6 - The Silage of History: Anselm Kiefer and the Kieferworld

Summary

An original painter or an original writer follows the path of the oculist. Their painting or their prose acts upon us like a course of treatment which is not always agreeable. When it is over, the practitioner says to us: ‘Now look.’ And at this point the world (which was not created once and for all, but as often as an original artist is born) appears utterly different from the one we knew, but perfectly clear.… Such is the new and perishable universe that has just been created. It will last until the next geological catastrophe unleashed by a new painter or writer with an original view of the world.

Marcel Proust

That geological catastrophe has Anselm Kiefer's name on it. Like all great artists, his work is his own, an untracked continent as yet unclaimed. Contrary to popular belief, it is given to artists, not politicians, to create a new world order. The Kieferworld is rich and strange, boundless and immersive, elemental and metaphysical. This artist traffics in fundamental truths. ‘Art is an attempt to get to the very centre of truth,’ affirms Kiefer. ‘It never can, but it can get quite close.’

There is something cataclysmic about the Kieferworld – heaven and earth take their chances in the rag and bone shop of the heart that is the artist's studio. Its most striking quality is the procedure. Kiefer sees artworks as actions, as he says, and not as consummate creations. In this material world the artworks are in the process of perpetual transformation. They slip and slide, corrode and erode. They age, and shed, and flake. They are weathered and distressed. Climate change comes indoors. Violence may be done to them, with an arsenal of weapons. They may or may not be happy in their skin. The time comes for them to leave the studio, but they are never really finished. In the Kieferworld, ‘finish’ is a misnomer. The dates of the works testify to an epic struggle: Ash Flower (Aschenblume) (1983–97), for example, a characteristic blend of oil, emulsion, acrylic paint, clay, ash, earth and dried sunflower on canvas – canvas of continental proportions (over seven metres long and nearly four metres high). An installation made specially for the Royal Academy in London in 2014 brings home the sense of action and transformation, and the sheer physical presence of these stupendous works.