Arte: 'When I was four I wanted to be Jesus. It was only a short step to becoming an artist'
Sean O'Hagan steps into the strange and seductive world of Anselm Kiefer
Sunday April 27, 2008
The Observer
On the Eurostar to Paris, where the 63-year-old artist is now based, I read a eulogy to Kiefer written by the heavyweight historian and critic, Simon Schama. It increases my sense of trepidation. Kiefer, as Schama memorably puts it, 'doesn't do droll, he does the big embarrassing stuff, the stuff that matters; the epic slaughters of the world, the incineration of the planet, apocalypse then, apocalypse now; the fragile endurance of the sacred amid the cauterised ruins of the earth.' Phew!
Kiefer has recently moved to the Marais quarter, where he lives and works in a building that takes up about a quarter of a block. He is waiting for me in his big basement studio, surrounded by paintings, and wearing a doctor's white coat smeared with the detritus of his work. Tall and slim, and possessed of a penetrating gaze, he looks a bit like a mad professor, and radiates the edgy energy of the perpetually impatient. He is also, to my immense relief, a bit of a joker. He laughs a lot, often at himself. I like him instantly.
'This space is too small,' he says, in all seriousness, when I tell him how impressed I am by the sheer scale of his studio, which stretches over two whole floors, and surrounds a vast courtyard strewn with the raw materials of his art - rolls of lead, cement blocks, branches.
All around us are paintings of the sea, maybe 10 in total. He seems to be working on all of them simultaneously.
'I did not set out to paint the sea,' he says, rubbing paint off his hands with a ragged cloth. 'When I started these paintings just before Christmas, I had the initial concept of painting the source of the Rhine. Now, you can see the Rhine is gone completely. There is only sea.'
Kiefer's sea is a huge, brooding ocean, grey-black, turbulent, thunderous. Up close, the crashing waves seem like solid ripples of congealed oil so thick are the layers of paint - and what looks like encrusted earth - that have been applied to the canvas. The paintings are so elemental, so humming with raw energy, that you can almost hear the ocean's roar in this big cavernous room. There are echoes, too, of other seascapes, of Turner, of course, and Courbet.
'Yes! Yes!' says Kiefer, nodding his head vigorously. 'You do the sea and Turner is there, always.' I ask him if, given his prodigious output, he discards many works along the way. 'Many, yes. But then I go over them. A painting is a conglomeration of failings. But, we can say this of life also.'
He laughs and then quickly turns serious again. 'The making of a painting,' he continues, 'is a reflection of your thought process but it also has a process of its own. Always, it is about somewhere I am trying to get to that I can never get to. This is the dilemma. But you also reach a place of transformation. The painting is transformed and you are transformed also. This is the exciting part.'
Anselm Kiefer has been engaging in this process of transformation for nigh on 40 years now, creating art from ashes, branches, concrete, fabric, lead, sand and even seeds, as well as from pencil, paint and canvas. You can currently see one of his giant books, made from lead and cardboard, standing in the entrance hall of the Victoria & Albert Museum, a dramatic introduction to their intriguing exhibition, 'Blood On Paper: The Art of the Book'. It is pure Kiefer, two metres high and weighing around 300kg; the book as sculpture and monument, on which he has etched the outlines of the constellations, with numbers corresponding to the numerical system applied by Nasa to identify the stars.
This book, the latest of many such creations, is called 'The Secret Life of Plants', but, as far as I know, has no connection to the Stevie Wonder album of the same name. Instead, it is inspired by one of Kiefer's heroes, Robert Fludd, an obscure and eccentric 17th-century English thinker and writer who believed that every plant on earth, and indeed every human being, had a corresponding star in the heavens.
'His writing is just extraordinary,' enthuses Kiefer. 'He combines the macrocosm and the microcosm. It is what Einstein wanted to do in a way: combine the laws of the vast cosmos with the most tiniest things in life: a bud, a leaf, a blade of grass. It is Blake's way, too, and the quest of the wheelchair man today.'
The wheelchair man, it turns out after much guessing on my part and much frantic head-scratching on Kiefer's, turns out to be Stephen Hawking, another more recent inspiration. 'He is saying what Fludd said, that we belong to the cosmos, that we are all connected to the cosmos. Many people,' he adds mysteriously, 'do not like this. They do not want to hear it'.
Across town, in a fascinating group show at White Cube in Hoxton, featuring work inspired by Edgar Allen Poe, Kiefer has created two signature pieces: a giant vitrine in which a grey, ash-encrusted landscape is overlain with branches; and an installation in the bowels of Shoreditch town hall featuring his sculptures of what look like hospital beds rescued from a nuclear disaster. It is uncompromising stuff, familiar now, but no less powerful.
By his own increasingly epic standards, these are relatively restrained pieces. A decade ago, he filled entire galleries with his big lead books, their etched texts referencing the Bible, Greek mythology and the elliptical poetry of Paul Celan, one of his abiding touchstones.
