Delft Blue as Parody: Sigmar Polke Carl Andre in Delft and Rosemarie Trockel’s Freude

Abstract

Focusing on Sigmar Polke’s Carl Andre in Delft (1968) and Rosemarie Trockel’s Freude (1988), the author offers a discussion of the different ways in which the two artists have parodied Delft Blue fabric. Polke applied the fabric unaltered, as a readymade, using it to refer to Carl Andre’s floor assemblages. Through parodic appropriation, he offered a critique of Minimalism—one informed by how it was received in Germany in the late 1960s. Trockel, 20 years later, parodied Polke own parody through a work constituted via machine knitting. In this instance, however, her focus is on value systems of Western High Art and how they marginalize the domestic and the feminine. Her parody of Blue Delft does not reinforce the fabric’s lack of status but instead serves as an ironic commentary on masculinist orientations in art that have underpinned a contempt for handicraft techniques such as knitting that have historically been the province of women.

Keywords:

• Delft Blue
• parody
• minimal art
• Sigmar Polke
• Rosemary Trockel
• Carl Andre

Acknowledgement

This article was translated from German to English by Stan Jones and then edited by Brenda Schmahmann.

Notes

1. In 1972, Rainer Speck acquired the Polke work from the Galerie Michael Werner in Cologne.

2. In this vein, Julia Gelshorn points out that Trockel reaches back to “famous male models like Marcel Duchamp or Joseph Beuys” (Gelshorn 2006, 138; translation by Stan Jones) while Melanie Mariño (1994) describes Trockel’s artistic strategy of appropriation as mimicry.

3. The exhibition took place from October 18 to December 15, 1968 in the Mönchengladbach Städtisches Museum. Carl Andre’s floorworks were bought by the museum and have since been part of its collection.

4. See also: Hentschel (1991, 305–311).

5. Carl Andre in Delft has been investigated in the context of research into iconotexts and their intermediality (see Wagner 1996). For commentary on how the status of a title may change when it is actually incorporated into a work, Derrida (1986) is helpful.

6. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/parody.

7. Frederic Jameson and Stefan Römer have suggested alternative concepts about the tradition of quoting, copying and paraphrasing in the arts, but which only partially correspond to Polke’s specific way of working in the 1960s. For Jameson, there could not be any parodies after the “death of the artist,” but only pastiches or so-called “blank parodies” devoid of irony (Jameson 1983, 113–114). Stefan Römer also prefers—with reference to Gérard Genette—the terms, “travesty” or “pastiche” to “parody.” His argument is as follows: as Polke’s works refer to “a particular model of production (painting) and of presentation (exhibition space), they can be deemed pastiches (playful imitations).” This is on the one hand:

because they are applied with a brush to a canvas, something standing traditionally for artistic expression, and on the other, because they are projected with an optical device onto a screen and transmitted in a neutral way, something traceable back to their industrial production process. This combination means that the original is fundamentally altered in how it appears; a colourful oil painting is reduced to a cliché differing in colour, contrast and format

(Römer 1998, 35; translation by Stan Jones) Polke’s Carl Andre in Delft is to a large extent a readymade, however, and in that sense Römer’s definition is not entirely applicable.

8. The participation of Robert Smithson indicates how imprecise Minimal Art is and was as a stylistic term.

9. Franz Meyer, the director of the Basel Kunstmuseum and Harald Szeemann’s predecessor as director of the Berne Kunsthalle, attributes the success of the exhibition to its focus on anti-authoritarian gestures, suggesting these suited the spirit of the times: “We know what 1968 means for the history of how people thought. In those days, protesting young people vehemently demanded liberation from all constraints and a fundamental change in the existing social and political circumstances” (Meyer 1997, 10; translation by Stan Jones).

10. This negative attitude towards Minimalism is conveyed especially clearly and succinctly in Held (1995).

11. David Campbell indicates the influence of Dada and Fluxus for German artists of Polke’s generation and suspects the roots of his humor are in this context (Campell 1996).

12. Translation by Stan Jones.

13. Heiser’s offers an interesting interpretation of the motif of the sailing boat in Carl Andre in Delft, suggesting that it may have been an ironical response to a sardonic comment by abstract artist Willi Baumeister. In his investigation of Polke’s Vitrinenstück, Heiser notes how it included a catalogue of the first Documenta exhibition. The catalogue was displayed open in such a way that a portrait of Max Beckmann was visible on the left while on the right was a photo of the participants in the jury session for the exhibition by the Cologne Artists’ Association in 1952. “Willi Baumeister—closely involved in re-establishing the Association in 1950—is supposed to have said during the first jury session for the survey exhibition: ‘We haven’t got Segelschiff [sailing boat] yet, that’s got to be in’” (Heiser 2010, 13; translation by Stan Jones).

14. Martin Hentschel (1991, 309) arrives at a similar conclusion where he writes: “Where Polke conflates Andre’s most mature form of artistic production with a centuries-old decorative form, he denies it any avant-garde credentials” (translation by Stan Jones).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Annette Tietenberg

Annette Tietenberg is professor of art history at the Braunschweig University of Art, Germany.

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