Phantom Interceptors

I still have not adjusted to the idea of publicizing my private experiences, and I am more interested in filling the emptiness with pictures. Horror vacui. Nevertheless, the pictures do reveal a bit about myself. Briefly, I will explain the significance of the profile picture which I have chosen – Gerhard Richter ‘Phantom Interceptors’. He occupies a complex position of ambivalence which I will try to explain. Basically, and superficially, the blurred photorealism of the Phantom Interceptors is a distancing effect. As a youth, he had been traumatized by the bombings of Dresden. During the Cold War, he witnessed foreign military presence in a country which has been split into the East and West after a history of attempted unification. Richter refuses to attribute political meaning to his painting by commenting that ‘I am a specialist in airplanes’. He has been accused of escapism because of his apolitical stance. He claims that “Ideologies are always the seducers and exploiters of ignorance; they justify war”. Understandably, his aversion to ideology is a consequence to two totalitarian regimes which he had the misfortune to experience – National Socialism and East German communism – before locating to West Germany where he considers himself an outsider. Of course, he can only be sceptical, and the only ideology he could subcribe to is anti-isms. No, he is not neurotic. By voiding the paintings of a historical context, he has not contributed to a total amnesia of Germany’s traumatic history. In Onkel Rudi, his uncle is portrayed in Nazi military uniform and concentration camps photos in his compendium of source material called Atlas would point to the opposite. Fascism and its associated atrocities continue to exist in his consciousness, resulting in a defiance of all ideologies.

I find it quite difficult to write about Richter. But, I hope you would have understood something of it.