Escaping from a storm·so Maria Morris Hambourg recounts·Polke and a couple of friends of his duck into a seedy bar. Outside, the air is heavy, charged with electricity; inside, the atmosphere is smoky, charged with other sorts of tensions: alcoholic, erotic, brutal. The men killing time together here and having extra fun with the foreigners, behave with no regard for social and sexual decorum, tease and taunt the young artist. EverythingËs suddenly spinning before his eyes. In the darkroom, Polke tries to resuscitate this dizzy air of insecurity. What his senses, his consciousness, and his camera have recorded in this bar, he tries to replicate as a fusion of the taking of the photo, its exposure, and print. A sort of darkroom écriture automatique. He aims to bring the siteËs fluidity, its mingling, its streaming of energies into the darkroom; to re-evoke the moment in all its vitality. For exposures Polke uses technical paper normally chosen more for drafting than for reproducing pictures. ItËs very thin and pliant, so that the image materializes less on the paper than in the paper.

"Sons of dark are seen by none," concludes BrechtËs Three penny opera. Viewed in this way, darkening photos is the adequate form for illuminating the fact that the men Polke observes with this camera in this bar are societyËs cast-offs. As though photographs could "enlighten" anything, anyway! Polke the pessimist rejects the notion of enlightening content for documentary photography. Here again we encounter his distrust of printed images. What photography documents is in and of itself obscure.

The motif of fringe groups and urban outcasts recurs in PolkeËs work of this period. Not merely because of his own experience as an impoverished student does he sympathize with drinkers and homeless people, but also because here he stumbles on the existential question: What are we? Life as risk, "living on the edge." The edge exists where norms and standards of control (that of consciousness, say) no longer apply: in drug and alcohol highs, in socially marginal existence. Or beyond West-European, Christian culture, as in Afghanistan, which he travels through in 1974. And like many young people of his generation questing after meaning, he mingles anarcho-bohemian social romanticism with an interest in "archaic" rites and a yearning for transcendent experience, in order perhaps somewhere to find an answer to the question: What strange sort of creature is man?

It seems as if artist myths are dumped on historyËs rubbish heap at the end of the twentieth century, if only for one or another loose form of thought to dig them out again, ingest them, and, fortified by this nourishment, acquire new myths to be told and swallowed in turn. So that ultimately intelligent existence canËt help but be cannibalistic.

Annelle Lütgens. Translated from the German by David Jacobson.