A Postscript To The Palette Of Anselm Kiefer - ARAS

Detail of Trinity by Anselm KieferA Postscript to The Palette of Anselm Kiefer :Kiefer at the Gagosian, NYC, Nov 6-Dec 18, 2010Jacqueline J. West, Ph.D. & Nancy J. Dougherty, LCSWThe images in this paper are strictly for educational use and are protected by United States copyright laws.Unauthorized use will result in criminal and civil penalties.1

Much to our delight, just as our paper The Palette of Anselm Kiefer:Witnessing Our Imperiled World appeared in the ARAS online newsletter (ARASConnections 2010, #4), synchronistically a remarkable show of Kiefer’s currentwork opened at the Gagosian Gallery in New York City. A few of the pieces in thisshow so directly echo and extend our previous reflections about Kiefer’s workthat we’ve been irresistibly prompted to create this “postscript.” We imagine thata number of you would be as excited as we are to see how Kiefer’s work continuesto evolve, how it encompasses and re-imagines the political, historical, mythicand spiritual themes in which he is so very well versed. We have not undertakenan overall review of the show, but have selected just a few pieces that deepen anddevelop the images we considered earlier. The show is no longer hanging, and itcan be entered effectively only in present tense. So – here we go.Leaving behind therather bleak city-scape ofrows of New York Citywarehouses on West 24th,the gallery visitor enterstall, opaque glass doors toface a large white wall onwhich Kiefer has handwritten, in his inimitableFigure 1 Title of the showscript, the title of this show: Next Year in Jerusalem. This title immediatelysummons the visitor to prayer that is rife with political intensity; it summons herto take a deep breath and enter into a state of being that is at one and the sameThe images in this paper are strictly for educational use and are protected by United States copyright laws.Unauthorized use will result in criminal and civil penalties.2

moment both sacred and profane, historical and eternal, intellectual andemotional, conscious and unconscious.With this induction, the visitor walks down a stark, white-walled hallwaythat opens into a hugewarehouse expansethickly populated byKiefer’s works –including numerous,very large threedimensional piecesencased in tall glassvitrines. Animpressively largeFigure 2 The boxcarmetal container,reminiscent of a train car, is parked obstinately in the middle of these tall cases.In marked contrast to the visually accessible pieces throughout the rest of theexhibit, the boxcar encloses and makes only minimally visible an impressivenumber of enlarged photographs printed on rather ragged, large hanging sheetsof lead.In counterpoint to the glass vitrines and the massive boxcar, thewarehouse walls present numerous complex paintings built out of paint, earth,branches, hair, constructed objects, snake skin – the variety of raw materials thatinhabit Kiefer’s images. Even before one begins to focus on a particular image, itis hard not to feel bombarded by the enormous scale of the works and how veryThe images in this paper are strictly for educational use and are protected by United States copyright laws.Unauthorized use will result in criminal and civil penalties.3

many of them there are here. This impact is not irrelevant; Kiefer’s work isinherently about bombardment and our human relationship to the forces ofdestruction and creation that express themselves in warfare as well as intranscendent imagesof the divine.Taking only afew steps forward,one is faced with animage that quicklygrounds thesefeelings historically.We see in the opendoors of the boxcar,Figure 3 The boxcara large photographof a young man in an SS uniform with his arm raised in the Sieg Heil. In ourprevious review, we mentioned that as an art student Kiefer took a series ofphotographs of himself in this pose, in various sites of Nazi occupation. He wasdetermined to bring about an awareness of the madness personified by the Nazisand the madness and violence within history.In this show, housing these photographs in an oppressive boxcarunderscores Kiefer’s insistence that we look directly at – and do not forget - thereality of the Nazi agenda to exterminate the Jews and rule the world, and that inso doing we look directly at man’s ruthless drive for domination. An inescapablesense moves into one’s soul, a sense of the treacherous and tragic potential thatThe images in this paper are strictly for educational use and are protected by United States copyright laws.Unauthorized use will result in criminal and civil penalties.4

can emerge from man’s drive to “reign.” As we walk around the boxcar, wediscover that it is filled with a countless number of these enlarged photographs,some only recentlyrediscovered by theartist. They areprinted on massivelead sheets hung soclosely to oneanother that theviewer can catchonly glimpses of aFigure 4 The boxcarvery few of theimages. Kiefer’s work frequently addresses or alludes to the essential role ofmemory – and its fragile, politically and psychologically vulnerable essence.Here, in the boxcar, much of what has been “documented” is inaccessible. He isapparently insisting with continued determination that we devote ourselves toawakening memory and that we directly face historically enacted madness andviolence. Yet we are not only faced with these memories, but also we are left withthe necessity to mourn the innumerable and unfathomable atrocities that wecannot explicitly remember. This compels us to enter realms of the unknown, toengage the unconscious.This confrontation with the unknown is repeated through thenumerous, enormous paintings in this show that challenge the viewer to walkinto the depths of mysterious forests. Analytically, we often find that the depthsThe images in this paper are strictly for educational use and are protected by United States copyright laws.Unauthorized use will result in criminal and civil penalties.5

