I visited the
Keifer exhibition at the Royal Academy on 25th November in the
company of Andrew Baker. I had
summarised two reviews of the show on this blog but I had done no other
preparation about Keifer before going to the Royal Academy.
The war with
Germany between 1939 and 1945 was a subtext to my growing up in late 1950s and
1960s suburban London, but with a maturing conscience and a teenage affinity
with the anti-Vietnam war movement, interest in World War Two became
increasingly distasteful for me. It was
a two week journey through Hungary, Slovakia and Ukraine in early 2010 with an
old friend and seasoned lone traveller east of Berlin that awakened in me a
sense that in Central and Eastern Europe there is vital 20th Century
history and meaning for the 21st Century that Western Europe has
forgotten.
Keifer confronts
in his works the triumph, decay and legacy of Nazi Germany.
The German
Third Reich seems to be a subject that will not go away, and if anything, it
gains in interest with every new European generation. Keifer grew up in the ruins of Germany and he
will not give up re-working the theme of Nazi Germany’s catastrophic hubris
which he represents by destruction, dereliction and ruin. But ‘ruin porn’ is everywhere to be found on
the internet, so what’s different about Anselm Kiefer’s work?
For a start,
there is an awful lot of it, and each piece is big.
Many art
works by Kiefer, whilst being paintings on the wall, are also assemblages and
collages of raw materials. Others are
free-standing installations. Kiefer’s
history that he presents to us is visceral and relentless. Many of the works in the show are weighty
assemblages that include sand, lead, dead vegetable matter and other raw
materials.
The
compositions are assured and the images are strong. Keifer has developed personal symbolism and
styles that lead the viewer into his world.
It is a disturbing journey.
Is Keifer a
great artist? A cynic would say that his
output is so prodigious that some of it must be good. A small part of Keifer’s oeuvre is on show at
Royal Academy: some is mediocre and mannered; mostly it speaks loudly of the
monstrous folly of Hitler and his war, and its voice remains loud after leaving
the gallery.
What does it
all mean?
In his review
of the Kiefer exhibition, Martin A Ruehl, writing in Art & Christianity 80 (see this blog, 17th November
2014) takes issue with the curator of the exhibition – Kathleen Soranio – who
asserts that Kiefer’s work shows a link between the divine and the human. Ruehl argues that there is no cosmology in
Kiefer’s works and that Kiefer is Earth-bound and denies transcendence. I agree with Ruehl in this. There is no hope of redemption in Kiefer: no
means of salvation for the German nation.
In his review
of the exhibition in The Guardian
(see this blog, 26th September 2014), Jonathan Jones concludes that
Kiefer ‘provokes anger in order to dispel forgetfulness’ and that ‘only by
dedicating his art to memory can an artist work with honour after
Auschwitz’.
Kiefer
relentlessly presses his point – that all that Germany lived for and fought for
in the mid Twentieth Century had no other intrinsic meaning than the substances that he
uses to make the pieces of his art.
ReplyDelete“the light and the structure seem to have crashed in / making you think of pigeons and crows / nesting and shitting in the temple of high culture” could also have described the Royal Academy building itself.
His images are mythic, impactful They are explicit images with symbolic value, made to show the scars of their ritual role in some mystical rite. I take their impact as images head on for what they are, always checking myself for being seduced by purely painterly qualities for themselves and yes giving in to it which he allows you to do. I suspect some in the modern oeuvre would have resisted this wholly and utterly as Kiefer does with his love of the discarded and careless surface and yet I also sense that there is much to enjoy with the ambivalent religiosity, stuck between heaven and earth between painted and romantic images whilst looking for the austere and adherence to consistent principle. But this is not how children play and there is much of the child about him.
His early 70s work could have been easily passed over as unremarkable and indeed rosy watercolours with figures in sketchbooks that themselves become fetishised 3 dimensional stacks, small then larger. There is a simple love for painting and drawing that squeaks out of a presentation forced into an installation pointing to something else. This is biography magnified to historical comment, but its the person who draws me most. How would we have seen him had he have been born in Ireland rather than the historical backdrop to the 20thC which was the Germany divided by the wall.
the early beginnings of powerful objects loaded with power, the burnt book, testament to self denial as much as incidents of history. It is a template for the cosmological infinite space of the later works where the images are with no little drama stretched across some vast space. Are they promoted or demeaned by this treatment? On the whole they are not. The field of burnt sunflowers is memorable for many reasons but I do not know why exactly and neither do I need to know as being definite or ultimately defined is to misunderstand a child simply and deeply at play.
Thank you Andrew.
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