In Mesopotamia: Anselm Kiefer (2)

Catalogue essay for the Anselm Kiefer exhibition
Karfunkelfee and the Fertile Crescent, White Cube,
October–November 2009

Anselm Kiefer is talking about bricks. They were, he says, the first toys he remembers playing with: putting something together, one thing above the other, fashioning walls, a place of shelter. He had pulled the bricks from the debris and rubble to which his home town had been reduced by wartime bombing. As it happens, I remember something of the sort myself: my father walking me through the blackened ruins of the East End and the City of London, policemen yelling at me as I kicked balls around bomb sites. Around Stepney, houses still had whole walls torn away, the ruins looking down on patches of weedy grass and bent railings twined with convolvulus. There were piles of bricks everywhere, shattered and sooty as if refired in the kiln of the Blitz. German planes had done this to my city; our planes had done that to Kiefer’s. I remember, in the short-trouser years of the early 1950s, compulsively playing with children’s brick sets. The best of them boasted actual miniaturised bricks and real cement mortar that I mixed in the kitchen sink with a tiny trowel. Later came the famous Bayko brick sets, grooved Bakelite rectangles that you slid down metal rods to make small houses, or, if time and ambition allowed, mansions, factories, cathedrals. That’s what kids did in the years after the war. We ran around the dim streets shouting, kicking stuff in and out of the gutters, and then we went home to build things.

One of Kiefer’s perennial obsessions is how history, the Nietzschean demon of havoc, chews up habitat. The maker of art is also the tumbler of edifices. The motif stalks through Kiefer’s early masterpieces of the 1970s, like the scarred and begrimed emptiness of the Märkischer Sand (1980), stretching to the vanishing point, so that perspective itself becomes the enabler of terror and lament. But other homelands romanticised by picturing are equally grist to the massacre mill: the woodland depth of the Teutoburger Wald (1978–80), for instance, where the Roman legions of Varus were annihilated by the Germanic tribes. In all these meditations on hubris, on the scarifying incisions and abrasions that power scores into the earth, houses of shelter and domination – towers, lodges, ziggurats – suffer some sort of stress fracture, from within or without. Constructed from the raw materials over which they loom – sand, clay, stone – they totter, shatter and crumble, returning to the elements from which they were constituted. Bricks that arose from mud fall back to the slather whence they came. Form loosens into unform; unform implies form.

For Kiefer, built structures – including the densely textured deposits of his own works – are always contingent and provisional, and subject to the erosion of time and the caprice of the elements, including human elements. Famous for his challenges to curatorial preciousness – in fact, to the presumption that art must be about permanence – he installs sculptures and sometimes paintings outdoors (in the courtyard of his Paris studio, for example) to see what the weather might do to them. (A set of his San Loretto paintings are there right now.) Air, light, wind and rain are co-opted as collaborators in this resistance to finish. Sometimes you see Kiefer’s mixed-media pieces locked down in gallery space, like so many tethered King Kongs or blinded Samsons, hulking, shaking their chains, with the pent-up feel of something that wants to break out from polite enclosure. Much of Kiefer’s work – like the Shevirat Ha-Kelim (the Breaking of the Pots) – has this uncontainable spill; a self-destabilisation, a falling off from the two-dimensional mooring of the wall into our own space.

History’s dislodgements, and the subsequent reoccupations of nature, are ancient subjects for Western art – as for scripture and literature – always burdened with tragic foreknowledge. The half-built helical shell of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Tower of Babel (1563) would, for any Renaissance beholder, have implied its own destruction. In Giambattista Piranesi’s Roman veduti, the overgrown ruin, choked with creepers and bristling with moss and weed, is the subject, not the original architecture. J. M. W. Turner’s Dido Building Carthage (1815) unsubtly foregrounds the vegetation into which the vanquished empire will decay. It was after visiting Roman ruins in Campania, at Baia and Pozzuoli, that in 1832 Thomas Cole was able to paint his moralising cycle on The Course of Empire for the kind of patron acutely conscious of the contingent nature of architectural pomp: the Manhattan merchant Luman Reed.

