Three years later, in a series of oil paintings, we can observe the same relation between the painted landscape – in other words, the world that is represented – and symbols from the world of ideas, but here the landscape has attained a much greater weight of its own: the brushstrokes are broad and thick, and the colors have an almost material quality. One painting depicts a brown-black field with a leafless tree in the foreground and a forest in the background: in the field a flame is burning, and above the landscape hovers the shape of a palette, along its edge the words “Malerei der verbrannten Erde” (“Painting of the Scorched Earth”) – which is of course a reference to scorched-earth tactics, a military strategy in which a retreating army burns everything to the ground. The symbol – the palette – still signifies distance, the canceling of illusion, that this isn’t a real landscape but a painted one, and if the words written on the painting emphasize the same distance, the irony is different, since it has to do with the bringing together of a historical phenomenon and the painter’s depiction of it. The material aspect of the painting, evidenced by its heavy brown colors, the blasted tree, and the smoldering flames in the field, carries such weight of its own that it is this space – the space of history, the space of war, but also, in the hinted-at fires, the space of being – that dominates the picture, that is what we latch on to: those are the emotions it evokes. The materiality has a deeply felt quality to it, because it has a presence that the symbols, which only point to but are nothing in themselves, lack.
Into the 1980s and 90s, Kiefer was to force representation of physical reality further and further toward the material realm, so that the image of the tree eventually became the tree, the image of straw became straw, the image of ash became ash, while in a similar way, the symbols were drawn not into space but into time, being embodied in objects found in our surroundings – an empty shirt becomes an angel or a Valkyrie; some plastic toy pigs become Odysseus’s crew on Circe’s island; a table with coffee cups and remains of cake become the ship of the Argonauts.
Kiefer appears to be constantly fascinated with the principle of change, that something is what it is as a result of a determination, and that with a flick of the wrist it can become something else – the name of a German poet or philosopher is scribbled above a forest and the whole of German culture and history is evoked in the forest; a serpent is drawn on the forest floor and the fall from grace and sexuality are summoned up; a burning flame appears and with it the divine. YGGDRASIL scrawled above a tree transforms it into the World Tree; “Götterdämmerung” written over a painting of some chairs in a room with concrete walls evokes Wagner, Nazism, and the doom of the Norse world.
How easily Kiefer conjures or alters meaning, how little it takes to complicate something simple in his paintings: this must have been and perhaps still is a seductive force for him, as the beauty that he is able to create with similarly simple means must also have been, but from the very outset it appears to have met with resistance within him, from something obviously unknown to me but which I imagine as a form of commitment, not to ethics or aesthetics but to the gravity of life. A commitment to existence, to life and death. That is why the conceptual, the idea-based and the cerebral, which could so easily have become a noncommittal intellectual game, stand side by side with physical, concrete, material reality, the darkness of the earth and the light of the stars, and that is why beauty never stands uncontested.
Watercolor is a medium that demands speed and cannot be reworked: what is there must be left there – one doesn’t get a second chance. It is an art of the instant, and Kiefer’s earlier paintings have often aimed at the opposite, spaces where time passes so slowly that it appears almost suspended, built up of layer upon layer of material. But although this, along with the delight in color and the small format, distinguishes these paintings from Kiefer’s earlier, often monumental works in muted colors, the greatest difference lies in the motifs, all these female figures. For one remarkable characteristic of Kiefer’s art is that after the early 1970s it became drained of human figures, and ever since has been nearly devoid of people. There are no faces looking at us or looking away, no eyes or mouths, no bodies doing anything either alone or with others, no hands or elbows, breasts or bellies. Humankind in Kiefer’s work has been represented as traces and signs, the things we leave behind.
Kiefer himself is also strikingly absent or distant: when one looks at a painting by Oskar Kokoschka or by Van Gogh, to take two artists Kiefer has related to in his art, it feels not only as if one is seeing what they are seeing, but also that one is feeling what they felt, and that in looking at their pictures one is close to someone, a particular person in the world, unique and idiosyncratic.
Not so with Kiefer’s art, where the individual has no place: not because his paintings are turned inward toward their own materiality – though they do this too – but because they are turned toward the space of human activity, the space in which we appear and vanish, and while that space is constant, our activity in it is fleeting and transitory.
The different speeds of time in the human and the material realm is a central premise of many of Kiefer’s paintings, and this is perhaps also why myth and mythology play such an important part in them. Myth is almost the only element of the human that doesn’t change, that is constant. Myths have no time of their own, but they enter ours when we realize them, and then they bring with them their own space, which is what Kiefer has often worked with.
