Luke Smythe is Senior Lecturer in Art History at Monash University. His articles and essays on modern and contemporary art have appeared in many journals and catalogues, including October, Modernism/modernity and Oxford Art Journal. He is the author of two books: Gretchen Albrecht: Between Gesture and Geometry (Massey University Press, 2019) and Gerhard Richter, Individualism, and Belonging in West Germany (Routledge, 2022). From 2012-2014, he was Guest Curator in Postwar Art at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich.
Scholarship 2022 - Dr. Luke Smythe, Polke and material art history
Dr. Luke Smythe, Polke and material art history
Sigmar Polke is well-known for his wide-ranging engagement with all manner of substances in his art. But his work has yet to find its place within the materials-focussed narratives of art’s development in recent decades that are currently being written. With this consideration in mind, my research project takes up the task of writing a new material history of Polke’s art. By more thoroughly examining the function of materials in his work, and more closely attending to his partnerships with non-human actors, I aim, first, to establish a clearer picture of his attitudes to matter and materials and, second, to position him within the expansive nexus of art practices that during the long arc of his career made related but distinct investments in matter and its creative capabilities.
There is no shortage of discussion of Polke’s myriad material experiments, but this has often focussed on isolated bodies of work. His approach to material agency has been widely discussed as well, but mainly in relation to movements like gestural abstraction, Dada and Surrealism, and his interests in alchemy and art history.
I plan, in contrast, to provide a more encompassing overview of his relationship to matter and materials, as this evolved across all areas of his practice between the 1960s and his passing, and to connect his work to other styles and movements in which matter is of primary concern.
Adopting this perspective will allow me to explore the hypothesis that, by virtue of his material sensibilities, Polke can be placed art-historically between two generations of artists: European painters of the postwar period for whom matter, in the guise of shattered objects and obliterated bodies, had been synonymous with devastation; and an array of contemporary figures who embrace it as a vital and self-organising fount of creativity.
During the first phase of Polke’s career, the shadow of the war’s devastation loomed large across his work. But rather than evoke matter in its raw and degraded postwar states in the manner of established painters like Jean Fautrier, Jean Dubuffet, and Alberto Burri, he engaged with manufactured materials in the guise of consumer products and printed images. Although familiar with the hardships of the early postwar period, Polke used his Pop-inflected work of the 1960s to air misgivings about the culture of reconstruction. As industrial control of nature had expanded throughout the Wiederaufbau, a standardised material environment had taken shape. In response to this development, the lives of the burgeoning middle class were becoming as banal and homogenised as the products they consumed. Frustrated by this arrangement, Polke started to unravel and contest it in his work of the 1970s, which was informed by a new approach to materials.
It was then that he started working with raw and unstable substances, whose agency he only partly controlled. In so doing, he embraced a freer, more collaborative conception of subject-object relations than that which prevailed in the wider culture. His use of LSD as a creative co-contributor to his work was another important marker of this shift. Ingesting it endowed his sensorium with new creative capabilities, and he fed some of the resulting experiences back into his art. But who or what was responsible for the works that bore their imprint? In each case there were several creative agents at work, who for a time became entangled, to the point where their respective contributions cannot be distinguished. As his career progressed, he would increasingly embrace such entangled arrangements and expand their parameters.
Conceiving of Polke’s work in this collaborative fashion suggests a new way of interpreting his attitudes to matter. Instead of understanding it as something low or abject in the vein of postwar matter painters or other artists working in the tradition of the informe, he lifted it above the state of fully-formed materials. Even when his works appear formless and degraded, they play host to effects of wonder and transformational strangeness, facilitated by the independent actions of unstable materials.
Positioning Polke as a celebrant of matter, alert to the entanglement of agents who cannot be strictly separated from each other, edges him toward more recent figures, like Olafur Eliasson, Herwig Weiser, Susanne Kriemann, and many others, who call attention to the agency of non-human actors in their work, often on ecological grounds and with a view to expanding our conception of what ought to count as living, creative and intelligent. I am not yet sure how closely he aligns with such figures, but I aim to elucidate this relationship, along with other issues relating to his place within material art history.