Royal Academy, London
(Yes,
yet another art exhibition reviewed long after it's over!)
“Kiefer
fights against our illusory belief that we live in the present
moment.”
The
Indelible Stain
If
the acclaimed German artist Anselm Kiefer has had a post-war career,
then perhaps that simply fitted with a post-war life. He was born,
briefly before the end of hostilities, in a small town in the
ruralised, conservative south. Yet while its true all those things
would inform his work, and arguably continue to do so, its possible
to allow this frame to limit our understanding of his quite expansive
art with its near-universal concerns. Nevertheless, let's start at
the beginning...
Even
today he is perhaps most widely known, if not notorious, for his
'Occupations' series, where he'd be photographed
before known European landmarks giving a fascist salute. As Martin Grayford puts it “the point... was of course not
to extol Nazism but to force Kiefer and his fellow Germans to
confront it”. This act was not just challenging, it would even have
been illegal under German law. Part of an attitude Kiefer (and many
of his generation) saw as an air-brushing of history, a masking of a
bad smell rather than a stemming of its source.
Despite
their infamy the show rather sidelines this series, which is probably
a wise step. While they're not simply rude gestures, outstretched arm
as two raised fingers, they are more provocation than anything else.
Kiefer seems influenced by Dadaism at this point; elsewhere in this
room are some of his sketchbooks with one page loudly proclaiming
“Nothing!” And here he seems indebted to its shock tactics. In
this way 'Occupations' also seems strangely
prescient of British punk's appropriation of the swastika as a
goading implement. They're the work of a young artist, impatiently
shouting at the world around him, full of furious and immediate
references - and ultimately they're little more than juvenilia.
Moreover,
they're not just culturally specific but in a way that doesn't aid us
- and certainly doesn't flatter us. Its probably not coincidental
that Kiefer began this series in 1969, when the German Student movement was still strong. Though some did
misread these photos even then, most would have implicitly understood
that a young man taking up such a pose would not be demonstrating
Nazi sympathies - so must be making an accusation of some kind. Yet
not a decade later British punk's armband-sporting tactics, riffing
on a similar theme, would be undermined by a swell in support for the
far right. And today similar, sometimes openly fascist, groups
operate across Europe, a trend to which Germany is alas not immune. Ironically, when we look at a photo of a man
sporting a Nazi uniform we see more liberal times.
However,
contemporaneous pieces contain more of the seeds of his mature work.
The army uniform he wore in the 'Occupations'
photos came from his father, and the series was perhaps aimed at his
father's generation. However his artworks are less outward-aimed and
less full of certainties. Kiefer has questioned our blithe
assumptions that had we been there at that time we would have
resisted becoming Nazis, while there's no way we can really know
this. In short he reintroduces doubt into what might seem one of
life's most certain questions, and as Mark Hudson puts it “expressed a sense of ambiguous
unease about [his] country’s past.”
The
forest landscape is a frequent setting, which of course doubles as
references to Nazi iconography and to Kiefer's own childhood. 'Ice
and Blood' (1971, above) seems titled to deliberately
reference their slogan “blood and soil”. Again a lone figure
gives the infamous salute, only this time over a frozen wintry
environment. Though (as we'll come onto) Kiefer would find his medium
in oils, here he uses watercolour powerfully to almost saturate the
painting with bloodstains. Its as if this is the setting of some Nazi
atrocity, the blood from which would never wash away, leaving some
barren world behind. The lone soldier returns, or perhaps never left,
to obsessively commemorate the bloody scene. (He's placed centrally,
but so far back he seems more a reaction to the scene than an
instigator of it.) Nazism is shown here not as an aberration, but an
indelible stain upon history.
'Man
Lying With Branch' (1971, above) is perhaps more ambiguous
still. With those jutting angles the branch could be said to be
shaped like a swastika. There's no way to tell whether it has somehow
stabbed the human figure or is redemptively rising from him. (Though
some interpret the dabs of black beneath the stem as blood.) The
branch could be murder weapon, headstone-like commemoration or symbol
of rebirth. We'll come back to the teasing ambiguity of this later...
Of
course these works use much of the imagery and symbolism of German
Romanticism. Others refer specifically to Norse mythology such as
'Odin – Ygdraissal' and 'Ragnorak'
(both 1976). And throughout this show we'll find that, for an artist
working in the modern era, Kiefer was highly influenced by
Romanticism. A movement of course often seen as soured by the later
Nazi era, any original innocence to it now despoiled. Leading many to
fence such symbolism off with the cultural equivalent of police crime
scene tape.