But Kiefer is acutely aware that nothing beats the twentieth and twenty-first centuries for spectacles of construction and demolition: Albert Speer and Slaughterhouse Five, the Kuala Lumpur Tower and 9/11; colossalism matched by incineration. But into his funeral pyres and sulphurous fields of annihilation lately has crept a note of redemptive brightness; germinations poking through the ash; blooms of sharp colour – flamingo, coral, carnation – blossoming through the sedimented strata. Destruction rains down on those big canvases, but from the cake-cracks, pits and chasms nature burgeons. And, as always in Kiefer’s work, the modern loops round the aeons to be met by the primordial and mythic. Half-buried, half-exposed within the scarified fields of slaughter, trilobitic forms of early creation lurk. Lately, or so it seems to me, Kiefer’s cosmology has taken an ecological turn, inflected with planetary pathos. Inside the vitrines of Palmsonntag (2006), Kiefer set branches of palms and other ancient trees, opened like leaves in a book and covered in a ghostly skin of plaster: the botanical lifecycle of seed and bud trapped in a pallid carapace. The beds on which these botanical phantoms arc were drifts of sand, laved in muddy water, allowed to pond and cake, resembling satellite images of deforested silted estuaries – places where human culture began and where its end might be heralded by ecological self-strangulation.

This drawing together of beginnings and endings – these sites that exist simultaneously as cradle and graveyard – continues to haunt Kiefer, caught at a moment in his own time-span when vitality and mortality are nudging up against each other more than our generation likes to admit. While he has been brooding on Mesopotamian origins and endgames, Kiefer has also been producing a series of exceptionally beautiful compositions, triptychs and diptychs enclosed in glass vitrines that revisit one of his earliest and most compulsive themes: the depths of the German woodland. This, too, has been, immemorially, a site of origination and termination. Through the 1970s, Kiefer, whose blankly scorched book was titled The Cauterisation of the District of Buchen (1975), returned again and again to an historical memory from which mythic tribal difference sprang: the annihilation of the Roman legions of Varus in the Teutoburger Wald by Germanic warriors. Names and portraits, rendered as if in woodcut (and sometimes actually so), of the genealogy of this myth of beginnings – from the hero Arminius to romantic poets like Stefan George – snaked through the forest depth, and over a path spattered with blood or dirtied snow. The treatment of pictorial depth itself was a beckoning to memory, and without any consolatory implication that by taking that path some sort of healing transcendence might be achieved. Whatever Kiefer’s histories are about, they certainly aren’t about cheaply bought closure.

Kiefer’s new work retraces some of those apparently inescapable obsessions without merely reiterating them. The form in which the woodland space is housed has changed from the implication – through the line of perspective – of interminable depth, to the box-vitrine: visible but untouchable. The tall glazed cabinets suggest the display cabinets of nineteenth-century natural historians, but, set side by side with no intervening space, also the opened pages or, as we might say, folios of a book. Memory has become, literally, boxed in; the relatively shallow space further obstructed by masses of leafless thornbush climbing the frame, interposed between the beholder and the woodland depth. Snagged or impaled on this memory briar are doll-scale dresses and costumes, while giant cuspids – the teeth that tear, puncture and rend – lurk in the undergrowth. At the base of the snarled growth, memory unspools, the serpent in the garden taking the form of a length of film on which photographic images are printed on lead, Kiefer’s favourite medium for embodying things that, heavy as they are, imply slippage and shape-shifting: the ultimately unfixable imprint of time.

The allusion is, of course, to another kind of literary folk memory: the fairy-tales collected and published in 1812 by the Brothers Grimm as Kinder- und Haus-Märchen – especially Hansel and Gretel, abandoned by their mother to feral beasts and the infantiphage witch. (In one particularly haunting composition, Kiefer suspends a floating costume with an empty hood – half monastic habit, half rustic dress – over the wood-space; a presence equally readable as guardian spirit or demonic ghost.) The ur-habitat becomes a place of imperilled innocence; grisly outcomes postponed or executed. But it is also the primal dwelling place turned into an unsafe shelter. Kiefer figures the tree trunks with broad, slashing, pitchy-black strokes, sometimes leaning towards each other to form an arboreal pointed arch. Knowingly encyclopaedic, these ‘organic’ proto-architectural leanings recover an entire literature on the origins of Gothic architecture, which its eighteenth-century archivists insisted followed the spontaneous intertwinings and sylvan tunnels of the deep woods and were somehow thus normatively closer to the natural world than to the classical masonry imposed upon it. But there was as Joseph Rykwert and others have reminded us – also an extensive literature on ‘primitive classicism’ going all the way back to Vitruvius, claiming that its elementary forms – columns, entablature and pediment – themselves originated in rustically modified tree forms: the open-air sacred grove turned into the built temple. Republican Rome apparently preserved such a crude timber temple to remind itself amidst the pomp of its masonry of the rude origins of its virtue and power.

