Polke Post 20 - Launch Reader: Productive Image Interference. Sigmar Polke and Current Perspectives

POLKE POST 20
Launch Reader: Productive Image Interference. Sigmar Polke and Current Perspectives

It is with great pleasure that we are announcing the release of our new publication.
Reader: Productive Image Interference. Sigmar Polke and Current Perspectives is now available from DISTANZ-Verlag.

The reader gathers together the contributions by international scholars and artists to our online festival. Bice Curiger, Camille Henrot, Sandra Neugärtner, Alexander Kluge, Magnus Schäfer, Daniel Spaulding, and others examine Polke’s work and its pictorial contexts in commentaries, conversations, and essays, drawing connections to the current production of art. This is supplemented with new texts by Lilian Haberer, Adam Jasper, Franziska Kunze, Charlotte Lang, and Gabriele Wix highlighting the inexhaustible potential of image interference, and not only for Polke’s art.

The group exhibition at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2021/22), the accompanying catalogue, an extensive supporting program, and collaborations with Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, together with the online festival have made the anniversary project precisely what we would like to celebrate with this second publication: inspiration for continued engagement with Sigmar Polke’s work.

Our sincere thanks go to the authors, photographers, editors, translators, the team at DISTANZ and graphic designers, Petra Hollenbach and Thomas Spallek.
We hope you enjoy reading the book and cordially invite you to attend one of the two book launch events.

Saturday, April 29, 2023, 11.30 am, Breakfast talk with Bice Curiger and Raphael Hefti at DISTANZ, Berlin.

Tuesday, May 2, 2023, 7 pm, Nelly Gawellek in conversation with authors Lilian Haberer and Franziska Kunze at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf / Salon des Amateurs.

*Reader: Productive Image Interference. Sigmar Polke And Current Perspectives* | © Photo: Nadine Schwickart

As a brief foretaste, we are pleased to be able to share an excerpt from the text by Franziska Kunze below, examining Sigmar Polke’s manipulated photographs of the German Biennale Pavilion and interpreting them as an “active, perhaps even activist type of photography”:

Sigmar Polke, Pavillon Biennale Venedig (Venice Biennale Pavilion) — Sigmar Polke, *Pavillon Biennale Venedig* (Venice Biennale Pavilion), 1986, gelatin silver print, 30.8 × 40.4 cm, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich | © The Estate of Sigmar Polke / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

[Sigmar] Polke was born to a second generation of artists who, following the end of war, sought in their paintings subjects beyond the mimetic and in doing so engaged critically with their predecessors, taking existing images from mass media only to transform them. […] As with other artists of their generation, they exposed the press’s promise of truth as false and used painterly means to reveal the constructed nature of the photographic image. […] What was unique about Polke’s work for the Biennale was that it was in constant flux as a result of the chemical compounds reacting to the humidity and temperature in the exhibition space.[1] As part of his research, Polke visited the site months before, absorbing the atmosphere and taking photographs.[2] With this, the dictum of metamorphosis underpinning his work was already coming into play. In the analogue development process, Polke not only lifted latent images from invisibility, but also conjured up the ghosts of the past. In his art, he often treated and referenced the occult. The paintings themselves as well as their titles, with such works as Höhere Wesen befahlen: rechte obere Ecke schwarz malen! (Higher Beings Commanded: Paint the Top Right Corner Black!, 1969) and Tischerücken (Table-Turning, 1981), demonstrate this penchant for the transcendent. If his brushes and paints were his magic wand when it came to painting, his camera and developer fluids performed this role in photography. With it, he revived the tradition of spirit photography, which had its heyday in the late nineteenth century.[3] Polke played a double role during his preparations: the spirit-incanting medium on the one hand, and on the other the photographer capable of only maneuvering what appears visible to him into the sphere of general visibility.

The artist counteracts the ever-so-carefully established core task of photography to depict reality and extends it ad absurdum. He combined negatives conveying the pavilion’s appearance with other shots of elements and traces that caught his attention on site.[4] These include a mysterious foam and a shattered glass pane. Using a sandwich printing process he stacked the negatives, thus overlapping the layers of meaning and creating interstitial zones that commented on and classified the place of action, as if flooded and shattered by a surging past. […]

[1] See Sigmar Polke: Athanor; Il Padiglione, ed. Dierk Stemmler, exh. cat., 42nd Venice Biennale (Düsseldorf, 1986), unpaginated.
[2] See Jürgen Hohmeyer, “Es wird sich schon was zeigen: Jürgen Hohmeyer über den deutschen Biennale-Teilnehmer Sigmar Polke,” Der Spiegel, June 22, 1986, 160–63, here 161.
[3] For further details see Erhard Schüttpelz, “Empfindliche Materie: Geisterfotografie als Geisterangriff (Großbritannien 1872),” Fotogeschichte 84 (2002): 59–70.
[4] Sigmar Polke: Athanor.Il Padiglione, Ausst.-Kat. XLII. Biennale di Venezia 1986, Düsseldorf 1986, o. P.

Except from: Franziska Kunze, „Sigmar Polke's Materialization Strategies of Past Phantasmas", in: Reader: Productive Image Interference. Sigmar Polke and Current Perspectives, 2023, 169–72, here 170.