“I Live in My Own World”

The declaration of Capitalistic Realism which took place in conjunction with Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg in the animated D?sseldorf of the 1960s – a motto which refers to the socialistic realism of the GDR and makes it the subject of irony – marks the entry of Sigmar Polke into art history, in which, in the space of half a century, he has secured an excellent place for himself. At this time, when Joseph Beuys taught at the college there, American pop art was prevalent, DADA and Francis Picabia were exhibited and Fluxus articulated the requirement for an identity of art and life, Polke and his friends decided, with campaigns and sculptural means, to take a sarcastic and polemic stance against the consumer world and make reference to that narrow, bourgeois dream world of the Economic Miracle of the young Federal Republic, the principal ingredients of which were rightly to travel into faraway, exotic regions, as well as the desire for physical pleasure, pin-up eroticism and a contemporary domestic ambience. Influenced by American art, they developed a variety of German pop, in which they focused upon the ubiquitous presence of the world of images of the media, as well as the dominant art movements. For example, with his painting “Modern Art” (1968), Polke satirised the constructivist and informal varieties of abstraction; it should not remain his final derisive commentary on contemporary art which, for its part, increasingly began to orientate his resourceful, original and cumulatively rapid steps and took in the extremely varied impulses which kept his diverse oeuvre and his extraordinary imaging strategies in readiness, and continue to do so.
Polke’s earliest creations were motifs from daily life, overlaid with dot matrices, on canvas and tacky printed tapestries on which the dot systems, actually industrial aids in reproduction, were initially applied, in contrast to the matrices of Warhol and Lichtenstein, without stencils, with a brush, and then with a board full of holes and an airbrush – or, when working on paper, with a rubber used as a printing plate – and cause irritation through minor discrepancies. The pictures are created three-dimensionally in several layers and glisten, agitated by all-over ornamentally created organisational points. In the stereotyped character of the regular, heaped-up and disjunctive dot matrix, Polke believed he had discovered the structure of his time and its uniform and standardised society. “For me”, he said in 1966, “the matrix is a system, a principle, a method, structure. It dismantles, disperses, orders and makes everything equal.” On later paintings, which emerged in the 1980s, he introduced negative matrices, white points on a black background, which thwart the legibility of the pictures.
With his means Sigmar Polke registers the position of the educational artist and the cultural scene as being as disquieting as alert observers to the same extent as social processes, German coming to terms with the past, the collapse of dictatorships and drug abuse; he aims at political events, which he records visually with many allusions and touches upon with his explicit, commentarial or enigmatic picture titles. He combines his phantasmagorias from trivial picture material, such as photos from newspapers and glossy magazines, comics or woodcut and xylograph compendia of the 19th century and quotations from the graphic design works of great master, in regard to which individual elements gain new significance, remote from their origin. “Love, death and the devil populate the pictures; romance and reality pervade them, sensuous, profound, also filled with private memories.” Levels of content – layers of reality – are displaced and novel references, frequently enough defying logic, created, which disclose a trait rarely enough encountered in German art: a laconic humour, even if it is also reserved. In addition – at least so the title of his prominent work “H?here Wesen befehlen: rechte obere Ecke schwarz malen!”, created in a dadaistic manner in 1969, would have us believe - Polke feels inspired and pressed by powerful extraterrestrial authorities or forces of nature. He attributes the removal of limitations from his creation, such as the investigation of hallucinatory and hypnotic states and phenomena such as trances and spiritualist seances, to their influence. In an autobiographical text going into his methodological principles, Polke wrote that it appeared to him “implicitly necessary, since the general assessment of my work as extraordinarily imaginative and full of ideas […] betrays a complete blindness to methodological problems and does not at all do justice to its likewise stringent and subtle methodology. For what looks as if it was devised by me was really empathy, i.e. it is not I who devised it, but it created empathy in me - just as what looks as if it created empathy in me was in reality devised by me, i.e. it is not I who empathised with something, but I devised it.” In another place he writes: “Yes, if anything at all exists to which all that applies which is always discussed concerning the artist: delight in innovation, creativity, spontaneity, creation for its own sake, etc. – then it is the potato: just as, lying there in the cellar, it spontaneously begins to germinate, in sheer inexhaustible creativity creating one new seed after another, receding right behind its work, soon disappearing behind its propagation, and creating the most wonderful structure.” Reason enough to set up memorials for the potatoes with two installations – a “potato house” (1967) studded with germinating tubers, whose radiation is supposed to transfer the power of growth from the potatoes to those who enter it, and a contrived “apparatus with which a potato can orbit another potato”. In spite of such initially amusing indications, a second, attentive look at Polke’s creations makes clear that his works were "not droll, not funny, but were still superficially intended to be funny. At once the covert anger which has been incorporated into them can be felt, the latent despair which is concealed behind the supposed picture jokes. Polke’s laughter always possessed those outrageous traits, with which what is holy in our eyes is concealed, the orgiastic moment at which the fundamental break between mankind and nature is abolished.”

