as paintings is telling as all comments for and against the exhibition value of the works. Richter has moved from the non-ideological postures of postmodern art to an anti-ideological pathos. The German Autumn of 1977 was perhaps the turning point. The "murders" of the Baader-Meinhof group in prison, after an autumn of escalating terrorist attacks in an attempt to free them, brought Richter‟s "photo-based" work in black and white back from the past (1962-1972) with all the inherent values of the intervening works. This series (eventually purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, New York) led critics to fall over themselves with either denunciatory or adulatory reviews. The "fifteen austere gray paintings" intentionally or otherwise ended up as an index of the path of Richter‟s work up tillespecially around 1989, just after October 18, 1977 is unveiled. It is the so-called apparatuses of art that supply discursivity, while it is the purely formal agency of the media that supplies art‟s inexorable means of appearing in the world. For certain forms of formalism, content is simply the formal operations of the transcendental field of appearing, while all else is repressed or voided, including (though never totally) the subject (artist/author). In the most strenuous forms of formalism, formal agency is simply a matter of the rules of the discipline and the will of the artist/author in accord or in conflict with those rules and conventions. This existential divide often produces the mythology of the heroic artist, while the actual terms of the encounter reveal the principles of