On Gerhard Richter’s painting ‘September’
Gerhard Richter’s painting ‘September’ 2005
25 years on and how do we memorialise 9/11?
As an eyewitness at street level to the event I feel that Gerhard Richter's 2005 painting 'September' comes closest to capturing the cultural significance of that moment, itself a painting based on a photograph. His 1982 painting ‘Two Candles’ seems to prefigure by association the momentous event that took place 19 years later, at least to my eyes it does.
"The attacks of September 11, 2001 have the dubious distinction of being the first terrorist attacks to be broadcast live. Moreover, 9/11 stands as the best-documented event of its type, thanks in large part to an overall democratisation of media. It is a day remembered as much by cell phone pictures and amateur videos as by the lenses of photojournalists and the news media. Even for those who experienced the atrocities first-hand, it is a day that is largely recalled via these mass-mediated images. In her 2003 book, Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag explains, “A catastrophe that is experienced will often seem easily like its representation.” In this sense, photography plays a privileged role in the construction of memory and often goes so far as to substitute for lived experience – which is true of Richter’s experience of 9/11 – as it is of most of the world’s. Sontag elaborates, “Nonstop imagery (television, streaming video, movies) is our surround, but when it comes to remembering, the photograph has the deeper bite. Memory freeze-frames; its basic unit is the single image.”Memory, therefore, is conditioned; it is inherently unstable, subject to revisions and corrections. The question for Richter then becomes, given these conditions of reproduction that are specific to the digital era, what can painting offer? After all, what could eclipse the images of bodies falling from buildings and smoke-enveloped neighbourhoods that are so indelibly ingrained in the collective conscience?"
Text: Jaime Schwartz, 2011
Two Candles by Gerhard Richter 1982