The Cage Paintings | Gerhard Richter | above, Cage (2), 2006

Each experience with the Cage Paintings is very different. Two experiences are never the same. There is something we can never grasp, never comprehend, and that, I think, is why we keep returning to them.

They are both about construction and deconstruction, adding and subtracting, it never comes to a conclusion. And so that’s what demands this infinite process of looking, because one could always discover new and different elements at each viewing…

There is something very beautiful about these paintings in spite of the sort of improvised way in which they’re painted.  Cage was important because he embraced the sounds and noise of just ordinary life, of the world around us, and he tried to incorporate those into his music. In both artists, you get a combination of improvisation and control…

This idea of something being very fleeting, the sort of transitory nature of human experience, comes over very strongly in these Cage paintings I think. This is the first time really that the recent drawings are shown alongside these Cage paintings and the question is of course is also how the drawings and the paintings relate. The drawings are autonomous in the work. They’re never studies. They’re never sketches. It’s not like they are preparatory works. They are their own reality, so I think it’s very fascinating to see actually the painting and the drawings together.  

One can sort of see also another link in a way because often in the abstract paintings there is this idea of adding and subtracting because these paintings are made with the squeegee. The main implement used in the case of the Cage paintings is an extraordinary form of squeegee made of perspex so that he can see through to what’s going on on the canvas as it moves across the surface of the painting. It provides all sorts of possibilities of concealing layers, effacing layers, scrapping layers off, subtracting, of smearing, coalescing, of dissolving.

It’s almost formless that’s what’s so extraordinary about these paintings. What one must emphasize is that is that there are no brush marks on these paintings at all. It’s as thought the brush hasn’t touched them. That’s part of Richter’s whole philosophy of reducing the role of the artist self or ego, which was such an important component or feature of Abstract Expressionist Painting, of refining that out of existence, in kind of zen-like, Buddhist way, which again relates him to John Cage. 

There’s a mystery and ambiguity to these drawings that one finds very strongly in the paintings. They’re very subtle, delicate very kind of light touch. It’s as if the paper’s just been brushed very lightly with graphite. There is a kind of ghostly or spectral trace of things going on behind the surface. I mean there’s this geometric straight lines, as if done by a ruler, and then there’s this much more informal, almost formless, non-formal shapes, so it’s as if he’s applying the same sort of approach in the drawings but, but rather than painting over, is rubbing out. So that there are connections between the two…

As an artist who grew up under two totalitarian regimes, National Socialism and then Communism, where art was hijacked into the service of saying things: messages, exhortations, propaganda – Richter recoils from any meaning in a sense, message in his art, and of course that brings to mind John Cage’s famous statement, I have nothing to say, and I am saying it…

It’s a process of decisions until there are no more decisions, and then the painting is done…Mystery is a key word with Richter. The Cage paintings convey something of the mystery of the world, of life…It’s a visualization perhaps of the myriad experiences we are subjected to in our waking lives and in our unconscious lives, as well, our dream life. 

– Hans Ulrich Obrist

“Everybody has a song. Which is no song at all: it is a process of singing and when you sing you are where you are. All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working it is quite clear that I know nothing…

I have nothing to say, and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it. This space of time is organized. We need not fear these silences. We may love them.

– John Cage, Lecture on Nothing, Silence

This one especially (referencing above) is horizontal. It’s like looking at a sheet of John Cage’s music, because music is written out horizontally, even by Beethoven, who was very erratic all over a horizontal field. 

The best thing I can say when I really love any artist is that they make me want to work. I feel like I want to write poetry right on his work. I mean not to desecrate it, it’s just I have the urge to write on them. They seem like to me that they’re inviting language, an abstract language…Maps of his mind. 

Sometimes you have to stop because that’s all you’re going to be given, you know, by yourself, and by God, and by what people call luck, or chance, or fate.    – Patti Smith

Wing (P. Smith)

I was a wing in heaven blue
On the ocean
Soared in the rain
And I was free,
I needed nobody
It was beautiful
It was beautiful

I was a pawn
Couldn’t make a move
Couldn’t go nowhere
Nowhere to go
Yet, I was free
I needed nobody
It was beautiful
It was beautiful

And if there’s one thing
Could do for you
You’d be a wing
In heaven blueI was a vision in another eye
And I saw nothing
No future at all
Yet, I was free
I needed nobody
It was beautiful
It was beautiful

And if there’s one thing
Could do for you
You’d be a wing
In heaven blue

And if there’s one thing
Could do for you
You’d be a wing
In heaven blue
And if there’s one thing
Could do for you
You’d be a wing
In heaven blue