ART REVIEW : When Pictures Vanish, His Work Just Begins

A museum curator once wrote that Sigmar Polke’s art was of major significance because it was the first ever to record a convincing visual equivalent to the elusive experience of ingesting psychedelic drugs, like LSD or mescaline.

Opinions might differ on whether being first at that achievement is a good benchmark of artistic merit, but the implied description is certainly apt. For Polke’s vaporous art is filled with strange and surprising images, which leave you with the apparent perception of remarkable sights you cannot logically explain.

“Sigmar Polke Photoworks: When Pictures Vanish,” the compelling exhibition that opened Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, examines in considerable depth one pivotal facet of the German artist’s often extraordinary work. Photographs have been important to his developing artistic vision since the late 1960s, and his well-known paintings have frequently been conceived as if they were themselves overgrown snapshots of evanescent experience. The show zeros in on his work with a camera, a darkroom and an unusually imaginative artistic intelligence.

Polke is neither a Photorealist nor a Surrealist, because his art does not merely describe or attempt to replicate images made by a camera or by the unconscious mind. Instead, he is an artist who means to create a vivid sense of enchantment through his work. “When Pictures Vanish” shows how photographs have been central to that effusive enterprise over the course of the last 30 years.

This large exhibition has brought together 138 works, ranging from an evocative series of small, rarely seen gelatin-silver prints from 1969-70 to several flashy, large-format C-prints made this year. There is also an eccentric 1969 film made in collaboration with Christof Kohlhofer and a dozen recent collaborative photographs made with Polke’s companion, artist Augustina von Nagel.

In between are photographs that have been subjected to all kinds of stresses and strains during the printing process--folding, irradiation, washing with bleach, slicing, layering, painting--all in an effort to demolish the usual seamlessness that characterizes photographic images we encounter in such abundance every day. If there is something Polke works hard to avoid in these pictures, it is ending up with a pristine print flawlessly produced in the darkroom with a perfect negative.

Conventional ideas of art-photography hold no interest for him. In fact, his work is intriguing precisely because it persuasively suggests that, by striving for purity, such photographs finally conceal more of the world than they reveal.

At one time or another, most everyone uses a camera to make souvenirs of the wondrous experiences of life--an amazing sight seen, an intimate person loved, an ordinary episode enjoyed. Polke is no different. He began making photographs out of a similar impulse, which seeks to capture a fleeting moment in order that it may be revisited, relived and somehow understood.

He recorded projects in his studio and the social calls of friends, including the English artist-duo, Gilbert and George. He took pictures when he traveled, making suites of images in Paris, New York and Sa~o Paulo.

In Pakistan, he photographed during visits to an opium den. In Afghanistan, he photographed a horrific sport in which a chained bear is brutally set upon by dogs, while grinning male spectators cheer them on.

In all of these cases, however, Polke subjected his photographs to assorted darkroom (and sometimes post-darkroom) manipulations. Often the pictures that resulted are marked by a mysterious, cloudy feel, enlivened with flashes of applied color or gilding, like a nighttime scene glimpsed by lightning.

By contrast, when ordinary folks take souvenir pictures, the film comes back from the lab, and something always seems to be missing. Yes, the picture might be good; it might nudge your memory of the experience it was meant to record, reigniting in your mind some ephemeral flicker of its original spell. But it’s that memory, never the photograph itself, that finally seems enchanted.

And that is the critical point where Polke’s souvenir pictures differ from yours and mine. Polke’s pictures are remarkable because, even though they seem to arise from the same mundane impulse, it is the photographs themselves that are charismatic. The pictures live.

The artist has talked often about his interest in alchemy, the Medieval science-cum-philosophy that sought to find a magical elixir of life and to transform base metals like lead into dazzling gold. Alchemy can be compared to Polke’s aim of transmuting a dead image, fabricated with light and chemicals, into a living work of art.

The sorcery is in the surface. Polke’s abrupt and sometimes rough-hewn manipulations give his photographs a lived-in look, as if they themselves have been through worldly experiences equivalent to those of the people depicted in them. The creases, blemishes, smears and splatters are like character-lines etched on a person’s face.

Among the most beautiful is “Fountain of Youth” (1984), a picture in golden and silvery hues that seem to melt across the image. It shows a man and a woman in a museum looking at a Northern European painting, which appears to represent the title’s subject.

The photograph’s surface is interrupted with more than two-dozen big circles, like greatly enlarged printer’s dots or spots dancing before your bleary eyes, as if the negative had been punctured repeatedly with a paper punch and then layered with a second negative. A new image seems in the miraculous process of being born, merging into your view of spectators happily contemplating the fountain of youth.

With works such as this, Polke was among a handful of critically important artists in the late-1970s and 1980s who endowed photography with a stature hitherto reserved for painting. A wonderful retrospective of Polke’s work in all mediums organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1990 traced that evolution, and it included a number of the artist’s photographs. (Among them were several based on Goya’s brittle masterpiece, “The Old Women,” which are also on view here.) Now, the photographic survey goes in for a closer look.

At MOCA, the survey does not follow a strict chronology, but loosely slips from the present to the past. Works are frequently installed according to visual affinity, not date.

It only seems right for an artist for whom the irrational and serendipitous are more to the point than are the logical and programmatic. Polke is a masterful proponent of making life through art, and this show is adept at unfolding that magical feat.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 626-6222, through March 24. Closed Mondays.