Anselm Kiefer: Subjectivity in and Out

Musings on a sr. philosophy thesis

Rachael DeWitt

As senior year draws to a close and my thesis sits on my bookshelf, bound in its purple cover, I remain excited by the ideas that prompted that yearlong academic endeavor. Presenting a version of the project—first at Colorado College and then at the Colorado Springs Undergraduate Research Forum—has forced me to reshape the 37 pages into 15 minutes of interest-sustaining theory. It is through that process of consolidation and reiteration that will keep this work form becoming stale and irrelevant. The entire project began with a longstanding interest of mine, characterized by the question, “what can philosophy tell us about art?” I have not succeeded in answering this question entirely, for it is one I hope I will never tire of. In attempts to continue to explore that question, here goes another version of “THE CONTINUOUS PLAY OF REPRESENTATION: DERRIDA AND KIEFER.”

Quick Summary: The topic of my thesis is Anselm Kiefer, the living German “neo-expressionist,” whose paintings I examine through the lens of Derrida’s aesthetics. But before I get to Derrida, I introduce Arthur Danto’s criticism of Kiefer. Danto finds the ambiguity of Kiefer’s work evasive and pretentious. Danto’s complaint, and later on Schapiro’s demand for accuracy when understanding a work of art, presupposes the possibility of a specific, determinate meaning behind a work of art. I wonder to what extent this degree of certainty is ever possible in art, and in Kiefer’s art. At this point, my thesis turns into a discussion of representation, and I look to Antonin Artaud and Jacques Derrrida’s philosophical commentary on the nature of representation as guides for navigating the simultaneously abstract and representational nature of Kiefer’s work. In the end I decide that representation is impossible to escape, even in abstract art, for the mind makes associations, be they unconscious, that tie a work of art to things and thoughts that are not themselves part of the work. I call this mental activity provoked by art, and sustained by the impossibility of a final or true “meaning,” the “play of representation.” I find that in Kiefer’s landscapes, when he creates a painting of the earth that is also composed of the earth, he exemplifies the constant coming and going of representation.

Above from left to right: Aperiatur Terra et Germinet Salvatorem, close-up of same work, and Black Flakes 

Thesis Excerpted . . . 

Section 7: (un)Stitching Kiefer’s representations

Just as Schapiro restitutes the painting to historical accuracy, Danto believes that good art may be restituted to an order, an order that Kiefer’s work resists. Kiefer himself does not seem worried about the restitution of order. Rather his works seem to reinforce this Derridian view of the endless play of restitution. At his Aperiatur Terra exhibit at White Cube in London in March 2007, Kiefer spoke to a small audience while standing in front of his various works. While stopped in front of the Aperiatur Terra et Germinet Salvatorem painting, Kiefer spoke about the role titles play in his work. “Aperiatur Terra means a lot. I always have titles that have not only one sense. Nothing in the world has one sense only. Americans think there is good and bad. That’s not true; even the truth is turned around. Sometimes the truth’s there; sometimes its there. It’s all in a flux.”

Kiefer’s Aperiatur Terra et Germinet Salvatorem (Latin for let the earth open and the/a savior grow) is a painted landscape, to which, as he explains to his audience, he applied red dirt and then exposed to the sun. The red earth in the center of the painting looks like fire spreading across the land. Up close, the crackles in the dirt fixed to the canvas serve as an allusion to the title’s mention of the opening earth. But the reference to savior and the appearance of fire is a provocative juxtaposition.