Yet
Kiefer takes the opposite approach, takes the whole thing head-on. He
asks, as Daniel Arasse puts it, “how can anyone be an artist in
the tradition of German art and culture after Auschwitz?” And the
ambiguity of 'Man Lying With Branch' acts as a
microcosm for this. While continually re-raising the question, Kiefer
continually avoids easy answers. We all live upon that bloodstained
earth, and none of know whether we will ever clean it. For this
reason Michael Gayford described Kiefer's art as Post-Cataclysmic
Romanticism. Perhaps not a catchy term, but an effective one...
Out
Of the Attic:
And
Kiefer's style leaps ahead with his Attic series ('71-'73) as he both
takes to oils and to the grander scale which would mark his more
developed work. Despite their size they also mark his tendency to
work in series form, each individual work however gargantuan a mere
piece of a grander plan. Motifs and images recur across and even
beyond series. Which gives us a problem, for to pull away one work
from all this feels wrenching and diminishing, like isolating a
phrase from a piece of music. Like themes within a symphony, you need
to let them recur at different times in different combinations. But
let's do what we can...
The
attics he paints are the actual attic of his then studio, a former
schoolhouse. They're not the 'Freudian attics' so beloved of horror
films, cluttered crawl spaces stacked with ambush objects, as if
teeming with a thousand petty repressions. If we had to give them a
name they'd be 'Jungian attics', expansive spaces, the grain of every
plank carefully delineated. And that space is made a surround for
some great glaring symbol. The lid is lifted on the collective psyche
and it turns out to contain one big gleaming thing. The solitary
objects gleam white against all those shades of brown, like dream
objects or apparitions. Take, for example, 'Parsifal
III' (1973, below).
Wagner,
of course, wrote an opera around the Parsifal legends so Kiefer is
once more taking head on the darker associations of Romanticism. The
beams of the attic make it resemble an Anglo-Saxon hall, further
rooting the paintings in legend. While the focus on symbols at the
expense of human figures make the whole thing seem a set of power
objects. This with-holding of the human figure is recurrent in
Kiefer's work. It serves to strip away human agency, giving the
images an eerie, ominous fatalism.
However,
the focus on Parsifal's youth ('Parsifal 1', 1973 displays his cot) also suggests at a more
autobiographical reading. After Parsifal's father dies his mother
attempts to keep him from war, but he defies this and goes in search
for the Grail. It suggests Kiefer finding post-war Germany not just
hypocritical but stifling, and striking out on his own.
'Father,
Son, Holy Ghost' (1973, above) shows Kiefer's habit of
conjoining two works into one. Beneath the now-familiar attic,
there's a forest of the trees that make up those planks and chairs.
(And if the trees look like pines, then that's the literal meaning of
Kiefer's family name.) The three chairs, only sketched in, seat three
fires - labelled the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. The pink of
the pines seems to set up the glow of these fires. The flames sit in
chairs, like monarchs on thrones, rather than consume them. It
recalls the Bible myth of Moses and the burning bush, a symbol for an
eternal force. And let's not forget an earlier work was titled
'Ygdraissal', the trees also represent the one
tree which unites all realms. The trinity becomes associated with the
more ancient notion of the three realms, our earth between the upper
and lower worlds.
Which
makes the work a diptych depicting a triptych. What's significant is
what's absent – like the human figure earlier, now the main part of
the house is cut out like a segment missing from a tree. Remember the
old posters “What's missing from this ch**ch? UR!” It suggests we
are oblivious to such celestial matters, we've pushed them to the
periphery of our vision even as they continue to influence us.
The
Muck of Ages:
If
in the last room Kiefer switches to his main medium of oils, it's
with what follows where his mature style truly emerges.
'Iconoclastic Controversy (Bilderstreit)'
(1980) could work as a general title for the next section – perhaps
of the whole show. In this period Kiefer became interested in the
architecture of the Nazi past, the grand buildings of Speer and
Kreis, and in what has become of them now. Let's focus on
'Ash-Flower' (1983/7, above, though its vastness
makes it one of those works you really do need to see to get a sense
of).
Its
of a dwarfing size, more than seven meters across, with what Fisun Güner calls a “theatrical grandiosity”. With its
receding perspective you feel yourself almost tumbling into it. (Ben Luke has commented “these are not so much paintings as
total environments — they swallow you up.”) Unlike the dwarfed
human figures, so commonly used by Romantic artists to evoke scale,
there's no human element whatsoever. And somehow that just makes it
vaster. That far wall could be a country mile away. The
post-apocalyptic in his post-apocalyptic romanticism was never
stronger than here. It's almost like seeing a generation starship
crashed.
