as inherently  expressive and subjective. Record Player records, without commenting on, a fragment of a  tragedy that haunted Richter for decades. The painting cannot change the reality it depicts, only  induce grief over what has occurred and, as a result, what now “is.” To Richter, painting  functions as “an alternative world, or a plan or a model for something different, or reportage,  because, even when it only repeats or recalls something, it can still create meaning” (Ricther, “Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker” 194). Even in the face of the senseless tragedy represented by October 18th, there remains a hope inherent to the act of painting. Richter, in his declaration of his own incapacity, reveals a compassionate desire to change something, to somehow produce, against all logic of the observable world, not  just an alternative narrative, but an alternative to narrative. There is only what there is, yet there  is grief over what there is, and within grief lives a fragile hope for “something different.” This is Not a Documentation of a Performance, too, unsettles the conventions of its form and opens a window into a new world. Piper writes of the freedom conceptualism allows her: “Freedom from the immediate spatio-temporal constraints of the moment; freedom to plan the future, recall the past, [and] comprehend the present from a reflective perspective that incorporates all three” (Piper, “Flying” 26). The power of the intuitive intention persists, through and despite means and method, and the past is called back—recalled—into the present. The work returns the autonomy to protest, and  liberates all art that comprehends the present from being reduced to a static document. If Record  Player reports the past, then This is Not a Documentation remembers it. Alike in their frequent  reduction to the political “topicality” of their subjects, these two works transmit social realities—displacement, death, idealism, violence—outside of the narratives that mediate the conventional  understanding of these concepts as concepts. In the project of art-as-report, as one of the millions of permutations of the struggle of art to make meaning from the meaningless—or to make meaninglessness from meaning—the artist gropes for a purpose without message. That, writes Richter, is “the real point of the work: Not to make things simple, but to reach a result, a  summing-up” (Richter, “Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker” 197). If effective, a work of report contains a shimmering present, alive with the refracting impulses, desires, and demands of the past. Even its inevitable distortions perpetuate the original impulse of actuality, as does the viewer of the record, in reacting. The past touches us. It takes hostages. It asserts itself, against the limits of reason and across time, driving into the  unconscious and seeding there the possibility of a free world. There is only what there is, but in the pause between events lies the potential that there might be, one day, “something  different” (Kubler 17). But what might there be? Even as I imagine, I cannot explain. After all, for Piper, as for us all: “Only the intuitive is truly unlimited” (Piper, “Defense of the Conceptual Process” 37).