Anselm Kiefer is preoccupied with the Holocaust and the legacy of the Nazis. Doing work on a grand scale, and partaking with symbols of Nazi grandiosity, he grapples with a subject matter to which several of his critics answer by citing Theodor Adorno’s perfectly-recognised statement, “To generate a poem following Auschwitz is barbaric.” Even though not absolutely unwarranted, that counter to Kiefer’s do the job is also effortless and a tad glib. The sentence is bundled in the essay “Cultural Criticism and Culture,” in Prisms (MIT Press, 1967), translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber. In the opening paragraph, Adorno writes:
The cultural critic is not happy with civilization, to which alone he owes his discontent. He speaks as if he signifies unadulterated character or a higher historical phase. But he is essentially of the exact essence as that to which he fancies himself excellent.
These are the troubling issues that viewers of Kiefer’s function should offer with. What is the essence of the artist’s discontent? Does he feel that he can redeem the matter and carry the Holocaust into the realm of art? Does he imagine he signifies an “unadulterated nature”?
Numerous of the 13 paintings in Anselm Kiefer: Exodus at Gagosian (November 12–December 23, 2022) are gargantuan they are composed of different processes and elements, together with emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, copper leaf, sediment, metal, material, wooden, hair, rope, terracotta, browsing carts, attire, and paintbrushes. Seven of the paintings depict a huge spoil. “Für Paul Celan” (For Paul Celan, 2021), which is additional than 12 by 18 feet, depicts the decaying and unused Zeppelin Industry Grandstand, made by Albert Speer, Adolph Hitler’s architect. In 2019, the metropolis of Nuremberg had to make your mind up what to do with this empire-scaled architecture and landscape that glorified Hitler and Nazism. Julia Lehner, the city’s chief society formal, mentioned, “We will not rebuild, we won’t restore, but we will conserve. It is an vital witness to an period — it makes it possible for us to see how dictatorial regimes stage deal with on their own.”
Kiefer has created will work that refer to Celan’s early, celebrated poem “Todesfugue” (Death Fugue) considering the fact that 1981. In that poem (translated by Michael Hamburger), Celan writes:
He phone calls out more sweetly engage in death dying is a grasp from Germany
he calls out far more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke you will rise in the air
then a grave you will have in the clouds there 1 lies unconfined.
What do the ashes mean in Kiefer’s paintings? Are they graves in the clouds for the hundreds of thousands who have been murdered? Is this Kiefer’s intention in depicting the developing in opposition to a blackish ground and dedicating it to Celan? What does it mean to dramatize the squalor of its classical edifice, and its dream of historical Rome and Greece? In the long term Germany for which the Zeppelin Subject Grandstand was crafted, only Aryans would be in a position to occur and value what it stood for. By dedicating it to Celan, a Romanian-born Jewish poet whose mothers and fathers have been murdered in a focus camp, is Kiefer underscoring Nazi Germany’s failure?
In 1958, when Celan was awarded the Bremen Prize, he stated of poetry following Auschwitz:
Only a person detail remained reachable, close and protected amid all losses: language. Of course, language. In spite of almost everything, it remained safe towards reduction. But it experienced to go via its have absence of responses, as a result of terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went via. It gave me no words for what was occurring, but went by it. Went through and could resurface, “enriched” by it all.
In Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (2000), the translator, John Feltsiner, prices the poet: “There is nothing in the environment for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.” In his afterwards poems, Celan tore apart the German language. He applied neologisms and wrote in a damaged language that gave him no words and phrases for what experienced happened. He experienced to invent his own words, whilst Kiefer has appropriated symbols and metaphors from a lot of resources and cultures.
“Für Paul Celan” is scaled for a museum, reminding me of anything Robert Smithson wrote: “[…] museums and parks are graveyards earlier mentioned the ground — congealed memories of the previous that act as a pretext for fact.” The fact to which Kiefer subscribes has its roots in German Romanticism, notably the belief that the artist can mediate between the imaginative and the divine, involving earth and heaven. With his use of direct and gold, he proposes the artist as an alchemist who can transform inert make a difference into spirit. This is the place I uncover Kiefer’s work troubling. He chooses the oracular and invokes the Rapture, with the direct procuring cart in “Exodus” (2022) tilted up toward the gold-leafed sky. He looks to believe the artist possesses a spiritual, superhuman electricity.
According to the gallery, “Danaë” (2016–21) which is around 12 feet significant and additional than 40 ft extensive,
[…] anchors the installation, fusing a illustration of the wide inside of Tempelhof Airport in Berlin with the ancient Greek myth of Zeus transfigured into a shower of gold, foremost to the distinguished use of gold leaf in the portray. The storied web site was constructed in an place belonging to the Knights Templar in the Center Ages, opened as an airport complicated in 1923, was made thoroughly under the Third Reich, and performed a significant role in the Berlin Airlift throughout the Chilly War. Substantially, the decommissioned facility was a short while ago used to deliver momentary shelter for refugees, connecting it to the themes of Exodus.
No mention is built of Kiefer’s use of a single-place perspective, an authoritarian determination that tells the viewer where to stand in order to enjoy the spatiality of the piece. In the Greek myth, Danaë’s father, Acrisius, is advised in a prophecy that he will be killed by his daughter’s son. Although Acrisius locks his daughter in an underground chamber, Zeus enters it disguised as shower of gold and impregnates her. When her father learns of this, he places Danaë and the infant in a chest and sets them adrift at sea. Years afterwards, the son, Perseus, will accidentally eliminate Acrisius.
What prophecy is Kiefer having at in “Danaë”? What wonder does he feel in? Is it the wonder of the artist as creator? What does it imply to cover the lack of solutions in gold, and to affiliate that gold with impregnation and the foretold dying of an elder? Anselm Kiefer is the Stephen Spielberg of portray. Each are masters of impact and persuaded of their possess genius. Just one are not able to enable but be impressed by what they do in their respective mediums. And yet, is being impressed plenty of?
Anselm Kiefer: Exodus proceeds at Gagosian (555 West 24th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) by way of December 23. The exhibition was arranged by the gallery.