Polke

Sigmar Polke intrigues, sets problems, provokes, amuses himself, investigates, and disturbs. He is possibly the most significant artist in the latter part of this century. He looks, with equal interest, at everything that arouses his curiosity and inevitably what interests him eventually finds its use. He obsessively explores what things can do, surrendering himself to the surprise of process. Should we look for a common denominator in his wide range of work that stretches from the drawing note-books to images projected onto textiles, or from experiments with rare and dangerous materials to film, photography, and actions, it may well be the qualities of surprise and simplicity that are lifted to a point where they become charged with mystery, with a resistance to being appropriated at any single level of meaning. He delights in cultivated contradictions: a sumptuous artist who is paradoxically anti-peinture; an image maker who is passionately involved with non-interference in the chemical processes; an exploiter of our image world who wilfully
plunders and insists on its fundamental banality.

Polke, like so many German painters of his generation, came from the East, from Silesia. He crossed over to West Berlin on a subway at the tender age of twelve pretending to be asleep so that nobody would notice him. Ten years later he invented, along with his friend Gerhard Richter, the concept of Capitalist Realism. It is a typically Polkian pun that involves both an ironic reflection on Pop Art as well as on Socialist Realism - a rejection of both ideologies in favour of anarchic sniping. He was impressed by the anti-artistic aspects of Pop but not by their commitment to graphic techniques or primary colours. He came from a different emotional, economic, and social background. His paintings of buns or pralines may well have involved a real desire to eat them! They are marked by memory and the ramifications of personal experience. They have nothing to do with Pop's clean hymn to the joys of consumerism. They are not package-wrapped, pristine objects for shelf seduction. He was attracted, for example, to Lichtenstein's and Warhol's exploitation of the benday dot technique but his use of it was entirely different - a fact that should be seen not in terms of a strategic reaction to a type of image that had already become common parlance but as a response to fundamentally different conditions. Warhol and Lichtenstein had themselves, of course, used the technique in different ways - the first literally as a commercial process that would allow him to produce more and fulfil his dream of becoming a machine and the second aesthetically as a provocative counter to the poetics of Abstract Expressionism. Polke, however, chooses to painstakingly paint the mechanical process and to reproduce it in all its minute error. He communicates his fascination with the way in which the images appear and the accidental variations that occur in the process of their reproduction. His Table (1963) has none of Pop's coldness but rather an almost sensual feel to it. His work shows nothing of the American brashness and hedonism, nothing of their espousal of the new, and nothing of their naïveté. His work is self-conscious, tongue-in-cheek, and eloquently intelligent. This use of dots is consistent throughout his work. Sometimes they can be best read as newsprint, but on other occasions they have an ironic purpose such as in Wardrobe where they seem to illustrate the title and pour scorn on some of the drier abstractions of the conceptual artists. As far as Polke is concerned, the dot makes 'something happen' - he says that he feels the world around him as a series of dots and that he likes them in all their guises!

Polke is deeply concerned with the process of selection of his images. Their appearance of simplicity and banality is artfully contrived. He gives a great deal of attention to what is to become visible and his work has consistently been preoccupied with establishing the distance of critical reflexivity. A number of works from the sixties appear as ironic metacommentaries on the major discourses of contemporary art. His Collected Works (1969), consisting of a long line of painted book spines looks like a swipe at On Kawara or Kosuth; his Socks (1963) recalls Warhol's early drawings; his Two Palm Trees (1964) makes fun of Noland's stripes; his sarcastically entitled Higher Powers Command: Paint the Upper Right Corner Black! (1969) is an all out dig at the Hard-Edge aesthetics of Kelly; and his Lovers (1965) seems to have a go at both the mucky authenticity of Abstract Expressionism and the ultra hygiene of Pop Art by drawing an almost scandalous attention to the fact that the contrary codes displayed on the surface are both simply a matter of applying paint. Polke is acutely aware that painting is a matter of selecting codes, and that some of these codes have meanings that are already beginning to slip.

