Anselm Kiefer and The Shapes of Time

Anselm Kiefer and the Shapes of Time
Author(s): CHARLES MOLESWORTH

Source: Salmagundi, No. 82/83 (Spring-Summer 1989), pp. 78-89
Published by: Skidmore College
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Anselm Kiefer and the
Shapes
of Time
BY CHARLES MOLESWORTH
(for
H.M. and
R.B.)
One of the
overriding
sensations
generated by
the Anselm
Kiefer exhibit* is that of
being caught
in a curious time
warp.
On the one hand Kiefer
paints
with
many
of the
attributes,
such as
egoistic theatricality,
heroic
scale,
and a
rough-house
attitude towards
materials,
that are
clearly
and
heavily
in-
debted to Abstract
Expressionism.
But
just
as
convincingly
he
goes
about his art with an attitude that could
only
be sustained
by
someone for whom that fabled American school of the 1950's
never existed. Kiefer seems to
escape
from the context of
Abstract
Expressionism by extending it,
as if none of its
problems, self-questionings,
and
revisionary
histories were at
stake. Kiefer has
accomplished
one
thing
crucial to all
artists,
and it
helps
to
strengthen
his
supporters
and
quiet
his critics:
namely,
he
paints
as if what he
does,
in all its
grandiosity,
was
the
way painting ought
to be done. The sensation of the time
warp, however,
creates a further sense that Kiefer is
supported
by history
and at the same time
contemptuous
of its
rigidities.
The
highest
claim one
might
make for him is that he creates
his own historical
context,
that he
warps
time in
probably
the
*
At the Museum of Modern Art in New York
City
until
January 3,
1989.
The show travelled from
Chicago
to
Philadelphia
to Los
Angeles
before
closing
in New York.
QO
I
2 S
li
80 CHARLES MOLESWORTH
only way
it can be
warped
-
disdainfully.
But it is not time
pure
and
simple
with which Kiefer
wrestles or
succeeds,
it is more
specifically
with art historical
time,
that
special
construct that is
open
to the winds of
change,
celebrity,
media
exposure,
and a dozen other forces even more
difficult to harness. From time to
time,
art historical schemes
return back to the histories of
society
and
politics
from which
they spring,
somewhat as a
prodigal
child returns. But is it out
of
duty
or instinct that such returns occur? And is the
homecoming
the occasion of
rejoicing
or retribution? But
Kiefer's work
occurs,
or at least is
famously exposed,
at a time
when art
history
is back
among
the historical constructs of-
fered on the
larger
canvases of
society
and
politics.
It is this
painter's tribute,
and his
special burden,
that his work raises
with new force the
questions
of how and
why
art should deal
with "real life"
subjects,
such as historical
ideologies, personal
will,
and emotional
qualities,
as
opposed
to the formalist con-
cern with
purely "painterly"
issues. In
fact,
Kiefer's art
engages
several
issues,
but
they
can be
grouped
under at least
three
headings:
social and emotional
content,
visual
pleasure,
and technical abilities. A full
response
to his
work,
of
course,
would
try
to
integrate
these issues into some coherent view.
Kiefer has executed several
large
canvases that feature
cultural, historical,
and
mythical
heroes of
Germany,
often
posed against grand,
even
grandiose, backgrounds,
and
labelled with a
script lettering
that
suggests,
in
part,
the sort
of hand one sees in the work of
admiring
school children
copy-
ing
out the lesson of the
day.
One
person's patriotism
is
another's
chauvinism;
one
person's burgeoning
nationalism is
seen
by
someone else as
incipient
fascism.
Kiefer,
of
course,
fully
realizes that German
nationalism,
since Nazism and the
horrors of World War
II,
is not
just
another nationalism. So
what is the
viewer, especially
the non-German
viewer,
to make
of Kiefer's work in this vein?
Having
raised so
explicitly
the is-
sues of historical and
political
values and
responsibilities,
what can he
expect
the viewer's
response
to be? In one
painting
the names and
portraits
of
Rilke,
the
mystical poet,
and von
Clausewitz,
the hard-nosed theoretician of
war, among
several
others,
are
present;
in a different
painting, effigies
(in
the form
i
li
of
flaming
torches ensconced in an
empty
hall)
representing
Joseph Beuys,
the radical
artist,
and Richard
Wagner,
the
great composer
and notorious
anti-Semite, appear together
with famous German cultural
figures.
