What is it that exists beforehand?
Language, categories, notions, history, myths: the superstructure that exists between us and all things. That has always been Kiefer’s subject matter, and by detaching it from things, or by bringing superstructure and objects together, he allows us to see at one and the same time the thing and the notion of the thing, time and the notion of time, man and the notion of man.
And although the paintings in this exhibition are full of faces, full of eyes and lips, arms and legs, full of flowers, of fields and sea, skies and planes, although these paintings open up the moment on small, colorful surfaces and in this differ from nearly everything we associate with Kiefer’s art, fundamentally they are preoccupied with the same questions.
When I look at them, the first thing I see is a celebration of life and the world. I see the pleasure in the women’s faces, and I see their beauty and the beauty of the flowers and the sea and the sky. I see the superb manual dexterity, how precise the poses are at the same time that the colors bleed and run and erase the contours, creating a sense of something fluid and boundary dissolving, which emphasizes the ecstatic.
I also see contemporaneity. Which is odd, because where does the sense of contemporaneity come from? The women are naked: there is nothing that connects them to a particular place or a particular time, and the physical expression of female sexuality, which these paintings show, is surely a constant of human life, for haven’t all women at all times done this, in these ways, in these poses and positions?
Yes, that must be it. As physical entities, the body and sexuality are timeless; it is the way they are depicted here that links them to time and to culture. Historically, ecstasy has tended to be portrayed within a religious context, not a sexual one, and this is one of the things these paintings explore and play on. In most of these works, the title, usually written on the painting itself, features as an integrated part of them, and these titles do what the motif does not: they situate the female figures within a time, a place, a culture, whether through the name of a historical person or a mythic figure. One work is called Semele (2013), for the mother of Dionysus in Greek mythology. Another is called Lorelei (2012), after a mythical figure linked to the Rhine. One is called Lilith (2014): in apocryphal texts, this is the name of Adam’s first wife and thus the first woman. Still another is called La belle de la Seine (The Beauty of the Seine, 2013), alluding to a woman who was found drowned and whom the pathologist, according to a legend mentioned by Rilke among others, found so beautiful that he made a death mask of her face, copies of which abounded in European culture around the turn of the last century. One is named for Mechtilde de Hackeborn, a German medieval saint, known as the Nightingale of Christ. Another is titled after Marguerite Porete, the French thirteenth-century mystic and writer.
It is possible to look at these watercolors without paying any attention to the titles or what they point to; then one is seeing them as an expression of contemporaneity and of unashamed, explicit sexuality, in a pictorial language that takes its codes from pornography, where we are used to seeing women depicted in this way. If one does this, the tension in the paintings has to do with, on the one hand, their free and uninhibited openness, the boundless state of ecstasy as it exists in the world, as something beautiful and good; on the other hand, it has to do with its opposite, the rigid formalism of the language of pornography and, not least, the power it gives to the observer over the person who is observed.
But if the titles are put into play, it all becomes more complicated. Semele was a common mortal woman desired by Zeus, who conceived his child. Deceived into doing so by Hera, she demanded to see Zeus’s true face, and perished in flames when she succeeded. Lorelei is a siren-like figure: her beauty and sexuality are treacherous, luring men to their deaths. Lilith was banished when she refused to subordinate herself to Adam, including sexually, and is often a symbol of the bad mother. Marguerite Porete, the French mystic, was burned at the stake in 1310. The beauty of the woman found in the Seine is also linked to death and destruction.
This is one of the notes sounded here: female sexuality as something threatening, something that must be controlled.
Another note is struck by the title Tandaradei (2013), taken from the idyllic, innocent, and beautiful medieval poem “Under der Linden,” the first stanza of which describes a love tryst in the following way:
Under the lime tree
On the heather,
Where we had shared a place of rest,
Still you may find there,
Lovely together,
Flowers crushed and grass down-pressed.
Beside the forest in the vale,
Tándaradéi,
Sweetly sang the nightingale.
The same tryst is described in the final stanza:
If any knew
He lay with me
(May God forbid!), for shame I’d die.
What did he do?
May none but he
Even be sure of that – and I,
And one extremely tiny bird,
Tándaradéi,
Who will, I think, not say a word.
The women in these paintings are depicted in exactly the same way as the women whom the titles associate with death and destructiveness, only the optics are different. But there is variation within the idyllic too, for “Under der Linden,” with its lusty Tándaradéi, is not the only German poem resonating here, so does Goethe’s “Heidenröslein,” which also tells the story of a love tryst:
A boy saw a wild rose
growing in the heather;
it was so young, and as lovely as the morning.
He ran swiftly to look more closely,
looked on it with great joy.
Wild rose, wild rose, wild rose red,
wild rose in the heather.
Goethe’s poem ends rather more ambivalently than “Under der Linden”:
And the impetuous boy plucked
the wild rose from the heather;
the rose defended herself and pricked him,
but her cries of pain were to no avail;
she simply had to suffer.