In a certain sense he is both proposing and analysing a rhetoric. In his work The Fifties (1963-69) he deconstructs a set of images, revealing the clash of counter-proposals that stand as signs but never jell into any effective tension. Together they appear as stranded recognitions, a trellis-work of the partially glimpsed. Polke is already at this point looking for an attitude that corresponds to the nerve-ends of his times and recognises that it cannot be closed in on any single style. He tells us in two key works that expectations will never be met and that systems depend on both a consensus of belief and a shared perspective. With Alice in Wonderland (1971), an image that appears to fit like a glove the way in which Germans view themselves, he makes it clear that we live in a topsy-turvy world where reality itself is simply one more fiction and where the only invitation we are likely to get is to the mad-hatter's tea-party. Here truth is effectively what happens. It is a principle that Polke applies both to some of his experiments with problematic materials as well as an active principle within the kind of meeting ground he establishes for his images. Nothing adds up. And should perchance it do so, it appears as little more than cliché. In Solutions (1967) none of the sums proposed give the correct answers. They are aberrantly simple; 2+3=6; but that changes nothing. As far as Polke is concerned their only chance for surprise is not to add up. Systems fail. That is their charm. We fail. That may well be ours. Solutions can be seen as an aggressively ironic commentary on Conceptual Art, on its new found faith in linguistics, process, and systematic structures. Polke irreverently produces the conceptual style 'image' or 'idea' in a painterly fashion, although he is using with characteristic Polkian perversity, lacquer on burlap. One could also argue that this same work insists on the principle of contiguity rather than on coherence or linear logic. What we have, in fact, are individual figures not solutions. Signs that live at ease amidst their own uncertainty, just as we have learnt to live amidst our own. Polke's images propose multiplicity and contiguity as a condition, as well as meanings but they do not wish to close on solutions. It is also worth noting, as Kenneth Baker points out in an Artforum article (Addition+Abundance), that the title Solutions contains a faint echo of the term Final Solution which served as a euphemism for Nazi genocide, and as for yet one more example of criminal logic. Later I shall be picking up some of the threads of this argument.

Should we look at some of his works from the 70s and 80s where he projects images onto a kind of coloured screen (often constituted by textiles or wall-papers), bringing them forwards or pushing them backwards in a fairly shallow depth, we quickly observe how they open themselves up to reading without closing down on any definitive version. Let me turn back to Alice in Wonderland since what it depicts is relatively simple to decipher. Carroll's text was a cult book for the drug culture of the 60s and Polke makes use of the scene where Alice talks to the hookah-smoking caterpillar who tells her between yawns that one side will make her grow taller and one side smaller. 'One side of what?' asks the ever-curious Alice. 'One side of the mushroom' says the caterpillar as he slides away. Polke's mushroom is doubtless no other than the boletus, the magic mushroom. So far so good. Yet Polke is not illustrating stories but trying to create an image sensation analogous to the effects of hallucinogenic drugs. His use of the fabrics with their sports motifs suggests that he is watching a sports programme on TV. The bright colours, the blur of dots in the middle, the excessive and chaotic presence of the figures, all heighten this impression. The ball loses its shape and turns into a mask, the game changes from football to basketball, the football pitch endlessly multiplies. The impressions are quick, disordered, and strangely flowing. In other words Polke projects onto a shallow screen something akin to a state of consciousness, drug-orientated but not simply illustrative of that condition since fragmentary vision has become characteristic of our way of experiencing the world in a fashion that far exceeds the limits of drug-orientated experience. Polke captures a way of reading the world where, to use Barthelme's phrase, the fragment is the only thing we can trust. We don't expect solutions, but we do insist upon the constant need for questioning. Polke's shortened perspectives draw attention both to the way the media presents the world and to the fact that we are accustomed to the immediacy of multiple events. We scan things, rapidly and fluently, as a survival strategy. It hardly needs saying that artists such as Salle and Schnabel have looked at Polke's work with immense care and respect. He has been enormously influential in defining an image of how consciousness organises and filters the constant bombardment of images that characterise our experience of the contemporary world. We are victims to an image-world whose surface we have learnt how to scan effectively. We don't have, as it were, to understand it but rather to find a way of living comfortably within it, of determining a way of surviving with some kind of grace and commodity amidst the ensuing barrage. Drug-induced states are, in some respects, analogous to the hyperactivity of contemporary experience, and to the schizophrenic state through which we are growing accustomed to read it. Polke's work has given this condition both presence and elegance.

