Detachment, death, and destruction in Gerhard Richter’s Strontium (2004)

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Martin Collins and an anonymous referee for very helpful comments on previous drafts of this essay. Also, a special thanks goes to Atelier Richter for permission to reproduce the work ‘Strontium, 2004’ (CR 888).

Notes

1. Buchloh, ‘An Interview.’

2. Nielsen, ‘Nanotech,’ and Zweite, ‘Die Silikat-Bilder.’

3. C-print refers to chromogenic color prints, composed of three main dye layers: cyan, magenta, and yellow. The first commercially available chromogenic print process was Kodacolor, introduced by Kodak in the 1940s. In the 1950s, Kodak marketed a chromogenic paper with the name Type-C. Today, C-prints may be reproduced from color negatives, slides, or digital images.

4. Various kinds of artistic blurring techniques are adopted in Gerhard Richter’s atomic images: from the slightly unfocused atomic spheres in the digitally manipulated Strontium through the smearing of paint in horizontal strokes in Silicate (2003) to the slightly enhanced offset reproduction of a newspaper clipping reporting on the first view into the interior of an atom in First View (2000) and the over-painting with a scraper of graphite structure in Graphite (2005). Most of Richter’s artworks, including the ones mentioned, are available on the artists’ comprehensive website, see Richter, ‘Gerhard Richter.’

5. Koch, ‘The Richter-Scale,’ 37.

6. Quoted from Elger, Gerhard Richter, 86.

7. The classic text on art and photography, published in 1936, is: Benjamin, The Work of Art. For a discussion of the disapperance of the notion of photographic objectivity within the sciences and arts during the first part of the twentieth century, see Galison and Daston, Objectivity.

8. Quoted from Elger, Gerhard Richter, 89.

9. Ibid.

10. Quoted from: Elger, Gerhard Richter, 93.

11. Joseph Beuys was the contemporary embodiment of such ideas. For a contrasting interpretation between the conceptions of nature in Beuys’ and Richter’s art, respectively, see Gandy, ‘Contradictory Modernities.’

12. Elger, Gerhard Richter, 88.

13. Storr and Richter, Gerhard Richter; Storr, September.

14. For an overview of the reception of Richter’s Baader-Meinhof cycle, see Storr and Richter, Gerhard Richter, 27–39.

15. Gerhard Richter keeps an ‘atlas’ of images in which many of the sources for his original artworks are being preserved. For this particular image, see Richter and Friedel, Atlas, Sheet 745.

16. Baker, ‘The Subject.’

17. See, for example: Bousquet, ‘Cyberneticizing,’ and Edwards, The Closed World.

18. Masco, ‘Target Audience,’ 23.

19. There is an ongoing discussion about long-term health risks associated with strontium-90 fallout in the USA and in Europe, respectively, see Mangano and Sherman, ‘Elevated in vivo Strontium-90,’ and Froidevaux et al., ‘Sr-90.’

20. Beck, World Risk Society.