This was particularly noticeable in Walhalla. The exhibition was composed of various objects, installations, and paintings, and it began with a long corridor full of beds, as in a hospital dormitory or an army camp. The beds were made of lead; so were the covers and the pillowcases, but despite their resulting colossal weight, all the little crinkles, folds, and imprints left by the molds created a sense of lightness and careless chance, like the impression a recently abandoned bed can give, while at the same time the weight and the immobility of the material fixed the lightness of that moment in something else, something immutable – a place without time.
And where are we then? Time is the space in which our lives unfold: life is one long continuous movement, it never settles down, it never pauses. We cannot escape time, it is a fundamental condition of our existence, and we are therefore excluded from nontime, from the timeless – it doesn’t exist for us. We may be able to see it or to imagine it, but only as something on the other side of an abyss.
The leaden beds in the London gallery were outside time, in the sense that the moment they represented, through the folds and irregularities in the material, would never be succeeded by another moment, but would remain thus, unchanging, for all time. This moment had once been human – someone had left their mark on the beds – but the lead caused it to sink into an abyss in time; these beds had not been abandoned just now, this very instant: they had just been abandoned a long, long time ago, and perhaps, it struck me as I walked past them, they had belonged to gods or heroes.
A room opened to the left: in the middle stood a spiral staircase, from which hung shirts and dresses. These were the Valkyries, who in Norse mythology chose the warriors that would die on the battlefield. A little farther on, the main gallery opened up: in it hung several enormous paintings of towers rearing up from desert-yellow expanses, and in one of them what looked like columns of smoke were rising.
Only a few days earlier I had been sent some photographs by Paolo Pellegrin – he had accompanied Kurdish forces through Syria toward Aleppo. In these photos, too, enormous columns of smoke rose from a flat and sandy landscape, and it was impossible not to link Kiefer’s paintings to the photos. At the same time, the paintings also opened on to a world of myth, that of the Tower of Babel and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
There was just one representation of a human being in the entire exhibition – a photograph – but other than that, the show consisted exclusively of beds and bedclothes, spiral staircase and shirts
and dresses, desiccated trees and rocks, and paintings of desert landscapes empty of people. A bed and a spiral staircase are articles of daily use, and so are shirts and dresses: they belong to the everyday and aren’t loaded with much of anything – nor are desert landscapes or trees or rocks. But here, juxtaposed in this way in this gallery, they almost collapsed under the weight of significance.
What was the significance?
To see a painting is to realize it, to draw it into our time and our own reality, to bring it to life. Art works with the living, it attempts to grasp life in time, as it is in precisely this moment, and when it succeeds, life in time becomes timeless, in the sense that the life in the painting can be realized hundreds of years after its creation, when everything human that once surrounded it has disappeared.
Kiefer approached it from the opposite direction: he sought to grasp the timeless, to install it here among us, and the effect this had, at least on me when I saw the exhibition, was to render current events in the world, in particular violent and destructive events such as the ongoing war in Syria and the continual terror in Iraq, suddenly no longer merely a distant and irrelevant flickering in which people were just numbers, eighty dead here, five hundred dead there, but present. This was achieved through Kiefer’s often criticized monumentality, because it makes death so vast and history so deep and thereby life so fragile and irreplaceable, not just mine, not just yours, but everybody’s.
That is how myths function. They deal with a few people placed in a few situations – think of Hector and Achilles in the Iliad, or Cain and Abel in the Bible – who are given such exceptional weight that, several thousand years after the stories about them were told for the first time, they are still present in culture. A fratricide that occurs now, say in Malmö, will go unnoticed: the local newspaper might devote a few lines to it, but for everyone not directly related to the brothers it won’t mean anything, it won’t leave an impression – it will be almost as if nothing happened. Or take any single event in a war – a soldier killed with a knife, a corpse dragged behind a jeep: it will vanish from the world in the same way, for everyone except those directly concerned. But if one hears about the fratricide while thinking of Cain and Abel, or about acts of war with the Iliad in mind, one comes to understand that all events carry the same weight, that everything that happens between people is equally significant. One also understands that everything has happened before, that being human was the same five thousand years ago as it is today. Myths are communal experiences, and what they do is give our lives a space other than that of time in which to unfold. Myths have no existence in themselves, they have no place of their own, but they enter the world every time they are activated, as in the Kiefer exhibition in London.
The heavy, unchangeable lead; the light and arbitrary imprints we leave; the inviolability of life; the inescapable nothingness of death – these are entities we all know and sometimes stop to consider, but to confront us with them, letting us be filled with them and making us understand them with our feelings, this is something only art can do.
