Wald

"For me Gerhard Richter is not only one of the greatest living artists and painters of our epoch, he is also one of the greatest inventors of artists’ books. The Wald book stands for a whole series of art books that Gerhard Richter has designed in the last few years. I chose Wald because it is one of my favourites, but there are at least 20 more I could pick – it’s an amazing, prolific activity to produce these books in parallel with his paintings. He has done dozens and dozens, from a gorgeous early book in the 1970s about ice, where he photographed the polar icebergs, to his atlas, which is amazing, to War Cut, which I edited with him, which was details of abstract painting. He would photograph an abstract painting’s details from many different angles and discover all these landscapes. It was micro and macro. Gerhard Richter actually did a book about me – he took a lot of portraits and then made a random collage of all my writings so that they became an absurd text. “To be contemporary means to come back to a present where we have never been.” In Wald he produced 285 stunning details of a very dense forest near his house in Hahnwald – they are almost abstract images. As always with Richter, he has an encyclopedic desire to put them into groups. Some are the branches, some the logs, some are diagonally growing trees, some are horizontal, some vertical. Then he interspersed text from a forestry magazine, but reproducing the words in a random order. So you have these very structured photographs of trees, which he took on his daily walks, brought together with text in a very complex book, which Richter designed himself – so it is an artwork. One is almost on a walk if one goes through this book, navigating through the forest and through the randomly arranged text and making one’s own connections. It really involves the reader. Since the 1960s and the moment of conceptual art, more and more artists have produced their own books. In England you’ve got Gilbert and George, who are pioneers, or Richard Long, for example. They have done beautiful things with books. So that is recent, but then is it really new? In fact it is a continuum. William Blake made books as artworks and now we have Gilbert and George doing it. There is a link between the beautiful artists’ books of previous centuries and Gerhard Richter too. Very often artists have thought very carefully about books as a vehicle for their art. It’s not just a book about their art, it’s more like a mobile exhibition. Yes, when artists make books they do tend to become artworks because they conceive of them as an object. People can touch and hold it in their hands, which is an important part of it. But also the book is a constant presence. Very often these artists’ books are done in an edition of only 2,000 or 3,000 copies, so afterwards it is going to be in 2,000 or 3,000 libraries or households over the world. It is amazing if you think that in almost every city in the world there are some copies of these artists’ books, whereas a work of art only exists once – then when a museum isn’t showing it and it’s in storage, you don’t see it at all. I think artists are interested in the idea that books have an almost viral infiltration of the world. Books have an amazing ability to travel and then they pop up when we least expect it – books are magical."