Aperiatur Terra et Germinet Salvatorem provides a stunning example not only of Kiefer’s simultaneous play between word and image, but also his career-long exploration of mixed media. In the Milky Way the juxtaposition between the transcendent and the earthly is created with paint and metal on the canvas. But in many of Kiefer’s other works, that coincidence is carried even farther when one of the subjects at hand, earth, is applied to the canvas, to represent itself. Black Flakes is another winter grassy scene, like Milky Way, but is composed of a wider variety of media: oil, acrylic, emulsion, shellac, burnt sticks, and lead book. In Black Flakes the rows of sticks and text meet at the horizon where a lead book protrudes from the 130 by 570 inch canvas. The sticks pop out against the white background and direct eyes to the book that is in the center of the canvas. As Lauterwein points out, “The materials actualize the signs of destruction by giving them a sensual dimension. Their destruction corresponds to the facts. Starting out from this mnemotechnical aspect of his materials, Kiefer creates private allegories: straw is transformed into ash, lead is purified, and sand does not burn.”[4]

In “On the Balinese Theater,” Artaud praises the gesture in Balinese theater for its direct rather than symbolic expression of human experiences. “—the Balinese offer us a stupefying realization, suppressing all possibility of recourse to words for the elucidation of the most abstract themes—inventing a language of gesture to be developed in space, a language without meaning except in the circumstances of the stage.”[5] Similarly, Kiefer seems to bypass the indirect nature of the symbol when he “creates private allegories” by bringing his subject matter to the surface of the canvas.

Black Flakes is quiet or perhaps somber. The black sticks conjure images of ash against snow, of plants sticking out above the snow, pointing to the text, literature or poetry, the Bible and its peoples, or text of order or law. The juxtaposition of light and dark, the component of natural media, and the centering effect of the book gives the work a calm and quiet presence, despite the possible Holocaust narrative told through the black ash in the snow and its proximity to the lead book.

 

Conclusion: Danto’s Search for Solid Ground

Throughout his career, Anselm Kiefer has ignored taboo and convention, and operated on his own terms of what it means to genuinely communicate. Kiefer’s attention to ambiguity and double meaning can be found throughout his work. Since Kiefer’s works don’t point to order, one is left only with the painting. From there one may engage in cycles of detachment. Ultimately, there is little opportunity to restitute the truth in Kiefer’s painting.

In response to Kiefer’s retrospective, which he dislikes, Danto describes good art as “immediately understood.”[6] Similarly, Heidegger’s essay drives Schapiro to make lofty historical assumptions for the sake of defending the idea of meaning in art as pointing to an idea outside of it. Derrida explores the outcomes and consequences of the ambiguity of art that both Kiefer and Heidegger uncover and Danto and Schapiro deny.

All these shoes remain there, in a sale, so you can compare them, pair them up, unpair them, bet or not bet on the pair. the trap is the inevitability of betting. The logic of the disparate. You can also try to buy the trap and take it home, as a tribute or the way you think you’re taking something away on the soles of painted shoes. All these shoes remain there—for he painted many, and despite the pas d’idiome one would like to pin down the very singular cause of this relentless effort: what was he doing, exactly?—as a tribute that cannot be appropriated . . . You can only give them back [rendre] if you think you have them, and you can only think you’re giving them if you haven’t got them. When Artaud protests against the ghosts [7]

At the end of “Restitutions,” Derrida revisits Artaud and his attempt to expel all representation from art. Derrida agrees with Artaud in that restitutions superimpose external subjects into a work of art that form a barrier between the viewer and the work. But he diverges from Artaud’s call for the incorporation of the sensory in performance to rid it of representation. While Artaud believes “there can be theater only for the moment when the impossible really begins and when the poetry which occurs on the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols,”[8] Derrida maintains that such restitutions are inevitable in encounters with art. In this sense, even Balinese theater where gestures are “realized symbols,” they are symbols nonetheless.

The closeness of the shoes Heidegger describes to the earth, Derrida’s description of the movement of the laces in and out of the frame, and the dirt and sticks piled on and in Kiefer’s canvases, all serve to expose the distinction and bridge the gap thus created between surface and content, between the reference and its referent, between representation and reality. Derrida ends on an optimistic note when he embraces the cyclical movement of representation, and continues the play between world and earth, between original and copy. “It’s just gone. It’s coming round again. It’s just gone again,” read the last lines of “Restitutions.” In the Derridian sense, there is no solid ground to rest the work of art upon, it supports itself through the play of representation.

[4] Lauterwein, 228. [5] Artaud, 61. [6] Danto, 241. [7] Derrida 1987, 381. [8] Artaud, 27-8.