The Wizard Who Made Ideas Disappear

Sigmar Polke at Tate Modern

Polke ‘Alice’ …the image is the disappearance of the image

Polke is the most enigmatic character in all of contemporary art. His work inhabits a phantom dimension between art and anti-art. A sort of artistic wormhole which distorts the usual values and perceptions, and in which a lesser talent would be crushed to nothing.

For many years I have wrestled with Polke’s work, seeing it and not seeing it at the same time. I just could not understand h0w any painting (and I am just interested in his paintings really) could be so beautiful and so ugly at once as his are. I don’t really know whether I like them or not and I am not sure that it matters. I think ultimately Polke only cared about stimulating a certain response in his viewers, which was a complex compound of dissatisfaction, questioning, aesthetic awareness and a kind of transcendental indifference to everything.

Like all good artists though, he didn’t care to repeat himself and his work takes many forms, and given his rejection of fixed points of reference it is hard to perceive the core, but it may well turn out that the core is rejection. Obviously if you reject everything all at once you won’t make anything, but he seems to have started with rejection of the Nazi past that was so recent for him (he was born in Poland in 1941), but followed that by rejection of post-war consumerism in the early 1960s, and by the time that he was rejecting perceptual reality in the 1970s through his drug use he had also embraced many rejections of new and traditional artistic styles in an exhausting contrarian Odyssey, and for the rest of his life (he died in 2010) he did not slow down or resolve into any obvious pattern, but he often backtracked and took on things he had previously rejected.

Polke’s bleak critique of his chosen vocation

 

Disintegration of patterns was for Polke suggestive of the disintegration of meaning – of photographs, of images in general. His use of fragmented images anticipates layers of computer graphics but also shows that using images in this way will hasten the descent into the void. To subvert the power and meaning of the images you are using even while relying on them for that very same power and meaning: he knew years before us all that photography was dead as documentation, and showed it reduced to entropic pattern.

varnishing day…

He used a hundred different ways of making transparency and translucency on the canvas in order to make his work more opaque.

I don’t go to Tate Modern that often, about once a year I reckon. I am not sure about it I feel obscurely oppressed by its omniscient orthodoxy. This time I went in the evening, and it was the best it has ever been. If you are going to try to give some mental space to art, you need some physical space to do so. It was just us and a few glamorous Italians who were really very decorative.

Polke’s use of spillages and other accidental marks seems an echo of Pollock, but his use of ‘ready-made’ images and printed fabrics seems an echo of Duchamp. Between art and anti-art lives the wizard, and like trying to identify the location of a mythical place, clues are often misleading. For many years he claimed his work was dictated by ‘Higher Beings’. Was he joking? Polke has made an enchanted world without certainties, where everything is open to question. That is not an easy place to live, but it is a free one, and I will return.

Polke showing his spills

 

Bloody Decomposition

Jonas Burgert not cheering me up

 

Jonas Burgert Stück Hirn Blind at Blain|Southern

I walked past this show a couple of times and thought: ‘Yikes! I really don’t want to go and see that’. Huge expressionistic horror canvasses painted in sludge brown and dayglo yellow and orange. But then it got me one day. The show of the ‘acclaimed’ German Artist is in the prominent Hanover Square Blain|Southern Gallery. Large paint on canvas paintings and a few (I think bronze) sculptures. The paintings are somewhat realistic in rendering, but impossibly dystopian in content.

There is an issue for people who can draw – who are enticed into making a career as an artist because of that talent. What does it mean right now? What can you do with it? It is possible to draw something simple and beautiful and make it count. That is to say – to compete with other forms of image making, to make it sit in the contemporary market and to satisfy the mind of a critical and demanding creator. Otherwise you have to turn your back on it and become a bitter repressed anally retentive conceptualist or a joky popster.  I think it is possible but on the evidence of this show it can’t be easy.

Is that a lance in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?

Burgert clearly has a facility with paint, but the wallowing in horror type imagery suggests this is uncomfortable for him. The history of painting weights heavily on him – these paintings recall the battle pictures of Uccello and Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari (lost) but overlaid with images of the Holocaust and the mutilated fetishes of chainsaw horror. Corpses decomposing, dereliction, mummy-style cerements in pseudo fluorescent colours all rendered with naturalistic shading. Lots of bloody splatters. It all seems impossibly adolescent and angsty.

It takes a lot of commitment to make this work….they are large paintings with complex surfaces – sanding, layering and lots of drips and ‘painterly’ brushwork. It suggests someone with a plan, someone knowing. This work is not a spontaneous reaction.

But wait. Downstairs there are some smaller paintings. Smaller paintings are almost always better, I think. They have directness – they are actual thoughts expressed as paintings. Not something pre-executed to cover an opulent wall. True for Rubens, and true for Burgert. Anyway, in just one picture there is a sign that he feels some frustration with the plan – he paints a head, gets frustrated. Scribbles it out. But because he is pretty good at drawing, his scribble looks like the best thing that Frank Auerbach never did! Check it out…

 

 

Termites ate the world. I’ve only just noticed.

Polke mixes it up

Been a while since my last post – but have been thinking. Changing my mind even, and that takes time.

I went to the very splendid Polke/Richter Richter/Polke show at Christies in Bond St soon after it opened. These two were once close now hanging together again at last like a great band reunited for a farewell tour .

