Two East German Defectors Walk Into an Art Gallery...

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Interview between John Anthony Thwaites and Gerhard Richter, written by Sigmar Polke, October 1964

JAT:  Mr. Richter, you are the most talented of the German Pop painters; you went through all the hardships and the hostility that the movement encountered in its early days; and you now occupy a leading position in the movement. Perhaps you can tell us something about your work and your artistic development.

GR:  I have a lot of work, and I am well developed artistically, and also mentally and physically. I pull the expander front and back. And if you saw my new pictures, Mr. Thwaites, you would collapse!

JAT:  Why?

GR:  Because they’re so good! You’ve never seen such good pictures in your life. No one has ever seen such good pictures, and I can’t show them to anyone, because everyone would collapse. So in the first place I hung cloths over all the pictures, and then in due course I overpainted them all white.

JAT:  And now?

GR:  Now I don’t paint at all any more, because I don’t want to have the whole human race on my conscience.

JAT:  How many victims have your works accounted for?

GR:  I don’t know, exactly. The exact statistics do exist, of course – they run into the tens of thousands – but I can’t concern myself with trivia. It was more interesting earlier on, when the big death camps in Eastern Europe were using my pictures. The inmates used to drop dead at first sight. Those were still the simple pictures, too. Anyone who survived the first show was killed off by a slightly better picture.

JAT:  And your drawings?

GR:  I haven’t done a lot. Buchenwald and Dachau had two each, and Bergen-Belsen had one. Those were mostly used for torture purposes.

JAT:  The Russians are said to have five of your paintings and drawings. Is that so?

GR:  I don’t know how many.

JAT:  Stalin mounted his reign of terror with two pictures. After killing millions of Russians, it’s said that he caught an accidental glimpse of one of your pictures, just for a fraction of a second, and immediately dropped down dead. Is that so?

GR:  I don’t know. One of my best paintings is in the Soviet Union.

JAT:  So what happens next?

GR:  I don’t paint any more. I can’t, because I don’t want to spread terror, alarm and anxiety everywhere, and depopulate the earth. But now it’s come to the point where I only have to think my paintings out and tell someone about them, and the person rushes off in a state of panic, has a nervous breakdown, and becomes infertile. That is the worst effect. Though I can’t say so for sure, as yet, because – depending on who tells the story – I have already caused dumbness, hair loss (mainly in women) and paralysis of limbs.

JAT:  Is it true that you supply paintings to the U.S. Army?

GR:  I can’t tell you anything about that.

JAT:  Have you no scruples, or anything?

GR:  I am an artist.

JAT:  Do you believe in God?

GR:  Yes, I believe in myself. I am the greatest, I am the greatest of all!

JAT:  Thank you, Mr. Richter.

GR:  Not at all, Mr. Thwaites.

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Now being reminded (via stumbling-upon) of the bit above, which I'd completely forgotten about, having first encountered it in a book I owned some years ago.

I know that the concept of the “fatal/killing joke” (as in, “die laughing”) had been around long before the Monty Python skit based on the same premise, had been around for a long time – but deadly paintings? Gallows humor in a Cold War context of postwar Germany, as well as a cynical dismissal of the heroic notion of “art as a weapon.” Also, it hints at the pair’s own anxieties about pursuing the quaint and retrograde practice of making paintings at the dawn of the consumer age – the suspected pointlessness of creating singular, hand-crafted images amidst the deluge of mass-circulated imagery pouring forth by way of magazines, advertisements, movies and TV, etc.. “Cynical” in that one, perhaps, could only continue to paint or make art by shrugging off the suspicion that doing so meant pursuing an increasingly marginalized, devalued, insignificant endeavor.*

The cynicism and dark humor of the “interview” are most likely attributable to Polke. Jokes about the feebleness of art in the postmodern age were a constant trope in his work throughout the years. For instance, a painting produced by Polke some five years after the text above, in which the artists has a laugh at the “transcendental” conceits of the pure-abstraction school of painting...

