We are delighted to be able to send, in this POLKE POST, a guest contribution by Dr. Julie Sissia, as a kind of appetizer. The author is not only an Anna Polke Foundation scholarshipholder (2019), but has also been involved in a discussion relating to her research “Cher Maître.” Sigmar Polke and France (a synopsis is available here) as part of our ongoing POLKE SALON. She talked to Bice Curiger, Artistic Director of the Fondation Vincent Van Gogh in Arles, about both Sigmar Polke’s exhibitions and the reception of his work in France, as well as about the role of national categories in art critical discourse and how these have impacted, not least, the work of the art historian and curator herself since the 1980s.
Polke Post 11 - “Braque-damaged” Bice Curiger, Sigmar Polke and France
POLKE POST 11
“Braque-damaged” Bice Curiger, Sigmar Polke and France
“They’ve been Braque-damaged, guitar infested, stupefied by still lifes. If they had at least had the grace to paint their oranges with poison! The great tranquilizers, pacifiers, Picasso, Fricasso and all the rest. There’s only one good artist in France and that’s fat Erik.”[1]
Sigmar Polke’s words were first published in the French publication art press in April 1985, in an interview between Polke and his friend and accomplice Bice Curiger, who had by that time already made a name for herself as the curator and founder of the Swiss art magazine Parkett. The comprehensive interview, the value of which can hardly be overestimated in view of the painter’s distrust of art historians and critics, provides an extremely entertaining testimony to the encounter. During the interview their faces were concealed behind ceremonial masks from Borneo, the encounter evoking negotiations between two rival tribal chiefs. The conversation jumps back and forth, but is only seemingly incoherent.
In the above photograph, both are wearing Hudoq masks from the Mahakam region in East Kalimantan, Borneo. Sigmar Polke acquired these masks from Werner Funke, a dealer in non-European art in Cologne. We would like to thank Werner Funke for the following information concerning the masks: "The Hudoq masks are found among the Dayak, especially the Bahau and Kayan. Hudoq is the name in the Dayak language for the hornbill bird. The feathers of the hornbill bird, which is an important figure in the mythology of the Dayak people, endow the masks with special power. Dayak ideas are rooted in animism, the presence of ancestral beings playing a central role in the social and spiritual life of the Dayak people. Dancers wore the masks for a variety of occasions, especially at Gawai, the rice harvest festival, when they were decorated with robes made from banana leaves. The masks were also used to ward off diseases and plagues." | © Curiger / Photo: Erdrand, Courtesy Parkett-Archive and Luma Foundation.
Whenever the conversation turns to France and the French, Polke ups the irony, delighting in a series of verbal pirouettes, consisting of a play on words and a Dada-like free association of ideas. His skillfully executed verbal attacks inevitably hit the mark. The vanity – and tautology – that accompanies every search for national identity, whether in the discourses of art or politics, is relentlessly dissected. Polke astutely exposes the contradictions of both France’s cultural policy and art institutions, together with their claims to the universal that have apparently been dragged along from another era. The interview sheds light on the shadowy areas of a national history marked by violence, which remain hidden in art and historical discourses. Polke "laughs and roars" and does not mince his words in denouncing France’s behavior at a time when the civil war in New Caledonia was about to reach its climax.
“Equipping the Force de Frappe with new foes is a job that would be too much for Jack Lang. Those skirmishes with a few Kanakas – that’s really stooping too low. A nation that proclaims liberty and equality has gotten rid of its images of foes, and they’re incapable of reading any other images either.”[2]
Polke, whose discourse unfolds, as does his art, through the stringing together of motifs and the superimposing of layers, touches on the frictions between a colonial past and revolutionary ideals, but also the points of convergence between military strategy and the visual dispositifs of knowledge. His words are already political in form in their eschewal of any linearity. The Swiss art historian and the German artist bring specifically French subject matter to light, which in turn casts an unexpected light on Polke’s own work.
In our talk it is the original interviewer that is now being interviewed. And since “art is punishment,” we will be considering at length such milestones of Polke’s reception in France as the monographic exhibition orchestrated by Suzanne Pagé in 1988 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, or the famous Magiciens de la Terre (1989) show, as well as the Parkett exhibition at Center Pompidou (1986). The talk will provide an opportunity for further discussion of certain works as well as unpublished archival documents.
At this point it should be noted that the interview in question between Bice Curiger and Sigmar Polke begins with a reference to Van Gogh, namesake of the foundation that Bice Curiger currently heads in Arles: “Which reminds me of an early drawing you made of a knife and an ear. It referred to Van Gogh, didn’t it?”[3]
To be continued […]
Dr. Julie Sissia
[1] “Sigmar Polke. La peinture est une ignominie,” in: art press, no. 91, 1985, pp. 4–10. Sigmar Polke quoted here from the Engl. version in: Parkett, no. 26, 1990, pp. 6–27, here p. 23. All the following quotes are from the Parkettinterview.
[2] Sigmar Polke, ibid.
[3] Bice Curiger, ibid., p. 18.