Anselm Keifer

“Stare into the heavens and you ignore the earth and your fellow man; ignore the possibility of heaven and you put a limit on the imagination,” Michael Auping, the curator of “Heaven and Earth,” wrote in the exhibition’s catalogue. After Hitler, heaven seemed a distant memory to many Germans, their imagination numbed by the atrocities of World War II. The post-war philosopher and social critic Theodor W. Adorno summed up the harsh reality facing the German psyche when he stated, “After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric.”

Born at the end of the war in 1945 in Donaueschingen, artist Anselm Kiefer never knew a time when the German people weren’t struggling to come to terms with the horror of WWII and with their participation in it. Kiefer initially studied law for a year before switching to art. He said, “I didn’t study law to be a lawyer, but for the philosophical aspects of law.” His interest in law was sparked by a desire to answer the question: how can people live together without killing each other? The paths Kiefer followed as an artist eventually came together in a synthesis of law, literature and visual art. Within his oeuvre, disasters, including the Holocaust, jostle with references to Jewish mysticism, European poetry and science. Much of the romantic neo-expressionistic work he has created during the past 35 years seems to be searching for the seed of hope amid barren fields of destruction. He said, “We [artist Joseph Beuys and Kiefer] were both in Germany at a certain time—a time when a dialogue about history and spirituality needed to begin. It was difficult to separate the two subjects. There was a sense of starting over.”

A sense of the past and of impending doom does hover over Kiefer’s stormy landscapes. Created using a palette of sombre colours and earth tones, the pieces are highly textured, both literally and intellectually. Lines of verse, keywords and NASA (the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration) star numbers are written across the surfaces in the artist’s own hand. Incorporating lead, barbed wire, dirt, sticks, old discarded objects (airplane propellers, clothing), with traditional oil and acrylic paint, much of the strength of Kiefer’s extensively worked pieces is their tactile nature. Weighted down by all the heady metaphysics and enormous scale, it is easy for viewers to simply lose themselves in the deft handling of the materials.

Kiefer’s sculptures are made principally in lead, his signature material. It is a material he uses both for its colour and as an allegory for humankind’s attempt to escape earthly boundaries. “You cannot say that it [lead] is light or dark. It is a colour or non-colour that I identify with. I don’t believe in absolutes. The truth is always grey,” he explains. “I feel closer to lead because it is like us. It is in flux. It’s changeable and has potential to achieve a higher state of gold. You can see this when it is heated. It sweats white and gold. But it is only potential. The secrets are lost, as the secrets of our ability to achieve higher states seem lost or obscured.”

Over six feet high and weighing 4500 pounds, The Secret Life of Plants is the most imposing sculptural piece in the exhibition. This massive lead book takes its title from a 1973 book by that name written by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. In their book, plants were studied on a cellular level, suggesting the information contained there held answers to larger questions concerning the cosmos. Each page of Kiefer’s book is filled with stars and each star is labelled with its corresponding NASA-assigned scientific number. This playful intermingling of the micro and macro runs through much of the works gathered together in “Heaven and Earth.”

In the piece Die Milchstrasse (The Milky Way), a charred field shows a puddle in the middle with the words The Milky Way written across it in German. The work is said to allude to many things: the myth of Hercules, a rural battlefield from WWII, alchemical transformations. Kiefer asserts that he sees the Milky Way as a metaphor for our developing understanding of scale within the universe. Once believed to contain the heavens, now, Kiefer says of the galaxy, “The further we go into space, the more distant the heavens become.”

The exhibition “Heaven and Earth” marks the first retrospective of Kiefer’s work shown in Canada and the first in North America since 1987. I saw Kiefer’s art in 1989 at the Serpentine Gallery in London, England. That show contained several canvases and one of Kiefer’s most monumental sculptures, The High Priestess: a huge bookcase filled with unreadable and deformed lead books. Before the Berlin Wall fell and the Iron Curtain disappeared, their massive forms, physical weight and weathered surfaces struck me on an essential level as an apt visual expression of the post-WWII sorrow still palpable in the European air.

Here in Montreal, 17 years later, the works no longer seem so connected to the violence and weight of history. They appear to me safe and almost decorative with their crumbling, cracked surfaces, placed securely on white museum walls. They are still compelling, accompanied by myriad texts and publications explaining what they mean, but now the context in which they are seen has changed. Before, they seemed to represent visually what couldn’t easily be spoken of out loud—a decaying vision of something that had been lost. With the shift in time and place, they have become meaningful historical artefacts, instead of powerful expressions of raw emotion reflecting the incomprehensible. ■

“Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth” was at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal from February 11 to April 30, 2006.

Christine Redfern is a Montreal-based artist and writer.