Next Saturday marks the fortieth anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas by an unidentified sniper. So this week’s picture is a sardonic reflection on Texas gun culture by the German artist Sigmar Polke. I Don’t Really Think About Anything Too Much was painted in 2002 and can currently be seen at Tate Modern in London, where it forms part of a large exhibition of the artist’s work collectively entitled, with characteristic irony, “History of Everything”.
Now in his early sixties, Polke is a painter with a considerable international reputation whose work has only rarely been exhibited in Britain (Tate Modern’s show was originally conceived for the Dallas Museum of Art, where it first opened a year ago, which helps to explain its distinctly Texan slant). The artist first came to prominence in the early 1960s as one of a group of painters based in Cologne who styled themselves “Capitalist Realists”. Influenced by American Pop Art while simultaneously reacting against its bright, glossy surfaces and apparently hedonistic self-immersion in the world of gleaming consumer durables and slick advertising imagery, the young Polke created his own contrastingly grungy and tattered version of the style. He still habitually works with found imagery. A cartoonist’s sensibility lurks behind much of his work but Polke characteristically paints on a grand scale. The picture reproduced on this page, for example, is nearly ten-foot square.
The painter reputedly dislikes talking about his work, although according to Dallas Museum’s Charles Wylie, Polke did let on that “these most recent paintings all have to do with intimidation, fear, and the potential for violence.” Given that they were created in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, and with the prospect of an American-led invasion of Iraq looming, that...
