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Anselm Kiefer,
Innenraum (Interior space), 1981, oil, acrylic,
shellac, and emulsion on canvas, 9' 5" x 10' 2
3/8". |
WHEN ANSELM KIEFER's
Innenraum (Interior space), 1981, among other colossal
paintings, knocked me for a loop at Mary Boone Gallery on West
Broadway in 1982, I didn't know that its image derived from a
postwar photograph of Albert Speer's Reich Chancellery in
Berlin: the cavernous, skylit, ineffably racy "mosaic hall"
where Hitler would meet around a map table with his military
staff, making plans. Nor did I know much else (I only thought
I did) about the Third Reich, or about German modern culture
generally except as filtered through standard humanist,
leftish, smoky vamps—Thomas Mann, the Bauhaus, Bertolt Brecht
(trans. Eric Bentley), Marlene Dietrich. Imprinted with the
Paris–to–New York mythos of modern art, I assumed that "German
painting" was a typographical error.
That same year, I sat on a plane bound
for Documenta 7, reading The Song of the Nibelungs. It
was my first visit to Germany. In Kassel I was far from
disappointed by the grandeur and some mysterious other
quality—I didn't yet understand it as humor—of more new
Kiefers. Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Georg Baselitz, and
the fetching Neue Wilde—remember Salomé?—also swaggered
on the walls. (I was crazy about Polke immediately.) Joseph
Beuys was on hand, at the top of his game. Loudspeakers
broadcast Wagner (a backfiring critical ploy by Daniel Buren).
Germany! I felt plugged into a great secret dynamo of reeking
truths and sickish excitement.
Modern European history after Napoléon
was brewed in Germany, starting with Marx and Bismarck.
Germany's enemies consoled themselves by developing the main
lines of modern culture. Retroactively, Kiefer made the
history a subject of the culture. His paintings had American
formats and French aromas. (Their rugged handling was coolly
dramatic and decorative, not Expressionist.) Kiefer was an
international conceptualist at root; he once told me he had
been inspired by Ed Ruscha to make books as art objects. One
of his '70s books—of blocky black forms painted over porno
babes—was called Donald Judd Hides Brünhilde. He built
jokes on a scale that only God could back up far enough to
take in. The Kiefer effect was like divine, unfriendly
laughter.
I was thrilled by Kiefer because he so
aggrandized aesthetic sensitivity, giving it the run of
grown-up stuff. His poetic license was like an ID with which
to breeze through police lines at major crime scenes. The big
emotion that his pictures stirred was, amazingly, not an end
in itself but an expedient for thought. Kiefer's work
suggested to me how art criticism, no less than art, could
handle political anxiety: lyrically and head-on, authorized
only by accurate feeling and a lot of nerve. Not that I could
do it very much myself (insecure), but I could spread the
word.
The pictorical rhetoric of
Innenraum is regular Kiefer: fleeing perspective
countered by frontal materiality, all imbued with light/dark,
sonorous tones and chafing colors. The underlying photograph
is made funereal by black patches over the hall's sumptuous
mosaic panels. A big wad of inked paper stands in for Hitler's
map table. Dominant is the gridded skylight, which, as an
upside-down and truncated triangle, swings forward, spilling
the bleak radiance of a no-comment sky. Feelings of the
space (terrific architecture) and about the space
(grief, anger) blend like notes in a musical chord. You may
not be given any new ideas about Nazism, architecture, or
painting, but a long look turns your old ideas back on
themselves in spirals of paranoiac irony.
I kept feeling that something momentous
was supposed to happen, culturally, on account of Kiefer. But
then I had similar anticipations about the initial impacts of
David Salle, Eric Fischl, and Cindy Sherman. (I proved right
only about Sherman, whom everybody likes and misunderstands in
ways that steady and goad her.) The early-'80s moment of
maximum artistic ambition and worldly attention evanesced. The
reason is a long story, marked by disastrously polarized
critical intellect and aesthetic sensibility. Kiefer remains a
tremendous maker of things, but his recent work seems more or
less resigned to solipsism. We let him down.
Peter Schjeldahl is art critic for
the New Yorker. |