In a
post-structuralist,
post-modern world,
we
might
read such
juxtapositions
as
ironic,
but
forgivingly ironic,
as if the
target
or butt of the
joke
were not
any particular person
or
group,
but rather
history
it-
self. If
any
nation or
group
can
produce
such
disparate figures,
Kiefer
might
be understood to
suggest,
and still call itself one
people,
one
entity,
then the boundaries of self-delusion are in-
finite,
and
infinitely
comic.
But is it all a
joke? Perhaps
the visual
pleasures
of the
work
help
us answer this
question, though again
Kiefer is and
is not a
painter
who offers such
pleasures readily.
Indebted in
part
to the same
impulses
that
produced
Arte
Povera,
with its
use of
crude, "everyday" materials,
the canvases are
startling
in a
way
that combines seductive textures and details with a
brusque un-painterly impatience
or directness. So the
ques-
tions return in another context. Do the dark
palette
and the
roughened textures,
the burnt-out look of the canvases and
their harsh
elementarity, complete
with
paint-encrusted hay,
stretches of
paint
thickened with sand and
clay,
often on a
backing
of lead
plating, suggest
destruction and historical
desolation? Or do
they
rather
suggest
some
nearly
silent but
proud
reaffirmation of a national
soul,
a "volkish"
spirit,
that
survives in
spite
of its own
self-destructiveness,
in
spite
of un-
ending brutality
from both inner and outer
forces,
in
spite
of
modernity
itself?
Kiefer's mentor was the late
Joseph Beuys,
and
Beuys
drew considerable influence from the modernist
attack,
elaborated
by Duchamp
and
others,
on retinal
pleasure.
This
would account for the more or less
directly
"semantic" side of
Kiefer. But he never allows such interest in
conceptual
or intel-
lectual issues to overwhelm his concern with
pigment, texture,
and
plastic
values. Yet even here the issues are
complicated.
By using
several
impractical techniques,
such as
painting
on
clumps
of
hay
and
fastening
blobs of
poured
lead onto the can-
vases,
Kiefer creates a curatorial
nightmare.
Much recent con-
cern has been aired about the state of
many
of the works of the
Anselm
Kiefer
and the
Shapes of
Time 83
Abstract
Expressionists
-
Rothko's
canvases,
for
example,
have
already begun
to fade less than a dozen
years
after his
death. For a
painter
like
Rothko,
whose commitment to the
qualities
of color
approached something
like a
religious level,
such
fading represents
a virtual destruction of the
spiritual.
If
Kiefer wants a monumental
art,
as his sense of scale and con-
tent would
clearly imply,
his use of
ephemeral
and brittle
materials
suggests
at the same time an attack on the
very
no-
tion of
durability
and a
triumph
over time.
By using
lead
sheeting
for the
background
of several
paintings,
Kiefer
indulges
in a modernist
exploration
of
material. The
properties
of lead are such that it can seldom be
rolled
absolutely smooth,
so it creates an effect similar to that
of color field
abstraction,
where
slight
variation in tone and
surface creates visual interest. Sometimes Kiefer scores the
lead with
acid,
but even here there is almost a chaste
result,
as
the corroded surface is not all that
gouged
or discolored. The
blobs of
poured lead, generally
used in
paintings
with scorched
or
roughened backgrounds,
are attached to the canvas
by
small
staples; apparently
the lead is not
poured directly
on to the
painting,
but added later in
collage
fashion. Such uses of lead
might very
well connote some interest in industrial
techniques,
a
way
of
signaling
some modern
impulse
at work in Kiefer's
mind. But because of the softness and its
interesting texture,
the lead also connotes
malleability
and
elementariness,
and
thus
suggests
a medieval or alchemical context. It is as if
Kiefer were
harking
back to
Mime,
the dwarf Vulcan-like
figure
from the
Niebelung
who mans the
foundry
that
produces
Siegfried's
sword. Kiefer has been
quoted
as
saying
that
"sym-
bols create a kind of simultaneous
continuity
and we recollect
our
origins."
Such concern with
origins
extends
beyond
the
semantic content to the materials themselves.
