Good enough to eat: on Richter, Polke, and the artistËs self-pillage


"Love wants to emerge from itself, merge with its victim like the conqueror with the conquered, yet keep its conqueror's privileges."
- Charles Baudelaire

The quest for an egoless art, that squaring of the circle, which consists of creating, as a person, something impersonal, or suprapersonal, permeates the aesthetic movements and manifestos of the twentieth century, from futurism to surrealism, whose model of creativity survives in abstract expressionism. Surrealism starts out by assuming there is a natural unconscious in human beings, one that communes with an unconscious nature and produces something analogous to Nature: Art.

Anthropophagy, as a part of these aesthetic strategies of the European avant-garde means, on the one hand, the offensive proliferation of irrationalistic forms of action, as a demolition of the dominant culture through consumption. At the same time, it partakes of the still-thriving, utterly romantic notion of the artist's self-consumption, self-immolation: the artist "eating his heart out," forced to turn the world and himself into an object in order to produce art.

In contrast to this destructive notion, I admire the constructive energy in the theory of anthropophagy that Brazilian painter Tarsila do Amaral and poet and philosopher Oswald de Andrade advanced in the twenties by going back to the roots of their own civilization: a reconstruction of their own history, an anticolonialistic transvaluation of man-eating aggressivity, an end to the piratical despoiling of nature and to social oppression.

Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke are two artists who by their very working methods put behind them the myth of genius, or as Foucault would say, of the author: their art foregoes all ideology, their painting takes the form of reflection on the possibilities of painting or art history, their work is open to chance and the commonplace.

To characterize the altogether different traces of the Anthropophagite evident in the work of Polke and Richter, I am tempted to recast my opening Baudelaire epigraph to suit each artist. Richter's would read: Painting wants to emerge from itself, merge with its victim, photography, like the conqueror with the conquered, yet keep its conqueror's privileges. And Polke's: Life wants to emerge from itself, merge with its victim, the artist, like the conqueror with the conquered, yet hand over to it the conqueror's privileges.

Polke represents a passive stance: the artist as medium, who lets himself be seized, ingested, occupied by chance: he must feed himself to Life, for Art to arise in the process. In Richter I see the active anthropophagite, the cannibal incorporating and in turn relinquishing his history through subjects.

Richter's 48 Porträts [48 portraits] from 1972, is avowedly a search for the father; yet the work also takes its distance from patriarchal cultural history. The individual steps of this incorporation and expulsion of subjects are known: It starts with a gathering of material (stamp-size photo-portraits from various reference books), which Richter then transforms into another pictorial medium, that of painting. This entails transfer to a larger format, formal adaptation and unification within the painting process. Next comes the mounting of the work at a designated site, the German Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. For presentation of the 48 Porträts in Cologne's Ludwig Museum, where the work has been on exhibition since 1980, the individual paintings were framed in plexiglass and hung in the museum in one block, in rows of four or five. At the same time Richter transferred the painted images back into photography, since he photographed his paintings on a life-size scale. This photo series would also occasionally hang in the museum. Recently Richter even brought out an edition of the photographs. Being identical in size and in their framing, the copy is increasingly hard to tell apart from the original image.

What started out as the pillaging of bourgeois cultural representation and its visual code ends up as exploitation or plagiarism of oneËs own art-work: appropriation in a dual sense. Richter, confidently shunting between photography and painting, accomplishes on the level of the art-medium what he has done with his distribution of space in the Hall of Fame in the Venice setting: a blurring of boundaries, an emptying-out of meaning. Ideas have lost their authority, famous personalities their individuality, the mediums of photography and painting their specificity. What remains of the uomini famosi are nothing but empty, desiccated insect larvae, impaled and put under glass, deposited in the museum, storage site for our humanist cultural wares. Worthless specimens.

Richter carried on his distanced, precise quarrel with the fathers as a member of a postwar generation whose representatives of their cultural heritage had grown, to say the least, questionable. In 1968, if a rhyming slogan of the West-German student movement that translates, "Under the [academic] gowns the dank odor of a thousand years," brought attention the Nazi past of GermanyËs universities, it was not only to demand other teachers, but also other contents for that teaching. The early 1970s saw major changes in the West-German politics of "reckoning with the past." The government, led by social liberals, put an end to revanchism in foreign policy and worked out a basic agreement for mutual recognition with the German Democratic Republic. Educational reform became a top priority in domestic policy.

In such a historical context, RichterËs installation of the 48 Porträts in the German Pavilion of the Venice Biennale could only have seemed all the more hollow and ironic. This false-bottomed nostalgic mounting of a Hall of Fame, in which the visitors had to file past a row of pictures hung above eye level, imposed a peremptory distance, as the blurred outlines and surfaces of the painted photos created the optic fuzziness of a copy. Yet it was also impossible to ignore that the provenance of the portraits was the sort of portrait photography geared to reducing a personËs individual traits to passport format. Inanition of photography is a favorite theme in Richter as well as in Polke, just as painting from degree-zero is. It is objectified in the monochrome gray, in the Benday dot grid.

The alchemist Sigmar Polke, in his photo series from the seventies, allows the material to do its own work. He sets up an alchemical process, waiting to see what will happen: amalgamation, fusion of subject, photographic shot, photochemical process, folds of the paper backing and traces of the artistËs activity. Together, these ingredients make the image. The motif is attacked by the chemicals, dissolving at different points. Polke, who loves the dot grid, that technically smallest unit of picture reproduction, and who works the dots on this grid as a corrosive fermenting process into his paintings, is equally unsparing toward the original photo. The image must be decomposed. These traces of destruction and dissolution are necessary so that the photoËs reality content may come through once more; for Polke doesnËt trust the traditional, static, and descriptive photo. It says nothing. The flow of living matter is documented in the confluence of photo chemicals. PolkeËs attitude toward the photographic process is basically that breaking the rules brings interesting results. He refuses to stick to the instruction manual, tame the chemical substances, get them to react purposefully, "properly;" heËd rather have them spread purposelessly. With the slogan "Developers and fixers of the world, unite!" revolution hits the darkroom.

What does this anarchistic principle mean for photographic motives? LetËs take as an example the 1974 Bärenkampf [Bear fight], photographic records of popular rustic entertainment in Afghanistan. It deals with the ritualized fight between a bear and several dogs. We recognize men setting their dogs, one after another, on the bear, while burnous-clad spectators sit or stand in casual rows on a gradual incline. Some have rested their bicycles down in front of them. It doesnËt really matter how the fight will end, but if anything, how long it will take until the dark, hulking bear is bitten to death by the sleek, light-colored dogs.

Polke creases and curls the exposed photo paper, retards developments and takes care to distribute the fluids over the paper unevenly. How will this struggle of substances end? What will remain of the photographed motif? Compassionate, Polke spares the bear, putting in vertical and horizontal creases in such a way that Master Bear, who always appears in the middle of the photo surrounded by his canine assailants, wonËt be exterminated a second time by photo chemicals.