Polke instigates a constant search to develop new paths in methods of painting and to try out their components in practice. Photosensitised canvases enable him to apply projected models without any problem. His testing of chemical reactions of pigments and lacquers on various media since the 1980s, initially experimental, and later consistent practical testing, demonstrates substantial convertibility and perishability, and simultaneously develops both an anarchistic and a constructive perspective. ?Since it no longer has to prove this nature, the painting suddenly once again proves everything that it can do, what it has always been - what it has never yet been, even if it would have liked.” Polke uses gloss paints, pigments, the use of which is described by him in picture titles with the words “giving breath, airy, whisked and polished”, synthetic sealing wax, chlorinated rubber, beeswax, synthetic resin, shellac, salts, micaceous iron ore, flowing and photosensitive colours and diverse - also highly toxic – tinctures not usually used in art, which in time undergo a process of change under the influence of light, heat and moisture, which has a long-term effect on the appearance of the works, long after they have been created. Polke‘s method of proceeding is kept in abeyance, in regard to which the invention, experiment, risk, unpredictable reaction, instability and corrosion maintain their balance in regard to their effect as competing design traits. “The interaction takes on many different forms, when the painter blows metal dust, even meteorite dust, into the synthetic resin or, with iodine or silver nitrate creates granulation, which evolves over the years […]. A new strategy of artistic “abstraction” is foreshadowed In this vitality. It can also be called a painted natural philosophy.”
Besides other materials, occasionally semi-transparent polyester canvas, on which patterns painted with the tuft portray shadowy figurations, full of associations, frequently serve as a medium for painting. The inlay of the stretcher frame and wall can be glimpsed behind the transparent painting surfaces. The pictures with a synthetic seal had several layers applied to the picture canvases laid out on the floor, onto the damp base of which Polke from time to time applied pigments, violet dust and grains of graphite, poured over gum arabica and applied silver leaf. The competent application of complex methods secured for Polke the reputation of an alchemist and magician of colour, who turned his studio into a laboratory. The result is magnificently opalescent productions, of which some explicitly pay tribute to the sage founder of alchemistic magic, enveloped in folklore, Hermes Trismegistos, and make visual reference to the mythical melting pot of the alchemist Athanor on the occasion of the presentation of a cycle at the Biennale-Pavillon of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1986. In connection with the accessible “Laterna Magica” painting installation begun in 1988 and perpetually being added to, which contains a consequence of illuminated “fairy tale pictures” visible on both sides, Martin Hentschel cites a test set-up by Polke, which throws light on his intellectual approach to the creation of a work. “I wanted to create a mirror with varnish, […] where you stand in front of it and see what is behind you. Then you paint what you see behind you, onto the picture which is in front of you. The next part is: while you see what is behind you, you worry about what is in front of you, which you cannot, however, see. For the illusion is already perfectly there.”
By pouring thick and thin paints and essences onto the painting medium, canvas, plastic film or paper, Polke ventures to only be able to control their flow with difficulty. They find their way on their own. Extensive picture sections are formed, deluges of puddles and clots, a subtle interplay of deep layers of colour and spontaneous placing of figures, during the creation of which the artistic handwriting is left out. Zones are formed in which the colours ripple, fuse together and explosively drift apart from one another. By coincidences, in the course of the procedure configurations emerge which appear to leave room for action and evoke associations of grotesque apparitional figurations. “Strange white shapes not connected with the accumulated dispersion all over the canvas are placed in front of a black and violet gouache background. The distribution and progression of the lush, fluidic substances are designed in such a way that in every case a figure occupies the field of vision. Astonishing regularities of the emerging lattices and network structures, root-like border regions suggest mysterious organisms and simultaneously unique images of higher art.” It is up to the artist to accept the images in the way that they have organised themselves, due to their consistency, or to modify them in retrospect. When working on paper, coloured or colour-based papers are frequently used, on which precisely defined structures, informal abstract dots, smears and atmospheric clouds of colour are compiled.