...In which the purity of the composition is sullied (if not nullified) by the intrusion of text, text which roughly translates as, “Higher powers command: paint the upper right corner black!” (And in that font, no less.) And then there's this one from 1976, with its obvious reference to the Nazi-via-malappropraited-Nietzschean übermenschen theme, transplanted into a postwar setting...

...About which I always wondered if Polke didn't derive the idea from the title of Norman Mailer's famous essay about JFK's nomination at the 1960 Democratic National Convention.

Such was the character of Sigmar Polke’s anti-mannerisms – corrosive irony combined with a pomo pastiche sensibility that appeared to disregard all notions of “high” and “low,” thus allowing a maximal accommodation for the most garish of decorative kitsch. Add to this his seemingly arbitrary or slipshod methods in the craftsmanship department, his incessant flirtation with visual murkiness, if not outright “ugliness.” Problematic and abrasive enough for some audiences, one supposes, were it not all capped off with – of course – the artist’s recurrent visual allusions to the repressed demons of Germany’s recent past. “For him,” critic Peter Schjeldahl once wrote of Polke, “Aesthetic decorum appears to be roughly as important in the present state of civilization as table manners during an air raid.” Unsurprisingly, hazy accusations of borderline “nihilism” have occasionally been made by some critics.**

At any rate, Sigmar Polke will most likely be the subject of some long-overdue inkage on these shores on account of the MoMA retrospective that's presently kicking off. High time, too. Polke received only a bit of letting attention in the U.S. previously – mostly back in the days of so-called “German Invasion” early phase of the 1980s NYC art boom. I believe at the time his work was touted as an acknowledged precursor to that of art-boom passing fancy David Salle. But ultimately Polke’s work proved a little “too German” – that is, too esoteric and impenetrable – for American eyes; because the attention fell away, soon enough. The spotlight would mostly go to Anselm Kiefer for the remainder of the decade, before critical consensus began to finally settle on Richter as the most important European artist of his generation.***

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*  Wasn’t there something along these lines serving as a theme in Wim Wenders’s 1991 film Until the End of the World – a character at some pointing morosely muttering about contemporary life being overrun by a “disease of images”? Difficult for me to recall the context, as it’s been about two decades since I saw the film.

**  In this respect, it could be argued that between Richter and Polke, the latter proved to be far more of an influence on younger artists in West Germany – particularly the “bad boy” Cologne coterie of Kippenberger, Oehlen, Büttner, etc.

***  In retrospect, it would seem that the American artworld craze for postwar German art mostly served to buttress the legitimacy of emerging NYC art trends. By which I mean: Polke as an establishing precedent for Salle; Georg Baselitz and A. R. Penck cast in the supporting roles for the neo-expressionism of Schnabel, Rothenberg, et al., and so on. Like some stealthily-chauvinistic booster campaign that whispers, "We've got credit in the Old World!."

When We Were Real

Eh. Maybe I was wrong. Or only slightly off. Perhaps it is a subtrend, after all -- the matter of curatorial re-enactment. I say this after reading about an exhibition which recently wound down at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, a 50-year anniversary commemorative "Reproduction" of the 1963 art event Leben mit Pop – eine Demonstration für den kapitalistischen Realismus, as originally organized and staged by four young and as-yet-known artists: Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Konrad Lueg, and Manfred Kuttner.

But in some respects, the Kunsthalle affair wasn’t a literalist attempt at restaging the original event. For one, the reproduction was hosted by an actual museum, whereas the original was staged in a department store. Also, it doesn't strictly focus on the original event so much, but rather on those first few years that Polke, Richter & co. were associated with each other as they developed – each in his own way – the "Capitalist Realism" aesthetic that they'd chosen as their shared artistic banner. And while the artists themselves took active part in the staging of the 1963 event (a la a Fluxus-style “Happening”), I doubt anyone approached the surviving instigators about "getting the band back together," so the Kunsthalle instead mounted a number of large photographs from the occasion that graced the walls throughout. In fact, as a review in the art publication Spike has it, the curators decided to go all-in with the "reproduction" thematic trope:

"Most significantly, the works by Richter, Polke and Lueg – Polke’s Socks (1963), Richter’s Neuschwanstein Castle (1963), for example – were presented only as full-scale, photographic reproductions, mounted unassumingly on corrugated cardboard. This decision to include only reproduced works (excepting the real letters and photographs that were presented in the archival vitrines) somewhat collapsed the formal divisions between work and reception, and more significantly, demonstrated an attempt to strip these canonical paintings of aura."

