Timothy D Martin, “Anselm Kiefer” Third

Text, No. 38 (Spring), 1997, pp.104-107. ISSN

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Reading about Kiefer's older work, especially

from the period of 1975 to 1990, was to encounter
certain adjectives such as sombre, epic, organic
impasto, tragic, reflective, critical, urgent with a
truth in painting and a history that mustn't be
forgotten. His work churned with post-fascist
intuitions about collective guilt, individual
responsibility and the perils of ideological
manipulation of the German romantic tradition.
They also seemed to pose a new postmodern
sublime warning. Against the grandeur and epic
adventure of Nazi romanticisations of war, he
placed the brutal historical results. He evoked a
tragic sublime out of the history of twentieth
century Germany, beginning with the Second
World War, through to Auschwitz and on to the
ever present possibility of an exchange of atomic
warheads over a divided country. This new
postmodern sublime seemed compelling in its use
of historical evidence to refute modernist
positivism, audacious in its abandonment of
abstract painting and courageous in its consid-
eration of Cold War anxieties.
As Kiefer's rise paralleled that of postmod-
ernism it still seems possible to read his work in
those terms. This might include the way he used
the heritage of romantic, expressionist, and indeed
fascist imagery to deconstruct them from within.
Much like the photography of Levine, Sherman
and Kruger, Kiefer took an existing style and
medium in order to demonstrate its ideological
underpinnings, its quality in a play of relational
meanings, and the often absurd or terrible
consequences which ensued when ideology games
get out of hand. If his paintings seemed to
appropriate ironically images from German history
and achievement, it was in order to leave open the
question of the genealogy of fascism.
While his reputation as a moral conscience in
the German avant-garde grew through the 1980s,
so too did misunderstandings lessen, and the
work finally proved quite resonant to Liberals and
Christian Democrats in most NATO countries.

Anselm Kiefer, Die Sechste Posaune (The Sixth Trumpet Call), 1996, emulsion, acrylic, shellac and sunflower seeds on
canvas, 520 x 560 cm. Photo: John Mason
Kiefer's rise to fame at the time was a sort of proof
positive to the rest of the art world of the sophis-
tication and moral intelligence of German cultural
politics. Swayed at the time, I remember the
Kiefer phenomenon, convincing because it
presented in stark terms a basic moral narrative
intended to avoid a third world war. With such
pragmatism in mind, it seemed inappropriate
then to deconstruct the religious elements of his
work, especially since he already went a consid-
erable way to a sceptical reinterpretation of fascist
culture.
This is not to say, though, that there were not
doubts about the visual beauty of the work
belittling the profundity of the Holocaust (Jed
105
Perl), doubts about the irony Kiefer displayed for
the cliches and kitsch of Nazi imagery, doubts
about 'fascinating fascism' (Susan Sontag's
phrase) and rumblings about a Heideggerian
'complicity'. Nevertheless, along with Beuys and
Richter, Kiefer took up the challenge of a post-
fascist morality, and perhaps one of the greatest
successes was his 1985 trip to Israel. In a difficult
moral condition he created paintings based on the
Exodus in order to give it meaning for his own
wish to be free of historical guilt. In defining a
positive identity through a reflection upon
another cultural mythology, he promised a
compelling negotiation of a shared identity where
there had previously been such atrocities. Perhaps
106
the overflow of this visit, the residual problematic,
was the noticeable increase in what I might call
'mythological intensities', and the decline of a
restraining irony about all myths. He seemed to
be providing teleology as a balm in conditions
which would understandably have been neurosis-
making at times. Another view was that it is
possible to achieve a state of 'grace' through
artistic immediacy and presence and to produce a
healing art which explored the powers of the
artist-as-holy-man.
Back in the early 1980swhen his work began to
be seen in Britain, mostly at the Anthony d'Offay
Gallery, this country was increasingly impressed
with its Femme de fer. The adjectives then were
those of greatness, hints of Empire, of Victorian
values, and a heroic re-conquest of public
properties. Powerful economic forces were to
reinvigorate and make a new and more sound
nation. Such ideologically driven certainties gave
great courage and determination to some. It was
all meant to be so epic.
For some, to look at Kiefer at this time was to
see a muted celebration of the greatness and
heroism so proffered at the time. The grandeur of
the spaces, the sense of peril and risk made the
work very resonant. In the art schools of the time
a little spawning could be seen of young painters,
as hopeful as any, who took to Kiefer's work as
the basis of a language which could laud what can
only be described as the Age of Thatcher. It was
the peculiar function of the British art schools at
that time, and the particular strength of Kiefer's
work, that this little spawn was dealt with. These
young painters were reminded that Kiefer came to
warn against the grandeur of Nazi images, and the
deceptions of an abused romanticism. Once
pointed out, Kiefer's message was just too self-
evident to dispute, and wherever such miscon-
strued admirations erupted, they were 'put right'
in an act of quiet aesthetic policing.
Now with all this said, it would be interesting
to speculate on the reception here in London for
Kiefer's new work. I say 'new' because, in the last
several years, there has been a substantial shift in
content which is not paralleled by an obvious
change in form. This is in itself rather striking
because it is not clear where the search for
historical and moral integrity is going. The same
general look, the large scale, the use of materials,
collage and photography remain formally in the
new work. It was perhaps doubly difficult
therefore not to bring to this show some of the old
expectations and criteria.
In accounting for this change in the new work,
Thomas McEvilley's catalogue essay indicates
Kiefer's sudden and complete abandonment of
painting in the early 1990s. After a three year
hiatus, "like a life begun anew", he then produced
work which is described as an ahistorical inner
space of the self, and a return to the mystery
which so often inflected modernist expres-
sionisms, both figurative and abstract.' The
change to a more personal and less historically
oriented interest is somewhat a matter of pleasure
- taken as a rushing into a lack - which is
genuinely moving when the frame is set at a
cosmological scale. In this Kiefer has not lost a
certain mastery of the Beautiful Sublime. The new
work treats so heavily of what might be called
'Dasein' after Heidegger, or simply 'a universal
Being which unites all men' that he seems to be
reversing his position and claiming some of the
very same rhetorical gestures so criticised in
fascism. Such a reversal tends to leave open the
possibility that, with the reunification of
Germany, these paintings are not reflections on
history so much as they are ideological positions
in this current historical context. Maybe, with the
fall of the wall, Kiefer has left a post-fascist cold
war stage and re-entered as a rhetorical agent of
the present policy objective of being united again.
Alternatively, perhaps during the hiatus Kiefer
was looking for a way to continue the sublime
note even after his subject matter had historically
escaped him with the end of the cold war.
Regardless of whether he is addressing the
internal tensions of reunification, he has certainly
gone looking for his new subject while travelling
abroad. And yet, after Israel this has not led the
work to Bosnia but to Bombay. His search for a
pan-theological macrocosmic schema has, in
specific, incorporated yogic practice and theology,
Aztec, Mayan, ancient Egyptian religion and even
the 'heretical' Catholicisms of European
Mannerism. I suppose he finds here many of the
same ontic urges of destruction, especially in
Aztec ceremonies of human sacrifice and Hindu
narratives, as in German fascism, and in this he
has a point. But, when Kiefer shows himself lying
down amongst giant sunflowers to be
overwhelmed by a stillness which bespeaks of
both a creative and a destructive cosmic force, this
supine pose does not suggest a self-reflection so
much as a repressed motive. I could see, for
example, psychoanalysis providing as thoughtful
a reflection on human sadistic pleasure and the
death wish. His choice is to find such forces of
creation and destruction finally in nature. In a
recent book, for example he shows the city of
Fesaia eroding and silting, suggesting the 19th
century sublime of the ruin. Unlike the old work,
grass and erosion, rather than the Panzer or the
ICBM, are once again the mythic agents of un-

