Sigmar Polke. Flesh and Epidermis
Sigmar Polke’s Photographic Infamies, an exhibition presented at LE BAL in Paris, until 22 December 2019, under the direction of Georg Polke and Fritz Emslander, with the help of Bernard Marcadé and Diane Dufour, presents a set of 300 previously unpublished prints from the years 1970-80. Displayed for the first time in France, they reveal the iconographic richness and complexity of the artist’s photographic work.
By his own admission, Sigmar Polke was never interested in the photographic image per se, in the sense of a snapshot of a “decisive moment”, but rather in the processes and procedures underlying the act and result of taking and making a picture, with their lot of unpredictability. Regularly associated with the retrospectives organized around the work of the German artist who died in 2010, photography, although at the heart of his pictorial work, was rarely the subject of presentations that could allow the unrolling of the scope of possibilities Polke used to deconstruct this medium, and this through an approach where amateurism and playfulness were combined with an “alchemist” dimension inherent to his aesthetics. A cycle of exhibitions presented in the United States (Los Angeles, Santa Fe and Washington) by Paul Schimmel, between the end of 1995 and the beginning of 1997, made it possible to grasp the complexity and elasticity of his photographic work, to identify the themes and main angles (if indeed it is possible to broach such cataloguing), to reveal the stratifications and highlight the link maintained (or not) with its pictorial counterpart.The exhibition mounted by LE BAL, focusing on the production of the 1970s and 1980s, provides new pieces of evidence all the more welcome as many works, never exhibited before, are from the artist’s family collection and in this respect occupy a privileged place in the constellation of inexhaustible photographic scenarios concocted by the demiurge of Düsseldorf.
A DOUBLE DYNAMIC
As Martin Hentschel recalls in an essay devoted to Polke’s photographic work, it is driven by a double dynamic: combined with a neutralization of the image’s powers of representation, paradoxically documentary underpinnings allow it to also record, especially in the 1960s, movements, actions, “small activities” and so forth. Documentary or conducive to experimental developments, his images never come under a “professional” approach that seeks to optimize an “analogical perfection”, to use the formula of Roland Barthes, specific to this medium. “Compared to the precision of the photographs by Bernd and Hilla Becher,” writes Hentschel about Polke’s first photographs, “they seem like the work of a dilettante and don’t even approach the aesthetics of an amateur photographer. In his time, under-exposure, overexposure, double exposure, blur and reflections were, in amateur photography, so many taboos that inevitably led to the sidelining of the shots concerned. Polke violates these prohibitions with enthusiasm and obviously achieves a high level of credibility: this is exactly how things must have happened, there is no doubt about it. The objectivity attributed to photography, its function, which
is to certify reality, is referred, in this form, to a magic of everyday objects, also associated with a post-Dadaist sense of humour (1).” This foregrounding of “everyday objects” would, in the last third of the 1960s, be completed by operations carried out in the artist’s darkroom. “In addition to the resources already mentioned,” says Hentschel, “he sets in motion a whole arsenal of technical and chemical procedures, by which he bypasses the rules of classical photography. He scratches the negatives, interrupts development, turns on the light in the middle of it, pours foreign substances into the developer, puts his hands or various objects on the photographic paper during the process of revelation, erases and discolours parts, places the same motifs – in positive and negative – on a single sheet in a kaleidoscope of shapes, etc. (2)” The works of the 1970s and 1980s are dependent on this double dynamic, this toing and froing between the photographed motifs and their photographic translations. Between a pattern, depending on the case, relatively spared or, on the contrary, subjected to modalities that can’t be qualified as iconoclastic insofar as the image, far from being denied, is exacerbated according to other creeds than those related to a mimesis the Bechers aimed for.
