Sigmar Polke

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And into his own hands this picture went. Sigmar Polke (1941–2010) is widely recognized for making an art from all that is unknowable, building images from gathered fragments, and delighting in the illusionary universe of these constructions.

In Unser Kundendienst! (“Our customer service!”) (1985), it is the artist whose gloved hands grip the canvas, flashing its emblazoned message: “When you buy a new mattress, we’ll take the old one to the trash.” But for this painting to actually wind up in the garbage bin would be a nearly impossible event. To Polke the art world’s tendency towards excess was predicated on the consumption of the new and the disposal of the unsalable; he holds up Unser Kundendienst! to remind the viewer of this irrefutable fact.

In 1964, Polke began using commercial fabrics for his paintings, buying colorful decorator fabrics at markets and department stores and stockpiling them in huge mounds in his studio as possible supports for future works. The fabrics that Polke chose were firmly rooted in 1950s design, both in their muted palette and their simple stripes, checks, and figurative motifs. Polke’s fabrics bring us into the sphere of consumption and the reality of a working-class existence in the FRG of the 1950s, in which one was completely subject to the mythology of the West German economic miracle.

In a 1966 interview, Polke uses the term Rapport to describe his fabrics, a technical term employed by textile designers and manufacturers to refer to a repeating pattern in textile. Christine Mehring speculates that Polke’s use of Rapport instead of Dekostoff, meaning ‘decorative fabric’, suggests he chose his fabric—and by extension the other materials that were subject to his appropriation, quotation, and parody—“with expertise, care, and an eye for iconographic, formal, material, and historical nuance” [1]. Das Palmen-Bild [The Palm Painting] (1964) is the earliest example of this technique.

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It is the early 1980s that mark a decisive phase in Polke’s career. Having spent the 1970s engaged in photography, extensive travel, and wide-ranging experimentation with drugs, Polke embarks on a return to painting facilitated by his total immersion in the very material of his paintings, experimenting with minerals, metals, lacquers, resins, and varnishes and stitching together larger and increasingly multiple swaths of fabric, thus redefining his earlier use of textile. By applying synthetic materials such as acrylic resins to his surfaces, Polke would turn relatively opaque textiles translucent, allowing Polke to play on the transparencies and opacities of the support.

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Polke’s work was rarely seen in the U.S. until the 1980s, though both Julian Schnabel, who Polke met in 1974, and John Baldessari, who regularly provided his CalArts students with information on European artists that was otherwise difficult to find at the time, were more appreciative of Polke at an earlier date. By the 1980s, several major international exhibitions pushed American audiences to integrate European painting into their view of contemporary art, and the American market began to pay attention to a generation of German painters that included Polke, Richter, Baselitz, Immendorff, and Penck. Polke’s first solo exhibition in New York was in 1982 at the Holly Solomon Gallery, where he showed three large paintings from 1972 that were not stretched across traditional frames, but instead hung across poles and that combined printed fabrics, painterly marks, and popular culture imagery [3]. Polke returned to New York in 1984 to show at Marian Goodman and again in 1985 to show at Mary Boone. With New York at the center of the heated market for contemporary art, it is perhaps no surprise that Polke painted Unser Kundendienst! in 1985, for by then he had seen and experienced first-hand the intense American market that seemed to strive to meld art and commerce.

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The brilliance of Unser Kundendienst! lies in the way that Polke structures his critique on the changing tastes of art and commerce. In contrast to American Pop Art, which glorified the triviality of the consumer world in high gloss and large format [6], Polke instills in Unser Kundendienst! the blatant contradictions between high culture and mass culture, between the rigidity of high-modernist abstraction and the luscious, mutable expanse of the artist’s own practice.

The integration of ready-made elements in Unser Kundendienst! —the work gloves and the two fabrics that constitute the support—endow the painting with an additional semantic register [8]. There are many, even contradictory implications of Polke’s appropriation practice: lack of freedom, possible insight, irony, laziness, incapability, stupidity, creative freedom, and interpretive act [9]. The gloves especially disclose the physical form of the body more than any of his works on fabric. Polke hung his fabrics from wooden dowels, revealed their frames behind transparent layers, and unfurled excess fabric to drape from either, or both sides of the support. None of these examples possess the same sculptural and material vocabulary as the gloves do in Unser Kundendienst!

There are endless examples of what it means to hold, to carry, to caress, to grip and how to visually represent such gestures. For all its illusions, Unser Kundendienst! has little to do with intimacy, except for an intimacy solely defined by consumptive acts. Despite obvious motifs— the mattress ticking, the stamp that imitates the cover of a mattress company brochure, the resemblance of the fabrics to bedsheets or other household textiles—the materialistic relation between these objects creates distance and discomfort.