Anselm Kiefer’s Amsterdam Blockbuster Pits Art Against Despair

Let’s name this “The Work of Artwork within the Age of All This Bullshit.” You already know the record by coronary heart: local weather catastrophe and its erratically distributed miseries, world pandemics, racialized violence, state brutalities, pressured dispossession, institutional collapse, conflict there and there and in addition there, neofascism, extinction-threatening expertise, drowned migrant kids on the shore. Ebullient oligarchs however the world is burning. All the things is shifting too quick, the options are coming too gradual, and are in all probability already too late. That previous curse: Could you reside in attention-grabbing instances. You do.

“Anselm Kiefer—Sag mir wo die Blumen sind,” an formidable double present in Amsterdam unfold throughout the neighboring Van Gogh and Stedelijk Museums, presents a rejoinder to the state of our world with an appropriately sturdy artist to play Atlas, holding its dangerous critique aloft.

With Kiefer, each establishment has to resolve what huge story it’s going to inform. The person simply turned 80, so there are lots of, and they’re well-rehearsed. There may be the one which begins in March 1945: a toddler born in Donaueschingen proper earlier than the top of World Warfare II, who grows up taking part in in its literal rubble, builds one lengthy Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“coming to phrases with the previous”) from Nazi horrors. With sculptural work similar to Dein goldenes Haar Margarethe (Your Golden Hair Margarethe, 1981), scarred with ash, flowers, and straw, the capital-A Artist navigates the conceptual largesse of nouns—Historical past, Guilt, Reminiscence, Duty—in dialogue with the likes of Paul Celan. On this model of the story, the capitalizations by no means finish.

Or, one would possibly recount the controversy that greeted “Besetzungen” (Occupations), the 1969 photographic collection of Kiefer performing the Sieg Heil salute that invited questions on intention, quotation, and irony. This story culminates in Jed Perl’s scathing evaluation of Kiefer’s 1988 New York retrospective through which he excoriates the artist for maximalist canvases that cut back the Holocaust to aestheticized image, treating it as “a sensuous texture.”

Maybe you favor to get your narrative templates from the cinema. With Kiefer, you’ve got a number of choices. There may be Sophie Fiennes’s Over Your Cities Grass Will Develop (2010), which exhibits the silk manufacturing unit that the artist remodeled into his studio-cum-Gesamtkunstwerk in Barjac, France, the place he settled after leaving Germany in 1993. Fiennes cinematically interprets Kiefer’s curiosity in materials and type, lingering on abstracted tunnels, corridors, and columns, all set to György Ligeti’s unworldly Atmosphères. A biography missing a protagonist—no human seems for the primary 20 minutes—this can be a story of studio labor as terroir, located in a spot. Against this, in Anselm (2023)—we’re now on a primary identify foundation—Wim Wenders returns to Barjac with a give attention to the artist as cosmic thinker, utilizing fictional reenactments to assemble his personal legend of the singular genius of alchemy and fantasy.

As we speak, in mild of installations like Geheimnis der Farne (Secret of the Ferns, 2007), and Die Erdzeitalter (Ages of the World, 2014), a brand new story regards Kiefer’s debris- and seed-strewn piles as harbingers of the upcoming finish of the Anthropocene, permadeath of the human experiment. This account supplants the Kiefer of Germanic guilt with one thing nearer to Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus by way of Walter Benjamin: “The place we understand a sequence of occasions, he sees one single disaster.”

How courageous, then, of the Van Gogh and the Stedelijk to arrange their present round none of those previous tales. As a substitute, they danger an accusation of worldly indifference, even political quiescence, turning inward and looking out with contemporary eyes on the factor largely forgotten and ignored. I imply, in fact, the artwork itself.

“Sag mir wo die Blumen sind” is a diptych, with the Van Gogh Museum targeted on the affect of their home post-impressionist painter all through Kiefer’s inventive life, whereas the Stedelijk shows justifiable delight of their early and passionate advocacy for Kiefer’s work, presenting every little thing of their assortment, and that includes a monumental new fee.

