Anselm Kiefer
After my epic encounter with Anselm Kiefer, https://www.a-n.co.uk/blogs/barcelona-in-a-bag/post/52397917 which I spoke about from a post memory perspective I realised that I had missed something. In my focus on the moral weight of Kiefer’s subject (an examination of Nazi German history and culture) and the compulsion of the post memory state, I failed to address the misgivings abroad concerning commercialisation and bombast.
It is, of course, very important to include the observation that Kiefer is one of the Art World’s big hitters in market terms. A fact which surfaced in the Imagine documentary I mention in my review (cigars and possibly ‘vainglorious’ projects), and in the installation-like beep-dance of the diamonds in room 9. It’s true, Anselm has enough economic ‘clout’ to use diamonds in his work and so he does. Strikingly, the Royal Academy felt no need to explain this improbable media in the pared back gallery info I so admired. What can you say about the sudden inclusion of a series of genuine sparklers without sounding defensive or downright shifty. There’s no excuse for it other than excess.
The compass I found to be generally sound in post memory terms (post memory referring to inherited rather than lived trauma, particularly relating to the Jewish holocaust), clearly wavers in others. Taste and ethics both make diamonds as artistic media beyond the pale in my view.
I also failed to include one association with the diamond room, so terrible that I probably suppressed it. How could one not think of the hideous appropriation of valuables from exterminated Jews, the treasure mountains ones sees in documentary photographs. If this were the allusion Kiefer was striving for it might actually make a difference and signal some coherence – but I don’t think it is.
So what also of the charge that Kiefer is overblown, overhyped on ego overdrive with his colossal works. It’s an issue I half addressed in my assertion that proportionality is important in post memory terms. I stand by this view, although I see that without post memory as a reason for the scale he works to it looks hopelessly macho and possibly a substitute for genuine engagement. A tendency to impose.
I’m also mildly irritated (I left anger behind me as a much younger art historian) by articles asking whether Kiefer might be the greatest contemporary artist alive – these really aren’t my values and the question seems both pointless and irrelevant. I’m only interested in the work, it’s quality and meaning, also to observe how a fellow artist deals with the weight of history where war is concerned.
At his most engaged with his subject Kiefer is incredibly potent, such as with the sieg heil photographs and his responses to Paul Celan. In his defence at some of the charges against him I would signal to the fact that he has been the most consistent artist working on German Nazi history that I know of. Perhaps it is also worth observing that if our artists become in any way vulgar or monstrous, it is usually because ‘we’ make them so. By this I mean the ‘high’ end of the market driven art world, and the tendency to strip art of authenticity through the bleak mentality of investment banking.
