Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth
The Modern
- Justin Quinn -
Melancholia waits outside Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth. This painting, often ignored by viewers eager to enter the retrospective proper, serves as a well-placed road sign and art-historical pun with a quintessentially German sensibility: it warns of the end. Heaven and Earth is set up like a lateral staircase—or a twisted timeline of sharpened metal—in which our perceptions shift and definitions of heaven and earth become muddled.
As one would expect, massive physical works dominate; pounds of pigment, ash and vegetable matter intermingle with tons of lead extracted from the roof of the Kölner Dom. These antiquated roof tiles—burned, oxidized and stained lead—serve as an armature for fascist architectural spaces and furnaces seething with ash. Kiefer’s language here is clear, but his visceral guilt is something I hope to never understand.
Anselm Kiefer, Himmel auf Erden (Heaven on Earth), 1998–2004
Oil, emulsion and acrylic on canvas with barbed wire
110 1/4 x 220 1⁄2 inches
Private collection
Often read in relation to the Luftwaffe, works like Earth and Die Ordnung der Engel (The Hierarchy of Angels) reveal a dangerous heavenly sphere: skies bent to ruin and earth bombarded with fire and death. Himmel auf Erden (Heaven on Earth), a massive painting Kiefer worked on from 1998 to 2004, brings this sense of guilt much closer to home. Here, the ashen palette of World War II is replaced with the sun-bleached sand of an Iraqi oil field. Heavy vehicles leave a trail toward a desolate horizon; barbed wire nests astral maps comprised of bullet holes. Heaven on Earth’s scorched terrain no longer tells a tale of German blood and soiled nationalism; rather, it depicts a contemporary hell of our own design. The sky has fallen, and suddenly Kiefer’s palpable yet culturally distant guilt no longer seems quite so safely exotic.
Anselm Kiefer, Burda Moden 92; pp 12-13, 2005
Book, 21 double pages; Photographs and paper on cardboard
31 7/8 x 20 1⁄2 x 2 3⁄4 inches
Private Collection
Perhaps the most surprising part of Kiefer’s retrospective is the incorporation of books in nearly every gallery. Bound pages transform an exhibition of massive painting and sculpture into an intimate experience, if only for a short while. Unlike Kiefer’s somewhat unyielding paintings, his books are fluid and honest, offering a glimpse into the artist’s contemplative life as well as metaphysical leanings. His books, whether empty or encrypted, are always mystical, made from the charred remains of clay, mud, lead and semen. They are about—and of—human flesh, swelling with the pathos of lost esoteric teachings, pointing towards the elevation of base materials to pure spirit. Could Kiefer be offering up hope in the midst of his otherwise abject skies?
he Secret Lives of Plants is a massive book that fans out in the round. Each leaden page becomes a personal alcove of dark, pitted matter suspended in the act of buckling under its own weight. The pages are maps, charting a section of the sky using both ancient names and NASA’s cold, complex numbering system. Every star is accounted for; points of light, traveling to us from extinguished stars, recreate ancient constellations as well as new celestial bodies. Equally engaged with the micro- and macrocosm, we stand exposed, as if in front of a full-length mirror where the heavens are indeed scaled maps of ourselves.
As we walk through the exhibition, our perceptions and judgments are continually in flux, largely because of Kiefer’s use of language and syntax. His slippery, ancient lexis stands in contrast to our reliance on binary codes. However logical and efficient current informational systems are, they remain ill-equipped to answer fundamental ontological questions. Kiefer’s use of words presents problems not only in terms of translation—as seen in the paltry title 20 Jahre Einsamkeit (Twenty Years of Loneliness)—but also in his abstract references. The painting Am Anfang (In the Beginning), a sister composition to Melancholia, offers a familiar, blasted-out landscape. But what separates this barren “birthplace” from a postapocalyptic vision? Kiefer shows us a trajectory that cannot be easily graphed; it is as if he looks forward to the beginning and then back to our end.