Wild rose, wild rose, wild rose red,
wild rose in the heather.
All these levels – of sexuality as something threatening, sexuality as something that must be controlled and punished, sexuality as ecstasy, ecstasy as religion, sexuality as something liberating and boundless, pleasure, beauty – are present simultaneously, and the explicit display of the nude female body creates a sense of something unchanging, something constant, a place within the human that has always been there and always will be, but which is met and understood in changing ways, the most recent being that with which we ourselves view it. What our own gaze contains is something we are usually unaware of, since it is such an integrated part of our identity, and the way we see the world is such an integrated part of the world that we hardly ever become aware of our gaze or what it imbues the world with. When Kiefer’s paintings separate these two entities, our notional world and the world itself, and juxtapose them in ever-changing ways, it isn’t just the world that reemerges, but also our gaze upon it.
The iconic figure of transformation is the alchemist, while the figure of change is the bricoleur, and Kiefer has something of both about him, as shown by the span between his heavy, darkly luminous monumental works and his playful, light, often ironic creations, such as the rough artist books he has produced throughout his career, containing drawings, clippings, photographs, watercolors, dried flowers, writings, and whims – such as the book in which he ejaculated on a new page every day, or his installation of fighter planes with dried poppies sticking out of their cockpits. The pictures in this exhibition evoke both sides of the artist, for if they are light and full of a spontaneous beauty, they are also existentia
lly charged, led into different spaces that make them at once ironic and deeply felt; but to place them in this context and lock them into what I already know about Kiefer seems almost an injustice, for these pictures are first and foremost paintings, brushstrokes on a surface, and if the incorporated text points to a place, a time, or an incident, the painting itself is held together by a unity of form and material.
One of the simplest paintings in the exhibition is the one of ears of wheat with houses nestling in them. There is no title to situate it: what we see is what it is – a dark blue sky, yellow ears of wheat, little houses placed along them, white with red roofs and smoking chimneys. I don’t know why, but something about this painting moves me deeply. It is whimsical and fun, and that in itself is a good thing, but it is also true that house and grain are no less near each other today than when people first became sedentary and began cultivating the soil, though much in our culture diverts attention from that simple fact. We eat bread and drink beer now as then. To capture this in a way that is simple and iconic, yet offbeat enough that the connection between man and soil acquires nothing of the monophonic sinister nature of Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil), is masterly, and requires a freedom in relation to art that perhaps only comes with fifty years of experience.
Translated by Ingvild Burkey
Michel Houellebecq’s Submission
Before I begin this review, I have to make a small confession. I have never read Michel Houellebecq’s books. This is odd, I concede, since Houellebecq is considered a great contemporary author, and one cannot be said to be keeping abreast of contemporary literature without reading his work. Ever since 1998 his books have been recommended to me, most often The Elementary Particles, by one friend in particular, who says the same thing every time I see him. You have to read The Elementary Particles, he tells me, it’s incredible, the best book I’ve ever read. Several times I’ve been on the verge of heeding his advice, plucking The Elementary Particles from its place on my shelf and considering it for a while, though always returning it unread. The resistance to starting a book by Houellebecq is too great. I’m not entirely sure where it comes from, though I do have a suspicion, because the same thing goes for the films of Lars von Trier: when Antichrist came out I couldn’t bring myself to see it, either in the cinema or at home on the DVD I eventually bought, which remains in its box unwatched. They’re simply too good. What prevents me from reading Houellebecq and watching Von Trier is a kind of envy – not that I begrudge them success, but by reading the books and watching the films I would be reminded of how excellent a work of art can be, and of how far beneath that level my own work is. Such a reminder, which can be crushing, is something I shield myself from by ignoring Houellebecq’s books and Von Trier’s films. That may sound strange, and yet it can hardly be unusual. If you’re a carpenter, for instance, and you keep hearing about the amazing work of another carpenter, you’re not necessarily going to seek it out, because what would be the good of having it confirmed that there is a level of excellence to which you may never aspire? Better to close your eyes and carry on with your own work, pretending the master carpenter doesn’t exist.
Houellebecq’s name is so rich with associations – it has become one of those names in the arts that are replete with meaning; everyone knows who he is and what he writes about – that you may quite easily conduct a conversation with people about Houellebecq, even members of the literati, without anyone suspecting that you have never read a word he has written. In such conversations I have, for instance, said that I have “skimmed” Houellebecq, or else I have praised him for his courage, and in that way given the impression that of course I have read his work, without actually having to lie about it.
