Scholarship 2024 - Gökcan Demirkazık, Photographic mythologies: Sigmar Polke's counter-anthropological gaze

Polke's photographic experiments transform documents into anti-documents—they subvert expectations of truth, transparency, and representation.

My dissertation investigates why and how Sigmar Polke’s preoccupation with material experimentation emerges out of his encounters with the world, especially with the communities and cultures of the broadly defined, notional Other. In a similar vein, it seeks to make sense of the resulting artistic processes in the charged context of a divided Germany: Cold War hostilities and solidarities, the influx of millions of Gastarbeiter, the contested collective memory of German colonialism and the Holocaust (or wholesale lack thereof) render encounters with Otherness—both physical and ideological—inescapable for subjectivity formation. Put differently, what does it mean to insist on material entropy, malleability of authorial gestures, and the reclamation of various—archaic or poisonous—forms of chromatic experience in an era of ossified political fixities and ravenous capitalist extraction and/or displacement of materials, resources, and populations?

The research project “Photographic Mythologies: Sigmar Polke’s Counter-Anthropological Gaze,” addresses a set of issues at the heart of my dissertation, revolving around the artist’s growing interest and engagement with non-European cultures, as well as anthropology. Indeed, as others have suggested, the artist’s concern with Otherness dates further back to the 1960s. During this period, it is possible to speak of a generic but somehow often fantastical iconography of Otherness, best exemplified by Polke periodic redeployment and reinvention of the palm tree as a mockingly exoticizing motif. However, even at this early moment, he demonstrates an affinity for critiquing epistemological structures that manufacture and propagate myths of difference through his own ostentatiously pseudo-scientific, diagrammatic travails; Menschenkreis(Fotokreis) I, 1968, and Pappologie, 1968–69, are among such works.

Therefore, it is not a coincidence that Polke befriends—like several other Rhineland-based artists including Lothar Baumgarten and Candida Höfer—the anthropologist and filmmaker Michael Oppitz in the 1970s, becoming a node in a network of artists interested in (pseudo-)anthropological approaches to the cultural Other and addressing histories of colonialism, tourism, and mass migration. As the list of Oppitz’s publications suggests, this moment is also a moment of deep self-introspection for the discipline of anthropology, which slowly begins to come to terms with its colonial, extractionist foundations and re-imagine its methods. And yet, if the anthropologist’s task is to make sense of an Other’s material and immaterial cultural forms, Polke and his travels fail miserably at shedding light on the specificities of world views, belief systems, and societal structures near and far. Particularly with his experiments in the dark room and pigment-based interventions, photography is forced to relinquish its documentary status and has to make space for flights of fancy. In the end, Polke leaves us with anti-documents that refuse to instrumentalize worldly encounters and Otherness—ones that make a travesty of their own alleged transparency and ability to “represent.”