DISRUPTION
With Polke, it is striking that the photographic image is sometimes the object of a superficial action, which alters its epidermis, sometimes of a shock treatment which in turn upsets its flesh (3). Given the fact that the artist doesn’t hesitate to intervene through various operations in its production, to maltreat the very essence of what constitutes it, to manipulate it in order to partially dissociate it from the ontological link connecting it to the motif the image cannot be reduced to issues of two dimensions, in the most modern sense of the term. The border between skin and flesh is, however, in some cases difficult to distinguish, a grid-like plane combined with pixel-like dots of printing being situated on the dividing line between a front and a back, a top and bottom of the photograph, the said grid, the artist’s ultimate trademark, being a means, as Schimmel recalled, of disjoining – the author speaks of a “disruption” – the coherence of the image (4). In other words, in photographs made from or innervated with “dots”, it is the epidermis that reveals the flesh. We find the same ambiguity in the many works created from overlapping sets. “What interests me,” Polke said of them in an interview with Bice Curiger, "is whether we find ourselves above or below. If it is the top that counts or the superposition of the layers.The one lowest dow has no choice and can only say ... If it was the only possibility, is it possible to remain oneself? We must have to get out of there. An old Chinese saying says that an overlay never lasts forever and that what is below cannot stay forever below. Overlays allow us to prove a very simple thing, namely that everything is moving. The mind is moving too. When will this stratification stop? Never (5)!" This form of ambivalence, we finally come across in the images produced, or more specifically generated, on the occasion of Polke’s participation in the 1986 Venice Biennale, where his intervention in the always very problematic German pavilion, especially with a mural designed in connection with hygrometric variations, left a strong impression. The images taken from the interior of the building at the time of installation bear witness again to the meshing of epidermis and flesh, the highly granular photographs reflecting a porosity between the different iconic and indexical strata. They also reveal the experimental dimension of a creator perpetually engaged in a manufacturing process, the slightest shot that may eventually be subject to extensions allowing Polke to find the right balance between destruction and (re) construction of the image. And the prints in question – that also applies to the hundreds of hours of raw material of film accumulated by the artist – are often, almost always, “poor”. Initially “poor”. Because, once manipulated, converted into a work, the least image is transfigured. Whether they are recovered (the Goyas), taken from family photo albums, taken from “reports” abroad or simply produced “on the spot”, starting with Düsseldorf – the moody atmosphere of the FRG of the 1970s seeps into multiple works – the images revived by Polke continue to transcend a "medium art" that they could easily feed, as his photographic practice crosses the social uses of this medium. But he does something else. And it is in this
doing, undoing, redoing, in the act of transformation that Polkian magic takes place. His images don’t speak to us exclusively about spaces or surfaces, planes or depths. But just as many temporalities (of the act, the process and the technical reproducibility). Also, to Curiger’s question of whether time stops in his paintings, Polke replies, “Not in mine! They never stop changing ... They vibrate non-stop. You have to look at my paintings very quickly. To look at them, to take them with you to bed, to never leave them alone ... To caress them, to embrace them and to address prayers to them, or whatever. You can trample on them, beat them, whip them. Every painting wants us to take care of it. A painting becomes a painting when you do your bit (6). The same observation could have been applied to his photographic work.
(1) Martin Henschel, [ The unpredictable and the magical. The photographic work of Sigmar Polke in Objectivités, catalogue of the exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, Paris, 2008. (2) Same. (3) “The silver halide paper is a skin, a body itself, and its touch by Polke gives birth under his hands to sensual reactions [...],” wrote rightly Bice Curiger, in Sigmar Polke, Photographs, Paris 1971 (1989), in Mariette
Althaus (ed.), Sigmar Polke et les Esprits Supérieurs, Dijon, Presses du réel, 2015.
(4) See Paul Schimmel, "Polkography" in Sigmar Polke.
Photoworks: When Pictures Vanish, catalogue of the MoCA exhibition, Los Angeles, 1995. (5) Sigmar Polke, "Painting is an ignominy", interview with Bice Curiger (1985), in Mariette Althaus (ed.), Sigmar Polke and higher minds, op. cit., p. 130-131 for the Annie Brignone’s French translation. (6) Ibid., P. 132.