Anselm Kiefer

This paper argues that Theodor W. Adorno's aesthetic project set in motion after the Holocaust is indissociable from thinking Utopia, with Adorno intuiting an emancipatory potential within the artwork. To do so, I explicate in detail Adorno's "negative dialectics", a dialectic driven by impossibility which structures his thinking, from his "Categorical imperative", to his conceptions of the artwork and Utopia. Moreover, this paper elucidates the relation between Adorno's materialist Bilderverbot, "autonomous art" and Utopia, culminating in a critical engagement with the work of Anselm Kiefer and Andrei Tarkovsky.

O artigo aborda a reflexão pictórica de Alsem Kiefer, tentando estabelecer uma relação com o pensamento filosófico, literário e imagético, sobre a concepção de catástrofe, a partir da concepção historiográfica proposta por Walter Benjamin e dos poemas de Paul Celan. A estética da catástrofe abordada na pesquisa reflete o pensamento místico judaico presente na obra do artista, no pensamento do filósofo e na poesia de Celan. O trabalho de Kiefer apresenta um elo entre o mundo terreno e o mundo celestial, onde inclui a mitologia e os elementos do messianismo judaico, para inserir com a imagem da ruína, a reflexão sobre o passado, diante de um aspecto de destruição e de redenção humana, propõe ao espectador um modo de repensar a história.

El arte proporciona una necesaria compensación sobre la reducción cientifica del mundo a la representación. Concebido aquí como producto del alma, es decir como comunión entre la inteligencia y el conocimiento del cuerpo, el arte es capaz de integrar el conocimiento intelectual con los valores relegados por una cultura científica. Es necesaria la reivindicación de la emoción, y el cuerpo con sus preñadas opacidades, su lentitud, su oscuridad y su supuesta torpeza, para hacer posible una visión más profunda del concocimiento y la experiencia de aquell que prevalece en la cultura contemporánea.

How can be understand "the mania"? This question, the question about despotism of National Socialism in Germany became the cause for the early works of Anselm Kiefer. So Kiefer broke a taboo by making it evident that pictures have the power to persuade and that it is necessary  that they are to be answered. Beyond fascism this is of consequence for the picture and cultural theory. - / -
Wie lässt sich der "Wahnsinn" verstehen? Diese Frage, die die Schreckensherrschaft der Nationalsozialisten in Deutschland betrifft, wurde für Anselm Kiefer zum Anlass für sein Frühwerk. Mit den Deutschlandbildern hat Kiefer insofern ein Tabu gebrochen, indem er auf die "Macht der Bilder" zu verführen verweist und es als notwendig herausstellt, auf sie eine Antwort zu geben. Sowohl bild- als auch kulturtheoretisch hat das Konsequenzen, die weit über die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Faschismus hinausweisen.

La Venere degli stracci (Vénus aux Chiffons), une oeuvre majeure de l'art de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle a fait partie de  'Michelangelo Pistoletto in Beirut', présentée en 2014 au Beirut Exhibition Center. Ce texte, publié dans le catalogue de l'exposition aborde cette icône de l'Arte Povera à travers des pistes issues de l'histoire, l'art et la culture populaire.

The melancholic landscape is important to how we view landscape art and the following long research paper will look at how other artists and I express the emotion of melancholy through landscape. The artworks of nineteenth century romantic landscape artists – like Friedrich and Turner – have inspired contemporary dystopian landscape artworks by artists like: Anselm Kiefer, Emma Stibbon and Jason Hicklin. The emotional expression of alchemy and melancholy in landscape artworks will be unpacked in this paper.

Inspired by the winter 2014 Royal Academy exhibition of some of Anselm Kiefer's most significant works, the aim of this essay is to address the ways in which Kiefer represents human morality in relation to National Socialism, German identity and remembrance of Germany’s past through his work. This essay also analyses the extent to which his work, in relation to Theodor Adorno’s proclamation that all art after Auschwitz must be engaged in preventing a recurrence of such atrocities, is sufficiently critical and preventative. The questions raised by Adorno, as to how one can adequately represent the trauma of the 20th century and how one can even truly be an artist in the wake of National Socialist culture, are critically addressed by Kiefer who at once implicates and engages himself and the viewer with the culpability of mankind and the myths that legitimised the holocaust, initiating important discussions with his deliberately controversial pieces. Throughout the essay, the focus is largely on Kiefer's earlier book cycles and pieces that recycle some of these earlier images and ideas which were so provocative in the 1970s and which continue to generate public debate on how we can adequately represent or come to terms with traumatic history and its effect on cultural identity.

