In the current Gerhard Richter show at the National Portrait Gallery in London, a mirror is exhibited as the final work in the show; an extension and culmination of Richter’s career-long excavation of the process of seeing. Painting and photography intertwined and equally unable to convey reality: opposition to – and appreciation of – abstraction…
I love the exhibition. I love Richter’s denunciation of realism, and his exploration of seeing through layers of technological insight. The sfumato of his early works, or the disintegration in later series such as the S. mit kind works appear emblematic of our learning through images. Photoshop accounts for our idea of beauty. I frequently perplex my girlfriend by trying to justify what and who i find beautiful. I can’t put into words or a totalised picture the result of what’s been fed to me via magazines, european cinema, victorian painting, porn, friends from both an upbringing in the poorer parts of coventry and the more affluent bubbles of postgraduate art history, and most vividly my own tastes which underlie all these things..somewhere.. hopefully.
But I was probably more interested at the NPG to find this mirror positioned at the end of a corridor of sorts. It acts as both a unifier of the exhibitions rooms, and an expected culmination of the exhibition’s point. It proposes that Richter’s interest is society’s reflection on themselves…
But it also, almost, finds itself in the league of major works such as Velazquez’ Las Meninas, Holbein’s Ambassadors, Matisse’s Snail, etc (at the Prado, National Gallery and Tate respectively) which are most often found at the ends of corridors to aggrandise their importance. They muscle themselves into every room preceeding them, and muscle out their competitors for sightseers looking only for the most famous works. They stand defiantly, exclaiming their own importance.
So does the mirror. It infiltrates the entire exhibition from the first time you see it at the end of the second room. The next three rooms are interjected by one’s own self-consideration. For me, the entire exhibition was superceded by my own shyness, and desire to not be looked at and considered by my fellow gallery visitors… I didn’t want to be the art…
But these power games appear everywhere in life.
Since I moved to London two and a half years ago, I have been consistently impressed by 30 St. Mary Axe, “the Gherkin”, not only for it’s beauty, but more particularly for its location. Walking down Whitechapel high st, the Roman Road and/or Kingsland Road, as I frequently did, it looms large. It ingrains itself in your conscious and on the london sky line. Yet in recent months I have noticed that the almost completed 100 Bishopsgate has been muscling in on the Gherkin’s territory. It has overtaken the Gherkin’s place at the end of East London’s major roads.
I love 100 Bishopsgate, not just for the aforementioned pompousity, but also for its shifting form, from the block skyscraper visible from parliament hill, to the gentile wedge seen from the end of the Bethnal Green Road, and I think it somehow mirrors Richter’s mirror. They both seem to reflect upon one’s own place in society. They both help me consider myself in relation to them.
Perhaps i’m being kind to 100 Bishopsgate, which might equally stand for the cocksuredness of the banking sector before the financial decline… I like to ignore that.
Instead, with both it and Richter’s Mirror, I am encouraged to attempt to make my own mark, however large or small. I consider my own importance, and believe I am capable of such an impact. I put myself up against everything surrounding me as both an equal and someone capable of, one day, conquering vistas and bookending corridors…
ALMF 