An
actual sunflower is hung, withered and upside-down, before it in a
manner than recalls crucifixion. (Hanging actual objects off his
paintings is a trademark feature of Kiefler. In so doing, we are sometimes told, “he invents a compelling third space between
painting and sculpture”. Which may be laying it on a bit thick, but
it does add an intriguing new element to his works.)
There's
little tonal variety, the way painting is supposed to work, it's
greys and browns containing only the odd flecks of white. Instead
there's textural variety, we tell the ceiling from
the walls partly because the paint is less worked there. It's, to quote Alastair Sooke, “more in the manner of relief
sculpture than painting”.
It's
so encrusted you imagine that rather than be painted into place by
the guiding hand of an artist it accrued, built
itself up in layers. Crucially, it looks less like a painting of a
ruin, like those neatly detailed Victorian Gothic depictions of
ruined follies, than it does a ruined painting. It looks like it
might have been painted when those halls were gleaming new, then left
there facing them. To rot alongside the place it depicted, the
portrait of Dorian Grey which failed to fulfil its promise. (I later
read Kiefer does sometimes deliberately weather works.) And this
evocation of temporal scale is what really matters. In the Guardian, Jonathan Jones comments:
“For
all it’s vast physical scale, [it's] just as vast on the scale of
time. It feels almost impossible to look into it and think back to
when that building was gleaming new. The
painting seems to span epochs. It is ancient. Kiefer includes time in
his art ... His tangled, archaeological surfaces... are mirrors of
time itself.”
The
indicia mentions Hitler's delusionally hubristic command for
buildings to be made from stone, not just to evoke the necessary
Classicism but “so as to make beautiful ruins”. An attitude described by Owen Hatherley as “the psychotic, suicidal notion of
building with the ruins already in mind: a death-driven
architecture... the corpse has been designed before the living body”.
Kiefer is partly depicting this, the theory that inside the Nazi lust
to conquer lay the death drive, domination as a route to submission.
Alternately
we could be looking at the ashes of Modernism. Perhaps those greys
were once the purest whites, but all those high hopes for a
transformed world turned into this wreck of a Corbusian palace. And
of course this allows us to combine the two notions, like Modernist
idealism could never truly be uncoupled from those fevered fascist
dreams. What they had in common was the hubris, the assumption they'd
remake rather than be remade, and the results were gross in every
sense of the word.
Yet
Ozymandian notions, however applied, seem inadequate. I'm tempted to
say its both those things and more, however much like luvvie speak
that sounds. The work seems so vast that any such
explanation virtually shrivels before it, seems too parochial, too
human in scale. It's clearly not an allegorical painting, there to be
pinned to a single meaning. But at the same time I'm temped to argue
the scale is its meaning. Culture always becomes
nature in the end. We live in the residue of the past even as we live
outside its context. It becomes as strange to and imposing upon us as
any lake or mountain range.
This
notion recurs in an instillation piece Kiefer created specially for
this show, 'Ages of the World' (2014, above). It's
composed of a teetering pile of discarded canvases, littered with
rubble and detritus, dead sunflower heads emerging from the mulch as
if still valiantly hoping to sprout. It's messy, haphazard, seemingly
thrown together. Yet wall posters give it a key, as if its a
cross-section of the earth. The indicia describe it as “speak[ing]
of a geological time frame so long it is almost beyond our
comprehension – part totem, part funeral pyre”. It's not, truth
to tell, one of Kiefer's best works. It feels like a bit of a
meta-text, a key to his work rather than a work in itself. Yet if
we're being handed a key, let's use it.
In
Marx's famous quote, society requires revolution in “ridding itself
of the muck of ages”. Countless artists of Kiefer's generation set
themselves the task of capturing and defining that revolution. It
might even be argued as the very definition of Modernism, the impetus
to break tradition, the desire to begin again. Whereas Kiefer
contrarily but quite definitely chose to depict the muck of ages, his
huge canvases weighted down by layered agglomerations of thick paint.
Representing, in the show's words, “the weight of human history”
- history as sediment.
The
Alchemy of Materials:
Kiefer
is wont to use not just non-standard paints such as emulsion but
incorporate non-art materials - straw, clay, ash, earth, polystyrene,
cardboard, silver leaf, plaster and what the indicia described as
“scorch marks”. (I have most likely missed some from that list.)
