Anselm Kiefer : Ironic Sacrality
（Saculacrum Metalepticum）
‘Metalepsis’: taking ‘past cause for present effect’. And so
an ‘absence’ is evoked… a journey in time, back in time, as what is present is
a ruin or remainder or reminder of the past… but what past? A non-existent past
(going back to ‘the past’ to look again at the present… but the objects in
question have no past… are made to suggest their being as a trace of ‘the
past’… but not of the past… and what then of the present)? What now of the
present? ‘What now’?
‘The present’. As that of the objects in question? As matter perhaps; but certainly as art… So ‘not present’
(either): an illusion. Not only the object in question: as archeology (for
example) unreal; as anthropology (to take another case) that of the present. Part of a ‘critical anthropology’ perhaps. Artifacts without authentic origin. Offering the illusion of
a past; from which we see the future (the objects are the ‘past’s’ ‘ future’). Our present. Present as
illusion. Precisely so; as art. Present only as a
gift. Ritual offering. Sacred.
And like all gifts, all intimations of the sacred, calling forth an obligation.
An imperative. To understand and act
accordingly… To understand and live accordingly.
For, unlike logic, the ‘is’ of art always implies an ‘ought’… ‘What now?’.
‘The present’. As the present… Not present. Suggesting
the rest (of the present) is also un-present… Not quite as it should be. Unvalued. Without enchantment nor magic
nor aura. Without value…
So
suggesting that it should be valued before it too becomes a ruin, or a relic.
The art of Anslem Kiefer: From 1960 and
1970s, through the means of neo-expressionism (large paintings, on occasion
with text) a look at history… and guilt - a past indeed, in need, to be dealt
with. From the late 1980s to the 1990s, the picture plane is added to, accreted
matter, objects, semiotic textuality,, semantic texture; a concrete visualisation
of a sedimented history and its relation to, and
through, Nature… (aka Rauschenberg, but natural materials are employed, not the
cut-up fragments of a popular culture, again it is a certain past that is being
evoked, and put to the question) we are… looking at our relationship with
nature, with the past, and with a growing sense of the sacred as a key
proposition in the ‘argument’ of the artwork. And so to the late 1990s and
2000s: most particularly to what is to be found at La Ribaute,
in the South of France: ‘sculpture’, ‘architecture’ ; ‘sacred sites’, ‘remains’
and ‘relics’. All in question: the after-glow of what once was ‘All’. The interrogative with the scent of ambrosia not quite forgotten.
Enchanted antiphrasis. Ironic sacrality.
A long tradition: the artist
as shaman, as prophet. Prophesying?
Elements : ‘Paintings’… forests or cathedrals or catacombs… Shrine like
remains, ; totems or sacrificial remains; objects; fetishes (in the best
anthropological sense of the term (not its negative colonialist, smug
rationalistic, misuse); and ruins above ground, the tottering towers, and
below, catacombs, a forest of pillars, of earth, as if an excavation, a
discovery of the past… not one made yesterday, evoking the distant past as if
discovering an ancient civilisation or wandering
around the burial sites of saints in the caves or spaces, the crypts under
cathedrals, with a concomitant sense of the sacred, of discovery or
ancientness… (all value bestowing, accreting)…
aesthetic value, and historical, an ability to learn from the past: for what
end, a critique of the present, as in the aesthetics of ruins… With its three
steps: representing three points of view, Heaven (the according of the
rhetorical ‘last word’ to religion), Nature (ecology and time as inimical to
human culture), Human (our valuing of the lesson: the lesson of valuing) - and
so an affirmation of the role of the sacred in human (post-religious) life.
Figure/ground: the ruin and
the enchanted wood (the sacred grove).
