Pictograms are often considered to have a sacred quality, and art that contains them is often treated with a special respect. This is because these signs are seen as primitive marks only part way to writing; they are seen to stand in a closer relation to the world they represent, to be more truthful, more original. Since few genuinely preliterate societies survive today, the holy moment before the advent of writing is now sought in the drawings of children, madmen, and “inspired” artists; it is there that our poets now seek the real.
The paintings of A.R. Penck seem to participate in this kind of romantic retrieval of the lost innocence before communication became suspect through mediation. His life-size stick figures stand there, black on white, as mysterious in their identity and meaning as any found carved into an old tomb. They are by turns passive and threatening, workers or warriors; or they are paired opposites, male and female, each taunting the other. The paintings are bold, but their directness is deceptive. The meanings of many pictograms are kept from us by the passage of time, but the meanings of these are left deliberately vague, their originality exotic. In short, Penck is open to the charge of mystification.
But his paintings are also so funny, and funny in such a numskull way, that such a charge itself seems a mystification. After all, it would take a great deal of pomposity to find fault with a painting in which one stick figure, identifiably female, points and laughs at another, a male, who crouches to shit. Penck does flirt with the tendentious string-pulling of the pictographic, but does so with a saving irreverence. The real problem the work faces on its debut in New York turns out to be something for which it cannot be held to blame; for it looks, and is, dated, and it is our prior ignorance of it that makes its appearance here right now seem a mite opportunistic.
—Thomas Lawson