Which is when he isn't hanging discrete objects from the front of his
paintings, such as the afore-mentioned sunflower. Rather than merely
being gimmicky there is something alchemical, almost animistic about
this.
He comments "for me ideas aren’t up in the sky and
materials down in the earth. Materials have a spirit that is evoked
by the physical presence, which can be accessed and opened up. In the
Romantic tradition everything is connected in a kind of universal
underground."
But
while talking about the symbolic function of materials, we need to
note Kiefer very frequently uses a literal one. Rather than depict
objects in paint wood can be used to represent wood, clay stand for
clay and sand sand. With Kiefer, contrary to everything semiotics
tried to tell us about language, the signifier very often is the
signified. Almost entirely self-taught, Kiefer in many ways resembles
an outsider artist – the grand scale, the obsessiveness, the
recurring private image bank, and this literal use of materials
suggests at naïve art. And yet, as ever with Kiefer, it's
double-edged. We're so used to seeing painted branches that to come
across actual wood placed inside a picture frame becomes almost
jarring. Paradoxically, this adds to Ann Christopher's comments that “Kiefer's works, even his
paintings, exude a strong feeling of being made”.
Yet,
while Kiefer is happy to use straw as straw, he'll use lead in the
most counter-intuitive ways. He makes books from lead, pages curling
like they've been read in some furnace-hot bath. In vitrines in the
courtyard outside, lead submarines lie like beached fish on cracked
earth. Kiefer has commented that lead is the only material heavy
enough to carry the weight of human history, and yet at the same time
for a metal it is highly malleable. Lead's the metal that can bend,
the solid that can become a liquid and, perhaps above all, the
earthly substance that can alchemically become gold - and thereby
heavenly. Lead is always something transformed or in the act of
transformation with Kiefer, to the point where you start to assume it
represents transformation to him. And
he has said “what interests me is the transformation, not
the monument”.
And
all of this seems to go hand-in-hand with his willingness to weather
works, or transform them after completion via electrolysis. The
dubstep artist Burial once said his first attempts to make music
sounded too limited, too circumscribed, too much like something he
had done. But when he started to mix in natural sounds such as
rainfall, the uncontrollable, unpredictable new element recast
everything around it and created something more compelling. Kiefer
seems to be doing something similar with these practises - ensuring
he doesn't have the final say in how his own works look.
To
the Architecture of Antiquity
In
1992, Kiefer chose to make France his centre of operations. This
seems to have underlined an already present shift in his subject
matter from an interest in German history to more universal concerns.
In particular he progressed from a fascination with Speer's ruined
megalomania to the architecture of antiquity. If his paintings of
ruins themselves looked like ruins, his paintings of ancient
monuments look like... well, I expect you're ahead of me. They loom
out of the canvas, inscrutably strange yet inescapable. And the
depictions of an indelible past come to be replaced by his
much-heralded “cyclic view of time”, in works such as 'Osiris
& Isis' (1985/7, above).
Broken
pieces of pottery are scattered around the base of pyramid (needless
to say with Kiefer, these are actual bits of pottery), as if hurled
from its apex. These are joined by wires, attached to a strange and
somewhat incongruous block. (Actually part of an old TV set.) The
pieces are numbered, as if found and catalogued by an archeologist.
The title suggests the legend of Isis literally re-membering Osiris, gathering his
body parts from the corners of the realm where there'd been thrown
and bringing them back to life. Its a myth is associated with the
inter-relationship between life and death, order and disorder. That
dashed pot will reassemble, re-climb the steps of the pyramid, only
to be dashed again and then again. As the indicia put it: “In
Kiefer's cosmology the universe is an immense alchemical oven in
which spirit and matter find themselves in a continuous process of
creation and destruction.”
Notably,
the pyramid shape was also seen in 'Ages of the World',
as a metaphor for the weight of history. And those narrowing,
hierarchical levels make the pyramid the ultimate power symbol,
appearing even on dollar bills. If pot is Osiris, and the block
hauling him back is Isis, perhaps Set, his murderer, is the pyramid
itself.
From
Words to Stubble
Next,
Kiefer revisits both the landscape setting and themes of his earlier
watercolours such as 'Ice and Blood', but now in
oil and at his characteristically huge scale. In 'Black
Flakes' (2006, above) the furrowed field is the size of
some nations, pulling to some impossibly distant vanishing point, the
raised horizon allowing only for a grey slither of sky.
