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Visual arts: Taking pot shots at a media-saturated world
By Charlotte Mullins
Published: September 30 2003 19:11 | Last Updated: September 30 2003 19:11
Since his student days at the Düsseldorf Academy in the 1960s, German painter Sigmar Polke has been challenging and responding to the legacy of Pop art. Rebelling against the joyous consumerism of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Polke nevertheless used the tools of their trade to do so.
He reappropriated the "Ben Day" dot from Lichtenstein, who himself had lifted it from the half-tone printing technique of newspapers, and used it to distort and parody photographs, illustrations and diagrams he found in newspapers, politicising images and highlighting the ironies of many social conventions. In a climate where the mass media was increasingly scrutinised and deconstructed by a whole raft of artists and theoreticians, Polke was in many ways forging the way.
Now, 30 years on, his latest thinking on issues as diverse as the Taliban and Texan gun law is presented in 70 new paintings, prints and drawings at Tate Modern. Polke has always cast his net wide, and in History of Everything he breaks down many motifs - from terrorists and cowboys to erotic dancers and alien faces - and uses them to continue his exploration of how both our perception of pictures can be manipulated and how the image itself can be distilled and fractured through endless reproduction.
In the first gallery, an illustration from a German newspaper shows how the Taliban horsemen can be hunted using spy satellites; a painting nearby, "History of Everything II", repeatedly enlarges the riders, finally leaving little more than a Rorschach ink blot to suggest their presence.
Polke's work is surprisingly painterly, the lines assured but organic, the brushmarks visible, and his most abstract work in the show - a series of paintings of printing mistakes - offers a welcome counterpoint to the jumble of narratives presented elsewhere. Glitches and smudges from newspapers have been isolated and enlarged. Ben Day dots compact in on themselves, blooms of paint flare over lozenges of unreadable text, surfaces corrode as if under chemical attack. They are painted on gauze that has been dipped in resin and strengthened with chicken wire, colours added to both sides of the material creating abstract patterns of surprising beauty out of original errors at the printing press.
This exhibition started out in Dallas and while half the works at Tate Modern come fresh from Polke's studio, the more successful narrative paintings come from the Dallas show, and several deal with a subject close to most Texans' hearts: guns. Polke doesn't tackle gun crime head-on, but uses images of gun fairs and target practice to comment on the proliferation of guns in society: a woman smiles next to a bullet- ridden man-shaped target as she proudly cradles her revolver; a couple of gun- toting cowboys turn out to be plywood cutouts used for gun club practices.
But how much of Polke's scattergun approach to contemporary culture really hits home? Yes, he draws on Afghanistan satellite footage and Texan gun law, but simultaneously he uses archive film footage and 19th-century illustrations of butterflies to create new work, and it's hard to get a grasp on any overall message. Another German artist, Candice Breitz, who is half his age, has more success in her critique of today's world. By using film and television images from our collective past, she highlights the present lack of authenticity or belief in the moving image. And while artists have been disproving the maxim that the camera never lies for more than a century, Breitz's work has a complexity and pace worthy of our media-saturated and savvy world.
At Modern Art Oxford, Breitz has furnished a gallery in heartland America living-room style circa 1983. In it, J.R. is mad: he shouts "No" repeatedly from a television screen. Miss Ellie whispers "I'm so sorry" from another monitor across the gallery. Other characters from Dallas join in, all reciting key phrases from cliffhanger episodes like mantras.
"Diorama" features the stars of Dallas locked in television purgatory, endlessly repeating the lines that once secured their fame, and in her new show Breitz presents five video works that all play out along similar lines. In "Soliloquy Trilogy", Breitz has filleted classic films to leave only the lead character's lines. Jack Nicholson's The Witches of Eastwick footage comes in at 14 minutes; Clint Eastwood (Dirty Harry) and Sharon Stone (Basic Instinct) manage only seven minutes apiece.
Breitz's work draws on the things she saw as a teenager to raise questions about how identity on screen and in the mind is constructed. One work features "Hopelessly Devoted to You", a song recorded by Olivia Newton-John, then aged 30, playing a heartsick teenager in Grease, made in 1978 but set in the 1950s. Did we believe her then? Do we believe her now?
In "Becoming", Breitz takes key female scenes from romantic comedies and re-enacts them, lip-synching in perfect time. But by removing the scenery, the colour and the big (blonde) hair, she reveals the women for what they are: actors conforming to a stereotype, shedding crocodile tears.
Breitz is a rising star in her own right, and this show points to the surprising depth in her work, despite its critique of soundbite culture and the sham of the silver screen. As Eastwood put it in Dirty Harry, you know you're crazy if you think you've heard the last of this guy.
'Sigmar Polke: History of Everything'. Tate Modern, London SE1. Tel 020 7887 8000 'Candice Breitz: Re-Animations'. Modern Art Oxford. Tel 01865 722733
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