Art: Mocker of All Styles

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The show of early works on paper by the German artist Sigmar Polke, which runs through June 16 at New York City's Museum of Modern Art, is a bit of an anticlimax. Much has been expected of Polke. He is one of the two painters--the other being Anselm Kiefer--who rose to the top of the enormously promoted pack of "new" German artists in the 1980s and remained there when others dropped away or became, like Georg Baselitz, with his crude upside-down figures, formulaic bores.

The contrast between Kiefer and Polke couldn't be sharper, of course. Kiefer (whose drawings were recently shown at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art) is oratorical, Wagnerian; he is a flat-out mythomane, dedicated to the Sublime, the Enormous and the Ultra-German; a marvelous artist at his best and at his worst a Black Forest ham. Polke is thinner, weirder and more elusive. His work--whose basic nature developed during the period covered by this show, from 1963 to 1974--is a hard-to-read image haze formed by the overlay of Pop art on Germany's postwar consumer society and its emblems, refracted through a needling, ironic and sweetly anarchic temperament.

Polke depends not just heavily but entirely on the "appropriation" of visuals from all manner of sources, from comic books to ads, from news photos to William Blake. He skips and flitters like a frenetic troll through this forest of images without feeling the least impulse to make narrative sense. His work has the rambling, no-rules character of a dopehead's monologue. Indeed, just as Filippo Marinetti, leader of the Italian Futurists 90 years ago, called himself "the caffeine of Europe," so one of Polke's doodles, of a glass tube with powder spilling from it, is titled Polke as a Drug, 1968.

How high you get on him depends on your cultural expectations. Polke has influenced a slew of younger American painters, and been hailed as the man who set painting in the '80s free--as if it had been languishing in bondage before!--by reviving, once more, the spirit of Dada that breathed through such movements as the Fluxus group in the '60s. He's the arch-trickster, mocking all art styles, sending up the dreaded Canon. (The fact that no work of art by a famous artist these days can safely be considered really and truly outside the Canon seems not to have dawned on those inside the Museum of Modern Art.) His strategy, according to MOMA, is to subvert "the elitist mythologies of artistic creation and production." And so forth. Such claims are counters in a solemn Laputan game whose object is to ratify the countercultural status of a given artist and thereby justify his (or her) prompt entry into the cultural pantheon.

There are times when you feel that if you hear the words elitist or subvert just once more, you'll barf. So when MOMA's Margit Rowell, who in the past has curated some intelligent shows on Constructivist sculpture, Brancusi, Antonin Artaud's drawings and other topics, affirms that Polke's vernacular has "regenerate[d] the language and meaning of Western artistic experience," and suggests that he is the Hieronymus Bosch of our day, you sigh. Polke has never shown a smidgen of the aesthetic intensity, the absorption in religious and moral experience or the staggering completeness of Bosch's universe of images. This has to be the silliest comparison since Julian Schnabel last likened himself to Picasso.