Ian Rothwell is an art historian with a focus on contemporary art and digital culture. He received his PhD in History of Art from the University of Edinburgh in 2017 for a project titled Images under Control: Pessimism, Humour, and Stupidity in the Digital Age. He currently works as a Teaching Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Edinburgh where he teaches specialist course options on ‘Art and Digital Culture’ and ‘Bad Painting’, which analyses how painting came to be seen as the ‘bad object’ of contemporary art. He is also working on a monograph titled The Afterlives of Post Internet Art, to be published by Routledge in 2022.
Scholarship 2021 - Dr. Ian Rothwell, Polke's Bad Drawing
Dr. Ian Rothwell, Polke's Bad Drawing
Polke’s Bad Drawing is a project about Sigmar Polke’s sense of humour, specifically as it relates to his drawing output in the 1960s when he (along with Gerhard Richter, Konrad Lueg and Manfred Kuttner) styled himself as a ‘Capitalist Realist’. In this period he made a series of drawings of commodity goods, often made on crumpled scraps of paper, which have a provisional, casual, slapdash, and careless aesthetic. They look like intentionally bad versions of the pop art that was coming out of America at the time. There has been a lot of writing on these works. Not least, by Mark Godfrey, Dietmar Rübel, and Darsie Alexander in the book Living with Pop: A Reproduction of Capitalist Realism (2013), and in the catalogue for a 1999 exhibition at MoMA titled Sigmar Polke: Works on Paper, 1963–1974.
This project will build on the established literature on Polke’s drawing and provide a new focus on his artistic methodology, which I will argue is intentionally bad, ironic, sarcastic, and stupid. It is in this respect that this project is about Polke’s sense of humour. This is an important, essential, aspect of his oeuvre and overall aesthetic sensibility. However, it has, until this point, not received any significant studied attention.
To my mind, Polke’s ‘Bad Drawings’ exemplify his sense of humour. This is why they demand attention. They are funny. But their humour is a kind of anti-humour – the ironic outcome of a seeming lack of craft, skill, and, more significantly, of any clear critical or political position.
This lack is made to seem funny. I want to investigate this sense of humour. How can a focus on Polke’s humour supplement an analysis of these works? What about Polke’s style or ‘draughtsmanship’makes them appear ironic? How does an artist draw sarcastically? To what extent is Polke’s style a response to the German socio-cultural context? How can we evaluate this response? To what extent can we see Polke’s ironic, sarcastic sense of humour, or anti-humour, as critical?
Whilst these ‘Bad Drawings’ were made in the 1960s, my specific focus on them in terms of their sense of humour also raises a very contemporary problem, which will also be explored in this project. Polke’s ironic and sarcastic style pre-empts the dominant sensibility of much ‘post-internet’ art and culture, which has been variously criticised for its use of irony and sarcasm as a form of overcompensation for a supposed lack of criticality. This sensibility has been pejoratively labelled a form of ‘aspirational nihilism’, which refers to a culture of sarcasm and anti-establishment sentiment that was once the preserve of the Left but has now been absorbed into the neo-reactionary and gleefully sociopathic ‘alt-right’ ideology and the imperative to ‘disrupt’ in Silicon Valley.
There is a risk that Polke’s ‘Bad Drawings’ and his particular sense of humour might be collapsed into this bad objectof ‘aspirational nihilism’. In this respect, a nuanced analysis of strategic forms of irony and sarcasm in art making is needed. It is needed so that we can extricate artistic forms, such as Polke’s ‘Bad Drawings’, from these noxious contemporary socio-cultural trends. Building on this, this project will argue that Polke’s ‘Bad Drawings’ can be seen as blueprints for an ironic and sarcastic form of art making that resists this contemporary trend of ‘aspirational nihilism’, producing critical consciousness rather than gleeful sociopathy.