Sigmar Polke, Higher Beings Command: Paint the Upper Right Hand Corner Black!, 1969And then, further down the gallery wall, I saw those weird funny drawings of capitalist fantasies. Pop art but not quite so obsessed with products. Surrealist tapping of the subconscious, but not confusing shoes with female body parts.
Sigmar Polke, Liebespaar, 1967Anyway, it was ironic. But not in a mean way.
And then, and then! The paintings on printed sheets!
Sigmar Polke, Palm Trees, 1964The works on resin!
Sigmar Polke, Untitled, 2001-2006 (resin on polyester)
Sigmar Polke, Untitled, 2001-2006 (resin on polyester)I hate that he was called an alchemist. Like it was a whim. Like there wasn't thought or politics behind it.
Sigmar Polke, I Live in My Own World But It's OK, They Know Me Here, 2002About the previous image: "The Afghan horsemen photographed by satellite in The Hunt for the Taliban and Al Qaeda (2002/3) reappear in History of Everything II (2002), and again in I Live in My Own World but it’s OK, They Know Me Here (2002), where they have been magnified to the point of disintegration. This repeated image reflects the rapid circulation of imagery within the mass media and shows how easily images can be manipulated, thereby drastically changing their meaning and significance." (From the Tate)
There are so many images in the world and so many paths and channels along which they circulate and appear to us. Most of them make me want to block them out. Predictable, deodorized, or giving off the scent of money. (I know, I've got issues.) But what I like the most about Polke's images (and I don't like them all--I'm not enamored of the cowboys and guns and lifeguard chairs and water towers) is that they seem to drag their histories behind them like cans on a string. He seemed interested in both the images themselves and in their print/re-print histories, the permutations, changes of context, strange printing mistakes. His pictures, the best ones, were like worm holes in the visual field.
2 comments:
He will be missed, especially since he seemed to be just at the beginning of his exploration of the resin (and, more recently, amber) medium. I like those pieces. I think you hit it right about his engagement with the past, but it in a humorous and non-cynical way. I always think about the ironists, that they can either hold that attitude as a distancing mechanism or as a welcoming/winking one, and I think Polke certainly eschews to the latter.
And I also agree with your reading of "alchemist" as a patronizing term, one that privileges the materials and their magic over the artist and his craft.
Thanks. And this also reminds me that in my memory his stuff tends to cluster to the 60s or the recent past. Time to go back to the catalogs and check out the 70s-80s-90s. What a productive life.
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