This was one reason I agreed to review Houellebecq’s latest novel, Submission, since then there would be no two ways about it, I’d have to force myself to read him. Another reason was the book’s reception. As is now well known, Submission was first published on the same day as the attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, in which twelve innocent people were killed. Houellebecq himself was featured on the magazine’s front page that week, and since he had once said in an interview that Islam was the stupidest of religions, and since Islam supposedly played such a prominent role in his latest book, his name immediately became associated with the massacre. The French prime minister announced that France was not Michel Houellebecq, was not a country of intolerance and hatred. Houellebecq was held up as a symbol of everything France was not, a symbol, indeed, of everything undesirable, and this in a situation in which human beings had been killed – one of Houellebecq’s own friends among them, we later learned – so that it soon became impossible not to think of him and the killings together. He was, by virtue of having written a novel, connected with the murders, and this was affirmed by the highest level of authority. First of all I wondered how this must feel for him, to be made a symbol of baseness and evil at a time of such crisis, not only in France but all over the world, for Houellebecq is presumably just an ordinary guy who happens to spend his time writing novels as well as he can. What inhuman pressure he must be under, I thought to myself during those days. Or were his critics right in claiming that he was a cynical bastard seeking out the areas in which he knew he could cause most damage, in order to aggrandize his own name? The answer would lie in the novel, since you can’t hide in a novel. Second, I wondered what exactly had taken place in France in the years since 1968, when Sartre was arrested during the May riots and President de Gaulle pardoned him with the declaration, “You don’t arrest Voltaire.” Conceptions of the writer’s, the artist’s, the intellectual’s role in society, and of the value and function of free speech, must have altered radically during those forty-seven years. For surely Houellebecq’s novel could not be so full of hatred and intolerance that it deserved to be excluded from the prime minister’s vision of France as a tolerant society? Surely France could tolerate a novel?
All these issues, from the slightly pathetic private ones to those of greater political and global dimensions, seemed to converge in this book, Submission, that had been sent to me in the mail and that I now picked up and opened as I leaned back in my chair under the bright light of the lamp, lit a cigarette, poured myself a coffee, and began to read.
Through all the years of my sad youth Huysmans remained a companion, a faithful friend; never once did I doubt him, never once was I tempted to drop him or take up another subject; then, one afternoon in June 2007, after waiting and putting it off as long as I could, even slightly longer than was allowed, I defended my dissertation, “Joris-Karl Huysmans: Out of the Tunnel,” before the jury of the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne.
So ran my first Houellebecq sentence, the beginning of the novel Submission. What kind of a sentence is it? It is not in any way spectacular, or distinctly literary, certainly not the opening of a blockbuster – and not just because it concerns a man whose youth was dismal and his relationship to what the vast majority of people would consider a highly obscure author of the nineteenth century, but also because the sentence in itself (at least as I read it in the Norwegian rendering, which I sense perhaps is closer in style to Houellebecq’s original than Lorin Stein’s graceful English translation) is anything but impressive, rather it is strikingly ordinary, sauntering in a way, slightly disharmonious and irregular in rhythm, untidy even, as if the author lacks full mastery of the language or isn’t used to writing.
What does this mean? It means that from the outset, the novel establishes a human presence, a particular individual, a rather faltering and yet sincere character about whom we already know something: his youth was unhappy and endured by the reading of novels, which became so important to him he felt compelled to study literature in a sheltered environment in which he wished to remain for as long as possible, the environment in which literature is read and written about. Not just any literature, but Huysmans, the novels of that well-known figure of French decadence.
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nbsp; At this point I’m afraid I have another confession to make. I haven’t read Huysmans’s novels either, although they too have kept their place on my shelf for many years, and despite the fact that one of my own lecturers back when I studied literature, Per Buvik, also happened to be an expert on Huysmans, and like Houellebecq’s protagonist had written a doctoral thesis on his oeuvre. The reason for this omission, however, was not envy but rather that I never felt reading him to be wholly necessary, knowing a bit about fin de siècle literature as I did, and most likely believing myself thereby to have some grasp of Huysmans too, at least enough to be able to talk about him without being caught out in the fifteen or twenty seconds needed to turn the conversation toward something else instead. Huysmans, I thought to myself, and imagined a pasty young man hastening through the autumnal gloom of a Paris shrouded in fog, on the brink of suicide, the way every face he passed seemed to him coarse and vulgar, and the roars of laughter as he scuttled by a drinking establishment shuddered through his very soul.
I could probably have read Submission with that image in mind, and then looked up Huysmans on Wikipedia before embarking on this review, but something about Houellebecq’s use of Huysmans struck me as fundamental to the novel, it seemed almost as if the ambition, in a way, was to rewrite Huysmans, to test out his conflicts in our day and age, to create a sounding board of the kind only novels can create, and so I took Huysmans’s best-known book, Against the Grain, with me to my daughter’s gymnastics practice and sat on the benches, drinking coffee from a plastic cup and reading while she somersaulted about on the mats below along with perhaps a score of other ten-year-old girls, in a harsh and glaring light as one hit song after another blared out of the public address system.
In the Land of the Cyclops Page 17