TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/120991/1209400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.9 KB | 121 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 80

Germany's Ironic Trickster


A touring U.S. retrospective displays the political sarcasm and
brilliantly mixed-up imagery of Sigmar Polke

By ROBERT HUGHES


    If you want consistency in an artist, you will never find
it in Sigmar Polke. His retrospective of some 100 works from
the past three decades, which has been touring the U.S. and is
now at the Brooklyn Museum, makes this clear. Polke, 50, is the
hermetic trickster of modern German painting: sarcastic,
refractory, endowed with a mania for mystification, and very
uneven in the quality of his output. The good Polkes are as good
as anything that has come out of Germany since the 1960s,
including the work of Anselm Kiefer; the bad ones, very much
not. And the problem for museums is compounded by the fact that,
as the catalog delicately puts it, "Since 1982, Polke has
consistently produced work that alters its appearance."
Translation: he paints with such untested and fugitive chemical
gunks that some of the images probably won't be there in another
10 years. See them while you can.

    When the '80s released their yowling chorus of demotic,
admass and apocalyptic imagery on an art audience bored with the
chaste devices of conceptual and process art, Polke was right
out in front. He scraped up disparaged cliches of "vulgar"
modernism, like Francis Picabia's habit of layering images one
over another, and combined them with a Rauschenbergian appetite
for the diverse. He was assiduously imitated by then new
painters in America, none of whom had Polke's edge or flair.
This was a small but classic example of the transatlantic
feedback loop, whereby ideas born in the U.S. are picked up and
developed in Europe and then shunted back to influence New York
City. For Polke's early paintings, from the late '60s and the
'70s, are clearly a response -- though an angular, ironic one
-- to American Pop. His enlarged raster grids come out of Roy
Lichtenstein's Benday dots, his use of stark photographic
transfer from early Andy Warhol, his enigmatic image collisions
from James Rosenquist.

    His skepticism, however, was all his own. Polke had
escaped from East to West Berlin in 1953 as a 12-year-old, and
after a spell as an apprentice glass painter (a training that
still shows in his penchant for transparent, backlighted
pictures), he wound up as a student at the Dusseldorf Art
Academy in the '60s. There he fell under the influence of Joseph
Beuys. He seems to have got two big things from Beuys: first,
the idea of the artist as clown, shaman and alchemist; second,
a healthy reluctance to believe in the final value of categories
of style. Hence his early parodies of the sacred modes of
Modernism. He and two student friends formed a grouplet named
Capitalist Realism -- the right term, they thought, for the
official (modern) art of the West, as Socialist Realism had been
for official Russian art since Stalin's time.

    Capitalist Realism had a further meaning. Like American
Pop, it was about objects of desire, seen from a distance. The
things Polke started piling into his paintings -- cake,
liverwurst, plastic tubs, etc. -- were excruciatingly hackneyed,
with none of the gloss and glamour of American Pop, but they
also had a muffled political dimension. Common as air in the
Germany he had entered, they were precisely what the Germany he
had left behind did not have; and the split between East and
West, for ordinary Germans, lay along the ruts of consumption
rather than the peaks of rhetoric.

    In the '70s and '80s, Polke's work became increasingly
diverse in its imagery, subject to crazy and lyrical jumps --
at times it suggested the sense of flittering between levels of
awareness induced by pot -- and impacted with material from both
low culture and high. But it never lost its political sarcasm.
Polke's scenes of mob violence from the French Revolution, blown
up from 18th century engravings (heads on Jacobinic pikes,
lynchings on street lanterns), had a special resonance for a
Germany haunted by the Red Army Faction. His Paganini, 1982,
with its key motif of the demonic violinist playing arpeggios
of swastikas, is a great history painting, nothing less.

    Watchtower with Geese, 1987-88, summons up the emblem of
Germany's internal split, the border guard tower, without
getting complacent about the wonders of the West: on one side
is the grim authoritarian tower, on the other a swatch of black
fabric imprinted with kitsch emblems of leisure -- beach
umbrellas, sunglasses, deck chairs -- and in between the two a
gaggle of outlined geese, with no clue as to whether they are
citizens of West or East. Such impudent symbols, made in and for
a Germany just before the unpredicted fall of the Wall, cut to
a level of general unease; they suggest a bottomless anxiety
about the stability of images.

    Polke, or so one may feel after going through this show,
is less successful when his trickster side recedes and a
longing for the sublime takes over. Witness the pseudo-Abstract
Expressionist paintings collectively titled The Spirits That
Lend Strength Are Invisible, 1988: urine-colored lakes of glossy
resin scattered with cosmic-significance emblems like ground-up
meteorites or Indian flint spearpoints. The show's curator, John
Caldwell of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, writes in
his catalog essay that they are "in some ways the culmination
of [Polke's] work" and that they are mysterious because
technically unclassifiable, "since blowing tellurium dust into
resin is not an activity normally associated with the act of
painting." Yet what else, when you come down to it, has painting
always been but the application of ground-up rocks mixed with
a binder to a flat surface?

    In such works Polke is vapid and pretentiously big. But as
a stirrer and subverter of ready-made images, nobody alive can
rival him.