Being.
If, as Thomas McEvilley has pointed out, Kiefer
has quit speaking as a 'German' and has also
remained reticent of his own subconscious
motives, I would argue that he has started
speaking not so much as an 'individual', but as a
high modernist 'everyman'. What is surprising,
though, is how limited an encounter with other
cultures this everyman tends to have. I would
worry that his ventures are decided on their
appropriateness as a note in the universalising
harmonies which the artist seeks. While real
Indians are invisible, what can be seen are a
sequence of unironic and uncontextualised
Hindu-based myths. Perhaps this is most clear in
the keynote paintings entitled I Hold All lndias in
my Hand. Here the artist stands in the middle of
the universe, encircled by maps of the peripheral
regions of the earth (generically called Indias)
where wisdom might still be found, all floating in
an infinite envelope of dual forces such as
fire/water and light/dark. Although he may be
quoting the 16th century Mannerist poet
Francesco de Quevedo's evocation of a "great
empire enclosed by love", it is still a title which
also suggests, among others, the hegemonic as
much as the harmonic. I would worry that, in
ignoring this irony and in staking so much on the
theme of an eternally conflicted 'Dasein', he also
runs the danger of creating a rationale for
suffering and destruction that might quite easily
be reconciled to all manner of future injustice. It is
just too easy to adapt this new work to an
understanding. of individuals as mere cosmic
agents who bear no moral responsibility or
subtlety of motivation.
In this respect, then, the new paintings, despite
his travels, are not really a space for a
multicultural exchange. Instead, they are an
autobiographical journey carried out against the
rather chance backdrop of what might be called
'the wisdom of the pre-Roman ancients' which is
still to be found in the non-industrialised margins
of Third World countries. Although he may still
be a formal master, the timbre of his self-reflection
through archaic and 'oriental' mythologies, the
insistent universalising, the use of rather
stereotyped and nostalgic religious archetypes
and symbolism, seem too forced and concocted
for either his unchanged style or an audience
attuned now to the more plausible claims of
difference and multiplicity. For example, the
quality of his experiences in India, which were
infinitely particular and historically bound, might
have been more evident in the work. While the
exclusion of the artist as a psychological being
with certain subconscious goals seemed justified
107
as clutter in the broad historical scope of the old
work, with such a major appearance of personal
content in the new work it might now be due for
an appearance.
In returning to a certain universalising and a
quest for purity at a time when it is also so evident
that impure and divers situations are the most
promising, he runs strongly against the current
grain. I would argue that the current cultural
milieu is admirable in that many can now more
easily identify with a variety of communities and
enjoy a certain freedom by not being marginalised
into anyone of them. In this respect Kiefer's new
work could seem an asset, both for his escape
from a strictly 'German' identity and for his
empathetic responses to a range of world cultures
and histories in defining a wider identity. But I
also think that most of these varied identities,
even within a single person, come into moral
conflicts which, it seems, can only be assessed
specifically and particularly. To promote such
broad self-identity without such a register of
'mundane' conflict is to give only the rosy view,
and a small fraction of the picture of negotiating
these conflicts. This is the historical condition
which now seems to be most promising. As there
appears to be very little of this in the new work, it
may be some time yet before its view may be
widely valued.
Thomas McEvilley, Communion and Transcendence in Kiefer'S
New Work, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London, 1996.
'I Hold all Indias in my Hand', paintings by Anselm
Kiefer, was at the South London Gallery, 4th
December, 1996, to 9th February, 1997. The Anthony
d'OfTay Gallery in London also had an exhibition of
Kiefer's work from 4th December, 1996, to 15th
February, 1997.