The spatial peculiarities of Polke's work can be seen as expressions and symptoms of our contemporary dilemma - one that involves our insertion as individual subjects into a multidimensional set of radically discontinuous realities, whose frames may well range from the still surviving spaces of bourgeois private life to the unimaginable decentralisation of global capital itself, or to the kind of ideological fragmentation that now envelops us from all directions. Not even Einsteinian relativity, or the multiple subjective worlds of the older modernists, are capable of giving any kind of adequate figuration to this experience, which in existential terms makes itself felt by the so called death of the subject, or more exactly, the fragmented and schizophrenic decentralisation and dispersion of this last. Polke moves towards an ex-centric self, allowing things to float in and out of his consciousness. He might easily agree with the Duchess's delightful tautological sense of self in Alice in Wonderland: 'Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.'

I might add, in passing, that there are other drug-related works, such as the Heron Painting IV, that have a kind of psychedelic wildness to it, resulting from the free acrylic loops painted on beaver cloth that twist into a heron's head and body. They seem to be engaged in some kind of fiery aria or passionately orchestrated ritual dance. Looking at it we can hear the Duchess murmuring again: 'I'm doubtful about the temper of your flamingo.'!

This relationship to new perceptual possibilities opened up by drugs are made even more explicit in Hallucinogen (1983) which depends entirely on a mood of dark, abstract, yet light-pierced effects. One thinks of Huxley's mescaline based experiments where objects changed into pure colour sensations. Indeed, there may even be an image-world obscured beneath the surface of the work that has been painted over. What astonishes the viewer are the strange, biting, acid nature of the colours with the neon strips of purple glaring at us from the right hand side of the canvas and the billowing greeny browns and blacks on the left. What, perhaps, is even more surprising than the colour is the off-balance composition - the piling up of these purple slats of light to one side. Once again, we should be wary about pinning the work down to a single meaning. Apart from the title I have, in fact, no knowledge as to whether Polke was tripping or not. It is as anecdotal, say, as the extra awareness of the fact that Ed Dorn's masterful long poem, Gunslinger, was written with a different drug corresponding to each of the three books. What I think we should recognise is that all meaning is a construct, built from the determinate code of language. New meanings exist only to the extent that they have been previously repressed, not permitted to reach consciousness. What Polke suggests in these works is that consciousness is now filtering experience in a way that will lead to new meanings, or at least to a fresh pushing within the given limits of the language. There can be no single meaning to Polke's work since he constantly shifts perspective; secondly, he seeks to propose new processes and new combinations that can lead him towards definition of a contemporary image; and finally, although he is actively engaged in the process of ideological delegitimation this does not mean that he sees all codes as optional at the same level. Polke, it could be argued, has revived the possibilities of painting but this in no way means that he lends moral support to the ideological code that supported it. Indeed, it remains even more obvious that he refuses to abandon the search for a new kind of discursive system. Where, for example, American Pop painters literally espoused the commodity they selected, showing that it had become its own ideology, Polke insists on presenting some of his media-lifted images with acrylic touches of colour that only stress their artificiality and painterly quality. Girlfriends (1965) is not treated so much as a random Pop image but rather as a conceptual image that calls attention to difference. Lichtenstein's use of the dots was in terms of the needs of high art, as can be seen by comparing his comic or advert images with their sources. Polke's use is more Duchampian and conceptual with the additional irony of deliberately faking the graphic process. The Media, symbol of Western abundance, is shown here as artificial. It is set at a distance so that it becomes open to critique. The medium here is definitely not the message!