The use of
hay
in the
paintings
is combined with
polymer
paint, emulsion,
and
shellac;
traditional media such as oil
pig-
ments are not
prominently
featured and
something
like
tempera
is noticeable
by
its absence. On at least one occasion
the
hay
connects in a
challengingly
literal
way
with Kiefer's
use of
landscape.
In a
painting
entitled "March
Heath,
March
Sand,"
he covers
large
areas in a
photographic image
of a
landscape
with
irregular strips
of sand
glued
onto the surface.
The literalness here is almost
comic,
as if he were
trying
to
plow up
the
image.
As it turns
out,
the title refers to a
patriotic
tune used for
inspirational
effect
by Hitler, and,
further
back,
the area
depicted
is a locale in
Brandenburg
that
figures
im-
portantly
as a
battleground
in Prussian
history.
The thematics
of
plowing
and
regeneration
would seem to
suggest
the
pos-
sibility
of a new
start,
but
they
could
just
as well
suggest,
with
typical equivocality,
the
penchant
to
plow
under
unpleasant
episodes
and the resultant
irruption
of unresolved destructive
impulses.
If the latter
suggestion
is
dominant,
then the
picture
could also be taken as a sort of literalized
pun, representing
the "real" area beneath all the associations of
memory
and
misused
history.
Such
literalizing
of
metaphors
and
puns
occurs in the
work of some
Pop
artists. Kiefer is
perhaps
as far removed
from a
Pop sensibility
as one could
be,
at least at first
glance.
But then we remember his use of
words,
often for the sake of
"identification,"
as
part
and
parcel
of the visual
images,
and we
might
recall the work of Jim
Dine,
or even the
Magritte
of "ceci
n'est
pas
un
pipe."
And Kiefer's
sculpture,
"Palette with
Wings,"
is a metal construction over nine feet
tall, composed
of
a
palette
board
(a
favorite
motif)
flanked
by
a
pair
of
wings
(with
an eleven foot
span),
and a lead snake entwined around
the
piece's supporting single pole.
The snake is both a
symbol
of trouble in
Eden,
and a
caduceus, suggesting
medical health.
The artist's tool can
soar,
Kiefer seems to tell
us,
but
only
if we
admit that such
soaring
is either
subject
to
corruption,
or is it-
self a
putative
cure for our fallenness. But the tone of this
par-
ticular
equivocal conjunction
has about it
something
like a
Pop
playfulness.
Even the notion of
sculpting
a
pair
of lead
wings
echoes an aesthetic
disposition
that stretches from
Duchamp's
marble
sugar
cubes to Johns's
"Painting
with Two
Balls,"
with
its
witty mockery
of macho attitudes. And is the
raggedness
of
the
wings'
feathers a
gesture
towards mimetic
naturalism,
or
an ironic
send-up
of it?
There is some indication that Kiefer is
moving away
from
a narrow German
focus,
as recent works deal with the French
Revolution and the
myth
of Isis and Osiris. But the latter in-
Anselm
Kiefer
and the
Shapes of
Time 85
dulges
in a
literalization,
as the
myth
of the scattered limbs of
the
Egyptian deity
are
represented by
shards of
porcelain
scat-
tered about a
hug
canvas and tied back to a central
point by
strands of
copper
wire. There is also the
vantage point
of the
viewer situated
just
outside and a little above the horizon line.
The revolution
painting
is titled "The Ladies of the French
Revolution,"
and consists of five
panels
covered with lead
sheets;
mounted on the
panels
in a random order are
wildflowers framed under
glass,
each named for a woman in-
volved in the historic events. But as with the ironic
juxtaposi-
tion of German cultural
heroes,
here we have both Charlotte
Corday
and Marie Antoinette
joined
in the same
work, denying
any
consistent
political partisanship.
What links these more
recent works with the German
paintings
is a
play
with
materials,
a sense of historic
irony,
and a sense that Kiefer is
developing
technical skills of execution
(the
French Revolution
work
being especially impressive)
under the
guise
of
expanding
his
subject
matter.
Kiefer is an
interesting
artist because such
questions
about his use of materials continue to be asked
alongside
the
queries
about his social content and historical themes. One of
the main
legacies
of formalism in
painting
and in art
history
was the notion that these two areas of art
-
matters of
style
and the
manipulation
of materials on the one
hand,
metaphoric
or thematic or ideational content on the other
-
were linked in some abstract
sense, though
what
really
mat-
tered was the first area.
