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Study Visit Review: Polke - The Open College of the Arts

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Study Visit Review: Polke thumb

Study Visit Review: Polke

Perhaps none of us should have been surprised that those students who attended the study day about the Tate Modern exhibition of Sigmar Polke’s work should have ended up talking about Charlie Hebdo. Yet what was interesting about our discussion was that it was triggered by an artist who was not only one of the most gifted but one of the most anti-authoritarian and non-conformist of his generation.
It is easy to compare Polke, whose post-war childhood was spent in East Germany, to Beuys and Kiefer in that his early works refer to the taboo subject of Germany’s wartime past. For example, in his early work he included tiny swastikas in his paintings. Yet even after he had become a successful artist, he included a reading from a South American text that referred to violent revolution in an installation at the Sao Paulo Biennale. As always, Polke’s political concerns went hand in hand with his questioning of modernism’s belief in the role of the artist and in what was then thought to be ‘the universal humanist values of abstraction’. Polke satirised both by painting the lines on his hand – the ultimate symbol of the artist’s creative signature – on a piece of ready-made material whose ersatz throw-away quality referenced both consumerism and popular culture. As always, the painting combined contradictory tones of voice with dazzling technical ability.

sigmar-polke-girlfriends

The ambivalence and variety of Polke’s output – which ranged from painting and photography to sculpture, textiles and film-making – seems analogous to that of other postmodernist artists. Yet what distinguishes him from the more lightweight purveyors of derivé and detournement is the abrasive, oppositional nature of his approach. In this he shows supreme confidence as well as a consummate technical skill that is sometimes reminiscent of Picasso. For example, in recent years the Chapman brothers have used works with mirror-titles such as ‘Ekoc and Camgib’ to poke fun at what had been regarded as the shibboleths of ‘primitive art’. Yet decades earlier Polke juxtaposed an African figure in a painting next to a cheeky abstract squiggle. At about the same time he also lampooned Beuys’ assumption of the role of contemporary artist as shaman by presenting himself as a cartoon astronaut floating with an all-seeing grin above the cosmos.
The details of Polke’s personal life were equally unconventional. Having established himself as a successful artist, he retired to the countryside where he consumed copious amounts of drugs while indulging in other marginalised practices including cross-dressing. When he emerged, as he did in 1973, it was to set off with his friends for Afghanistan where he photographed equally intoxicated locals in black and white and added streaks of coloured on top of them. As always, the works are extraordinarily beautiful. Yet they seem to question our sense of what we are looking at. Are these references to early photographic tinting processes or the after-images of hallucinogenic drugs? Is he representing Afghanistan as an ancient culture using the media of an earlier generation or is he suggesting that is part of the psychedelic lifestyle that was then ubiquitous?
So how did the group get on from there to Charlie Hebdo? Well, in recent months I have been struck by how often OCA students have questioned the radicalism of works produced between the nineteen-sixties and eighties. This has cropped up in discussions about works associated with feminism and multiculturalism. It has also emerged in comments about what some visual studies students have seen as the old-fashioned critical stance adopted in the texts written by Barthes, Foucault and others. Although I take their point, I have to confess that in visiting the Polke exhibition, I felt a nostalgia for a more innocent era when people saw ‘the state’ and ‘the system’ as the enemy rather than those people who are outside the western capitalist consensus and who now pose an all too tangible threat to us.
If you are unable to visit the Polke, you might want to try reading Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Inherent Vice, which is about to be released as a film with Joaquin Phoenix. Pynchon probably chose to set in 1973, when Polke visited Afghanistan, since it was the year of the oil crisis and of the US debacle in Vietnam. Both have since been identified as a turning point between the hegemony of the west and the coming of the new and more uncertain global relationships in which we find ourselves. In foreshadowing the end of post-war affluence, 1973 also signalled the end of the hippie counter-culture that had been sustained by it. Both the book and the film are highly recommended.

The Polke exhibition at the Tate runs until 8 February 2015.
 
Image Credits: Sigmar Polke (1941 – 2010) Girlfriends (Freundinnen) 1965/66 © 2013 Estate of Sigmar Polke / ARS, New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Featured: Sigmar Polke Untitled (Quetta, Pakistan) 1974–1978 Glenstone© The Estate of Sigmar Polke / DACS, London / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn


Posted by author: Gerald

5 thoughts on “Study Visit Review: Polke

  • Fascinating. I saw the show and loved it, though I think it tailed off towards the end. I saw it the day after seeing the Kiefer show which made for an interesting juxtaposition. Kiefer is IMPORTANT and SERIOUS but Polke wears those labels more lightly.
    With regard to the references to Afghanistan, I recommend that everyone sees Adam Curtis’ new film ‘Bitter Lake’ which is currently on BBC iplayer. It’s a tour de force of words and images and deconstructs much we take for granted…
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p02gyz6b/adam-curtis-bitter-lake

    • I too thought of Curtis’ Bitter Lake when reading piece about Polke, somewhere else I contrasted it (Bitter Lake) with ‘American Sniper’ possibly because of all the reasons that Gerald discusses above. I have a feeling that Bitter Lake might be taken down – perhaps I’m being unnecessarily pessimistic – so I would recommend viewing sooner rather than later (I’m not recommending the ‘ .. Sniper btw).
      I found echoes of Hannah Hoch in the work of Polke; though her post WWII years, where she became less and less political coinciding with Polke’s most vociferous? A baton handed on?

    • Kiefer was so overwhelming and exhausting it must have been a VERY interesting juxtaposition to then be smacked in the chops by Polke. I spent the exhibition being offended and intrigued in equal measures. His innovation in technique and taking apart givens is inspirational to practicing artists but the finished work was too brutal and rather obvious. It would be a very interesting study to compare Kiefer to Polke but I was profoundly moved by the former and irritated by the latter. However it was exactly this point that made the day so stimulating!

  • I very much enjoyed this study visit. I wasn’t sure what to expect of Polke’s work – and I was pleasantly surprised to find such a diverse range of output – I particularly liked the large wall hangings in mixed media. Thank you to Gerald for leading us around this exhibition.

  • I saw the Sigmar Polke exhibition in December before the killings at Charlie Hebdo so it is good to have a piece linking Polke’s anti-authoritarian stance with the cartoonists in Paris. But in the end I’m still wondering if “I am Charlie” or if “I am not Charlie.” I wasn’t persuaded by Will Self and Martin Rowson on Channel 4 saying responsibility is more important than freedom of speech. If that were the case, some of Sigmar Polke’s work might not exist.
    As a writer, I suppose I’m more aware of the written word than the visual image so on a similar theme I was struck by Irvine Welsh’s article in The Guardian Review section two weeks ago, defending the violence of Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and Chuck Paluhniak’s Fight Club as depictions of our society and therefore not perpetrating violence and misogyny, but merely representing it and so not to be censored in any way.
    But perhaps, it is only our western society, or the well-to-do within it who can afford to be Charie Hebdo anyway. If you haven’t got enough to eat and nowhere to live, freedom of speech and visual depictions in cartoons may be an irrelevance. And yet……..

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