i thought at first his work was fun, poppy, bright text and language stuff- i liked it, but it didnt move me. then i saw his watchtower series, and it spoke elqouently to me about the nature of the totaltarion(sp) history of Germany and the west. So, esp. momus-who was inspired by polke for his latest album-tell me what you think of this gentleman.
― anthony easton (anthony), Wednesday, 25 September 2002 16:53 (twenty-three years ago)
I've not seen much of his work (and I've not see the Watchtower series), and he doesn't get an entry in the Pop Art book I read recently (Richter does). Still, you know I am interested in any of the post-Duchamp types whose work is often about art (and reproduction and originality and all that), but I've never really felt excited by anything of his.
― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Wednesday, 25 September 2002 19:31 (twenty-three years ago)
I think Polke's very much a painter's painter. What people find so liberating looking at his work is the co-existence of different techniques, styles and idioms within the same picture plane. (I guess that makes him the early Beck of painting!)
There'll be sketches, diagrams, collage, representational bits, polke-dots, whatever.
It's playful in the same way a short story by Donald Barthelme or Italo Calvino is playful. Anything goes, so long as it's interesting. This style makes for something fresh and interesting to look at, but it also leads us towards a certain philosophy of pluralism, reminding us that we always need a worldview, even for something as simple as looking, and that many worldviews can and should co-exist. And in this he's the exemplary post-war German painter, expressing a certain lightness and flexibility and freedom and optimism (as opposed to, say, Anselm Kiefer's heavy, history-laden works).
Polke's influence on young painters now is huge. And his titles show the same bastardising playfulness and inventiveness, stuff like 'Knitted Alps' and 'Rubber Band Durer Hare'. In some ways you could see him as an inheritor of the quirky humour of Paul Klee.
― Momus (Momus), Thursday, 26 September 2002 01:27 (twenty-three years ago)
Some
Polke themes:
The "platypus," 1963-64; children's drawings, 1964-65; "potato heads," 1965-66; ghosts or spirits, 1963-69; "baroque" motifs, 1963-68.
Isn't that great, to spend a year on platypus drawings? MoMA's press release continues:
'The "platypus" series shows figures whose silhouettes are both frightening and comic. Executed in felt-tipped pen on torn wrapping paper, the isolation of each motif highlights its emotional barrenness. The "face-to-face" and "potato head" series present conventional couples--mother and child, man and woman, or heads of state--translated as juxtaposed caricatured silhouettes, portraying a false togetherness. Drawings with the "ghost" or geist theme show the folk spirit of his potato heads, metamorphosed into the immaterial spirit. The "baroque" series contains stylized floral motifs and abstract curvilinear thrusts that are reminiscent of the painted and sculpted details found in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Silesian and Bavarian architecture. Polke's energy and deliberately awkward style are preserved in the rippling curves, stylized volutes, and cockleshells that traditionally connote the tension between the spiritual and the sensuous inherent in the Baroque style.
'Another small group is the "raster-dot" drawings of 1963-69. In this series, Polke explores a technique that he would elaborate in his paintings. The raster dot refers to the black-and-white rasters of the television screen...
'Polke's sketchbooks, which will be displayed in vitrines, provide a grammar of the artist's visual motifs, styles, and themes. With their extraordinary inventiveness and variety, the sketchbook drawings reveal Polke's desire to revitalize art through works that are in constant metamorphosis. They often contain experimentation with toxic chemicals, by means of which Polke studied the transformative properties of pigments.'
So you see he's not only bored by the idea of using one fixed style, he's bored by the idea of a painting -- fixed culturally and chemically -- which fails to change over time.
― Momus (Momus), Thursday, 26 September 2002 01:43 (twenty-three years ago)
ok nick- but he is playing and playing and playing-then he does these sombre(somber?) watchtowers,how does that fit into his ouverue(sp)
― anthony easton (anthony), Thursday, 26 September 2002 17:09 (twenty-three years ago)