Sigmar Polke's images often suggest big questions - but leave the viewer tocome up with the answers, writes Aidan Dunne
We've yet to see a Sigmar Polke exhibition in Ireland, yet the German painter, now in his 60s, is one of the most influential European artists to have emerged in the latter decades of the 20th century. He is currently the subject of a major show at Tate Modern in London, titled, with typical presumption - and typical irony - History of Everything. It was organised by the Dallas Museum of Art and includes an appropriately huge body of work made directly with Texas in mind, as well pieces from his Printing Mistakes.
Polke was born in 1941, in a region of eastern Germany that is now part of Poland. By 1953, his family were settled in Dusseldorf, where he was apprenticed as a glass painter before going on to study at the influential Dusseldorf Art Academy in the 1960s. Among the artists he encountered there was Gerhard Richter, his senior by several years but recently relocated from the east and so back at school. Although temperamentally different personally and in terms of their approach to work, a close association developed between them, and a degree of rivalry.
They both worked broadly in the area of a movement termed, again with some irony, Capitalist Realism, a pop art variant that set them on their linked, though divergent, artistic courses. The crucial difference for them was that pop art offered a way of dealing with the world in terms of existing representations, in the form of the imagery and phenomena of consumerist culture, high and low. It was a much needed way of tackling the cultural landscape rather than the ostensibly natural landscape which was presumed to be art's appropriate subject. That has remained a hallmark of their respective styles.
Where Richter, arguably the more important artist in the long run, has been the more sceptical, guarded spirit, whose cold-hearted work barely makes its way into existence past barriers of exasperation and despair, Polke has been a more exuberant presence, at least in terms of surface appearances. But there is actually an intractable emptiness and bleakness at the heart of his critical explorations of the fabric of contemporary life.
Not uniquely, but with great verve and ruthlessness, he went on to make complex paintings drawing on a huge range of imagery, techniques and materials. Notably, he became obsessed, as did a number of artists, with the mechanical dot matrices that constitute images in lithographic printing. In conventional use, the point is that, filtered through a fine screen of dots, an image is readable as an image, not as a mass of dots, but Polke set about vastly enlarging the dots and messing around with the process so that we know we're dealing with a distorting medium. Everything we see, he implies, is similarly distorted.
Typically, images quoted from various sources - high art, newspapers, cinema, advertising - and on various scales are dragged arbitrarily together in his paintings, where they co-exist with wild gestural passages of abstract paintwork, with other signs and symbols, and often with mass-produced fabrics, whether monochromatic or printed with patterns. The resultant layered, overlapping, intermingled compositions can be atmospherically very powerful. They are cool, despite the sometimes frenetic level of activity; they offer us both too much and too little in the way of information, and in all this they can approximate to the condition of existing within contemporary, Western, urban culture.
The dots are much to the fore in the Tate, in both Printing Mistakes and more recent work.
On occasion, he frees the dot patterns entirely from their original representational function and exploits them as symbols of mutability and ambiguity: an image might be anything or nothing, or might mutate into anything, from quirky local detail to an astronomical event on a galactic scale, as in the works that give the show its title. He also links the dot pattern to other forms of network and organic processes, with considerable flair and conviction. Even here, though, some of the pictures come across as relatively laboured and over-extended.
Apparently, when he was planning the Texas show he requested that masses of local newspapers be sent to him, and the result is that the Texas work is not only saturated with newspaper imagery, but excessively dominated by it. It's as if he was so taken with the idea of drawing inferences and associations from the images he found that he didn't get around to doing enough with them. We're left with banal photographs edited and reprinted on a huge scale.
Obviously there is more going on than that, but it is a problem. Predictably, he looks to America's fascination with the gun. While he refers mostly to recreational shooting, he draws in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan and related events. Other pieces deal with ideas of feeling threatened and potential violence in odd ways - a tiny man surrounded by tall women, a semi-naked table dancer surrounded by ogling men.
There is a recurrent emphasis on seeing and not seeing, on the difficulties and pitfalls of perception. The confident predictions of omnipotent surveillance dissipate into ambiguity and uncertainty. A view of the site of the Battle of the Little Big Horn recalls a significant failure of judgment and perception in the US's past history. There is a lot going on here, but not really enough. It's spelled out over the vast expanses of some really enormous works - as much as four-and-a-half by five-and-a-half metres But many of them are what Polke terms machine paintings, which look suspiciously as if they are straightforwardly processed restatements of newspaper images mechanically printed on a monumental scale. One can't help feeling that a newspaper cartoonist would do the job more effectively in the space of a few column inches. Contemporary artists, presented with huge museum spaces, naturally jump at the chance to work on a major scale, but the work should necessitate its scale, not just be big for the sake of it. As it is, this show, interesting as it is, comes across as over-inflated.
Sigmar Polke: History of Everything is at Tate Modern until January 4th. www.tate.org.uk/modern/