Polke's ideological involvements remain as ambiguous as everything else. The much discussed Camp (1982), or the Watchtower series (1984) take up the theme of German history, German guilt, and the immediate German past that created such divisions within their society in the 60s and 70s. It links him superficially and generationally to Kiefer, Lüpertz, Penck, Baselitz and Immendorff but the stances of these artists are fundamentally different. Immendorff is directly concerned with the political realities of his time and wants his art to carry a social concern; Lüpertz use 'Nazi' images, fully aware of their built-in provocation, but his provocation has aesthetic ends in the search for the dithyrambic image capable of surging with the power of its own voice; Penck presents images of radical and apocalyptic division; Baselitz, following his series of airforce pilots as Wagnerian heroes, presents a world whose orders have been inverted and seeks seclusion in the painterly process as the vehicle for experience. Polke's works are, however, produced much later (closer in time if not in intent to Richter's ambiguously charged Baader-Meinhof series) and the images can no longer be seen as directly provocative to German sensibility. Camp (1982) strikes us, paradoxically, as a disturbingly luscious image, symphonic in a way that is directly counter to the primary significance of the image. Inevitably, the work is dark, foreboding, and threatening with its barbed wire fences and regularly spaced lamps that control the perimeter and whose shape recalls that of the soldier's helmets from the War. The lower part of the work is darkly impenetrable, as if suggesting that there is no way that it can be crossed. Yet the technique of acrylic and spattered pigment on fabric and blanket also makes the work seductive. The purplish tones of the blanket mixed with orange and gold tones of the sky create both the impression of apocalyptic vision and dramatic sunset. The blanket is a typically composite Polkian image that can be read on many levels, as a reference to the spartan conditions of the camp where the prisoners received their regimentary blankets, as a double Art History reference that almost cancel each other out, as well as ironising their meanings given the drama of their context - I am thinking here of the evident references to Noland's stripes and to Pollock's drips where both are reduced to effetely aesthetic functions and as a contributing element to the night sky. Polke, I suspect, (and I go against the majority of interpretations that move to an ethical positioning so comfortable for us all), sees this image as yet another cliché, and not that far removed from his images of socks or bunny girls, something akin to that worn war film image of the Germans as cruel, vicious, perverted conquerors who finally lose out to the humanity and intelligence of the Western allies, and who are occasionally saved from total damnation by another cliché image of an officer of the old school who is just a professional soldier who preserves a code of honour. PoIke has lived other kinds of violences, including the brutal weight and corruption of other 'idealistic' ideologies whose practice was equally dehumanising. He cannot really be expected to feel this image as something that morally continues to gnaw at him. To the contrary I tend to feel that he feels a kind of morbid fascination for it as an image that has become almost banal through over-exposure. Hitler's fanaticism and lurid policies of extermination are metaphors for the camps that Polke himself might see that include Stalin's gulags. This may be a dangerously simple comparison and without wishing to push it any further let me simply say that the camp has become synonymous to the excesses of ideology, and as such it serves as an image for the contemporary delegitimation of ideologies. It is a terrible image of our capacity for cruelty, terrifying in its sumptuousness. In its sensuality it shows how we milk signs of their significance. Polke, perhaps, senses in an acute fashion the logic of separation that has become so relevant to us today, in which psychic fragmentation and the resistance to totalities, interrelation by way of difference and schizophrenic present, and above all the systematic delegitimation to which I have already referred, have produced both a war on totality and a radical depoliticisation. These are haunting images that brutally stalk the mind. They cannot be pinned down to simple readings framed by ideology. Baker, for example, sees the black mass that fills the ground between the fences as the inexpressibility of what it meant to be caught at the mercy of the Nazi soldiers. This is a reading that narrows our sights by overspecifying. It seems to me more like a kind of no man's land where anybody might end up if they adhere blindly to ideological commitments. In much the same way, the Watchtowers propose situations where we are both the hunter and the hunted. They could, of course, be read as the watchtowers of the prison camps, or the watchtowers (and here the meaning would clearly carry relevance at an autobiographical level) that lined the frontiers between East and West, or on a more nostalgic level they could be the towers used by hunters to shoot wild game (a reading that is clearly identified for us in the last work of the series where a flock of geese are superimposed onto the image of the tower). The first work in the series seems to suggest flak wracking a night sky but it could equally be mist in the early morning light. The two striking contrasting patterns that serve as the background heighten the effects of division. The second and third are darkly lyrical night-song images where Polke surrenders himself to the evocative potential of his materials (silver, silver oxide, silver bromide, natural and artificial resin). The tower seems lost in subjective mists - anguish mixed with romantic depth, the swirling uncertainties as we move out into the desert singing our troubled identity. In Watchtower III (1985) the tones are lighter, more pastel, due to the use of iodine, cobalt, and chloride. Superimposed onto it there is an image of a hand holding up a card. One immediately wonders, given the context, if it represents somebody being identified but the posture of the hand and the lyric tones of the tower make this reading unlikely. It looks more like an image of the instructions of how to introduce a credit card into a machine. Thus it juxtaposes the symbols of political and economic oppression. Is Polke being cynical about history? Is he demythologising it? Is he simply stating his own deeply ingrained distrust? Polke would probably agree that the vitality and authority of any culture, or ideology, hinge upon its power to convince the majority of its devotees that it is the sole possible way to satisfy their needs and to realise their aspirations. They are as strong as their power to convince their least dedicated member that their fictions are truths. When myths are revealed for the fictions they are, then, as Hegel says, they become 'a shape of life grown old'. Polke seems to suggest we are surrounded by aged categories and some of his images, such as the those of the camp or the watchtowers, might well be seen as attacks against the stagnation of the intellect rather than a commitment to a self-evident and rather over-worked liberal position. If he espouses anything it is the anarchy of provocation and the pleasure of finding out for oneself through the doing as well as the pleasure of losing oneself in the possibilities of meanings. In these works, despite their 'content' (or perhaps more correctly against it), the pleasure of 'painting' and the capacity to momentarily lose sight of self are paramount. One wonders also if there is not a Spenglerian awareness that we are isolated within the peculiar modalities of our experience, so much so that we cannot hope to find analogues and models for the solution of the problems facing us, and thereby enlighten us to the peculiar elements in our own present 'situation'. It is a view that brings under question the very concept of a universal humanitas.