The fate of early dwelling places, the construction and deconstruction of the abodes of culture, seems to preoccupy Kiefer, especially when he shifts his own places of residence and work. The first time I saw his desert-pyramid forms was at the Gagosian show in downtown Manhattan in 1998; the monumental fruit of work done at Barjac in the South of France where, after a period of desolate self-mortification (as in the 1991 painting Zwanzig Jahre Einsamkeit), his creative drive had begun to show a phenomenal power surge. The Gagosian exhibition Dein und mein Alter und das Alter der Welt (Your and My Age and the Age of the World) was named after a line from Ingeborg Bachmann’s poem ‘Das Spiel ist aus’ (1954). It enacted a monumental link between the Austrian poetess who had also been responsible for introducing German readers to the work of her lover and doomed hero, Paul Celan, whose own Todesfuge, written in 1945, had had an incalculable effect on Kiefer’s interpretation of German fate and the Holocaust. But in the form of an immense stepped pyramid, half-lost in the swirl of sand that adhered to its abraded surface, Kiefer was also knowingly engaging with the first love poem that Celan had sent to the twenty-two-year-old Bachmann in 1948, In Aegypten (In Egypt), in which the old erotic-thanatic intricacies of the ashen-haired Shulamith and the golden-tressed Margareta reappeared: Du sollst die Fremd neben am schönsten schmücken / Du sollst sie schmücken mit dem Schmerz um Ruth, um Mirjiam und Noëmie. (Bejewel the stranger who sits beside you most beautifully / Bejewel her with pain for Ruth, for Miriam and for Naomi.) The drifts of scouring sand covering the half-built, half-unbuilt pyramid put in play the tension between solidity and instability, dwelling and rootlessness. In another poem from Ober Gerauchschlos (Above Soundlessness), Celan had conjured up the Sandvolk (‘Sand people’, and sometimes also ‘Urn people’) dwelling in an ultimately barren place beneath an unsparing sky, their lives watered by the tears of their eyes, the ground beneath their feet shifting grains.

Kiefer tells me that not one of the overwhelming paintings shown at Gagosian sold, and that, as he remembers it, the reception, even from critics who had admired his work, like Peter Schjeldahl, was largely hostile. In retrospect this seems astounding, though not surprising. The immense, half-eroded structures, which appeared simultaneously to arise from and collapse back into barren waste, constituted a one-room epic with which the usual opening-night rituals – Manhattan black kit, glasses of white wine – seemed an uncomfortable fit. The troubled-travels of Celan and Bachmann in and out of Egypt – one lover dying by water, the other by fire – could not have seemed further away, for all their inscriptions on Kiefer’s great paintings.

It was a test, I suppose, of whether heavy-load maximalism could register at a time when impish minimalism was king of the contemporary art world. The union of art and history had been decreed uncool. Conceptualism sprouted even – or especially – when the concepts were themselves jejune. Desert Storm was a memory; 9/11 and another Iraq campaign were not even bellicose prophecy. One of the paintings from the 1998 exhibition, Für Ingeborg Bachmann. Der Sand aus den Urnen (For Ingeborg Bachmann: The Sand from the Urns), is being shown again at White Cube, where it is, however, surrounded with the brickwork paintings that make up The Fertile Crescent series. Seeing the stacks of Kiefer’s bricks again, laid down in the sand, reminded me that on that earlier opening night in Manhattan I had thought, for some reason, of another hod-load of bricks: Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII (1966), bought for the Tate Gallery in 1972. The bewildered or furiously obtuse response to Andre’s neatly continuous bed of 120 bricks laid on the floor forced its defenders into an explanation of serial minimalism, but it’s fair to say that the high concept of art from which all trace of art-ness, as well as the shaping hand of the artist, had been expunged proved a hard sell to the narrative-hungry British public.