Art is as much about searching as it is about creating. But if so, searching for what? For entrances into reality, openings into the world. The expressionists sought to create a sense of immediacy, of directness, of acuteness, because the traditional pictorial space entailed distance and a conciliatory continuity, and that reconciliation was felt to be false and had to be broken down. The painting Scream (1893), by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, is perhaps primarily concerned with a breaking down of that space; the space is closed up, reconciliation is blocked, suffering becomes the only thing that matters.
In Walhalla Kiefer does the opposite: he opens the space, empties it of people, in order to link the acute and the immediate with history and in that way to give it depth, not least because the sheer mass of relayed moments of suffering in our media-dominated age has turned the acute into a permanent state, and thereby almost eradicated it as experience. The time lag between an event in the world and our awareness of it has become so short that it is as if we are living in the instantaneous world of Scream, and the demands of art have therefore become the opposite of those limned by the expressionists: time must now be given a new place in space.
Obviously it isn’t that simple. Myths are not pure and uncomplicated entities: precisely because they are linked to timelessness and the universally human, one may easily ideologize them by installing notions of origin and authenticity within them. Kiefer, who was born in Germany in 1945 and grew up in a time when the war and what had happened during it were not talked about, has confronted silence and the effect of the German catastrophe on the human condition throughout his entire career, and in doing so he has often touched upon the work of the poet Paul Celan, perhaps the most significant writer of the postwar era and one of Kiefer’s elective affinities.
Celan was a German-speaking Jew from Romania. His parents were killed in a concentration camp during the war, and his poems, in which the Holocaust is present in a fundamental way, were thus written in the language of their executioners. A language is a system of signs, the meanings of which are agreed upon by the members of a community, and that consensus connects not only the words but also the community that shares it. In Celan’s late poems, it is as if the community has been shattered. No connections between words can be taken for granted; the words lie strewn in the poems as stones lie in a field. The implicit “we” that all languages express and take for granted has been lost. The poems are situated on the margins of communication, verging on aphasia, where meaning isn’t a given but something that arises and disappears in and between words. It is almost a religious place, for this is language that approaches nothingness, which cannot be named, for if it is named it is no longer nothing but something, and it is not so far removed from the relation to the divine found in negative mysticism. However, in Paul Celan’s poems “nothing” is an entity not merely with metaphysical implications but also with historic ones. How can the Holocaust be represented? The name alone, the Holocaust, is a huge, almost an infinite reduction, for six million people were exterminated, and the connection between their absence and the nine letters we use to signify it is monstrous. The task Celan set himself was to represent without betraying. His poems therefore sought nothingness by way of the particular, that which stands alone, which is something in itself. Reading them is like being in a world without language, and then to encounter one word, surrounded by darkness and emptiness, and a little further on another word.
And it is somewhere around here that Kiefer meets Celan. In the poems it is as if words approach things, and in Kiefer’s paintings it is as if things approach words, quite explicitly in Schwarze Flocken (Black Flakes) from 2006, where branches and twigs are placed in patterns that resemble letters in the Norse runic alphabet, and this – that the distance between the immaterial, abstract world of ideas that the words represent and the concrete physical reality that they signify is nearly suspended – makes it possible to see how meaning arises, what meaning is.
While Celan wrote the word “ash,” Kiefer uses ash as a material in his paintings. Ash is no longer represented, through being painted in oils or written about in words, but appears in itself, as if the world in itself is language. And so it is, in that we subconsciously establish connections within it, creating a hierarchy and infusing its elements with meaning. Obviously, ash meant something quite different to my grandparents when they were young in the 1920s than it does to me barely a hundred years later; so do a cut lock of hair and an empty railway track. Meaning is something we assign, not something we are given, and the world is a language – or a book, as one imagined in the Middle Ages, in which everything was a sign of something else, in patterns of significance that sooner or later led to God.
This place, where nothing becomes something and something becomes something else, is not only Celan and Kiefer’s place, but the place from which all art secretly springs. It is also the place where
art and reality interlock. For when we look at the world, it is not already complete: the world comes into being in the encounter; it is continually in the process of becoming. This becoming, mutable and chaotic, is impossible to live in: we have to protect ourselves from it, and we do this by classifying it, by establishing categories and creating patterns, so that it isn’t new to us every time, and rather than being something we see, it is something we see again. All artists know this, that what they are going to paint already exists within them, as what Gilles Deleuze calls “the painting before the painting,” which means that the canvas is never white, it is always already filled. For art to approach that reality, it has to go there, into that which doesn’t exist yet but is on its way to becoming.
In the Land of the Cyclops Page 16