Schama on Kiefer

Above images Anselm Kiefer.

Simon Schama from "Landscape and Memory"

Kiefer: "In 1945, after the 'accident'as it is so emphatically put, people thought now we start from scratch. The past was taboo, [my] dragging it up only caused repulsion and distaste." He was committed to becoming a cultural nuisance, worrying away at the scabs of memory until they revealed open and livid wounds again.

Kiefer was provocative, even brazen about his challenge to conventional decorum, confessing that to understand fascism he needed to some degree to re-enact its megalomania. The stance was perverse, threatening, daring to be misunderstood, which it certainly was. But he was saved from obscene tomfoolery about the crematoria by his aggressive historicism, born, I believe, from an authentic determination to explore the modern fate of landscape myth.

As he announced in a series of self-consciously grandiose paintings, the Bilderstreit (The Dispute of Paintings), Kiefer had more weighty things on his mind then silk-screened Marilyns. And to express those things, he needed a reinvention of traditional forms; above all, landscape and history painting.

Kiefer was concerned with a different kind of integrity: that of the undisguised storyteller, the orchestrator of a visual Gesamtkunstwerk: a total experience, at once operatic, poetic, and epic. So he pushed the plane back down, using aggressively deep perspective to create the big operatic spaces in which his histories could be enacted.

At the core of this strategy of embarrassment was an obsinate determination to force together culturally acceptable elements of the German heroic and mythic tradition with its unacceptable historical consequences.