I should also draw attention to what have been called the 'alchemical' experiments at work within these pictures. The term is unfortunate; it misleads us as to Polke's intentions. He is not trying to turn anything into anything. He is simply introducing another possibility that stems from the willingness to allow his materials to declare their qualities and potentials. The paintings effectively become a place where something happens. Like life, they are an event in which things are changing all the time. In Watchtower II, for example, the colour of the painting changes as conditions of temperature and humidity change around it. In addition to this the guard post appears and disappears as the viewer changes angle. It can literally be said to have its own separate existence and thus seems to ironically deride one of the great ambitions of Modernism!

It almost seems as if Polke, in experimenting with these materials, began to find the image itself superfluous and decided to risk allowing the work to declare its own complete authority. Athanor, in the 1986 Venice Biennale, responds in a similar way to humidity. It becomes almost pure phenomenon where the imagination of the spectator creates the reality of the work. Polke is here 'directing' surprise and it is a role he fully relishes. He is as much scientist as alchemist. What is interesting, here, is the fact that he introduces laboratory practices into artesanal processes. Knowledge means finding out for oneself and it becomes for Polke a guiding principle. These works in the German pavilion caught for me the sense of dampness and the movement of light and colour in Venice - ethereal, fluid, Turneresque, endlessly changing. These hydro and thermal paintings used Dürer as their point of departure, exploiting some of the forms found in the margins of his drawings. Even more surprising were the works he produced in Paris for his retrospective exhibition since they were barely visible at the time of their first showing and have only developed over the years. The five paintings constituting the suite, The Spirits that Lend Strength are Invisible (1988) (a title based on a native American proverb), make use of a honey-coloured synthetic resin that is darkening over the years and that has in some works been dusted with tellurium or nickel powder, in others sprinkled with silver leaf, and in others painted with silver nitrate. Polke characteristically uses a punning title that refers literally to the process underlying the work and to the fact that he has chosen to work with native American materials. The tellurium dust that has been blown onto the artificial resin creates the effect of an Indian rupestrian or sand-drawing. The reference to Otter Creek, with its incorporation of neolithic pools and the use of meteoric granulate; in another work only further heighten the impression that Polke wants to embody time within the work. Their mysterious depths and swirling movements, their acrid intensities and bewildering plays of absence and presence, all seem to stress that the works, like ourselves, are organisms that change in time. They are a homage to the American continent, to its space, to the civilisations embedded within it, and especially to those who represent what the American poet, Gary Snyder, calls the 'old ways'. They are also a warning against the American way of life and the experiences proposed by the fledgling concept of the American nation. Another American poet, Charles Olson, adroitly pointed out that 'we are the last first people'. He was referring specifically to the newly created concept of American, to the idea of a nation endowed with the energy and the arrogance that corresponds to youth. But it was also the same poet who recognised, and it is a recognition that would probably have Polke's sympathy, that man wert off the rails way back in the Pleistocene Age! We are nothing when measured against the evolutionary process of our continent.

