Brooks Riley has written a stunning essay on Anselm Kiefer called Fire in the Attic at 3 Quarks Daily. Of the many things this unique thinker has brought into my world, Anselm Kiefer is one of the jewels. Chris asked, "How could we not have heard of Kiefer before this?" It's a good question since Kiefer is one of the greatest living artists active today--so yeah, how did we miss him till now? Thank you Brooks!
The Broad Museum has several important Anselm Kiefer pieces. Last week, we went down and faced the long lines to see the three currently on display.
Deutschlands Geisteshelden [Germany's Spiritual Heroes] (1973): Born at the close of World War II, Anselm Kiefer reflects upon and critiques the myths and chauvinism that propelled the German Third Reich to power. With immense scale and ambition, his paintings depict his generation’s ambivalence toward the grandiose impulse of German nationalism and its impact on history. Painted in extreme perspective, Deutschlands Geisteshelden positions the viewer at the mouth of a great hall, an amalgam of Kiefer’s former studio and Carinhall, a German hunting lodge used to store looted art during the Nazi era. Burning torches line the walls of the space, which is empty except for the names of inspirational artists and writers scrawled above the receding floor: Joseph Beuys, Arnold Böcklin, Adalbert Stifter, Caspar David Friedrich, Theodor Storm, and many others. This is hardly a triumphal place; the lodge keeps vigil, housing names that have become embroiled in a painful history.
This is the attic of Kiefer's first studio, located above the home where he and his new wife lived in a village not far from the Palatinate Forest (?) Kiefer's early work is characterized by forest scenes and attics. In Brooks' essay, she discusses the painter's use of the attic in his 1971 painting called Quanternity--"depicting three small fires burning on the floor of a wooden attic and a snake writhing toward them, vestiges of the artist’s Catholic upbringing in the form of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost and the Devil. Metaphor meets reality in the sacred attics of stored mythologies." She writes about a different Kiefer attick (this one from a house he lived in during his art student days):
Quaternity is one of the few paintings that addresses a lapsed religion now stored away in Kiefer’s mind, his attic—an attic he once lived in as a student, and one he has revived in other paintings. It is only one of his many recurring motifs that serve as conduits for his multiple concerns and thought processes. Myths of all kinds are stored in that iconic space, along with the first- and second-hand memories of history, philosophy, poetry, metaphysics, astrophysics, mysticism and alchemy.
We stood in front of Deutschlands Geisteshelden for a very long time. Tourists would wander into the alcove where his work was quietly hanging on three walls, and stand to take a selfie. I watched as they would struggle to position themselves in a place that would make them active participants in the painting. With its extreme perspective, the viewer stands in ambiguity and must choose to enter the vortex, standing as participant in a position within the perspective enabling the art work to "work" or to stand outside it and be an observer-but not able to have the three dimensionality wash over them.
Brooks says:
It’s difficult to stand in front of a Kiefer painting without hyperventilating. The bombardment of myth, thought, history, philosophy, mysticism, metaphor, poetry and omen, together with the tactile spirit of materials like lead, straw, dust, sand, ash, in multiple layers, coaxed by his alchemical processes of scorching, electrolyzing, melting, soldering, endow his works with an impact and energy completely at odds with the pleasant, colorful, often figurative works that dominate the canon of modern art—the Rauschenbergs, the Warhols, the Basquiats, the Hockneys, the Rothkos.
She talks about the maelstrom quality of his work.
That is how I felt in front of this painting. I could not help but think of Heidegger. Heidegger‘s book on art had a huge impact on me when I was young and I tend to look at art through the lens of Heidegger --but I also am extremely interested in materials and what you wrote about the alchemy of materials. So much could be said about Heidegger‘s philosophy, German nationalism, exploration of mythology and the psyche and how a “work of art works.” Standing there, you are in a state of ambiguity and of existential choosing. Person-making involves an embeddedness with the communal history and culture, and with being as a work in progress. To stand within the historical mindset, within nature--the forest-- the religion, the myths and to choose. Which cultural icons are to have their names written in that "Hall." You see absent is Heidegger and Nietzsche. But there is Wagner and Caspar David Friedrich.
And then there was the use of varied materials and high craftsmanship. You can’t even grasp how something like this was created --as it looked more like an artifact that fell down from space than something that man. Or in this case, the wood seems organic. Alive.
I got the last cheap copy of a book by Mathew Biro called, Anselm Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger. The opening chapter analyzes Deutschlands Geisteshelden. Reading it, the intense feelings I had standing in the vortex of this picture fell into place.
Kiefer sifts and evaluates different culturally transmitted possibilities for being... [his] self-defining aesthetic investigations suggest that human existence is a constant process of interpretation and that it is possible to take both authentic and inauthentic readings of our world and our possibilities for self transcendence. Like Heidegger, Kiefer's works suggest that the individual subject exists within a shared social and historical horizon that it inherits from its past and that it projects towards future.
Biro is very interesting when he compares Deutschlands Geisteshelden to Leonardo's Last Supper (which Chris noticed right away, I think. Or maybe it was me?) In 2016, over at 3 Quarks, I wrote a post called Eyes Swimming with Tears-- about the surprising effect that Leonardo's work had on me. And that, in part, could explain the emotional power the early Kiefer work exerted. Here is Biro:
Like Leonardo da Vinci‘s Last Supper in the church of Santa Maria del Grazia in Milan, for example, Germany Spiritual Heroes opens up the wall upon which it hangs in thereby sucks the viewer into an enveloping fictive space of representational and symbolic elements. However, whereas the perspectival space of Leonardo‘s fresco both idealizes and harmonizers its religious subject matter (through the placement of Christ's head at the center of the image, the balancing of the figure groups, and the harmonious poses), the perspectival space of Germany’s Spiritual Heroes, which is skewed slightly toward the left, suggests a rationality and an order of gone wild. Upon inspection, Kiefer's one-point perspective appears more pronounced than Leonardo's. And because nothing substantial occupies the space between the spectator and the far wall, our eyes move back-and-forth between depth and flatness more rapidly in Kiefer's painting than in the more filled interior of the renaissance work. As a result, the spectator feels more controlled. Thus, because Kiefer's perspective is “forced" and his room empty of human inhabitants, his perspective scheme also seems more violent and domineering. In addition, the conflict between the geometrical linear and organic linear elements of Kiefer's surface creates a destabilizing optical rotation, which evokes rhythmic and monotonous motions of machine production. As Kiefer's wooden interior implies, it is at times reasonable to have heroes -- role models with stories and relics can represent possibilities for action in our own lives -- and at other times completely insane, as demonstrated again and again by social and political movements that based themselves On the cult of a. supreme leader . This perspectival expansion of the wooden room suggests the scientific – rational power of the heroes followers: the subjects who have supposedly constructed the wooden hall and whose social identity appears to be at least partially informed through their acts of collective historical commemoration. In addition, because of the multiple signs of danger, Kiefer's work suggests that the "followers" have contributed their considerable strength and knowledge to serve some higher cause without a visible sign to confirm the moral correctness of their allegiance to this particular group of Germany’s spiritual heroes. Finally, the pronounced natural grain of the wood clashes with the geometric structure that confines it and to which it must conform. Nature, which in the Renaissance was understood to harmonize and find completion in human reason, here seems at odds with-- perhaps even endangered by --humankind's rational abilities.