Recently, too, in the vast landscape near Barjac in the south of France, where he lived and worked for 11 years, he has created a series of paintings over 50m high, housed in huge concrete towers linked by underground tunnels. Some are self-portraits in ash and oil, in which he lies prone, tall trees growing from his groin into the starry heavens above. His landscapes, too, are as elemental as his seascapes, great ash-grey furrowed fields merging into steel-grey skies; desolate places that seem biblical or post-apocalyptic in their utter desolation.
Kiefer's work is weighted with history, and shot through with the historical anxiety that characterises many German artists of his generation. The academic, Daniel Arasse, wrote that Kiefer's art continually asks the question, 'How to be a (German) artist after Hitler, the be-all-and-end-all of German artists?'
I ask Kiefer if he minds being constantly referred to as German artist. Is it not a reductive description. 'In a way, yes. But it is also a fact that I am a German artist even though, of course, that is not all I am.'
In what way exactly is he a German artist?
'I suppose in my attitude alone. It is to do with a certain will, no? A will to go to all the way to the end in order to look for the thing itself.'
In many ways, Kiefer is also an artist out of step with the times, the heavy seriousness of his subject matter at odds with the irony and theoretical tail-chasing of much contemporary conceptualism. Some critics, mostly younger ones, have accused him of being too earnest, too portentous. Others, like Schama, view him as an antidote to all that is supposedly vulgar and frivolous about the post-YBA art world; the keeper of the mystical flame lit by the other great German post-war visionary-artist, the late Joseph Beuys, his one-time mentor.
'Beuys was the first one to understand me,' he says. 'I met him in 1971 and showed him my work and my actions. After all the negativity, he was the first, the only one, to say, "Yes! This is good work! Continue!"'
The 'actions' Kiefer is referring to, which caused considerable controversy in Germany at the time, were a series of photographs entitled 'Occupations', in which he posed as a National Socialist Party member giving the Nazi salute before various European monuments, ruins and tourist sites. Some of the images are obviously absurdist - Kiefer as a deranged Nazi saluting the sea - but all were provocative, and genuinely shocking, back in 1969, when Germany was still grappling with the horror of its recent past. Kiefer was 24 at the time that he made 'Occupations', just finding his feet as an artist. Such was the outrage his work caused, and the ferocity of the critical mauling he received from the German art establishment, that it seemed his career might be over almost before it began. He remains unrepentant. 'I did it because I had found a disc with the speeches of Hitler on it,' he says. 'Now, this was truly shocking to hear. It seemed almost unbelievable to me, someone who was not even born when the speeches were made. I wanted to know what it meant to be a German at that moment.'
Does he, as an older, wiser artist, regret the brutal directness of the work, the provocation inherent in those Hitler salutes? 'Well, to me, it was a very direct existential approach to the question of what it meant to be German. I was trying to look into German history, but also to look into myself as a German. It seemed important also because absolutely no one else seemed to be doing that. I think it was absolutely necessary for me to say, "We are part of this," to confront it and explode it somehow.' He shakes his head and grins like a guilty schoolboy. 'At the time,' he says, 'only Beuys agreed.'
Kiefer was born in the tiny town of Donaueschingen in 1945, just a few months after Hitler's suicide and the German surrender. He grew up, he says, amid the ruins of the Second World War, and those ruins have haunted his work ever since. 'I have grown to like the ruins,' he says. 'It is like Isaiah in the Old Testament. All will crumble into dust. I like this. The ruins, the dust, this is where I begin from.'
His childhood, he says, was interrupted by 'the big catastroph (sic) of starting school'. He still seems genuinely perturbed by this early trauma. 'I cannot really remember anything about it. It is buried. But, I know it was a disaster from the drawings I did as a child. Before school, they were big and vigorous. Then, after starting school, they became precise and unpleasant. You can see it from the very first day, the impact of the rules and restrictions, the fear and the discipline. It was not good for my instinct as an artist.'
Does he honestly think he had the artistic instinct, as he calls it, at seven? 'In one way, yes. Before then, I wanted to be Jesus. I was a four-year-old child with a Jesus complex. Strange, no?' He cracks up again. I ask him what it was exactly that appealed about the job. 'I could see he was the most succeeded (sic) and most powerful person of all. That appealed to me for sure. Then, at seven, I realised the impossibility of being Jesus so I seriously considered following the way of the priest. I was taught that God chooses you to be a priest and who does not want to be chosen by God? After that,' he adds, chuckling, 'it was only a short step to become an artist. It was the next best thing.'
Intriguingly, Kiefer chose to study law rather than art at university. 'I still had a genius complex,' he says, laughing some more. 'I thought, I don't need art school. I can instead study something useful.' Nevertheless, he somehow ended up attending the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf in the early Seventies, a kind of free school where some 600 refusniks from art colleges across Germany had congregated around the charismatic figure of Joseph Beuys.
