Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
TWO-WAY ARTIST
(Translation: Dan Pelleg; words in italics were not
translated but copied unchanged from the original text)
If you pick up the line and glide along it with your eyes, as if on soft
ice skates, if you retrace that line, with which Alexander Polzin engraved
Heiner Müller's face in wax, you will at once discover those things that you
had always retained in Müller's face: The soft arc with which the forehead
projects itself, like an infantile hydrocephalus; the small mouth, whose
inwardly turned smile might have just closed onto some sweet drug; the much
acclaimed prong of his nose, which scarcely goes with his mouth; the hair line
that doesn't make it to the forehead, like a piece of clinging fabric cut much
too short; the very narrow shoulders pushed slightly forwards; and of course those
eyeglasses, clinging even tighter than his hair, which seem to span his eyes like
the larva-like glasses of the bad boys in those Mickey Mouse Comics, which parents
in West Germany - long before Alexander was born into the East-German World - under
no circumstances would allow their children to read. Nothing captures better the
uncertain impression of a slight crookedness in Müller's body than Polzin's tender
line, but now you learn to love that crookedness, and perhaps even to desire it.
I have asked myself whether this line - much like the line with which Polzin brought
back to life Stefan Zweig and his wife's dead bodies, left behind after a suicide
much longer than a half a century ago on a bed in Brazil - I have asked myself whether
these lines are formulas, which reduce faces and situations (for example) to their
essentials. But at the end of the day I would find such a "formula of the line"
much too philosophical, and therefore (for this purpose) banal. For Polzin's lines are
soft and fleshy, so soft that they convey to you the premonition of how the solid
determination of a firm hand could eventually fuse with the tenderness of a morning's
fondling. And thus those faces, which were seemingly strapped down to their essentials,
will never turn into concepts.
If Alexander Polzin needed an epic sobriquet, like those of medieval knights or
Spanish bullfighters, I would suggest calling him the "Master of the Soft Form".
For he remains a Master of the Soft Form in those unbeatably different paintings
which look to me as though a form, which had already been determined and completed,
had devolved into that primordial sea that already contains everything from the start,
but in which nothing ever strays into becoming a form. If you enjoy some trendy reading
(like I do), you might prefer to see what I've just referred to as "primordial sea" as
a Zen-Buddhist nirvana, i.e. as a world of un-singled substances, far behind the
threshold from which forms emerge. Between this Berliner nirvana and Polzin's definitive
forms, a world - I would never say "the world" - begins to move. No one could be tempted
to try and contrive something out of the seemingly unfinished forms of Polzin's Red
Riding Hood, as they would with the parts of a rebus. For these pictures are worlds
away from the Surrealists' somewhat cramped democratic invitation to the spectator "to
participate in the creation of the image." On the contrary, I have always waited for
Polzin's unfinished forms to begin to move on their own (haven't they at times moved
imperceptibly?), so that a world could emerge. And "emerge" isn't too philosophical
a term here, for it describes how an unforeseeable form surfaces out of formlessness,
convincing us that it was the only form that could have surfaced. Polzin is a "Master
in this Cautiously Moving Chaos" too.
Only after having looked into Polzin's primordial sea and nirvana for a long time, with
the unfulfilled hope that it might transform into a richly contoured landscape, do I learn
to completely appreciate the softly determined lines at the other edge of his spectrum.
For only then does the apprehension overcome me that the figures brought into existence
by his lines could also never have emerged, or that they could even be on the verge of
dilapidating into formlessness, as fast as a house of cards, or slowly decaying like a
buried body. Here the extremes of the "Master in this Cautiously Moving Chaos" meet with
those of the "Master of the Soft Form". The two-way artist goes full circle.
It is not a total coincidence that, while describing Alexander Polzin's pictures, I am
reminded of Genesis, of the story about the co-emergence of our world and of ourselves,
which can't be told or thought of without the horizon into which the world and we will
disappear at the end of the world. But Polzin's pictures are not an allegory on the
allegory of Genesis. For this would be nothing but some thin-lipped academism (and a
relapse into the influenza of meaning attribution). Polzin's pictures are for some of
us the equivalent of what Genesis has been so long for others. Polzin's pictures are
made for those of us who - with all possible enthusiasm that we might have for the
intellectual exercise of theology - cannot find our way back into the myth.