By Joan Davidow, KERA 90.1 Commentator
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-488023.mp3
Commentary: The Hurricanes and Anselm Kiefer
Dallas, TX –
There on the front page of the morning paper splayed the devastated aftermath of Hurricane Rita ~ a vertical destroyed road laced with what looked like toothpicks poked from strips of land flooded by blue waters. Little remained from the buildings that lined the highway near the coast of southwestern Louisiana.
Two days ago I had seen the opening of the Kiefer exhibition at The Modern in Fort Worth. The horrors of the hurricane repeated the imagery of Anselm Kiefer, a highly accomplished contemporary German artist. One of Kiefer's many themes, Heaven and Earth, is laced with his ongoing concern of Germany's role in the Holocaust. Kiefer is the only German artist working today who is dealing head on with Germany's role in the horrific Nazi era.
You've seen the same horror-stricken pictures of the recent natural disasters, such as an aerial view of rows of destroyed homes leaving only the foundations, the gnarled tree silhouetted over the floodwater-damaged levee, the remnants of a shattered piano with its keyboard on end, water grasses blackened from oil spills caused by Katrina, and a lone victim atop his wood-lined roof over Lake Pontchartrain.
These disasters were nature-driven; what Kiefer paints are man-driven ~ horrors all the same. All these large, room-sized clunky paintings made of oil paint, emulsion, lead, shellac, applied wires, broken glass, rocks, and steel cables engage the viewer in the artmaking process. This is active painting. It sucks you into its environment and the imaginative spirit of this thought provoking artist.
I stood in front of the paintings, dumbstruck, saddened by the heart-wrenching emptiness. Floorboards that resembled that Louisiana rooftop appear in a monumental attic painting called Quarternity. Carefully drawn charcoal wood grains define the barren attic that plays host to three vividly colored burning pools of fire and an approaching snake representing evil and doom. Those fires will burn and destroy.
In another painting called "The Dark Brightness which Falls from Stars," a stepped landscape fills the lower third of the canvas, with swirling black specks filling the whitened sky like vermin or a plague, like the black crows that dot our skies. Upon a closer look, those specks are piles of darkened sunflower seeds, seeds that show the hope of regeneration.
"The Hierarchy of Angels" shows an aerial view of a black and rust smeared landscape. One shabbily made lead propeller hangs suspended, laden with rocks hanging from the wings. Of course, a rock-laden propeller can hardly fly; it's carrying the weight of the world. Somehow for me there was hope in that prop; I saw it as angel wings, but clearly too burdened to go far.
Lastly, "The Milky Way" shows a high horizon line of radiating rows in shambles, piled with what looks like plaster. There's a distant black charred Armaggedon and a streak of milky white that swipes across the foreground, defining a World War II battlefield. Suspended over all is a lead cone parachuting down and planted is a stake that seems to measure the depth of the disaster. About this painting, Kiefer said, "The further we go in space, the more distant heaven becomes."
The images of the devastation our neighbors have experienced will live long in our memory. These paintings help us see how Kiefer deals with the memory of the horrors that preceded him, to make them real ~ its depths and its hopes, the Heaven and Earth of Anselm Kiefer, and a visual touchstone for us today.
Joan Davidow is director of the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art.
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