Kiefer, on the other hand, has consistently been the most un-modular of contemporary artists; the least likely to be satisfied with an extruded grid as a sufficient expression of immanent form; the least likely to withdraw the shaping hand of the artist from his work as if it were a contaminant. On the contrary, Kiefer’s gestural brushwork is aggressively artisanal, Rembrandtesque, bereft of hard-edged rectangularities, loaded not just with the dense matter of painterly construction, but an unapologetically personal relationship with the histories therein embedded. So Kiefer’s bricks are made in their clayey, puddly muddiness as he works. Differential drying rates echo the process by which loose clay or mud hardens and cakes, the density of the pigment forming tessellated deposits and stacks. Anything less modular could hardly be conceived of. The work both in its elements and as a whole is organic and shifting like memory itself. Bizarrely, some of it makes me think of John Ruskin’s beautiful, if operatic, approach to geology in which solid rock exposes the volcanic tumult responsible for its prehistoric creation. Only Ruskin could describe slaty crystalline as ‘quivering’, but he would, I think, have understood and enjoyed the charge of mineral energy that Kiefer brings to his brickwork. In this sense, the fertility of Mesopotamia, the slow-motion kinesis of its estuaries, carries through to the edifices that were raised on its river banks. And as if in acknowledgement of this organic relationship with the landscape that produced the hanging gardens of Babylon or the ziggurats of Ur, Kiefer’s tesserae are alive with mineral animation. Even when whole fields of them are laid down on an extensive landscape (as in fact they do dry in simple Indian brickworks), the bed, in Ninife (2009) for example, heaves, buckles, writhes as if the bricks and topography on which they rest undulate in erotic connection. That would indeed be the Mesopotamian way.

Kiefer’s fascination with the ambiguities of construction and deconstruction lead him to treat his brickworks synecdochically; they are fragments that imply the whole. Rising stacks appear as the initial elements of an eventual pyramid; while the walls of the building behind them represent a structure that is both maker and made. Its arched openings and high walls suggest a simple brick factory akin to those which Kiefer himself saw and photographed in south India. But they also imply the grandiose imperial towers and citadels of Chaldea, Assyria and Babylon, which rose from the mudflats only to fall, each in their turn, at the hands of successor empires. The flaring, rusted, hard-fired passages in the ground of some of these paintings, or the half-ruined, ragged-edged turrets, complete the cycle of historical births and deaths in which Kiefer discovers the history of our own times as well as the archaeology of antiquity. Where writing and cultivation and law and architecture began is also where war and annihilation achieved epic consummations. In Die Siebte Posaupe (2009) and in the largest painting from The Fertile Crescent series, unmistakably fortress-like buildings shed their brick skins as if sloughing off their Babylonian power, to be reduced once more to rubble.

If this seems unsurprising in a German artist, it’s not just because of a life that began its memories amidst smouldering rubble and destruction, with Trümmerfrauen (rubble women), sweeping amidst the debris for the bricks that might yet make an Anfang (beginning) out of a Ground Zero. It’s also because it was German archaeology that transformed the study of the ancient Near East. ‘Fertile crescent’ was a phrase coined at the turn of the twentieth century by the first – and prodigious – American Egyptologist, James Henry Breasted. But the Midwestern Breasted had studied archaeology in Berlin, and his scholarly, impassioned location of the origins of ‘Western’ culture in the great river societies stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates was an overwhelmingly German enterprise. It was German Assyriologists like Robert Koldewey who first mapped out a credible chronology for the succession of Mesopotamian civilisations, and who also understood that the primary building element from which their mighty and fallen monuments had been made was, indeed, unfired mud brick. When he excavated cuneiform-inscribed brick vestigial walls, Koldewey believed he had discovered the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. His site was all wrong, for the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus clearly locates the gardens beside the Euphrates itself, but in most other respects Koldewey and his German colleagues got it right. The great brick walls – probably of a storehouse – were erected sometime in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, towards the end of the sixth century bc: the same period in which the First Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed.

More modern Assyriology has confirmed, though, that unfired brick structures go right back to the identifiable origins of building itself; perhaps as early as the fourteenth century bc, according to the historian of Mesopotamian building materials, Peter Moorey. This kind of information, linking the earliest conceivable structures of shelter, power and ceremony with an unchanged technology that can still be seen today in parts of India, needless to say delights and inspires Kiefer, confirming, as it seems, the ribbon of time within which epics of construction and deconstruction – work arising from floodplain mud and returning to it – unfold along a continuous arc.

That the most recent adventure of military havoc took place in 2003 amidst utter indifference to the conservation of memory will only have reinforced Kiefer’s instinct about the conjunction of disaster across the aeons.

From time to time – especially in New York – complaints are voiced about contemporary art’s failure to produce some sort of adequate response to the world-shattering moment of 9/11. But it seems naive to expect an equivalent to Goya’s Third of May 1808 (1814), or Picasso’s Guernica (1937). The risk of banal illustration and moral incommensurability with the magnitude of the massacre is great enough to persuade artists to stay their hand. But anyone in search of a resonant meditation on the instability of built grandeur, on the chronicles of heady calamitous risings and tumblings that constitute the narrative of humanity from Ur to Manhattan, would do well to look hard at Kiefer’s The Fertile Crescent. As usual, he is incapable of making trivia.