Moving targets

Sigmar Polke's use of old photos, old engravings and old porn makes his painting fascinating - and impossible to pin down. By Adrian Searle
Polke: The Fastest Gun in the West, 2002
'A painting is target practice, for painter and viewer alike.' The Fastest Gun in the West, 2002.

Sigmar Polke is a man who takes his morning coffee with a big pile of newspapers and a pair of scissors to hand. He snips things out, headlines and odd or arresting images, to re-use in his art. For 40 years, Polke's art has been a very serious joke. Polke, born in Silesia (now Poland), moved to West Germany in 1953. He later trained - significantly - as an industrial glass painter, and first became known, along with Gerhard Richter, as a kind of failed pop artist. Polke, misunderstood, got his revenge.

Compared to Polke's, most painting looks feeble, slow-witted, uninventive. Even though his is an art frequently based on secondary material - the newspaper clipping, the found photograph, old engravings, old art, old pornography - his work startles, confuses, fascinates and bedevils anyone who cares, or tries, to pin it down.

Polke's first-ever major London show, History of Everything, opens at Tate Modern tomorrow. Despite the title, this is not the full-dress Polke retrospective one might expect. It began life as an exhibition made specifically for the Dallas Museum of Art, to which Polke has since added a significant number of other new works for London. For those who come fresh to Polke, there is also an excellent three-room loan display of key early works, from the 1960s and 70s. This functions as a kind of condensed primer to the artist. At the time of writing, new Polkes are also being put up and taken down elsewhere in the building, as the artist himself plays once more with his own work, rearranging it, adding new works and removing others (sometimes with a healthy disregard as to what are key paintings, and what might represent a shaky new direction). Polke, then, is trying to make an exhibition that is as lively and fresh for himself as it will be to his public. Creative thought doesn't always stop at the studio door.

There is so much to look at in this show. And much that disturbs and wrong-foots the spectator. In fact, it is apparent that Polke's art is more and more a meditation on looking itself, on the slipperiness of vision, and the impossibility of pinning down single meanings to the images and things we look at. Even where you stand in relation to a Polke matters. Get up very close and an entirely new, microcosmic layer of events and detail often reveals itself: a disruption in the surface, a passage of real embroidered pattern, infinitessimal half-tone dots, concentrated drawing that borders on the mesmeric and obsessional. The skin or surface of the painting might be impregnated or embossed with what appears to be a honeycomb pattern, a cellular structure, or a semi-transparent pattern of scales, like sloughed snakeskin. Step back and the layers gel, or almost do. You are not quite sure where or how to look. Often, instead of canvas, the surface is translucent, weaveless, high-tech polyester scrim. You can see right through it to the stretcher behind, and the wall behind that. As you move, the material catches the light and shimmers with refracted irridescence. A painting, classically, is a virtual window, with an illusory painted world beyond. In Polke's case, the window is real, and so is the beyond, even when there's nothing there.

In the painting Anyone Can Have Out-of-Body Experiences at Will, Polke has painted, with impeccable precision, a frame of op-art cum psychedelic interference patterns around a central, tilted rectangle of nothingness. You see right through this area of transparent material to the wall. This tilted, milky, veiled emptiness, framed at the edge of vision by twitchy, optically upsetting pattern, feels complete, both entirely material and playfully rhetorical, mysterious and evanescent.

In other cases the painting includes bits of cheap tablecloth or patterned dishcloths, or some horrible novelty wallpaper, depicting a stampede of horses, cartoon celebrations of beer-drinking, a stag hunt. In one small painting, a white spilled stain unfurls across what I take to be a patterned, pinkish tablecloth. It is impossible not to think of a sperm stain on a coloured handkerchief; impossible, too, not to be reminded of all those religious paintings of Veronica's veil. This is more than ambiguity - more a blasphemous duality, and the kind of thinking that permeates Polke's art. A figure from a medieval drawing, blown up and redrawn, turns into Bin Laden, hiding in a trunk. On the opposite wall, the Virgin is conjured by an alchemist in his magic circle; Polke the alchemist, raising apparitions. Other paintings, in particular the series called Printing Mistakes, seem to be made entirely from a toffee-like resinous substance, a gummy, brownish amber in which an image, or several images, have been trapped - not so much like flies, as like old memories or something half-glimpsed, or once pored-over then forgotten. A uniformed dwarf, borrowed from a 1930s Spanish newspaper. A patterned stone that looks like a tongue or a turd.

Some of these paintings do not so much appear to be glazed or covered in old varnish, but to be made of these organic, glutinous substances. This is the sort of thing weaker artists would turn into some arresting "look". In Polke's case, they're more a metaphor: the painting as trap, as flypaper. Perhaps they are a metaphor for the mind itself, a place where things, images and events stick. For the Dallas version of this exhibition, Polke became preoccupied with images of America's gun culture. This, inevitably, has an awful correspondence with America's adventure in Iraq.

Pictures of sharpshooters aiming at battered fairground targets vie with diagrammatic pictures of spy-in-the-sky surveillance planes and the smart-war hunt for al-Qaida and the Taliban. All these images, in Polke's paintings, become hunts for meanings, for things that cannot be found, for lame excuses. Looking at paintings is, after all, looking for something that isn't there or can't be found by simple objective means. A painting is target practice, for painter and viewer alike.

The dot, just like the printer's half-tone, the field of bendy dots, the raster, is in many works his version of the brushstroke. It is also much like a bullet hole. And, as the eye looks, it tries to pierce surfaces too, just like a bullet. "I shot him a look," we say, or "I pierced her with a look." If looks could kill. We come to doubt, nowadays, the sovereignty of human vision, the veracity of things seen with one's own eyes, let alone any superhuman powers we'd like the eye to have. He re-draws these rasters, all these fields of dots, by hand, with a small brush, building them up, breaking them down.

The images they articulate have frequently already been manipulated through photocopier blow-ups, as multiple generation copies that, through their successive reprintings, both destroy an image's legibility and create a further, almost indecipherable new image at the same time. So an eye becomes a smear, then a figure, a glob; the glob becomes a corpuscle, an atom, a leering face, a new world, a Rorschach blot we might then take for something else again. Images plummet into other images, the world is a welter of shifting signs.

In a couple of very new works, Polke has redrawn some bizarre naturist photos of naked men being chased around a farmyard by a grinning, equally naked woman with a fork, and a naked ploughman tilling a field. I guess they were found in some northern European version of Health and Efficiency magazine. Elsewhere, there are female bondage and spanking images - which appear silly rather than salacious - and lots and lots of bared and proffered bums. And then 19th-century balloonists pulled across the sky by eagles, winged women flying out of eggs, and the arcing, abstract, curlicued calligraphic trails of sub-atomic particles in the accelerator. These are all either occasions of wonder or a cosmic joke. They're both - and a painter's joke too.

Looking at art often leads to the conclusion that one is engaged in a futile search for something that isn't there. Or that one is standing in the wrong place, looking for the wrong thing, asking the wrong questions. What to make of Polke's daft porn, surrounded as it sometimes is by lovely, hand-drawn foliage, or embedded in a painting so startling in its disruptions, so wayward in its effects, that it cannot be reduced to one thing, especially not a bum joke? Polke's art depends on such breaches of decorum, on wilful misapprehensions, deliberate mistakes; and it swerves from one thing into another. It is also erudite, difficult, spontaneous, deliberated. There is in Polke enough to fuel dozens of lesser careers. The really frightening thing is that there's even more to him than at the Tate. Viewer beware.

· History of Everything is at Tate Modern, London SE1, from Thursday to January 4. Details: 020 7887 8000.

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