Only
if the first area were accorded
something
like absolute
primacy
of aesthetic
significance,
would the second area be allowed a
place; otherwise,
opinionated, gullible,
and
temperamental
as most of us
are,
our
opinions, fancies,
and ideas would lead us
away
from the
purely
aesthetic. While Kiefer lets us have
opinions
and fan-
cies,
he still lets us
know,
unlike the
conceptual artists,
for ex-
ample,
that visual
pleasure
is not
only
a noble but a
necessary
aim in easel
painting.
Another
way
to
approach
Kiefer's relation to art
history
is
to trace
through
his work traditional or
mythic
motifs that he
has himself bent to a
personal expression.
For
example,
he
often uses
landscape frontality
in his
work;
the viewer is
presented
with a
large expanse, generally empty.
Even in
those
paintings
that have a
building, room,
or other structure
in
them,
the
feeling
is one of an
empty expanse.
The
viewpoint
is often
just
above such
expansive emptiness,
so that Kiefer
may
be
suggesting
that we are not
exactly
immersed in or
trapped by
our historical
horizons,
but we are far from
being
free of them in
any way.
He also often
paints
trees or ferns or
flowers,
even
occasionally incorporating
actual
plants
into the
work. These can be seen as emblems of
frailty,
but also as
signs
of
eternally self-regulating forms;
in either
case, they
seem to serve as
something
of a rebuke to the orders of culture
and human intention that are otherwise so dominant in the
paintings.
Such
appeals, through
traditional
motifs,
to the
themes of domination and
frailty
of
responsibility
and detach-
ment would indicate a standard humanistic
attitude, though
one
deeply
felt and
sincerely expressed,
that tells us we
are,
as
Shakespeare
would
say, "poor
forked
things," simultaneously
the victims and the observers of our fate.
Now
many
of our historical
schemes,
and
by
extension
our art historical
schemes,
are
impoverished
when it comes to
setting up polarized
dichotomies.
Despite many warnings
and
good intentions,
such
polarities
turn out to have no
really
use-
ful
mediating
term or
category
that will
keep
the scheme from
becoming
mechanistic or reductive. So Kiefer
may
turn out to
represent
a continuation of formalism
by
other
means,
or else
he
may
be hailed as a
precursor
of a return to
painting
made
significant through
social and historical content. It is hard to
see him as
representing
both
possibilities
(even
harder to see
him as
representing neither),
because the two
"parties",
that of
formalism and that of
socially
conscious
art,
have no room for
overlap.
The most
cynical reading
of Kiefer would be that he
realizes all this but has chosen to set it
against
itself
by subtly
manipulating just enough
of the
stylistic
markers from each
camp
so as to
appear equally
at home in both. For what does
seem unavoidable is the conclusion that Kiefer is
nothing
if not
self-conscious about
style
even to the
point
of
being stylish.
One of the
ways
that art historical schemes are drawn
up
is to attend to
questions
of
skill,
or
rather,
to
try
to use levels of
skill,
and even attitudes to skill
itself,
as historical markers. In
Anselm
Kiefer
and the
Shapes of
Time 87
some
fairly
radical versions of such
history
there is even a
hoped-for equation
between skill and
political
content. This is
true in other than art historical
schemes, by
the
way.
One
slogan,
for
example,
heard
during
the 1960's in America was
that
"good writing
is
counter-revolutionary."
The
equation
here
seems to involve a notion that
pleasure
can have a
specific
class function and a
specific
class
identity;
certain forms of
frippery
or a concern with variations rather than with
themes,
for
example, might
be assumed to be
"bourgeois."
Con-
trariwise, rough
externals or a thematics of
disrespect,
even
resentment,
are assumed to be
proletarian,
or at a
minimum,
anti-bourgeois.
Such
equations
are
rejected by many
critics as
too
simplistic, reductive,
or tendentious. But
establishing
the
truth of such claims is
tricky,
much trickier than the all-too-
ready willingness
of
many
to discard them
completely
would
seem to warrant. A considerable
part
of the excitement
generated by Kiefer,
and also some of the
dismay,
is tied to this
recurrent
predilection
to make an
easy assumption
about the
relatedness of technical and
stylistic questions
on the one
hand,
and
ideological
and
political
values and
concerns,
on the
other.