of the forest, like the depths of the ocean, symbolically carry a sense of the vastunknownexpanses of theunconscious.Uncharted andunknown, theserealms are notonly potentiallydangerous but arealso charged withtransformativeFigure 5 Trinityenergies. The paradoxical nature of these archetypal realms, symbolized here asthe forest, is palpably rendered in the piece titled Trinity. Many of the imagesthat are thematic in Kiefer’s work arewoven into this painting. This forestdepicts the natural world but allows us tosee through into a deeper dimension. Thetrees look uncannily strong; starkly black,they appear to be ravaged by fire thatremains as embers in the background.Again we see references to both theGerman and the Jewish soul in thepresence of golden and black hair wovenFigure 6 Trinity (detail)The images in this paper are strictly for educational use and are protected by United States copyright laws.Unauthorized use will result in criminal and civil penalties.6

into the dried bramble and ferns in the foreground. These references to thestories of Margareta and Shulamith, which we discussed in our previous paper,remind us again of the Holocaust. The landscape is cold ashen white, frozen butalive with fire and infused with the ash and smoke of incinerated fleshtransformed into the delicate presence of spirit. The foreground is layered withthe presence of ferns.The primal nature of the ferns andtheir deep associations in both ancientand Christian mythologies with secretknowledge and devilish forces makethem a provocative image. As we noted inour previous article, ferns “. . . speak ofthe eternal cycle of creation anddestruction, the glorious appearance ofnew life and the sorrowful arrival ofdeath.” They symbolize the viableFigure 7 Trinity (detail)presence of a healthy narcissism: acapacity for empathy, humor, creativity, a sense of transience, wisdom, and adeep appreciation of relatedness. These vulnerable yet resilient plants appear inmarked contrast to the rigidly defended narcissistic structures imaged in thiscurrent show as the boxcar, analogous to the bunkers in Monumenta. Again, asnoted in our earlier piece, we see defensive narcissism ,specifically alphanarcissism (which we have defined as “ominpotence and exhibitionism fueled byaggression rooted in the archetype of destruction”), as having quite a tenaciousThe images in this paper are strictly for educational use and are protected by United States copyright laws.Unauthorized use will result in criminal and civil penalties.7

grip on our American character structure. It is daunting to address the terrifyingforce of destruction that underlies this trenchant narcissism, individually andnationally, yet it is by facing it that we candevelop a conscious and responsiblerelationship to this force. Kiefer’s workis an inspiration in this regard since itrepeatedly and boldly attempts to dojust this.In the density and intensity ofthe Gagosian show, one is required toactively interact with the work, sincemyriad reflections, one’s own andthose of everything around one, areseen on and through each piece. In theFigure 8 Danaemidst of these multiple reflections,Kiefer’s theme of “falling,” as seen inthe dead and ashen stars of “FallingStars” and the dried but still fertilesunflower seeds of “Sol Invictus,” isredeveloped in a number of intriguingworks. In “Danae” a single tall andlooming sunflower alludes to thepresence of Zeus, whose seeds fall likeFigure 9 Danae (detail)The images in this paper are strictly for educational use and are protected by United States copyright laws.Unauthorized use will result in criminal and civil penalties.8

the golden rain in order to impregnate themaiden. The shimmering golden seedsfall upon the open pages of lead booksthat, we sense, tell many versions ofDanae’s story. In the work titled “rising,rising, falling down” resin coatedsunflowers hang from the heavens, onceagain unifying ascent and descent, “asabove, so below.” In “The Red Sea”, threechairs, precariously perched on a tiltingFigure 10 rising, rising, fallingdownglass ceiling, tip towards the descent ofthe Trinity that is occurring in thenearby work Jeremiah, Baruch. There,two of three chairs are perched onseparate ceilings covered with debris,and the third has fallen into the chaos ofhistorical violence below. In each ofthese works, Kiefer envisions a collapseof the opposition between the big worldand the small, the heavens and theearth, the spiritual and the material. WeFigure 11 The Red Seaexperience such a collapse as theenlivening appearance of the transcendent function, as the entrance into anThe images in this paper are strictly for educational use and are protected by United States copyright laws.Unauthorized use will result in criminal and civil penalties.9

activation of the ego-Self dialogue that has the potential of forging adifferentiated unity within psyche.Figure 12 Jeremiah, Baruch(detail)Figure 13 Jeremiah, BaruchThe dynamism of the transcendent function that transits the ego-Self axispervades Kiefer’s multi-layered image that is a shocking and powerfuldevelopment of the image of Shevirat Ha-kalem, The Breaking of theVessels, considered in our previous paper. Whereas in that installation, largesheets of glass fell from stacks of huge leaden books to shatter upon the floor,here (in die Sefiroth/Shekhinah) jagged sheets of glass, violently embedded in aFrench wedding dress, have broken and fallen upon the floor into shards. In thisimage, the Kabbalistic tree of life with the differentiated sefiroth, rise out of, aredeeply rooted in, a woman’s dress, as if this holiest of dynamisms is rooted in theThe images in this paper are strictly for educational use and are protected by United States copyright laws.Unauthorized use will result in criminal and civil penalties.10