Anselm Kiefer

[Dave Monroe]

Slected selections from Alan Riding, "Anselm Keifer:
Dodging the Spotlight as He Turns to Jewish
Mysticism," New York Times, Tuesday, April 3rd, 2001
...

... At 55 Mr. Kiefer is considered one of the most
important artists of his generation, yet he has never
courted the limelight. Even many who admire him do not
know what he looks like. And that is fine by him.

"I never wanted to be a star," the German artist
explained. "I want to communicate through my work. If
you are a star, you communicate through the lowest
common denominator. I never want to have photographs
of myself in the press. I am not important. All I want
is to do something that goes through me and results in
something."

In that sense he has succeeded. Over the last 20 years
his immense paintings and sculptural installations,
many of them inspired by his research into German and
Jewish memory and myths, have been widely exhibited in
Europe and the United States. And, to his
satisfaction, a Kiefer painting is now far more
recognizable than Mr. Kiefer himself.

Now Mr. Kiefer is engaged in turning his entire
property into a massive installation comprising three
lakes as well as numerous buildings connected by
tunnels and staircases. The work takes its inspiration
from Sefer Hekhaloth, the ancient Jewish mystical
tracts that describe the search for God at the center
of seven heavenly palaces. "The Hekhaloth is the
spiritual journey toward perfect cognition," he said.

The installation is no less a logical step in Mr.
Kiefer's own journey as an artist, one in which he has
come to regard the meaning of his work as more
important than its appearance. "I cannot do a painting
as a painting," he explained in a recent interview.
"It's impossible for me. I do a painting  because I am
interested in a historical event or its mythological
context. This gives me the motivation to paint. 
Otherwise I would have no motivation. But the
spectator can have completely different ideas about
it. He may have no idea what I mean. If he wants to be
involved in the intellectual or philosophical
background, it does no harm. But it is not necessary."

The risk, of course, is that his work is
misunderstood.

[...]

His research led him deeper into the German soul, into
Goethe, into German philosophy, into the age-old myths
that inspired Wagner's tetralogy, "Der Ring des
Nibelungen." He now had ample motivation for his work,
but the intense paintings that followed also earned
him the reputation in Germany of being a gloomy and
melancholic artist. 

[...]

"I was born into a very Catholic family, so the
Judaism in the Bible was very familiar to me," he
said. 

[...]

The experience led him to study Jewish mythology and
to create an entirely new body of work. He was not,
however, looking for faith. He accepts that "there
must               be something supreme that cannot be
expressed in words," but he was above all fascinated
by the human search for an explanation. "I could have
started with Chinese or Indian philosophy," he went
on, "but it is not next to me. Next to me is
Catholicism and then Judaism."

Was his attraction to Jewish mysticism, he was asked,
also a product of German guilt?

"There is what you call `German guilt,' " he replied.
"I am not responsible because I was too young, but if
you are German, you are connected to that era. But
there is something else. Some people said, `First you
were researching about Germanism, now about Judaism.'
But it is all one thing. I cannot imagine German
culture without Judaism. Everything that makes German
philosophy and poetry interesting to the world is a
combination of Germany and Judaism. One thing is that
the Germans committed the immense crime of killing
Jews. The other is that they amputated themselves.
They took half of German culture and killed it."

Mr. Kiefer's historical and philosophical baggage is
of course only suggested in his paintings, yet it
assumes enormous power through both the materials he
uses [...]   and the images he evokes [...]. From the
mid-80's the titles of his paintings frequently
referred to the Old Testament and to Jewish mythology,
while his obsession with the written word led him to
create big painted books made of lead.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/03/arts/03KIEF.html

The bigger they are, the more obscured they are, the
more obscure thay are, apparently.  Speaking of both
the God of the Old Testamnet and the sublime ...

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