Since 1970 Polke has been taking new bypaths and opening up unorthodox detours for photography, not only because he permits the camera a certain life of its own in relation to complexities of exposure and advancing the film if he seeks to capture a specific situation with it, but, first and foremost, because he adopts the tools of the darkroom and all those liquids which can influence the development of a film as accomplices, if necessary to obscure the motif printed from the negative with the aid of chemical processes, the regulated influence of light sources and the principle of coincidence in supplementation of his planning. His handling of the medium is based on methods which stand in crass opposition to everything which a trained laboratory technician is expected to do, namely to create a perfect reproduction of what has been photographed. In the development process he manifests the artistic gesture, namely to fuse documentary and subjective moments. Double exposure, cross-fading and solarisation, geared formally towards dynamics and, as regards content, towards the demolition of rational destruction, a process whereby the photographic paper is re-exposed prior to fixing, or the alteration of the hydrated paper with developing and fixative fluid breaks all the rules of photography. That includes the consequent creation of unique works of art, while the medium is in fact geared towards the principle of - also unlimited - duplication.
Although early groups of works which arose in the kitchen at home, in the studio or on trips to faraway lands still portrayed illustrations mimicking reality or presented surreal alienated subjects, including reworked side views of the New Yorker Bowery, opium dens in Quetta, combatants in Pakistan, a bear fight taken in Afghanistan or “Cologne beggars”, in the1990s abstract formulations gain in popularity, due to the artist’s increasing interest in every conceivable form which can be created and photographic reproduction for its own sake, and that means seeking out and embracing the incalculable. Polke‘s interest has always been in the substance of what is illustrated, its body, its materiality to be defined - which is sometimes called into question - and its conduct in regard to other objects, which also appear to him to be of significance. Minor adjustments to inconspicuous items, such as bamboo canes “to be brought to life", peas or foot rules, were documented by photos in the 1970s and thereby attributed a higher value: they provide evidence of the mysterious activities of the artist and distinguish the elements used as worthy of exhibition. Due to reworking by the artist, they take on the appearance of being spiritually exalted, or at least appear as objects surrounded by mystery. That unforeseeable paintings, appearing to be visionary, can form through such adaptation underlines the intriguing effect which these cycles exert on the observer who recognises that an entirely different perspective on the items from that with which we are confronted in the everyday media is possible. “There is no suggestion of the idea, for example, in the centre of Polke‘s whirling pictures, that everything is permitted, because the entire sense of the world have long been dissolved in universal chaos, but the very much more fruitful conviction that only an open artistic method of working, takinginto account all perspectives, can put the artist in a position to do justice to the hidden, potentially unending levels of significance of a complex reality which can no longer be comprehended as entire sense.”
Finally, the celluloid-negative paper, or the paper coated with photosensitive silver salts, which is safe from the developing and fixing bath, experiences significant changes through additional chemical, physical or mechanical intervention, and works emerge which bear no similarity to the snapshots of the 1970s. Impurities, bleaching, damage, obliteration or spots arising when hydrating and drying the photos, are likewise accepted as traces of coincidental constellations, just as the loss of a subject which sinks into a sea of shimmering black. Other effects of these works are due to the assistance of radioactive or X-rays, to which the photos are subjected. Layers of mist likewise shroud sections of colour vapour of the representation, details glisten and recede from view, self-creating contours lose their conciseness when viewed from changing standpoints, turbulences are constructed out of them, take their place and create a significant visual atmosphere. Visual flaws, which take the observer by surprise, and uncertainties of all kinds fall within the artist’s purpose, because they enhance the range of possibilities for expression.
That possibilities such as those offered by photocopying technique find their way into his repertoire appears almost logical, because their technical functions also permit the emergence of incalculable pictures. Picture puzzles, which emerge through the manipulation of reproductions from his enormous reservoir of templates of various origins are shaped into futuristic, contorted sequences - “what wants to appear should be free to appear. Whereby the work no longer becomes the death mask of the conception, but continues to unremittingly bear witness in seeking the unforeseeable. As with the photos, the question is raised regarding authenticity, reality and notional allegation concerning everything, which we ourselves perceive or alternatively should see. Since time immemorial, Sigmar Polke has attempted to “erode and release torpidity or fixations, by attacking our being caught up in all too comfortable conventions with entirely unexpected means […]. Because Polke sometimes lets his subject appear playfully simple, almost as a children’s joke, one is even more balefully entwined.” We are concerned with an artist who does not cease to pose questions and likewise has to hand intelligent, as well as disconcerting, answers, which activate all the senses and provoke a great deal of thought, for a picture only becomes a picture once you add something to it yourself: “With mutative pictures, you have to bring something to them yourself, so that you can move with the flow.” “Can you always believe your eyes?” - the picture title of a drawing (1976) painted with fluorescent colours, and accordingly only clearly visible in the dark, appeals to our perceptive abilities, and the intangibility of Polke‘s cosmos bears witness to the double-barrelled statement of the title of a painting created in large format in 2002, with black specks on a silvery background: “I live in My Own World, but It’s Ok, They Know Me Here.”