Idiomatic Différance: Reflections on Intranslatability in the Works of Gerhard Richter

Translatability of a work of art, according to Walter Benjamin, is an essential ability to allow a translation to take on »a specific significance inherent in the original« so that it will retain a close relationship to the original. In contrast, Gerhard Richter's photo-based paintings show such an auratic significance of the original in its innate deficiency or intranslatability. As Rosemary Hawker puts it, the striking effect of blur in his paintings represents itself at once as a unique photographic idiom and a distinctive shortcoming of photography which impedes the medium from providing viewers with clearly perceivable images; the blur creates a site of différance in which both media come to a common understanding of one another’s idioms by telling what those idioms always fail to achieve. In this short essay, I will examine ways in which Richter’s photographic and pictorial works, including early monochrome paintings and recent abstract works based on microscopic photographs of molecular structures, attempt to untranslate photographic idioms in order to see painting’s (in)abilities simultaneously. In doing so, I intend to observe in the artist’s pictorial practice an actual phenomenon that the image can designate certain facts or truths only through its inherent plurality, faultiness, and partiality.

Idiomatic Différance: Reflections on Intranslatability in the Works of Gerhard Richter

Translatability of a work of art, according to Walter Benjamin, is an essential ability to allow a translation to take on »a specific significance inherent in the original« so that it will retain a close relationship to the original. In contrast, Gerhard Richter's photo-based paintings show such an auratic significance of the original in its innate deficiency or intranslatability. As Rosemary Hawker puts it, the striking effect of blur in his paintings represents itself at once as a unique photographic idiom and a distinctive shortcoming of photography which impedes the medium from providing viewers with clearly perceivable images; the blur creates a site of différance in which both media come to a common understanding of one another’s idioms by telling what those idioms always fail to achieve. In this short essay, I will examine ways in which Richter’s photographic and pictorial works, including early monochrome paintings and recent abstract works based on microscopic photographs of molecular structures, attempt to untranslate photographic idioms in order to see painting’s (in)abilities simultaneously. In doing so, I intend to observe in the artist’s pictorial practice an actual phenomenon that the image can designate certain facts or truths only through its inherent plurality, faultiness, and partiality.

Potential Cities_

Buildings and urban construction are understood in this paper as representations of the city. Their meanings, however, are often invisible, positing unrealized urban visions, which are both imbedded in and which call up chains of associations expressing desires and fears. Narratives of what the city should be often contain the rejection of the existing urban situation. Understanding architectural objects as potential underscores their imaginary nature. Freud, for example, uses the Roman ruins in Civilization and its Discontents (1929) as a means to imagine stages of history. Yet, meanings of the new can also be covered over and layered. Milan is a city with fragments of the new, which once projected an ideal urban space into the future. The potentiality of Milan’s postwar urban objects is analyzed in relationship to narratives of the city and insertion is framed as an imagining into the city.