As far as contemporary art is concerned, we’re still very much living under the influence of Pop; in much the same way that we’re still awash in the thrall of the material culture that inspired the movement’s first generation of artists. So much so, that Pop holds an almost monolithic presence in the cultural imagination. But between the Kunsthalle’s revisitation of Leben mit Pop and the Tate’s tribute to the 1958 This Is Tomorrow exhibition a few years ago, we’re presented with a somewhat ironic conundrum – as each of the original versions of these two exhibitions embodied two different, international responses to postwar material culture. The Independent Group’s This is Tomorrow exhibition was largely celebratory in tone. The Group’s engagement with the emergent culture of the day, via their activities at the London ICA and the resulting exhibition, were a largely noncritical – and at times enthusiastic – exploration of the transformative dynamics of “mass culture” (as well as a generational rebuke against the parochialisms of Herbert Read and his fellow directors at the Institute).*

But the four artists responsible for Leben mit Pop had a different relationship with postwar American popular culture; one which was much more ambivalent. Each wveas young enough to ha come of age in the years following World War II, in a mainland Europe shaped by the Marshall Plan – the U.S. recovery project that aimed to rebuild war-torn Europe and counter Soviet ideological influence by way of promoting its own model of postwar prosperity and democracy abroad. As Europe struggled to extract itself from the rubble and get their own industrial economies in full operation, these years saw a deluge of American products and media, all of it modeled after a middle-class lifestyle as broadcast and imported wholesale from another shore. A love/hate relationship ensued among some Europeans, one characterized by a circumspect regard toward a blinkered culture of consumerism that sometimes rubbed against the grain of traditional native values. Some would eventually begin to refer it as the “coca-colonization” of Europe.

Add to all this that Polke and Richter had both been defectors from regions of East Germany. Having been exposed to postwar European life on both sides of the Wall, the recognized that the true marketplace wasn’t so much about objects and mod cons, but ultimately one of ideas. With the shape of contemporary culture coalescing around the channels through which these ideas were communicated – through the airwaves, films, magazines, showrooms and Expo halls of late Modern society.


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*   Or, as IG co-founder Reyner Banham called it, "the marble shadow of Sir Herbert Read’s Abstract-Left-Freudian aesthetics." It might also be noted that the Group’s focus wasn’t limited to pop culture in the common sense, but extended to science and technology, as well. For this reason, the sometimes utopian optimism that characterized the IG’s discussions and activities have provoked occasional comparisons with the aesthetics of Italian Futurism earlier in the 20th century.

Canon Fodder: Some Random Sidenotes

Claire Bishop begins her essay “Digital Divide” (see prior post) with the springboard thesis that many recent artists shirked or fallen behind in embracing and utilizing current digital technology. Instead, she argues, there’s been a recent trend in the opposite direction – “an eschewal of the digital and the virtual” as manifest in a predilection for obsolete analogue technologies like 8- or 16-mm film, slide projectors, pre-digital photography processes, and the like. Her query on the topic is as much theoretical as prescriptive, and to some degree she answers her own rhetorical questions before even asks them. Perhaps no more so than when at one point she concludes, “The continued prevalence of analog film reels and projected slides in the mainstream art world seems to say less about revolutionary aesthetics than it does about commercial viability.”

Which acknowledges one pragmatic aspect when it comes to digital art (or a lack thereof). For the sake of display and presentation, one can always uncrate a painting or sculpture, or – by following a detailed set of instructions and schemata – reassemble an installation. Anything involving technology will inevitably pose the problem of obsolescence, if not the possibility of having to reverse-engineer a solution in order to get it to function properly. Perhaps preferable for everyone involved not to bring the item out of storage after several years only to encounter an error message: “PLATFORM NOT SUPPORTED.”

