"Plus dramatiques les événements, plus importante la forme" : Montage et guerre préventive dans War Cut de Gerhard Richter

Under the title War cut Gerhard Richter edited an artist book in which 216 photographed details of his abstract painting of 1987 alternate with abstracts from the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” and, specifically, from the issues published at the outbreak of the Iraq war (22 and 23 March 2003). The text/image juxtaposition thus confront narrations of war-related issues (military, as well as social and economic) to abstract images; this visual montage often activates, on the single pages, an unexpected figurative or ‘figural’ potential of the image, suggesting desert landscapes to be explored, frontiers, war devices or blood stains, as Richter suggests. This is due to the visual/verbal montage intended as a genuinely productive device.
Beside the montage on the single pages in the serial book form, Richter includes the War cut layout in his Atlas, thus displaying it spatially on the wall in a block composed by forty sheets (697 to 736) and conferring to the publishing production process a public and autonomous dimension. That peculiar form of tabular display differentiates itself from the sequential organization of the book-form, thus allowing the spectator to embrace the whole project in a Übersicht (so Georges Didi-Huberman on the atlas device) where the spatial disposition itself produces collisions, repetitions and relations capable of producing new knowledge and new sense.

The contribution aims at exploring the productive potential of the montage enabled by both the tabular and the book display of the War cut project.

The analysis will focus on two main operations of this montage that activates the figural ‘force’ of the visual abstract details; two operations that point tawards a critic of the media discourse on war (and on the Iraqi war in particular):

- How the montage in War cut points to the specific text/image relation proposed by contemporary media, where images are strongly ‘thematized’ and framed by the journalistic text, thus developing and reinforcing politically oriented interpretations.

- how the visual/verbal relationship in War cut addresses a specific form of verbal argumentation commonly used in the journalistic discourse on Economics related to the war, a discourse based on the legitimating power of mathematical and statistic data proposed as ‘objective’ and on the scientific, often ‘abstract’ images that support it.