MARTIN A RUEHL: ANSELM KIEFER - COSMOLOGY AND HISTORY

Martin A Ruehl: Anselm Kiefer – Cosmology and History

This is a summary of a review by Martin A Ruehl of the exhibition of works by Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy, London from 27^th September to 14^th December 2014. 

Martin A Ruehl teaches German cultural and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge.

The review by Martin A Ruehl was published in Art and Christianity 80, dated Winter 2014, on pages 8 and 9.

Art and Christianity is the quarterly journal of Art and Christianity Enquiry (ACE).

This blog published a summary of Jonathan Jones’ review of the Kiefer exhibition from the Guardian newspaper on 26^th September 2014.

Martin A Ruehl: Anselm Kiefer – cosmology and history

Ruehl writes about Kiefer’s ‘relentless, obsessive engagement with his country’s past’. 

He writes about Gallery 4 of the exhibition in which Kathleen Soriano – the curator of the exhibition – states her understanding of Kiefer’s cosmology, which is that Kiefer shows a link between the divine and the human.   Ruehl is dismissive of Soriano’s analysis. 

In its place Ruehl advances his view, which is that if Kiefer subscribes to a cosmology it seems likely to be that of the ‘black fairy tale told by the grandmother in Buchner’s Woyzeck’. 

This fairy tale as retold by Ruehl is, in summary, that there was a time when an orphan child found that he was the only person alive in the world.  The child’s desire was to ascend to heaven, and he managed to reach as far as the moon, but he found that the moon was no more than rotting wood.  The child travelled as far as the sun: he found that it was a decaying sunflower.  Upon arrival at the stars, the child found that these were ‘tiny golden insects stuck there as though by a butcher-bird on blackthorn’.  When he returned to the earth the child found that it was no more than ‘an upturned cooking pot’.  The child cried, alone, and he remains there to this day.

Ruehl describes Kiefer’s ‘sustained, determined resistance to transcendence’.  He argues that this arises not so much from a cosmology as from a specific understanding of history.  Ruehl argues that Kiefer depicts a world that is ‘man-made, or rather German-made’.  Kiefer’s world, writes Ruehl, is a world that survives after ‘an all-consuming conflagration whose charred remains are the only possible, or at any rate, the only legitimate objects and materials for the post-apocalyptic artist.  That conflagration is, of course, the holocaust’.

Kiefer is probably the only artist who has successfully presented Germany’s post-war reckoning with Nazism as visual art.

And Kiefer’s engagement with his subject is ‘monomaniacal’, and ‘deadly earnest’.  Ruehl is critical of Kiefer’s lack of irony, finding his work wanting when compared with that of Beuys who was Kiefer’s teacher.  Kiefer’s later works are ‘literal, heavy-handed and overly didactic’. 

Ruehl criticises Kiefer for his lack of awareness that his placing of National Socalism in a direct lineage from Nordic mythology and Prussian militarism perpetuates the Nazi understanding of German history.  Ruehl argues that the frequent motif in many of Kiefer’s works of parallel lines leading to a point in the distance may show Kiefer subconsciously subscribing to Sonderweg – Nazi Germany’s understanding that by rejecting the liberal ethos of Western Europe and adopting a ‘fateful special path’ for Germany, the Third Reich was inevitable. 

Thus, Ruehr argues that Kiefer is showing ‘death and destruction as the necessary vanishing points of German history’ and he is showing his belief in ‘German singularity’.   ‘Death is a master from Germany’.