A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

by Siri Hustvedt

  Kiefer’s work has generated thousands of pages of commentary since it first came to attention and then gained an international audience in 1980 at the Venice Biennale. In scholarly books, as well as popular articles, writers have hoped to make sense of Kiefer’s work in texts that range in tone from extravagant hymns to biting dismissals. The extreme views of Kiefer’s work interest me not so much for their content but because they uncover an ambiguity in the art itself. “The truth is always gray,” the artist once said, citing a platitude that is also a color key.3 There is a lot of gray in Kiefer, both figuratively and literally.

  No one writing about the artist has missed his immense themes—his unearthing of historical traumas, especially the Holocaust; his use of imagery and language from several mythical and mystical traditions, including Kabbalah; or his frequent references to alchemy. No one is in doubt about the vast scale of many of his works, which dwarf and overwhelm the viewer. Nor does anyone dispute that Kiefer’s materials—his use of photographs, earth, straw, sand, fabric, ash, and lead on surfaces that are often scarred, scorched, ripped, layered, and violently transformed in one way or another—are thick with intentional meanings. The controversy has turned on what those meanings are. Kiefer’s work calls out to be “read,” like the countless cryptic books he has made and evoked repeatedly throughout his career. Kiefer’s spectator is also a reader of images and texts, a spinner of an associative web that leads her from one meaning to the next, none of which rests easily in a single schemata.

  The deep, empty wooden room of Deutschland’s Geisteshelden (1973) is lined with burning torches. Rosenthal identifies the place as a converted schoolhouse Kiefer once used as a studio.4 It is a personal space, one that also recalls Albert Speer’s triumphal Nazi architecture and Norse myth’s Valhalla, which in turn summons Wagner’s Ring cycle and Hitler’s obsession with his music. The heroes are names scrawled on the burlap surface of the painting: Joseph Beuys, Arnold Böcklin, Hans Thoma, Richard Wagner, Caspar David Friedrich, Richard Dehmel, Josef Weinheber, Robert Musil, and Mechthild von Magdeburg.

  Although several critics have identified the figures as German, there is one Swiss, Arnold Böcklin, and two twentieth-century Austrians among them, technically German only from the Anschluss in 1938 until the end of the war in 1945: Robert Musil, the great Viennese author of The Man Without Qualities, and Josef Weinheber, a Nazi, eulogized by the anti-Nazi W. H. Auden in a poem. Weinheber committed suicide on April 8, 1945, exactly a month after Kiefer was born, and Mechthild von Magdeburg, the lone woman, was a thirteenth-century ecstatic Christian mystic who described her union with God in passionate sexual imagery. Sabine Eckmann correctly refers to the inscribed names as “German-speaking cultural figures” but then writes that except for Beuys and von Magdeburg, they were all “highly regarded by the regime.”5 In fact, Musil’s books were banned by the Nazis. The poet Richard Dehmel died in 1920 of an injury sustained in the First World War, a conflict he zealously supported. He was accused of publishing obscene and blasphemous works, was charged with those crimes, and was tried in German courts in the 1890s. Dehmel’s name is associated both with torrid eroticism and Germany’s history of suppressing books.

  On May 10, 1933, German university students staged torchlight parades around the country and burned twenty-five thousand books deemed un-German, including the works of the poet Heinrich Heine, a Jew who converted to Christianity. In his 1821 play, Almansor, Heine wrote, “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.”6 “Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people” (my translation). These Geisteshelden—the German word Geist means mind, ghost, and spirit—constitute a very private, not public, catalogue of heroes, the nominal inscriptions in a psychic space that is also part of historical memory, one to which Kiefer has access only by crossing a border of mass murder by immolation in crematoria that ended two months after he was born. In the space of the empty schoolroom, the metaphorical and the literal collapse into each other. The living flames of poetic, spiritual-erotic, and musical expression preserved in books, paintings, and compositions are irretrievably bound up with the actual burnings of books and people. The personal, the historical, and the mythical mingle to create a dialogical, darkly ironic tension in a canvas of unseen ghosts. It is representational and nonrepresentational at once.