Things made now to look as if, to conjure up the past (the trope
of prosopopoeia), the conjuring up of the past, the
present of the past, the present in a future, our gaze as if from the future
onto our remaining archeology, the ruins of the past, the ruins of the present
in the future. What survives, as at once archeology and fake…, so an aesthetics of ruins, so both folly and prediction…
warning and prophecy…
The ruin of a civilization,
its surviving fragments and tottering towers. Its
totems, its altars constructed (as if) by time, its ritual fragments,
remaining, and their force…
Figure/ground: the ruin and
the enchanted wood (the sacred grove).
Tradition: draws on the aesthetics of ruins (East and West); but
as a ‘constructed’ ruin or remains. So a folly.
Evoking a past lost… (but that past is today…).
So in effect a latter day ‘folly’: Modern or postmodern folly? A folly for our times, of our time, the folly of our times… mocking
the present… with the achievements of the past, or appropriating the past as
the past of the narrative of the present, and so justifying it? The smugness of the survivor. None of these traditional
ideas of the folly apply here. Rather it is the fake, simulacrum, or other copy
of ruins, that stands before us as folly; so throwing the present onto the
past, so making our present looking on, looking at, as (if) from the vantage
point of the future…. Looking back, on what remains… of what one day may
remain… of our civilisation, and of the presence of
the sacred in the world… (present in its negative
aspect as in a sense of loss, melancholia, mourning – and the merciless joy of
destruction).
As
Anselm Kiefer also evokes the sacred in his works… asking where to find it, and
what we should do with it when we find it…? Of what use if the sacred to us?
So the creation of objects and images and scenes, landscapes,
suffused with force, accreted through the material, and its historical (pseudo)
references… because it represents a historical past that is, or may be, (or
once may have been) today. We are in mourning for the present; as we look so we
prophesy our forthcoming doom…
All would be melancholy (as in Adorno)
but for the question of the sacred. Once evoked, what to do with it, to be left
to adorn the past (adorn, no)? Or to the criticize elements of the future, what
may be forthcoming, so suggesting we look for the elements of the present that
lead to disaster. Or to be used for some other purpose,
guiding us to other solutions. To a redemption
that involves a re-sacralisation, a re-sacralisation as the means of our salvation, involving,
evoking a sacred vision, as do all redemptions, but one beyond religion, beyond
belief… (after religion only the gift of making sacred
remains…). And if humanity and the world were sacred perhaps we might be moved
to save them.
If
humanity and the world are sacred then we will be moved to save them.
‘Everything profound loves a
mask’ (Nietzsche). What kind of mask? A genre mask.
Genre Masks.
Of Kiefer’s
collections and follies we may well ask the question so often asked of art: ‘if
it does not have a use, what use does it have?’ What
is its ‘other’ use? What is ‘the other use’ that all things have?
Genre Mask; ‘Assemblage’;
‘Still Life’; ‘Sculpture’. Shrines; ‘fetishes’ – in the
proper ‘objective’ non-judgmental, (so not a superior -or ‘colonialist’-
posturing, deploying the rationalist negative) sense of the term, as accreted sacrality, or as focus of symbolic sacrality
(ideals, holy feelings, the best of the past, its claim to memorialization,
moral guide to the present, hopes for the future, the ‘good life’). As Still
Lives make the collection of objects depicted into something special (read
‘sacred’) through their rendition and framing -their mis-en-scene,
their means of expression and their enclosure- so the construction of such
enigmatic assemblages also suggests strongly, even irresistibly (such is the
force of their aesthetic charge) a locus of sacred energy or meaning (here the
same thing) also framed by their space, or placing… or means of expression. If
their first meaning is that of an ensemble of objects, or, as here in Kiefer,
as materials, objects reduced to brute, yet transfigured materiality, if this
is their first effect, then the second effect, the affect they draw from us is
that of a sacred collection, of the sacred in the everyday, a first meaning
that commands a second, a manifestation of the desire for the sacred. The centre, or locus, final resting place
of sacred feeling. Construction of the sacred.