Polke insists on looking for something that is forbidden, something that resists the canons, that does not simply collapse into some kind of variation on 'art practice'. He espouses the banal because the banal is resistant to attention. It pretends nothing and as such simply allows him to get on with things. His series of transparitions where he is working on silk dacron (a synthetic textile used in the production of silkscreens) shows a similar insistence on making the work a 'becoming' and something that resists and refuses to yield itself entirely to the spectator. Each screen is mounted on two wooden stretcher frames and painted on both sides with polyester resins. What is painted on one side shows through on the other as a reversed image. They interact and disturb each other and permit Polke to convey something of the dark phantasmagoric world that he feels lies behind everything - a fact that in part explains his fascination with the work of Goya. What matters is never fully legible but always there. In a sense it is the substance that gives body to the work. Polke's imagination is haunted by an underworld that his work manages to communicate, despite the fact that it can never be fully materialised or formalised. It is a shadowy presence, a fleeting suggestion. The Transparents literally show the image crossing over to the dark side of the canvas and pushing through into the exploration of a psychically torn underside - a sensation that emanates both from the icons themselves (borrowed or media-generated) and from his own mind. It is not important if the primary meaning of the image is political, allegorical, or mystical since the process he is exploiting produces an evident homogeneity. The source of the images has no hierarchy in itself. All of them carry their own night language, their own subtle powers to evoke something beyond themselves, something that hides within themselves, yet something that changes for each epoch and whose interpretative load changes for each viewer. Polke is looking for those breathing shadows that give the work its life.

In all of Polke's work - and it does not matter if we are referring to the 'screen' style paintings, to the works that experiment with the nature of the materials themselves, or to the Transparents - there is always the constant of some inner life that escapes being pinned down however much it is inferred through the complex processes of production. He uses chemistry and optics almost as techniques of revelation for some underlying mystery that he himself does not understand, for a darkness that can never be fully appropriated. The Transparents are open to multiple readings and declare themselves differently from different perspectival positions. The angle of incidence of the light creates new meanings, as if seeking to be analogous to our changing vitality and to the way we glimpse 'content' or register the nature of experience. Forms contain forms; images contain images; life contains life. The same metaphor stands for Polke's chemistry of colours that become 'houses' to a whole hidden range of nuances. The Transparents present dual and contradictory worlds. Their dense fusion, their play with contamination and contiguity, their sense of iconic saturation, all open up new ways of reading our image-world. He uses art references, caricatures, images from his drawing books, comics, pictographs, classical emblems with the same insistence that they are what they are but they are also vehicles for other layers of discourse. For Polke, the ultimate banality of the icons becomes a starting point, a means of liberating himself from all pretence and of gaining access to the voyage of discovery.

His use of these materials, that even include poisons, has something of the shamanistic and of the world of private rituals. He observes to Paul Groot: 'To me it is the chemical working of the painting, the alchemy of the colour that is important. The flatfish adjusts its colours to its natural surroundings, just like a chameleon. We c (ends abruptly)