  Lisa Saltzman is surely right that Kiefer is haunted by Theodor Adorno’s famous dictum that to write poetry after Auschwitz is “barbaric” and that Kiefer’s work struggles with iconoclasm.7 To represent the death camps is not possible. Films and photographs exist as documentary records of the horror, but these cannot make art. It is interesting to note that Gerhard Richter’s Atlas, his compilation of hundreds of photographs over many years, includes pictures from the death camps, pictures Richter called “unpaintable.”8 Richter is thirteen years older than Kiefer, a man who, like my mother, has specific memories of the war. Kiefer has none. Not a participant in but an heir to the crimes of the parents, especially fathers, he and his generation were creatures of Germany’s aftermath—a country that had been bombed to rubble and was populated by citizens unable to speak of their Nazi pasts.

  How does one speak of or configure this historical memory? Paul Celan, a Romanian Jew, grew up speaking several languages but wrote in German. His parents were sent to Nazi labor camps in the Ukraine in 1942. His father died of typhoid, and a Nazi officer shot and killed his mother when she was too weak to work. Kiefer’s turn to and use of Celan’s poetry is a search for a language, at once poetic and visual. Edmond Jabès wrote, “In Heidegger’s Germany, there is no place for Paul Celan,”9 and yet, the reality is complex. We know that Celan objected to Adorno’s pamphlet against Heidegger, The Jargon of Authenticity, and defended the philosopher despite his deeply ambivalent relationship to him.10 In a 1947 letter, Celan wrote, “There is nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.”11 In his repeated quotations of Celan’s Todesfuge, Kiefer borrows the poet’s singular German to address the Holocaust. Celan’s diction becomes both a vehicle of and permission for Kiefer’s own expressive needs. Celan’s words in the poem “dein goldenes Haar Margarete” are opposed to “dein aschenes Haar Sulamith”—two figures of womanhood in the poem, German and Jewish—and are transformed by Kiefer into landscapes of gold straw and burnt ash that return again and again.12 The nearly abstract landscape Nürnberg (1982), with its blackened earth and application of straw, the words “Nürnberg Festspeil-Wiese” inscribed just above the horizon, terrified me before I even knew what I was looking at. The references include Wagner’s comic opera Die Meistersinger, Hitler’s mass rallies, the 1935 anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws, and the postwar trials, but the painting’s wrenching force comes from the feeling of violent motion in the canvas itself, the marks made by the painter’s body in a very un-American action painting, one altered by representation. Am I or am I not looking at railroad tracks overgrown with weeds?

  The will to metamorphosis in Kiefer is powerful. The burning fire of alchemy is one of his tropes for artistic creativity. The glass vitrine, Athanor, with its furnace and debris, its pale feathers like angel wings rising, combines objects in a three-dimensional poem. Familiarity with Kiefer’s visual vocabulary forces me to give the work multiple meanings, to read cremated bodies along with the secret fire of alchemical philosophy. This is my reading, of course, one among other possible readings. Kiefer’s is a hermeneutical art, one that both hides and reveals uneasy, ambivalent, sometimes tortured meanings the viewer feels well before she begins her interpretations. It is a mistake to reduce Kiefer’s work to a narrative of either heroism or penance. Such a comfortable, black-and-white polarity is precisely what the art defies. The gray zone is where definition breaks down, and ordinary language becomes inadequate, little more than syllables of pure nonsense. Another mode of expression is required, one that can hold painful contradictions and agonizing ambiguities within it. It be
comes necessary to turn to the poetic image, one that splinters into semantic plurality, one that allows us to see, in Celan’s words, “ein Grab in den Lüften,” “a grave in the air.”13

