After Modern Art by Hopkins David;

Author:Hopkins, David; [Hopkins, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2018-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

Turning to painting, the postmodern epithet is frequently attached to Sigmar Polke, previously discussed (in Chapter 4) in relation to German Capitalist Realism [63]. Looking at This Is How You Sit Correctly (after Goya) [102] of 1982, it is possible to see how his earlier appropriations of mass-media imagery subsequently became intermingled with diverse high-cultural allusions. Against a background featuring a collision of two varieties of decorative fabric, one abstract, the other sprinkled with saccharine animal motifs (possibly for a child’s room), Polke has overlaid fragmentary, irresolute linear quotations. This mode of layering imagery was partly borrowed from the French dadaist Francis Picabia, whose Transparencies of the 1920s, consisting of linear overlaps of disparate motifs, had a distinct vogue in the early 1980s. The American painter David Salle, who was directly affected by both Picabia and Polke, set elliptical fragments of 1950s textile design into grisaille fields of soft-porn imagery, floating nebulous and deliberately crude graphic notations from Old Master paintings over them. Polke’s melding of public and private, decoration and fine art, also harks back to Rauschenberg’s Bed [19]. However, whilst Rauschenberg’s discursive jumps were mediated by a formal logic, Polke’s cultural fragments seem irreconcilable. The effect is very much that of Jameson’s ‘rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers’.

102 Sigmar Polke

This Is How You Sit Correctly (after Goya), 1982

Polke’s work frequently juxtaposes images wrenched from different periods of history. At the bottom left he makes use of a collage by the early twentieth-century surrealist Max Ernst, whilst the central image derives from a satirical etching by the Spanish Romantic artist Goya.

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