From Zero to Infinity - exhibition of Sigmar Polke's work in Hamburg, Germany

Art in America, Sept, 1999 by Raphael Rubinstein

A show (now in Hamburg) of Sigmar Polke's early works on paper, including a suite of freewheeling, large-scale drawings, touches on consumerism, Cold War politics, German history, motorcycles and mind-expanding drugs.

In the face of the recent Museum of Modern Art exhibition "Sigmar Polke: Works on Paper 1963-1974," it's easy to forget how long it initially took for this German artist's work to make it across the Atlantic. Nineteen years elapsed between the earliest drawings in this show and Polke's first New York solo (in 1982, at Holly Solomon Gallery). A flurry of gallery and museum shows over the following decade, culminating in a retrospective that toured the U.S. in 1990-92, did much to make up for the delay, but, as the MOMA exhibition demonstrated, American audiences still have much to learn about Polke's art. Interestingly, Polke's achievement in this period comes through as well in his drawings as in his paintings; indeed, the former sometimes eclipse the latter.[1]

The exhibition also demonstrated the advantages that can accrue with the passing of time. For instance, from the perspective of 1999, it's easier to see that American viewers looking at Polke's work in the 1980s and early 1990s had to spend too much time thinking about his much-discussed influence on American painters such as Julian Schnabel and David Salle. Now that the latter have largely forfeited their claims on the viewer's attention (at least as far as this critic is concerned) by settling for the cautious tweaking of their signature styles, we're freer to consider Polke--an artist, by the way, who has made stylistic restlessness into a way of life--on his own.

What we find when we do so is a figure who, especially during the years covered by this show, is prepared to risk everything. In the 1960s, discarding all components that might normally confer value on a work of visual art, Polke found a new esthetic zero-degree through the intentional embrace of banality. In the early 1970s, he took an equally risky path by plunging, with the aid of mind-altering drugs, into a suite of visionary, near-chaotic works. Polke's art during these years is closely tied to larger events, including the then-prevailing political division of Germany, the expansion of consumer society and mass media and the rise of the counterculture, but it's also a fiercely personal art, the result of an inner adventure that has produced some of the most incisive and visually innovative works of the last 40 years.

In 1963, when the show opens, Polke was 22 and studying at the art academy in Dusseldorf, West Germany. That year, along with fellow students Gerhard Richter, Konrad Lueg and Manfred Kuttner, Polke made his exhibition debut in a vacated store under the moniker of Capitalist Realism (a tongue-in-cheek reference to the doctrine of Socialist Realism that prevailed in East Germany, whence Polke and Richter had emigrated, and to West Germany's "Economic Miracle"). Like the American Pop artists, whose work they had seen in magazines, Polke and his colleagues were in revolt against the gestural abstraction that had dominated the 1950s. As Margit Rowell, curator of the MOMA show, explains in the catalogue, Polke's work of the early 1960s is "humorous (whereas art was supposed to be serious), narrative (a pictorial system that had fallen out of fashion), and seems technically crude (whereas art was supposed to demonstrate superior technical skills)."[2]

Working with the lowliest of materials--usually blue ballpoint pen on newsprint or kraft paper, sometimes spruced up with watercolor or colored pencil--Polke produced clumsily rendered fragments of cartoons and advertisements. The figures in his early 1960s drawings, usually shown from the neck up, sport an army of stiff, pre-Beatles hairstyles, and their schematic faces have the lopsided, disjointed look of a child's drawing. Foodstuffs (butter, sausages, candy) and basic consumer products such as toothpaste and hair spray (of course) make appearances. The compositions are as rudimentary as the drawing technique and subject matter, motifs placed dead center, a cursory line for a horizon, sometimes a scrawl or an abbreviated pattern in the background. Many of the drawings have torn corners or edges; the paper is mostly yellowed and brittle, betraying its humble origins and is, no doubt, the nightmare of many a conservator.

While this attention to consumer culture was partly inspired by American Pop art, other aspects of Polke's work reflect his exposure to the Fluxus movement--in the early 1960s, Dusseldorf and nearby Wiesbaden were the sites of numerous Fluxus events. The anarchic, anti-art spirit of Fluxus is echoed in the way Polke shuns anything smacking of art professionalism (as well as in his taste for escapades such as the "Capitalist Realism" show). Fluxus in spirit, for instance, are his drawings of blobby heads from 1963 that look like they could have been done by a six-year-old. In contrast to the many preceding 20th-century artists who have looked to children's art for inspiration, Polke seems less interested in some ideal of innocent expression than in what happens when a child tries to copy an image and produces something that is to adult eyes an absolute failure, a mindless mess. His lackadaisical mark-making was also influenced by the graffiti-inspired paintings of Cy Twombly, which he had seen in 1960.[3]