  Mapplethorpe/Almodóvar: Points and Counterpoints

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  1. My first impression of the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition curated by Pedro Almodóvar is that I am looking at classical images. The images make me think of Greek statuary as photographs. Mapplethorpe makes no attempt to create any illusion of movement in them. Unlike painting or sculpture, photography needs a person or thing out there in the world to capture, and a living person is in motion, even if he’s just breathing. Mapplethorpe’s human subjects, who are or were real people—some of the photographs give their names—feel lifeless. We are not looking at narrative beings. They are fixed, inanimate things, as carefully arranged as the objects in nature morte. Almodóvar even included one of Mapplethorpe’s late pictures of a statue, Wrestler, as if to emphasize this frozen quality. Mapplethorpe preferred to photograph reproductions of ancient statues to the statues themselves because the reproductions had no flaws. They were perfect. He once said he strove for “perfection.” These pictures are perfect, and there is something alienating about perfection.

  2. On the other hand, the picture of Patti Smith is not perfect. She looks vulnerable, crouched down to hide rather than reveal her nakedness as she looks into the camera. Her body is thin and young. I can see her ribs. I feel as if I could bend down and talk to her. She doesn’t feel like an object to me. She seems real. The photograph has tenderness.

  No doubt, that is why her picture is isolated from the rest. Her portrait is an exception in this particular exhibition. Her subjectivity, her personality is part of the image. I feel as if I could talk to her, and she would answer me. The Almodóvar movie Talk to Her is about men talking to women in comas. Benigno talks to the speechless Alicia, and his fantasies flower in that silent void.

  3. I tell myself to look again, to rethink what I am seeing. What is the Mapplethorpe fantasy? The pictures have a classical, formal aesthetic, one that removes the viewer from some of the pictures’ overtly sexual content. Greek culture was openly homoerotic and, as such, subject to conventions about how male love affairs should unfold. It was not a free-for-all. Mapplethorpe is alluding to and playing with Greek homoeroticism, but the beauty of the pictures doesn’t entirely smooth over the threat, does it? Erotic images always carry a threat, at the very least the threat of arousal, but images of men as delectable sexual objects went underground after the Greeks.

  4. The history of art is full of women lying around naked for erotic consumption by men. Those women are mostly unthreatening, aren’t they?

  5. I find the tied-up cock in Cock and Devil unsettling, a bit scary. But the devil in the photo is comic, too. The message seems to be: if you tie up (or let someone tie up) your cock, son, you’ll go straight to hell! Mapplethorpe was a Catholic boy. The devil might have haunted him as a child. Here humor may be revenge on religion.

  6. But Mark Stevens is not funny—a man cropped at his neck to show his torso as he leans over a block or slab with his penis lying on its surface, and he’s wearing leather pants cut out behind to show his ass. The picture is static. There is no action. What we see of this man is beautiful, idealized, and yet this body is disturbing, not only because of its S&M theme, which is marginal to sex sanctioned in the culture, but because sexual desire and our ideas and fantasies about the other (whomever that other is) inevitably dissect the body into eroticized parts. Aren’t many sexual fantasies reductive, machine-like, and often faceless? This is true from Sade to The Story of O. Sade was a man. A woman wrote The Story of O.

  I am looking at a fantasy here, a fantasy about control. The photographer is master of his image, but he also participates in the submission of his subject. The viewer is implicated if only because he or she is looking at the picture.

  7. But doesn’t the gorgeousness soften whatever violence may be implied? The image is too “artistic” to be pornographic.

  8. If pornography is a vehicle for orgasm, no more, no less, then Mapplethorpe does not want to make a pornographic picture. On the other hand, pornography may itself be a catalyst for art. In the sex photos, he wants to show subversive content in a weirdly heroic form, which is where the irony comes in: Achilles as sex slave. Behavior generally regarded as seedy and taboo is reinvented through the vocabulary of high art. The messiness of real sex is not included. The feelings of real sex are not included. Talk about light and shadow and form is a way to rescue photographs from the charge of indecency. Look how aesthetic it is! But content is important. Almodóvar did not pick Mapplethorpe’s most “shocking” sex pictures. Cock and Knee, for example, is pretty as a photograph, and it is sexy because the cock is erect, but it has an abstract quality, not unlike one of those modernist photographs of female nudes—dark and light, hills and valleys. Thomas and Amos, a sublimely beautiful man with his cat, is a sweet picture. This is a personal comment: the sexiest picture in the exhibition is Miguel Cruz—a man seen from behind taking off his shirt. His body is framed by a circle. It’s an erotic view of a sculptural man, who is not only turned away from the spectator but distanced further because he is enclosed in a geometric form like a halo. For all human beings, distance, the inability to get what you want, is exciting. And here there is the suggestion of action, of undressing before sex.