This organizing precept—Kiefer by way of Dutch painter and Dutch establishment—is neither arbitrary nor artwork historic navel-gazing. In a 2019 lecture at Tate Britain (reprinted within the luxurious exhibition catalog), Kiefer spoke of Van Gogh’s monumental affect on his work, courting again to sketches he made at age 18 whereas retracing Van Gogh’s footsteps by means of Benelux and France. These beforehand unexhibited charcoal drawings, displayed on the uppermost flooring, present an unformed Kiefer of heavy line and attempting hand. Elsewhere, the likes of Sunflowers Gone to Seed (1887), numerous 1890 wheatfields, Footwear (1886), and Self-Portrait (1887–88) are displayed alongside 11 of Kiefer’s monumental works, together with De sterrennacht (The Starry Night time) and Die Krähen (The Crows), each from 2019. The juxtapositions create a proper dialog: One’s Nineteenth-century thick brushstrokes change into the opposite’s Twentieth-century wooden, wire, gold leaf, and straw, whereas each artists discover the perspectival potentialities of a excessive horizon line, inducing claustrophobia and expansiveness without delay. Even the place the motivic connection appears most direct, as in Kiefer’s use of the sunflower—in Sol Invictus (1995), the aggressive verticality of showering seeds meets the weak horizontality of a supine human type—the impact is much less simple homage than shared lifelong challenge. One sees two artists making an attempt to characterize an unreachable, fracturing world.

The Stedelijk can be telling a narrative about artwork, this time in regards to the sheer vary of Kiefer’s oeuvre. There may be the early Kiefer of Innenraum (Inside, 1981); the Kiefer of textual content and delicate dried flowers in Die Frauen der Revolution (The Girls of the Revolution, 1986); the full-scale set up warplane of Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the Finish of the Night time, 1990); and Steigend, steigend, sinke nieder (Rising, Rising, Sinking Down, 2009–12), a towering film-reel tumble of photographic prints on lead with pictures from the artist’s corpus, together with some from “Besetzungen,” a historical past neither of Deep Time nor trendy Europe, however the private historical past of inventive repute.

The centerpiece on the Stedelijk is the titular set up, a collection of canvases created for the monumental, light-soaked staircase on the constructing’s heart. Taking its identify from Pete Seeger’s 1955 anti-war anthem “The place Have All of the Flowers Gone?” as popularized by Marlene Dietrich, the work phases figures of thoughts and physique—from pre-Socratic philosophers to Charcot’s hysterical feminine sufferers—set in opposition to luminous gold backgrounds, thick layers of paint and clay, hung assemblages of fabric, and piles of dried rose petals. The impact is to stroll among the many paradox of life: that it regularly begins, that it regularly ends. However whereas your eye scans the sublimity and poignancy of this generality, a hanging element—say, a clay-crusted uniform—recollects that the ending-ness of life doesn’t come for all in the identical approach. Seeger took lyrical inspiration from a Cossack people tune. Unimaginable not to consider Ukraine, but in addition Sudan, Gaza, Syria, strolling by means of the piles of crumbling petals.

This, then, is the query that can divide the viewers. What proper does any artist and any establishment should stage, in gold leaf and rose, the query “The place have all of the flowers gone?” at this historic second and to reply it with inventive inspiration, formal conversations, and issues of brushstrokes, mild, perspective, and scale?

Different crops would possibly reply. Dealing with down a world of cruelties and wars, Voltaire’s Candide meets a person absorbed within the job of labor, content material to are likely to his orange timber. I now perceive, says Candide: We should domesticate our backyard.

Artwork can nonetheless be a provocation in opposition to despair. This present’s gamble is that it may be so not regardless of, however exactly by, remaining curious in regards to the work artists undertake. Candide is proposing the optimism of exercise: of seeding, making ready, making. We should domesticate our backyard. What else, ultimately, can we do?