Yesterday, a weird thing happened. I was presenting paintings by the German artist Gerhard Richter to a group of Printmaking & Art Appreciation students (not painters, so no harm!). We ended up questioning Richter in respect to his claim that painting is a “stupid” activity.

Calling painting stupid is nothing new, but this coming from a painter like Richter is dripping with irony, Richter being the most prolific, subject/style-varied & consistent painter on planet Earth in the last 100 years, in a death spiral of production, including Capitalist Realism, squeegee abstraction, colour charts, photorealism, blurred realism, portrait, landscape, still life, toilet roll & so on.

Then one student asked what I thought about the Zurich Portrait Prize 2023, its photographic winner just announced this week, & the conversation & energy in the class somehow dipped & dropped off a cliff into its own death spiral.

Looking at the winners & losers online, there was nothing really to say, question, get heated by or critical about in the classroom. It's quite a conservative survey of portraiture — reflecting the conservative tastes of the judging panel — except for one or two technical or conceptual outliers.

It seems all quite academic & traditional, the only talking points being the old masochistic chestnuts of skill & labour. And yes, it’s unfair & stupid to compare an individual artist, like Richter, with a portrait award. But in terms of contrast not comparison, I know what Richter does to my mind & nervous system, but I don’t know what the Zurich Portrait Award is for, or for whom: recognition, public acknowledgment, the showcasing of that most deceptive of categories or values: TALENT?

Speaking of Gerhard Richter & portraiture, there’s this idea of “the Real” (capital R) that Jacques Lacan formulated within a triad of ideological destinations, including the Imaginary & the Symbolic. The Real is the most difficult to define symbolically as it, in crude terms, avoids symbolisation, Yet, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, nothing avoids symbolisation. So straight away there is a tautology inherent in defining the Real. Žižek says something else however when pushed to elaborate, that the Real is not some traumatic or horrific something that we cannot confront. The Real is its own “distortion”.

Example: Let’s take a photographic image from Gerhard Richter’s family album of black & white images, & look closely at the distorted & damaged way Richter paints photographs from his family life. The Real is both the distortion & what is behind the distortion. It is the-thing-itself plus its distortion. If the distortion is removed, what is behind will not exist.

There is also the complicated backstory to Richter’s family album, a family history frozen in time, in which he himself escaped to the West from East Germany as a young man, but his parents didn’t, “trapped in ice” forevermore (his words). So there is a traumatic kernel to his photographic references which complicates & colours Žižek’s definition of the Real as NOT traumatic or horrific (even though we know Žižek is removing trauma & horror as a contrarian, like Lacan before him).

The strangest of all of Richter’s self-portraits, which connects Lacan’s Real with Freud’s Uncanny, & which looks like one of his paintings from the same period, but is in fact a Polaroid twin of his paintings, is titled “Gustave Flaubert sieht seine Geliebte” (Gustave Flaubert sees his beloved), a reference to French writer Flaubert identifying with his own fictional & delusional character, Madame Bovary.

Traumatised with hairline scratches, finger prints & the mannequin blurs of Richter centre-stage with friends peekabooing behind in the forced contrivance of being captured having fun in a freeze frame, the Real, for an instant, is happy, albeit ironically happy, maybe...

📸Gerhard Richter, Gustave Flaubert sieht seine Geliebte (Gustave Flaubert sees his beloved), Gelatin silver print, 8.8 x 11.2 cm, 1966.