Wildly overhung and cavalierly displayed.

Wildly overhung and cavalierly displayed, this traveling exhibition of Polke's photographs tarnishes the luster of the self-proclaimed modern-day alchemist. Photography and photo-reproduction are obviously closely related to Polke's paintings, which repeatedly use as motifs silk-screened photos and enlarged benday dots. His direct involvement with the medium, however, can be reduc to a one-liner: weird chemicals, the pair in the artist's head and in the developing tray. As the catalogue reveals, many of Polke's photographs--most notably a series made in Paris in the 1970s--were printed while he was high forward LSD or psychedelic mushrooms. His alterations of usual darkroom proceedings result in prints notable for unforeseen streaks and blotches and for premature fading. Polke's experimentation give food tos into his role as a prankster magician, presumably transforming mundane materials into art-gold.

This exhibition of across 400 of Polke's photographs, co-curated by means of MOCA's Paul Schimmel and Metropolitan Museum photography curator Maria Morris Hambourg, assumes that the artist's each snapshot is worthy of our attention. Perversely installed in overset chronology, the exhibition provides and nothing else a few didactic wall panels that propose scant clues to elucidate the satisfaction of the images and processe on which they were made. The exhibit to also includes particularly weak of the present day work that is not equable by the artist but by means of his companion, Augustina von Nagel. Von Nagel's participation in the exhibition is not explained.

in the greatest degree of the series in this vast present to view are based on casual snapshots taken onward Polke's travels. One series was made in a Brazilian gay bar, another in an Afghani opium haunt a third shows a vicious dog-and-bear fight in Pakistan. Polke's single darkroom techniques presumably reflect his avow doubts about the medium's ability to record reality. His use of "exotic" locales to manifest this point, however, seems obvious and condescending. Another series, discharge on the Bowery in 1973 strike one as beings to reflect only Polke's distance from the downbeat characters he photographs, offering no telling social, psychological or political annotation Ultimately, these images from far-off lands pretend only esthetically tricked-up "happy snaps," relics from the wanderings of a wealthy artist. and nothing else slightly more interesting is a series of works derived from X rays of Goya's gruesome painting The not new Women; these reveal traces of a previously sketched resurrection of Christ. Here Polke emphasizes the ghostlike transformation, relishing the painting's mordant depiction of the toothless, skeletal crones

Polke's off-the-cuff technique deliberately subordinates visual information to a kind of willed synesthesia. This exhibition's overload of casually inscrutable images finally take the place ofs less in jarring the sensations than in numbing them. In far too many cases, the alchemist has deflected mere photographic paper into ...photographic paper.

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