Mocker of All Styles

By ROBERT HUGHES

The show of early works on paper by the German artist Sigmar Polke, which runs through June 16 at New York City's Museum of Modern Art, is a bit of an anticlimax. Much has been expected of Polke. He is one of the two painters--the other being Anselm Kiefer--who rose to the top of the enormously promoted pack of "new" German artists in the 1980s and remained there when others dropped away or became, like Georg Baselitz, with his crude upside-down figures, formulaic bores.

The contrast between Kiefer and Polke couldn't be sharper, of course. Kiefer (whose drawings were recently shown at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art) is oratorical, Wagnerian; he is a flat-out mythomane, dedicated to the Sublime, the Enormous and the Ultra-German; a marvelous artist at his best and at his worst a Black Forest ham. Polke is thinner, weirder and more elusive. His work--whose basic nature developed during the period covered by this show, from 1963 to 1974--is a hard-to-read image haze formed by the overlay of Pop art on Germany's postwar consumer society and its emblems, refracted through a needling, ironic and sweetly anarchic temperament.

Polke depends not just heavily but entirely on the "appropriation" of visuals from all manner of sources, from comic books to ads, from news photos to William Blake. He skips and flitters like a frenetic troll through this forest of images without feeling the least impulse to make narrative sense. His work has the rambling, no-rules character of a dopehead's monologue. Indeed, just as Filippo Marinetti, leader of the Italian Futurists 90 years ago, called himself "the caffeine of Europe," so one of Polke's doodles, of a glass tube with powder spilling from it, is titled Polke as a Drug, 1968.

How high you get on him depends on your cultural expectations. Polke has influenced a slew of younger American painters, and been hailed as the man who set painting in the '80s free--as if it had been languishing in bondage before!--by reviving, once more, the spirit of Dada that breathed through such movements as the Fluxus group in the '60s. He's the arch-trickster, mocking all art styles, sending up the dreaded Canon. (The fact that no work of art by a famous artist these days can safely be considered really and truly outside the Canon seems not to have dawned on those inside the Museum of Modern Art.) His strategy, according to MOMA, is to subvert "the elitist mythologies of artistic creation and production." And so forth. Such claims are counters in a solemn Laputan game whose object is to ratify the countercultural status of a given artist and thereby justify his (or her) prompt entry into the cultural pantheon.

There are times when you feel that if you hear the words elitist or subvert just once more, you'll barf. So when MOMA's Margit Rowell, who in the past has curated some intelligent shows on Constructivist sculpture, Brancusi, Antonin Artaud's drawings and other topics, affirms that Polke's vernacular has "regenerate[d] the language and meaning of Western artistic experience," and suggests that he is the Hieronymus Bosch of our day, you sigh. Polke has never shown a smidgen of the aesthetic intensity, the absorption in religious and moral experience or the staggering completeness of Bosch's universe of images. This has to be the silliest comparison since Julian Schnabel last likened himself to Picasso.

Which is not to deny that Polke is an intriguing artist, and no respecter of pomposity. Sometimes his drawings have a deadly bite, solely as one-liners. One consists simply of an L, drawn in black ink on a page from a notebook. Its title, typed below, is Higher Beings Command: Paint an Angle! The date is 1968--a time when art circles in Germany, and the U.S. too, were still given to overheated "spiritual" rhetoric about the transcendent powers of all sorts of abstract art, from Kandinsky and Malevich through Barnett Newman. As an art joke, it gets close to the mustache on the Mona Lisa.

Still and all, Polke's smaller drawings get fairly monotonous en masse, though their edgy defiance of taste can be pleasurable, particularly in the earlier work. Drawn in ballpoint pen, the least aesthetic medium imaginable (no variation of line, just scribble-scribble and hatch-hatch), they take very ordinary objects--doughnuts, cheap shirts, cakes, vapidly smiling hausfraus and the omnipresent German sausage, which for Polke is the essence of what he called "Capitalist Realism"--and present them in full inanity as a comment on the ordinariness of objects of desire. Sometimes a touch of political comment comes in--at least that's what seems to be going on when he does Nixon and Khrushchev as potato heads--but it isn't a hard poke, more a distanced tweaking. As a satirist, Polke doesn't come close to 19th century Germans like Wilhelm Busch, whom he clearly admires.

The best things in the show are four enormous drawings on pasted-up sheets of paper, collectively titled The Ride on the Eight of Infinity, 1969-71. These are both obscure and curiously impressive: a yowling torrent of images that relates at one end to Polke's enjoyment of fast motorbikes and at the other to the German physicist Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which asserts--to put it in the simplest terms--that reality isn't stable but discloses itself only in shifting contexts. Some artists in the '60s doted on Heisenberg, particularly when stoned, and Polke more than most. These drawings inundate you with their turgid stream of consciousness; they have the character of trance utterances, but don't ask what they mean. (The catalog isn't a whole lot of help on that either.) But they carry a swarming and visceral conviction, their surfaces contain some beautiful passages, and at least they're not, as too many of the later small pieces are, just another Polke, like any other Polke.