'He was a leader,' says Kiefer, 'but I was not really a follower. For me, he was someone to bounce ideas off, a mentor. But I was never really working in the art school even though I was enrolled there. Instead, I was always in the forest. I knew it was better for me to be on my own, to go my own way.'
Later in the Seventies, still under Beuys's influence, Kiefer's art began to interrogate the great German myths. He painted deep dark forests, the ground beneath them seeping blood, and big roughly hewn timber buildings in which rows of torches burned ominously. Slowly these mythic scenes gave way to barren fields and glowering grey skies, to landscapes that resembled the desolate aftermath of the Somme. He became an artist who excavated the nightmare of the recent German past, whose work suddenly seemed not just to convey the horror of the battlefield and the death camp, but to actually resemble remnants and remains of those same catastrophic landscapes. An artist, then, of mourning and remembering.
'People say this constantly,' he sighs, 'but for me it is not so much about mourning as about desperation. I am consistent in that. In the work, you ask yourself, over and over again, where do you come from - but you never get an answer. This leads to a certain desperation. But also to a kind of irony, a dark irony. The thing is,' he says, smiling, 'you need a whole lot of irony to be so desperate and yet to continue.'
Of late, Anselm Kiefer, so long out of step with the prevailing trends in the art world, has become a zeitgeist artist by accident. Last year, visitors to the Royal Academy in London were confronted by two of his giant concrete towers, big solid edifices that seem on the point of collapse. Many assumed they were a comment on the terrorist attacks that destroyed the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001, but Kiefer has been making his towers - homages to the biblical Tower of Babel destroyed by Christ when it rose too close to heaven - for years now. In Barjac, there is a whole city of them, standing mute and desolate, in an otherwise bucolic landscape.
'The tower is such a symbolic thing, no? My towers are solid but they always look like they will fall down. It is the catastoph (sic) of Babel. I am trying always to catch that moment of collapse, that sense of dreadful movement.'
Intriguingly, Kiefer tells me that, in the Eighties, he made a big painting of an aeroplane crashing into a skyscraper. 'Artists have a certain instinct about things otherwise they would not be artists,' he says, as if in explanation. 'These American skyscrapers have always seemed provocative to me. The Americans want always to show they are the biggest, the most powerful. They provoke the world all the time.'
For the first time today, he seems on the verge of anger. I had heard that he refuses to go to America at present. He confirms that this is indeed the case, adding that his wife, Renate, attends openings there on his behalf. It turns out that Kiefer's disgust at American foreign policy is such that he has decided he will not go there again until Bush leaves the White House. 'They do not care about the world, these people,' he says. 'They only care about having the most power, and doing what they want. I read a few months ago that Bush had forbidden the Governor of California to do something for ecology. To me, that is too provocative. I cannot go there, no and be treated like a criminal as I enter, fingerprinted and scanned. No, it is too much.'
Later, he passes to me a letter that he recently sent to the chancellor of Brandeis University in Massachusetts, turning down an honorary doctorate. 'I cannot accept this honour today,' one paragraph reads. 'At the moment, I cannot travel to the United States. Due to her arrogant politics and violating human rights, America is about to destroy the world. Where there were no borders for me in the past, there are now.' One wonders where his work will go next.
It is the landscape that he has left behind in Barjac, though, that may yet become his most enduring legacy. Surrounded by a high wire fence, and accessed only by a huge steel security gate, it is a vast site that took me an afternoon to wander through. On one side of the hill on which stands his former studio, a converted 17th century silk factory, lies the valley of Babel-like towers, out of whose innards sprout plants resembling giant trioxids. It is utterly unreal and not a little unsettling, part post-apocalyptic city, part sci-fi film set.
While I was there, negotiations were underway for the Guggenheim Foundation to take over the project and open it to the public. Those plans seem to have since fallen through. (The day before I arrived, one of the giant towers collapsed, which may or may not have been an omen for the project's future.)
'I worked in Barjac for so long,' he says, sighing. 'But, you know, I never felt at home there. I never even knew the landscape there. I used photographs of the landscapes of Germany and Israel while I was building this project, but I did not really draw on the landscape of this part of France. This is strange, no?'
Maybe. Maybe not. There is the sense that wherever Anselm Kiefer bases himself, he will always be a German artist, his work a constant, even obsessive, process of psychic excavation of his own, and his country's turbulent past.
Before we part, I read out a quotation to him, a sentence that seems to sum up the vast endeavour he is still engaged in: 'I believe above all that I am wanting to build a palace of my memory.' He looks momentarily startled. 'Who said this?' he asks. 'You did,' I say, laughing. He seems genuinely taken aback. 'Oh! It's very good, no?' I nod. 'But, you know,' he says, grinning his mischievous, childlike grin, 'I am just saying it. It is only a moment.' He begins laughing again, maybe at himself, maybe at people like me who take him too seriously. I suddenly see that he is a prankster, too, but a deadly serious one, laughing in the face of death itself.
· 'Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book' is at the V&A until 29 June; www.vam.ac.uk
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,2275828,00.html
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