As
earlier the field is barren but ploughed, never primeval, never
de-cultured. The blackened stubble (actually protruding wood)
resembles war graves, as if nature's one vast cemetery. In Paul
Celan's post-holocaust poetry, always an influence on Kiefer, the
veiling presence of snow is a frequent metaphor for forgetting. And
yet a lead book is set on the painting. With this extra element the
snow-white field starts to resemble a giant page, the stubble
fragments of letters. Lines of poetry by Celan are written in the
receding furrows of the field. And let's note from an early point
Kiefer has been writing on his artworks. (He once made a series based
on the letters of the Kabbalah, not included in this exhibition.) And
books are a common metaphor for remembering. (A companion work,
'For Paul Celan – Ash Flower', 2006, features
burnt books.)
So
are we looking at a barren field doubling as a war grave, or at a
visual metaphor for a book? That's probably the point. If 'Ice
and Blood' portrayed an indelible past seeping through to
the present and 'Isis and Osiris' time in a
perpetual cycle, this work hints at a transformation without
delivering it. Books are like seeds, planting ideas. Will even the
immense bleakness of this scene yield to Spring, the embryonic
letters assert themselves through the snow? For all it's size, the
painting's like a coin about to be tossed. It could bloom. Or it
could as easily fall back into frozen tails again.
Beyond
Human Scale
There's
a rough but noticeable increase in scale to Kiefer's work throughout
this exhibition, from attics to grand ruins to cosmological scenes.
But while the gargantuan buildings were on the edge of human scale,
these constellations and cosmic pieces perhaps tip over into a place
beyond it. They don't dizzify you in the same way, for they don't
engage you to the same degree. The all important (to quote the show)
“link between the celestial and the earthly” becomes stretched if
not broken. Notably, in 'The Secret Life Of Plants, For
Robert Fludd' (1987/2014), the proportions of 'Black
Flakes' are inverted; there's a caking of earth right at
the painting's base, like the ground barely clinging on.
The
best work in this series is best explored by comparison to an earlier
piece - 'For Paul Celan: Stalks of the Night'
(1998/2013) to 'The Orders of the Night' (1996,
both above). Though, as is typical with Kiefer, the earlier picture
itself recalls the afore-mentioned 'Man Lying With
Branch'. Though 'Orders' is still more a
funereal picture, the single branch replaced by the multiple black
'faces' of the sunflowers bearing down on the recumbent figure like
anti-suns. We saw earlier how Kiefer used the image of the one tree
uniting the realms, from its lofty leaves in the upperworld to its
roots digging into the underworld. Replacing the branch with
sunflowers suggests they can represent the same unifying concept in
his work. But Kiefer is also interested in the Seventeenth century
cosmologist Robert Fludd, as we've seen dedicating another work in
this room to him. And one of Fludd's conceptions was that every plant
on the earth had a parallel star. So those sunflower heads are also
associated with stars.
In
'Stalks of the Night' the piercing branch is back,
and the sunflowers fallen away to reveal an almost abstract blackened
canvas. The human figure is less individuated than before, slashing
downward strokes making up his ribcage. We tend to use the term
'diagramatic' critically in art, for works which are merely
schematic. But with Kiefer these negative connotations seem to drop
away. This is almost like the cosmological maps of the Medieval era;
gold leaf adheres to the top of the work as if representing heaven,
while below tree and torso are reunited. The domed line performs a
similar function as the join in his earlier conjoined paintings, a
formal separation standing for an actual connection. Notably, while
heaven is gold, the line is in silver. Though only barely realised,
the figure is thought to be a self-portrait. Mortality may rule in
our middleworld, but this does not stop it being connected to grander
realms.
The
Earth Breaks All Teeth
As
if not overwhelming enough, this exhibition came with something of a
scoop – the first British showing of Kiefer's most recent series,
Morgenthau. These works are given a room of their own, like an
instillation piece. And with their break from the the sombre muted
palettes of the wintry landscapes, with their copper greens, aqua
blues and golds, they become an arresting sight. After the waning of
interest in the cosmological scenes, they kick the show back into
life.
Their
title comes from the Morgenthau Plan, an American proposal for the “industrial
disarmament” of post-war Germany. In this almost 'Hunger
Games' scenario of calculated impoverishment she would have
been stripped of her capacity to wage further wars by being stripped
of her capacity to do very much of anything. She would have become a
“pastoral state”, essentially a nation of farmers. Though of
course never implemented, it was for a while seriously considered at
high levels.