Kiefer's work contains a number of
equivocal aspects
and
these make such relatedness hard to
spell
out. In the face of
such
ambiguity, many people
want some resolution. One im-
mediate
temptation might
be to
argue
that
Kiefer, by
return-
ing political
and social issues to
painting,
is
ipso
facto a radical
artist. Another
temptation might
be to add that his
style
is
deliberately rough,
that it
abjures
not
only
the
polished
sur-
faces of commercial art but also the
by-now
tame standard
forms of
avant-garde outrageousness;
hence his
project
must
constitute a
truly challenging
new direction. These
readings
of
Kiefer would echo the sense of a time
warp
mentioned
earlier,
for
they
would
implicitly suggest
that he becomes
truly
avant-
garde by outstripping
the
avant-garde
at its own
game,
that is
by ignoring precedent.
The
irony
in Kiefer's case comes from
that fact that the
precedents
he
ignores
are those of the avant-
garde
itself. As a friend of mine remarked after
seeing
the
Kiefer
show,
"After
post-modernism
comes modernism." In a
way
what we
might
be
seeing
is the
turning
back on itself of an
art historical
consciousness,
and that
turning
back results in a
challenge
-
even a deconstructive
challenge
-
to art
history
itself. If the
Pop
and then even more so Minimalist movements
were
examples
of art conceived
by people
who knew art
history
but chose to mock its
"truths,"
then Kiefer is an artist who
works with and
against
the structures of such
history.
One
way
to understand a
history
that turns back on itself
is to see it as a form of
myth,
a recursiveness that would be
traceable back to a scheme from a
philosopher
like
Vico,
with
his love of
cycles
and
completions.
Kiefer is
certainly
a
mythic
artist,
at least in terms of much of his ostensible content. And
the
mythic disposition always
has a
tendency
to mock
chronological history,
to see it as an inferior
temporal
order
-
"those
dying generations,"
as Yeats said. What is there
by way
of motif
may
be there
by
virtue of a
guiding vision, though
that
doesn't mean that Kiefer has a consistent or
programmatic
at-
titude towards the
competing
claims of
myth
and
history.
But
at the
very
least it would
help clarify
the mixture of
tones,
al-
lowing
the
grave
historical
irony
and the
painterly play
with
materials and semantics to coexist. It would also
help
us see
why
it is
possible, perhaps necessary,
to
regard
Kiefer as both
an historical and a formalist
painter.
This
may
be the clue to his
political meaning
as well.
Most of the
major political revolutionary
movements have both
a forward and a backward
looking aspect.
This
may
come from
a desire to
capture
and even
shape
time
by freezing
it into a
recurrent
pattern.
Sartre has written of how the Girondin
party
in the French
Revolution,
for
example, adopted
Roman
values,
and even wore Roman
togas
in their
Republican
as-
sault on the order of the
monarchy.
But it is not
enough
to
say
that Kiefer must look back in order to move
ahead,
or that we
can trust his forward
lookingness
to "decontaminate" or ironi-
cally
correct the
possible
ethnocentrism or racialism in his sub-
ject
matter. It is not
enough
to make such
arguments,
but it
may
be all we are able at this time to make of Kiefer's work.
History,
as the
poet said,
has
many cunning corridors,
and
much
may
well
depend
on who is
willing
to follow Kiefer down
his
particular
route. Marx's famous remark in The
Eighteenth
Brumaire,
that men make their own
history
but not
always
as
Anselm
Kiefer
and the
Shapes of
Time 89
they
would
wish,
has been
glossed many
times. Marx used the
plural advisedly,
for the
history any
of us makes must in turn
be further made or unmade
by
those that follow. But this
ap-
plies
to Kiefer with
something
like
special force,
not
only
be-
cause he seems to have an
ability
-
or at least the desire
-
to
make his own
history
as he
goes.

Anselm Kiefer and The Shapes of Time

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Anselm Kiefer and The Shapes of Time

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Anselm Kiefer and the Shapes of Time

Author(s): CHARLES MOLESWORTH

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