A Measure of Power
- By Michael Thurston
I discovered Anselm Kiefer around the same time as I saw Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire and I’ve been occasionally obsessed with both ever since. Kiefer and Wenders are linked in my mind not only by the accident of timing but also by angels; Wings of Desire follows an angel who tires of consoling the spirits of Cold War Berlin and falls for a circus performer, and Kiefer has several important works built around the orders of celestial beings and the mythic belief in purification through fire. I’ve got a poster from Wenders’s film at the top of my staircase at home and a postcard reproduction of Kiefer’s Book with Wings taped above the light switch in my bedroom. Of course, then, I had to see the major Kiefer installation at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) before its scheduled closure next week.
The installation designed by the Hall Art Foundation brings together three large-scale works: Étroits sont les Vaisseaux (Narrow Are the Vessels), which used to live on the second floor of the museum’s main building, The Women of the Revolution, and Velimir Chlebnikov. All three pieces begin by putting you in a position from which you look down the length of the work. The first is a rippling wave of broken concrete, its edges bristling with rusted rebar, a road warped into waves by an earthquake or some similar trauma. When you stand at the end nearest the entrance, lowering your eyes from the title inscribed high on the far wall, the wave seems to be bearing down on you. (Kiefer has riffed on the famous Angel of History from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” and you can imagine yourself as that helpless figure, blown backward by the winds of progress and able only to see the wreckage that human struggle piles up before his eyes.) From the entrance of The Women of the Revolution, you are looking down the aisle between two rows of lead-sheeted beds, a grim, gray dormitory or hospital ward that culminates in a large photograph of the artist, his back to you as he walks away down a muddy road, continuing the perspective well beyond the physical space of the gallery. And when you stand at the entrance of the Chlebnikov series, you feel—as the museum intern I spoke to put it—as though you are drowning in the sea represented in the thirty large paintings that hang on the walls to either side.
Kiefer’s palette runs to gray and rust, but far more compelling than color in his work is texture. The paintings, not only here but throughout his career, tend to incorporate plaster, mud, clay, straw, hair, fabric, wire, and other materials, and his sculpture and installation works emphasize rough surfaces and harsh sensations as well. Each of the twenty beds in Women of the Revolution is made up with a lead sheet whose folds and draping could easily be stiffened fabric. Each has a deep depression, as if a body—no longer there now—had lain in it for a long time. Each depression contains some remnant. Some have dried-up puddles, as if the body the bed had held leaked fluids before it was removed. A few have chunks of stone or rubble. The depression in the bed labeled “Madame Danton” holds a generous handful of what looks like the greenish corrosion you sometimes find on the terminals of old car batteries, while in the the double bed labeled “Madame Robert / Charlotte Corday” we see in the dregs of a puddle some bits of stone, a leaf, pot shards, and wire from a vaguely heart-shaped chunk of something charred.
Texture is the dominant feature of the thirty sea-themed paintings in Velimir Chlebnikov too. Inspired by the Russian Futurist’s esoteric philosophy of history, one tenet of which is the idea that human history is reshaped by a major sea battle every 317 years, the suite offers a stunning set of variations on ash-gray seas and rusted ships. Some of the paintings include metal vessels fixed to the canvas with wire. A couple of these are as caked as the surfaces of the paintings with thick scabs of paint or mud. Some are shot across with bands or strings suggestive of connection; in one, barbed wire winds and whorls across instead. Three of the paintings have a glove hanging near the top, its fingers downward. The hand of God or destiny? Or, paint-covered as they are, the hand of the artist? A handful incorporate dried sunflowers on long stalks (one of the revolutionary women’s beds has sunflowers, too). But more striking than any of these three-dimensional objects is the painted surface of each painting itself. Impasto does not nearly describe the effect Kiefer achieves with the heavily slathered paint (often mixed with plaster). The stuff sometimes stands two inches high on the canvas. These rucks of black, white, gray, and rusty brown create the roiled seas of battle and storm. The surprise is that they also make for powerfully convincing placid seas, some under starry night skies and a couple with dawns and daylight that remind you of Delacroix or Turner. I can say nothing about Chlebnikov’s arcana (I know him better from his zaum poems and his experiments with the page), but I think Kiefer has captured something fundamental in these paintings. Like huge panels in a comic strip, they add up to a portrait of the compulsion that has, for millennia, sent us down to the sea in ships.
If a measure of an artist’s power is the way he or she affects our vision after we leave the gallery, then Kiefer is one of the most powerful artists I know. After a couple of hours with his work, I walked into the courtyard of Mass MoCA and felt as though I’d walked into one of his paintings. The rusting steel fittings and flashings, the old brick wall, the leaden water of the canal of the former factory all seemed part of the same portrait as the beds, the ships, and the breaking wave of concrete. The impression stuck as I drove back home along Route 2, the gray November sky and the rough and rusty late-fall hillsides, the abandoned motels and faded “Indian Crafts” emporia, even the road around Charlemont, still under repair after Hurricane Irene blew through two years ago, all could have fit into a wide open Kiefer installation. Driving by a memorial to the Mohawk who once traveled through these passes, you’d think it’s Anselm Kiefer’s world. We’re just living in it.