  9. When you really think about it, it is strange that images of genitals, especially hard penises, should upset people so much. Half the human race has penises. They’re so ordinary.

  10. Penises in Greek art were always modestly sized. Mapplethorpe’s images of penises are large, much larger than would have been deemed beautiful among the Greeks. They abhorred anything that suggested the monstrous.

  11. Courbet’s Origin of the World, his painting of a part of a woman, her legs open to show her genitalia, is beautiful, erotic, and ordinary. It was once a scandalous canvas, however. Jacques Lacan owned it for a while, which makes sense. It is now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. In The Shrinking Lover, the Almodóvar black-and-white film within his film Talk to Her, his hero is so small he can climb into his beloved’s vagina. He goes home and stays forever.

  12. But that is another fantasy, Benigno’s fantasy in the movie. There is no dream of the maternal in Mapplethorpe. But then, Almodóvar is a storyteller. Mapplethorpe is not. Almodóvar makes motion pictures, not still photographs, and he invests a lot in his narratives. Mapplethorpe worked mostly in black and white. Almodóvar loves color. There is one red tulip in the exhibition—as punctuation: a red period to mark the end. The two men have very different aesthetics. You could almost say one is Apollonian and the other Dionysian. Mapplethorpe insists on boundaries, on frozen and discrete visual entities, a disciplined beauty of limits. He presents his masculine objects as hard, muscular, macho ideals. The names assigned to some of the images (Ken Moody, for example) are ironically superfluous because these pictures are anonymous celebrations of the male form. Almodóvar breaks down thresholds. His characters are idiosyncratic, personal. He plays with gender difference and mixes up the two. He has, at times, a hermaphroditic sensibility. I am very sympathetic to this mixing of sexual styles. It makes me feel at home.

  13. I admit that there is something absurd about calling Mapplethorpe’s work Apollonian. After he died of AIDS, Mapplethorpe’s photographs scared the daylights out of conservative American politicians in a way Almodóvar does not. Robert Mapplethorpe’s work was seen as a threat to societal order, the family, and the sanctity of heterosexual marriage. But whatever Dionysian frenzy Mapplethorpe may have experienced in life, it does not appear in his photographs.

  14. But maybe it is wrong to invoke Nietzsche and his poles of Apollo and Dionysius. Almodóvar, like Mapplethorpe, creates strong visual boundaries in his films, light and color contrasts that create a luminous and beautiful screen image. This links him to the photographer and to the Apollonian.


  15. Almodóvar continually quotes other films and genres. His aesthetic is a hybrid. The conventions of fairy tale, myth, romance, horror, soap opera all come into his movies. Mapplethorpe’s references are fewer, and they are more starkly mythological and far easier to read. The violent story of the Passion—a theater of cruelty—informs his photography. In Derrick Cross, for example, the body of a man suggests the crucifix. His flowers are beautiful and anatomical, a male twist on Georgia O’Keeffe’s vaginal and clitoral blooms.

  16. Besides Patti Smith, the only other picture of a woman in the show is of Lisa Lyon, a bodybuilder, whom Mapplethorpe often photographed naked. His pictures of her are in keeping with his hard, muscular corporeal ideal. But in this image you can’t see her body at all. She’s covered in a hooded cloak. And she’s holding a ball. The photo evokes monks, sorcerers, magic, and the standard image of death as a hooded, faceless figure.