But I had never felt anything for either of these artists. To me they represented a detachment, an anti-art and debasement of visual culture. I spurned that approach – I wanted unity in a picture. The fracturing of the image, the use of found imagery and stencils, of photographs was a dilution of painting. The idea that Richter has latterly pursued that you could somehow paint a painting of a painting seemed somehow to remove the artist so far from the battlefield – his pictures for me were often drone pictures flown over the enemy held territory of mass media reproduction. Polke seemed to me incomprehensibly casual and devoid of focus.  And yet…

Polke and Richter side by side

In of my work (in visual effects) I am dealing with imagery every day. Some is photographic and some is synthetic, and the job usually involves bringing the two together. This mutable reality was anticipated by Richter and Polke working in the pre-digital age. But they are not trying to imitate a retinal reality; rather they are pointing out how weak those imitations are.

Photography was briefly a shared visual currency of truth. For most of the 20th century it held an unprecedented position as a factual record of an event. But just in the last quarter of the century something strange began to happen and now that Photoshop has taken hold and the practice of altering photographs is almost universal, the truth is out. A photograph is a mere shell of appearance and it does not represent the truth of an event. It is a skin of pixels, as it was once of emulsion, that is held together only by our brain’s willingness to make an arrangement of dots into a meaningful pattern.

Was this a tyranny  that was overthrown or destabilisation of a legitimate authority?

Polke seems to suggest that the photograph is just another piece of raw material, as he blows it up it emphasises the halftone pattern in a kind of inverse impressionism. There the dots become the image; here the image becomes the dots. He is retaking the  ground won by mechanical image making at the expense of artists at the end of the Nineteenth Century – but stealthily, by undermining it. Literally undermining it like a termite eating a tree trunk from within. What is left still has the surface appearance of the original photograph, but the original meaning has been hollowed out so its shapes can be used in a sensual admixture. Polke’s haphazard marks now appear rich and sensual to me. Where he has painted on both sides of a surface that too offers a unique interplay of light with the material. They seem rich and varied, the approach not limited. The varnish that was once a meretricious eye catching glossy surface now seems to add depth. It excites me to look at in ways I never expected.

Richter is a little different, He seems to have started out with some kind of photorealist idea in his mind – to paint the photograph not paint from a photograph as if it were like any other object. But he seems to have gone somewhat beyond that. By choosing a mixture of imagery, some provocative (his uncle Rudi in Wehrmacht uniform) and some undemanding and picturesque (the Daydream Nation candle) he challenges us to see the painting as a mere surface – linking photography to Jasper Johns’ use of flags and targets The dragging of the paint seems to aid this, as if he is mentally defocusing his images as he paints them.

These termites have denuded pictures of the kind of meanings we were expecting, maybe the structure was rotten in any case…but they are offering us something different. Image making without preconceptions. I still have work to do to look without preconceptions.

Polke (left) and Richter

 

 

 

Misfitting right in.

If one is good, are four better? Andy Warhol’s photos

David Lynch, Andy Warhol and William Burroughs at the Photographers Gallery

Baselitz and his generation at the Strang print room at the British Museum

At this point it’s probably too late to do anything but notice, but it is remarkable that so many famous contemporary artists are hopelessly socially maladapted. Alienation from society seems a badge of honour for some its favourite icons. What does it say about us that we admire the art of those who are so profoundly alienated? These people are not good role models!

These two shows have an insight into the workings of their minds, rather than the finished, mature work. Perhaps we find artistic disaffection in others comforting, perhaps we identify with it, perhaps we just let the artists feel this stuff so we don’t have to.

William Burroughs’ name is a byword for a kind of unhinged sociopathy that inspires a respect before any words have been read. Burroughs must have been very entertaining to spend time with and this is somewhat reflected in what seems to have been a freeform photo diary that he kept. The notes politely acknowledge the almost total lack of influence of others on his work.

David Lynch’s holiday snaps

David Lynch’s Eraserhead remains the benchmark of modern angst and he has a dystopian view of life on tap. Yet his monochrome photographs of old factories are oddly pleasant. Well composed, interesting play of light and texture, they are modest objects. The might of industrial entropy is condensed here, much as victorian watercolours compressed the alpine landscape. It has something of the same quality of a diary of the sublime emotions felt while travelling in safety through a hostile environment, but it is the tourism of decay.

Andy Warhol seems well adjusted and normal next to them, but his persona and his obsession with becoming a brand are products of alienation from a depersonalising culture.The Warhol on show is just his photography, not his paintings based on photography. It sort of feels as if we are peeping behind the curtain of his life-performance although he would no doubt have been happy enough with that. This seems like source material – a vague Americana without focus: ephemeral street scenes, ads etc. His finished work re-packages this slight material in such a way that we feel the coolness of detachment and alienation from it. This is Warhol’s shallow but significant insight, a mask that we are allowed to peep behind in this show, but there is not a lot to see.

Georg Baselitz – The Pandemonium Manifesto

The Germans have their share of disaffected misfits too. In the cool dark atmosphere of the Strang print room at the British Museum, the heat of Baselitz’s Pandemonium manifesto is clearly a bolus of unfocused nihilism, directed at dominant (West German) materialism. False, hollow heroes predominate as a theme in Baselitz’s early works – they seem to inspire pity more than respect.   Baselitz seems to be the most charismatic now that Beuys is no longer with us, but the rest of the gang of his contemporaries – Lupertz, Immendorf, Polke, Palermo –  are no less at odds with their homeland, its history and their lives in general. Richter….well, let’s come back to him another time.