One could argue that the theme of obsolescence has been with us since the advent of pop art (if not earlier), if not an integral component of pop’s reflections of consumer culture. Bishop skirts around acknowledging as much when she cites the practice of artistic “repurposing” at play in the work of contemporary artists, particularly Rashid Johnson. Yet Johnson’s practice of gathering and displaying could be viewed as a variation on the same as done by Haim Steinbach, if not harkening back to pop and assemblage “combines” of Robert Rauschenberg and his neo-dadaist peers; at least to the degree that they all involve a similar repurposing and reclamation of mass-produced goods or cast-off detritus.

The theme of obsolescence is central to Pop because it’s also a core component (a feature, not a bug) to the economics of consumer culture. In that respect, one can detect an undercurrent of morbidity beneath the sheen of Pop’s alleged celebratory engagement of the common culture; that flash of recognition that comes from a work being so immediately tied to a given cultural moment. But one day's ephemera is the next day's rubbish or marginalia, and the pace of supplantation – one gadget or app or upgraded operating system replacing another – builds in momentum and rapidity as one approaches the current digital age.

Analog or digital, perhaps neither here nor there in this instance; one being – in a sense, theoretically – a metaphor or stand-in for the other. All of them bound for a garage sale or trash heap sooner or later.*

The artist Robert Smithson intuited much of this early on in his career, having initially been attracted to working in a Pop style in the early 1960s, but quickly abandoning it to take his work in other directions. For Smithson, obsolescence was but one of many things that fell under the larger domain of entropy, the latter being the central guiding concept to his "earthworks." Case in point, in his 1966 essay "Entropy and the New Monuments," Smithson quotes Vladimir Nabokov’s observation that, "The future is but the obsolete in reverse."**


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Another scenario; continuing on the themes of obsolescence, entropy, decay and shelf-life...

Doing a little more casting about, I find a couple of other critics citing incidents of “recurated” exhibitions – revivals or resurrections of notable exhibits from bygone eras – and each expressing wariness about it being a sign of some nascent trend. Which begs the question: Which exhibitions might merit such a thing.

First that leaps to my mind: The "Eccentric Abstraction" gallery exhibition, as curated by critic Lucy Lippard back in 1966, which featured the work of Alice Adams, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, Keith Sonnier, et al. The exhibition’s notable for a number of things, among them the role it played in introducing the broader public to the work of Eva Hesse; who has largely unknown at the time, and would eventually be canonized, years after her untimely death.

I raise this somewhat perversely, given the fate encountered by a number of Hesse’s works. Her piece for Lippard's exhibition, "Metronomic Irregularity II," posed its share of installational issues; having at one point before the opening fallen from the wall on account of being improperly mounted. As it was, a fair amount of assembly was required for the piece, and it was reported to have lain around in an "undone" state for a long while after the show.

Other of Hesse's works have been lost due to the materials the artist chose to work with – namely, the pieces crafted from latex rubber. It was a newly available material at the time, and Hesse (along with some of her peers) used it for some of its physical properties, finding it ideal for crafting surreally & uncannily corporeal abstract objects. Thing is, as a material it doesn’t age well – eventually decomposing, warping, decaying, withering. Which makes them candidates for the category of works of art that no longer exist in their original form, although there have been efforts to recreate some of them in recent years.

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*  Curiously, once thing that Bishop overlooks (or intentionally avoids in her citing repeated uses of obsolete tech like 8-mm film and slide projection is these devices' prior very-common role in pedagogical settings (as opposed to their entertainment or interpersonal "communicative" functions). This consideration, I suspect, plays no small part in why such gear has been adopted by particular artists in recent years.

**  The quote, incidentally, is taken from Nabokov’s “Lance,” which was written in 1952 and counts the final short story that the author ever published. The story takes the form of a science-fiction tale concerning interplanetary travel, which Nabokov frequently taking the opportunity – via the story’s narrator – to vent his own loathing of the science fiction genre.