Adrian Searle: he noted images recurred “like repetitious thoughts that won’t go away.” Including “innocent things”, like toilet roll, and “guilty things” like a Nazi hanging a boy and two women playing with a cucumber.

An interesting quote in relation to previous 3D project: “Is it now possible, in Europe, to watch trains without thinking where the lines once led?”

Is it possible to watch planes without thinking where they’ve terminated?

For current conceptual project, this archival artwork ranging from 1962 to the present day offers a 2D method for display, which I could perhaps install alongside video and sound (a multi-media artwork). A theme that persists in this artwork from previous discussed (Akomfrah and Grimonprez) is the impossibility of the historical archive, the acknowledgement that events will have occurred which weren’t recorded. Archives are organised fragmented memories (personal and social) which through “association, return and recall” memorialise the past. ATLAS itself as an artwork is too large to be experienced in singularity, and its purpose is not narrative or chronological – a metaphorical meaning to be noted here.

What would the benefit be of using this template as well as or instead of video and sound? – what can it offer that they might not? could it be a sound archive? video archive? multi-media archive?

The purpose of the grid is to stabilise what would be an incomprehensible stack of images.

I should take inspiration from the work for my general practice – sequential numbering of artworks, saving of photographs – personal and cultural, snippets, notes, sounds, videos.

It demonstrates Richter’s wide variety of approaches to conceptual art-making.

Sources: David Hopkins, After Modern Art 1945-2017

David Burnett GOMA blog – The Order of Memory: Gerhard Richter’s ATLAS