One
way of framing this aesthetically would be to see Germany as taken
home again, reduced to resembling one of its own old Romantic
paintings. German Romanticism has always liked to imagine life sprang
from some timeless country idyll and always kept its heart there. And
these rural works are once more indebted to Romanticism, particularly
Van Gogh. (Let's not quibble over whether he was late Romantic or
early Modern, Kiefer's interest seems precisely in this interchange
point.) But we perhaps get to their essence quicker by not comparing
but contrasting them. Wheat is about as kitsch a subject in art as
sunflowers. We see it on cereal packets or in Soviet Realist posters
– arranged in neat yellow rectangles, obligingly awaiting felling
by armies of jolly peasants, so harvestable you can even sing a song
while you're doing it (see below).
Whereas
Kiefer transforms wheat as much as he did sunflowers. (See
'Morgenthau Plan', 2012, above). He paints a
nature, cultivated in theory, yet untamed. They're no neat lines but
a thicket, an impenetrable mass of jutting angles. Hung before them
are farming implements, archaic and rusty, traps tooth-broken on
heavy rocks. One contains an actual pair of muddy boots, as if
defeated by the clogging earth and discarded there like a solider
lost to battle. You'll struggle to feed your impoverished belly by
dragging your blunted plough across these pitiless stones. If the
Romantics found the overpowering force of nature in mountains and
mighty rivers, Kiefer finds it in a farmer's field.
Kiefer
could conceivably have grown up in this alternate history, where it
was the Marshall Plan which was the footnote and Kraftwerk were an acoustic folk act. And perhaps this series
stems from him envisaging such a fate. But that seems to describe the
works' inception rather than their nature. As ever there's a
political dimension to Kiefer, but to reduce his work to a narrow
capital-P political would be to unecessarily diminish it.
The
most common theory of the prevalence of hunting scenes in cave
paintings is that they worked as a form of sympathetic magic – by
spearing an auroch in symbolic form you empowered yourself against
the actual auroch. The tangled crops of the Morgenthau series seem
the farming equivalent of those hunting scenes, humanity locked in a
symbiotic war with nature.
From
Ashes to Diamonds:
Kiefer
seems to divide opinion into enthralled devotees and those who find
it all just ostentation, prog rock for the eyes. I am normally
suspicious of vast canvases and grand statements in art. Artists
often get big and lofty when they run out of things to actually say,
the equivalent of shouting instead of speaking. Yet seeing this show
has firmly made me into another of Kiefer's devotees.
Perhaps
the ideal way to view is work would be to visit the two environments he's built for his artwork, as featured in the
recent BBC 'Arena' special. Part studio part
instillation piece, they seem less a place to look at his work than a
way to climb inside it. But alas they're not open to the public.
(Perhaps because of what seems a somewhat permissive approach to
health and safety.) But this show's a decent substitute. I suspect it
will be one of those memorable events people later claim to have
attended, whether they did or not.
And
perhaps we even need someone like Kiefer right now... As our culture
as a whole becomes more visually oriented (interactive web sites
replacing magazines, comics becoming more accepted as a medium and so
on), this has led to an irony - rather than enhancing visual art
itself it seems to have stripped it of its special status. A century
ago, Modernism seemed the very tip of the cutting edge. While
contemporary art now can often feel mired in post-modernism, a
burnt-out fire with all the illumination coming from elsewhere - in Dubuffet’s description “like a dead language that no
longer has anything in common with the language of the street”. The
artists who remain well known often feel like celebrities and
scandal-mongers, sometimes dabbling in a bit of art to perpetuate the
figleaf for their fame.
Yet, as the Telegraph's Mark Hudson puts it: “At a time when most
art is only about itself and its relationship to the market, his work
challenges the past and his own role and, by extension, our role
within it”. Kiefer is invigorating, enthralling and overwhelming –
but not necessarily in that order. You come across his works the way
you would ruins in the desert; they look unforgettable at the very
same time they look beyond any scale or context, gargantuan new facts
to rearrange everything else around. I've probably only scratched at
those rich thick surfaces, traced the faintest of paths through those
dense forests. Several sections I've simply skipped over. But it will
have to do for now.
Except
its even more than this. Perhaps befitting an artist with such a
cyclic view of time, this exhibition is less retrospective than
summary to date. It demonstrates not an artist able to keep doing it,
but one embarking on directions quite new for him. Its not even that
he’s still at the top of his game. Its more like his star is still
in ascent.
Here's some sample pictures at a more fitting scale.
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