Magnus Schäfer is an author and curator. From 2012 to 2019 he was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he co-organized the retrospectives Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010 (2014) and Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts (2018-19), and organized Projects 195: Park McArthur (2018-19), the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in New York. Together with Hannes Loichinger he published the first comprehensive monograph on Ull Hohn, titled Foregrounds, Distances, in 2015. The focus of his current research is on the role of digital media in formatting perception.
Scholarship 2020 - Magnus Schäfer, There is no such thing as too much information. Sigmar Polke and the digital
Magnus Schäfer, There is no such thing as too much information. Sigmar Polke and the digital
From the 1960s until the first decade of the twenty-first century, Sigmar Polke's multifaceted work questioned and deliberately undermined the conventions of artistic media including painting, drawing, photography, film and language. While he nominally adhered to these media, he continually eroded their boundaries, relinquishing established certainties about their appearance and functions.
The period in which Polke worked coincided with the proliferation of digital communication and image media. This raises the question of whether and to what extent Polke’s images can be brought into a productive dialogue with this development.
Of less interest here is the role digital images have played in Polke’s work, which is minor. Rather, the research project Es gibt kein Zuviel an Information. Sigmar Polke und das Digitale (There is No Such Thing as Too Much Information: Sigmar Polke and the Digital) investigates the forms in which the relationship between the continuity of the Kittlerian “Real” and its translation into discrete information characterizing the digital comes into play in Polke's hybrid image media.
As Rachel Jans and Kathrin Rottmann have pointed out in their contributions to the catalogue Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010, some of Polke’s works from the 1960s attest to a familiarity on the part of the artist with the technical-formal foundations of the television image coded into individual pixels (conveyed by his teacher Karl-Otto Götz) and the binary on/off scheme of digital operations. However, the fact that Polke imagined digital communication in 1968 as a telepathic session with the late poet William Blake illustrates that the seriousness with which contemporaries such as Max Bense had proposed communication theory as the basis for a new aesthetic a few years earlier is diametrically opposed to Polke’s artistic sensitivity.
In the early 1980s, however, things looked somewhat different. The Copyist (1982) shows a figure in the foreground, bent over a desk and writing into a large book. This medieval copyist is not reproducing another manuscript, but is observing a landscape which, the composition suggests, he translates into writing; he transfers the phenomenological wealth of what he sees into a discreet and symbolic medium, thus opening it up to further forms of data processing.
At the other end of the media spectrum are Polke’s novel gestural-abstract works, among them the Negative Value triptych, also created in 1982. These pictures feature iridescent surface effects, which Polke achieved through special treatment of violet pigments; they change according to the standpoint of the viewer, so that the three canvases can appear dramatically different from different perspectives. These effects—and thus the images as such—are difficult to capture in photographs and thus resist being stored as discrete information.
Polke developed this experimental approach at a time when electronic data processing was becoming more and more important and visible. With the technique of dragnet investigation introduced in the late 1970s, automated data processing became established in the societal consciousness of the Federal Republic of Germany. At about the same time, the first PCs became available to consumers. Against this background, Polke’s abstract images could be understood, with reference to the media theorist Friedrich Kittler, as the noise that underlies all communication and simultaneously forms the unwritable counterpart to the symbolic.
Polke also began experimenting with photocopiers in the 1980s. Enlargements of images from newspapers and magazines made the raster of the printed originals clearly visible—an effect he had been reproducing manually since the 1960s. Owing to the inaccuracy of the copying process, these enlargements created previously invisible constellations of raster dots which Polke sometimes extended or commented on with additional graphisms in order to give them a figurative meaning. By moving the originals during the copying process, he distorted representational motifs, sometimes causing them to become abstract (e.g. in the portfolio Kugelsichere Ferien (Bullet-Proof Holidays) from 1995). In the vocabulary of communication theory, noise stands for too many choices on the part of the recipient, i.e. a surplus of information that erases meaning. In order to transmit information economically, it is necessary to achieve the ideal distance between meaning and the inevitable noise. Polke’s photocopy experiments show that an excess of information can also lead to new meanings, thus opening up a productive dimension to noise.
In terms of the significance of the digital in Polke's later works, the question arises as to how far the juxtaposition with Hito Steyerl's concept of the “poor” image (cf. her essay In Defense of the Poor Image from 2009) can be illuminating. As it circulates through the media, the “poor” image, which is digital in principle, undergoes processes of compression, quality reduction and contextual shift, and thus appears as a “visual idea in its very becoming,” linked to the contemporary conditions of image distribution. Can Polke’s distorted photocopies be understood as analogue precursors of these “poor” images, or as a counter-model that, despite formal similarities (e.g. low resolution or reproductions of already reproduced material), makes the differences all the more obvious?