As in
the case of the hanging work we might well call ‘The Golden Fleece’, it is a
case of something made from one thing (or things) but looking (or suggesting)
something else… Exactly like the stones, used in Chinese traditional gardens –
and with some similarities in effect. Again, as in other examples, other art
works, this technique is the most effective, in the effects of the contrast of
the materials - and in the control (or creation) of meaning. A contrast that
may be read as A^~A, A and not-A, together, a contradiction usually avoided as
a logical necessity (although one with limits regarding its use in natural, as
opposed to artificial, language) but one which in literature and meaning gives
us irony, ‘antiphrasis’, a clash of meanings productive of complexity or able
to represent the complexity of the real world and real feelings, of human
perceptions, conflicts and loyalties. A world of emotions and
contradictions. A world held in partial aesthetic resolve in art (and perhaps
in art only). As irony appears to govern history (a human understanding of
human life), so its balanced tension appears to inspire the apprehension of
sacred feeling in, or through art.
Genre Masks: ‘Landscapes’ (Paintings) on canvases: as two dimensional
art, painting, and the accretion of matter. A continuation of
the art of the ‘80s and ‘90s. On a vast scale; the sublime as the
bringing down of the sky and the stars, the capture of the forest, on a
‘life-size’ canvas…
Genre Masks: ‘Landscapes’ (Actual I). ‘Land
Art’. Underground landscapes. Tunnels: Dromos, the pathway to the dead, to the place of the dead,
to the after-life… the passage to the crypt, to the place of storage of the
bones of the saint beneath the altar, the grave beneath the alter, the place of
the funeral feast, ritual of remembrance… to the underground place of ritual
(ritual marriage as in the myth of Persephone and Demeter, and Pluto… or, older
still, the myth of Isis and Osiris, the Earth Mother and her Lover, the ritual
as renewal and identity, communion, as link to the Otherworld and its deities,
and renewal of life as of self and community…). Myth of
renewal. Caves of early mankind’s ritual and their art, born of ritual
(as our theatre, tragedy and comedy is born of ritual). Caverns and catacombs
(the underground cities of Turkey) place of hiding and survival, or things
living on after the surface life or environment has moved on, or vanished, or
been destroyed… what survives here? Tunneling to find the sacred…
The
pillars of the underground cathedral, the underground petrified
forest (the sacred grove).
Genre Mask: Landscapes (Actual II). Monumental Sculpture
(‘landscaping’). Towers. Ruins built as such: Follies.
The fake ruin as barely disguised alarm call, as a wake-up call we have set
ourselves. A small corner of our aesthetic consciousness we have set aside for
prophecy, for foreboding. Set in a real background (a ‘Real Landscape’). Figure/ground.
Figure/ground: the ruin and
the enchanted wood (the sacred grove).
Exterior landscapes are also always interior landscapes.
Landscape as objective matter, object of vision, is always apprehended as
subjective feeling… the vision inspired by, or incarnated in, an object. So
interior landscapes of … the aesthetics of ruins… a critique of the arrogance
of Will and Achievement by Heaven and by Nature (allied as one, or opposed,
with Nature as radical entropy) destroyed by Good, with the remainder
(ourselves) spared as an act of heavenly Mercy, or by Evil, by Nature as
inimical to all human effort, to all Culture (that would be, would mistake
itself for, Nature).
Figure/ground: the ruin and
the enchanted wood (the sacred grove).
So it is that even in ruins we search for the sacred, our desire
for the sacred manifests itself even in the vision of our fall, but exceeding
the usual answers; an excess that is the desire for value, the desire to make
value, to give value… to give value our world and ourselves… to value our world
and ourselves.
And by which signs and
portents will we know when we have touched this blessed state?
…when
the smoke we smell is that of the scented wood of symbolic sacrifice, the burnt
offerings of the hearth - and not the acrid smoke of burning cities…
And when the tears that fall, fall not in the exultation of
destruction, nor in the terror of death, nor in the tears of mourning for the
lost, but in the relief and joy that comes when we realize that we too can live
in the sacred grove that we have tended ourselves.
Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2014