Art - Richard Cork is impressed by an artist unafraid to shoot from the hip
Ever since he emerged in Germany in the 1960s, full of precocious wit and irreverence, Sigmar Polke has refused to be trapped inside a narrow range of subjects. His Tate Modern show, "History of Everything", tackles even the most unnerving aspects of contemporary life - in particular the new perils thrown up by 21st-century atrocities.
Long fascinated by the possibilities of exploiting the smudges, errors and distortions of cheap mass-media printing techniques, Polke confronts us in the first exhibit with a puzzling, multi-panelled image. Clusters of planets seem to swim before us, blurred by the grainy texture of magnified Benday dots. Although he calls this picture History of Everything I, it remains maddeningly elusive.
But Polke, who has always thrived on unpredictability, soon changes gear. Nearby hangs an ominous work whose title could hardly be more specific: The Hunt for the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Here, a single planet occupies much of the available space, and he clearly identifies it as the planet earth. Key military sites, among them the Pentagon and RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire, are named and linked by curved beams with a space station suspended above in the dark, encircling void. The work is dominated by a surveillance plane. Its sleek, streamlined yet utterly impersonal form invades the picture, and Polke juxtaposes it with a far smaller postage-stamp image of riders on horseback. These suggest the Wild West, hinting that the hunt for al-Qaeda is infused with the spirit of gun-toting cowboys bent on revenge.
Since most of the exhibits on display were produced after 9/11, such references are all too understandable. But Polke's fascination with contemporary violence has a very particular edge. Several years ago, he agreed to stage a show of new, as yet uncreated, work in the Dallas Museum of Art. By February 2002, however, his ideas had come into focus. Requesting heaps of Texas newspapers to be sent to his Cologne studio, Polke immersed himself in their stories and photographs. As well as exploring the overriding concerns of the state where his show would be mounted, he was almost certainly intrigued by the cowboy flourish with which President Bush conducted foreign policy.
Hence Polke's concentration, in the most spectacular and disturbing room, on images of gun culture. Do the World a Favour and Eat a Bullet is the macho title of an enormous picture in which two cowboys seem to advance towards us with swaggering, lethal intent. Nothing, though, is at all straightforward in Polke's complex and multi-layered art. The cowboys' bodies are punctured by Benday printing dots, so that they seem to be riddled with tiny holes.
Both men reappear in an even more colossal work called The Fastest Gun in the West. Pushed to one side of the composition now, they suddenly look vulnerable and one-dimensional. The cowboys could easily be cardboard targets, installed on a rifle-range. A hefty figure, paunch squeezed into a pair of jeans, aims a gun at them. Although presented in fuzzy black and white, he could easily be a present-day Texan lifted from the pages of a newspaper. The cowboys seem as doomed as the victims in Manet's celebrated painting of Emperor Maximilian's execution - a precedent that Polke surely had in mind.
Hovering like a spectral presence in the centre are two disembodied circles. Preoccupied with this form, Polke ensures that it reappears in a work entitled Splatter Analysis. Here, a man in shades wearing a cowboy hat kneels beside a giant round target. His rifle thrusts into the circle with phallic arrogance as he gazes at the bullet-holes on its surface. Someone has counted them, and written "208 TOTAL" with relish in the corner. The notion of firepower as a gleeful sport stalks the exhibition.
In another room, a diminutive figure in a peaked cap and overcoat marches along the deck of a ship. Polke has swiped through him with a dark smear, as though determined to obliterate this strutting embodiment of menace. But the martinet refuses to be ousted. He lingers there obstinately, like a figure in a nightmare.
No doubt Polke would like to rid himself of these threatening ghosts. His show suggests that they press in on him relentlessly, and sometimes they cannot be identified. One brooding work is burdened by an immense boulder-like form covered with cracks. It appears capable of crushing anything in its path and generates a mood of inescapable helplessness. Polke admits his inability to evade this monstrous apparition by calling the work There Is Nothing More Real Than Pictures You Can't Get Out of Your Mind.
No relief can be found in the news photographs he blows up to such a monumental size. One of them, taken by Stephen Crowley of the New York Times on a ship in the Gulf of Aden, shows American marines playing the board-game "Risk". One, clearly regretting a bad move, hides his face in his hands. But the other three players look eerily confident as they survey the positioning of their pieces. "The object of the game is to dominate the world," declares the caption with barefaced, deadpan accuracy. And the weapons scattered over the board seem to occupy most of the main continental land-masses with their aggressive bulk.
As freewheeling and prolific as he has ever been, the 62-year-old Polke now seems to have arrived at the zenith of his powers. He moves with suppleness and aplomb from the present to the past and back again. Some of the grainy images - of soldiers exercising, for example - surely derive from the Second World War. Polke, who was born in Silesia, fled with his family to Thuringia in 1945, and he is bound to find current images of unrest colliding in his mind with traumatic childhood memories of a country decimated by conflict and suffering.
With typical wryness, this eminently self-mocking artist admits, in one of his picture titles, that I Live in My Own World, But It's OK, They Know Me Here. These words are attached to one of Polke's most mysterious images, where several black amoeba-like forms appear to float in an unidentifiable region filled with smaller, even more rudimentary organisms.
But then he brings us straight back to the equally macabre reality of patriotic life in the US today. Enlarging an AP/Wide World Photo to titanic dimensions, he confronts us with a hot-air balloon in the shape of the Statue of Liberty's head. Suspended in the sky over Houston, it lets the Stars and Stripes unfurl from the basket.
According to the original magazine caption, this bizarre display of national pride was prompted by "the crisis over Iraq", which has "highlighted the American ideal of democracy in unusual ways". The caption-writer apparently did not realise that Liberty's puffed and distorted face looks uncannily like a Buddha.
Polke, with his unerring eye for absurdity, hangs it opposite an 1801 engraving of a man held aloft by an early and far more precarious version of the balloon. Clutching the reins of two enormous birds, he lets them pull the whole fragile and unwieldy contraption through the sky. It is an exhilarating spectacle and says a great deal about Polke's willingness to let his imagination roam.
But he is also prepared to contemplate apocalypse. One of his most devastating pictures shows everything shattered into fragments, including Father Christmas's red hat. Making them spin down in a crazy vortex towards a desolate world where nothing survives apart from stripped trees surrounded by flood-water, Polke appends a title that asks the bleakest question of all: When Will It All End (Pissing in Coke, Spitting in Shoes).
"Sigmar Polke: history of everything" is at Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 (020 7887 8000) until 4 January 2004
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