This year we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. In July 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong was the first person to set foot on the moon. With works like Sternenhimmeltuch (1968) and Polke als Astronaut (1968), Sigmar Polke also inscribed himself in space at the end of the 1960s. On the occasion of this anniversary, in this POLKE POST we are focusing on the work Pasadena (1968), which was also executed during this period.
“The tenth photo, recorded in Pasadena. It shows the surface of the moon at the landing site of Surveyor 1. The stone on the left-hand side in the foreground of the picture is 15 cm high and 30.8 cm long. The bright dots are reflections of sunlight.”
This is how Polke described the source of his “raster” painting. Even before the moon landing, NASA disseminated the first images of the moon’s surface in the media. The Surveyor 1 space probe of the US space agency transmitted the first data and pictures from the moon to earth in 1966. The photographic views of the moon’s surface were made accessible to a public which at the time was not accustomed to seeing and recognizing such images. With Pasadena, Polke addresses one of these early NASA photos together with a caption that is not a caption, but part of the image, raising more questions about the information value of this picture than it answers. The photo in question can be found today on the Lunar and Planetory Institute’s website including the corresponding explanation.
Polke Post 3 - About Sigmar Polke's work Pasadena (1968) on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing
POLKE POST 3
Pasadena and the moon landing
“It is a peculiar spatiality, space that extends into the immeasurable, an endless vastness and coldness. It could evoke planetary, cosmic ideas. The many dots vibrate, oscillate, blur, reappear; associations ensue, associations with call signs, radio photographs, television. Then a certain mood creeps into my pictures, a little loneliness, abandonment, vastness, and yearning.”
Christoph Wagner investigated the metaphysics of the scientific images in Sigmar Polke’s work and we are pleased to quote an excerpt from his article on this topic by kind permission:
“It is telling that with this painting the then 27-year-old artist, who in 1966 presented a solo exhibition to the public for the first time (at the René Block gallery in Berlin) and with painter colleagues formulated the combative position of ‘Capitalist Realism’, revealed in an ironic, tongue-in-cheek way the intrinsic difference between textual and pictorial references to this new, up-to-the-minute description of reality: In the face of an image in which we recognize hardly anything more than a structure of stains and grids, we learn the size of two stones down to the millimetre, are apprised of a ‘landing site’ and ‘solar reflections’. The information value of the text is just as corrupted as that of the image.
At the same time, the text addresses the multiple transformation of the image in its transmission in different media modalities, from the exposed celluloid of the photograph and its digitalization and radio transmission, to its ‘recording’ at the ground station in Pasadena and the typographical rasterization of the original photograph. Here, the writing is part of the painting, and the painting is simultaneously an information carrier. Yet in their vanishing points, which are indissolubly shifted in relation to each other, both writing and painting also refer to the threadbareness of texts and images, to the metaphysics of scientific pictures. Neither of them show anything, but instead allude to the opacity of the media used (and not least always to themselves). And it is precisely this that constitutes the artistic epistemological value, the astonishing evidence, of his painting: Only when the composition of the painting itself comes into view can its epistemological value be interrogated.
(…)
In the early 1990s, art history initiated a fundamental paradigm shift in the humanities through the Iconic or Pictorial Turn formulated by Gottfried Boehm and W. T. J. Mitchell, which provided insight into the iconic structure and meaning of images for all areas of human knowledge. In many spheres of knowledge, this Iconic Turn has not, or not fully, been carried out: It means no less than mistrusting images, which implies the obligation to investigate their origins, their contextualizations, their implications, as well as their aesthetic and technical constructions. Reflection on the image and its functions under the aspects of image theory, aesthetic history, its very concept and its functions goes far back in art history and the history of image theory.
In this context, Sigmar Polke painted a key work in 1968 with Pasadena: There are no truths in images, unless one reflects the aesthetic interventions carried out with images. This insight provided by the Iconic Turn in art history can be made fruitful not only in the humanities, but – and Polke seemed to shout this out to us as early as 1968 – can also be transferred to image-based examinations of visualizations in all scientific areas.“
Excerpt from: Christoph Wagner: "Sigmar Polke und die Metaphysik der wissenschaftlichen Bilder", in: Blick in die Wissenschaft, 37, 2018, 45–48.