Modern art remains a mystery because most people – including art critics and even artists themselves – are unable to see beyond the imprisoning confines of classical fine art. Everything is judged in terms of beauty and technical skill, when it should be viewed from a quite different perspective, namely that of the imaginative world that the modern artwork is a part of. Successful and authentic modern art is about creating worlds of the imagination - like a film, or a novel - only this time using different media. Modern artworks are like lobby cards and film stills to imaginative worlds, and they should not be seen as aesthetic ends-in-themselves. And for an artwork to be authentically artistic, as opposed to merely crafted, it must invoke a ‘strange and disturbing’ imaginative world, not a variant of the world we currently inhabit, as that world is the world of crafted and aesthetic objects.

Anselm Kiefer and Olafur Eliasson, even if divided by generational differences and the material of their art, they share a similar understanding of the function of the work as a narrative medium. The place where the work is exhibited, its historical value and the story it contains force us to reverse the conventionally accepted significance of the presence of contemporary art in two globally recognized, most important museums of France: Kiefer's at the Louvre and Eliasson's at Versailles. The exhibition of the works of these artists at places that represent historical, symbolic and artistic significance both for the French, as well as the whole world, allowed their narrative function to extend and thus to change the perception of the place of a contemporary art exhibition. The connection of contemporary times with history is also an attempt to open the borders defined by the traditional location of the place. Both presentations aim to show how the perception of contemporary art can be changed when it is understood as a continuation of great historical narratives. In 2007, Kiefer exhibited three works at the Louvre. The artist incorporated his works in the framework of the narrative-history, philosophy, religion, art history, tradition and modernity. In 2016, Eliasson presented sculpture-installations in the gardens and palace of Versailles, in the form of architecture and garden design works whose message is the anxiety and concern about the fate of the modern world. Just as illusory was the world in which the inhabitants of Louis XIV's Versailles lived, so is our own illusion of a world without borders, a world with endless natural resources, where our conscience is numbed by apparent actions to protect it from ecological disaster.

Feelings play an important part in general perception and in particular perception of pictures. Their relevance to the construction of meaning and actions that are cultural processes will be shown. By referring to traditions of philosophy and history of art as well as to more recent research in neuroscience and developmental psychology this assumption will be analyzed and examined in respect of its perceptional and artistic prerequisites.
Based on Anselm Kiefers "Deutschlandbilder" (1969-1983) consequences and conclusions can be drawn as far as these pictures can be determined as "places forming cultural values". - / -

Gefühle spielen bei der Wahrnehmung im Allgemeinen und der Bildwahrnehmung im Besonderen eine bedeutende Rolle. Deren Relevanz für Sinnbildungs-, Handlungs- und damit Kulturprozesse aufzuzeigen, dient die Untersuchung. In Auseinandersetzung mit philosophischen und kunsthistorischen Traditionen und jüngeren neurowissenschaftlichen und entwicklungspsychologischen Forschungen gilt es, diese Annahme hinsichtlich ihrer wahrnehmungs- und bildtheoretischen Voraussetzungen zu prüfen. Anhand Anselm Kiefers "Deutschlandbilder" (1969-1983) lassen sich daraus weitreichende Konsequenzen und Schlussfolgerungen ziehen, insofern sich diese als "Orte kultureller Wertebildung" bestimmen lassen. Forscher (lt. Inhaltsverzeichnis) Hartmut Böhme, Ernst Cassirer, Ernesto Grassi, Max Imdahl, Immanuel Kant, Platon, Aby M. Warburg, Harald Welzer.

This is an early version of the essay. Please read the revised, expanded, improved, and completed version can be found as “Indiscernibly Bad: The Problem of Bad Painting/Good Art,” in Oxford Art Journal, volume 41, number 3, December 2018, pp. 321-339 here: https://academic.oup.com//oaj/article/41/3/321/5250682?guestAccessKey=e364f573-7aeb-478c-9e08-f389cf90c38a

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcy017

[Anticipiamo la recensione al volume L’arte sopravvivrà alle sue rovine (Feltrinelli, Milano, 2018) di Anselm Kiefer scritta da Arianna Lodeserto che sarà pubblicata nel n. 2 della rivista Altraparola di imminente pubblicazione. L’immagine è dell’opera “The Orders of the Night” (1996) di Anselm Kiefer]

The obsession with death is a constant and recurring theme in contemporary art. Not surprisingly, in some recent exhibitions, many works by Damien Hirst are displayed together with paintings and sculptures that belong to the tradition of memento mori. Apparently this is a legitimate comparison because the symbolic representation of the duality of life and death is a rigid designator of artistic representation. However, Jean Baudrillard accurately defined the different values taken on by death in modernity, when it was gradually marginalized as irreconcilable with the principles of bourgeois rationality: individual values, unlimited progress of science, domination of nature on everything. This world view created a sort of collective unconscious that is expressed in many of his recent works, including The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. It is a conceptual model reproduced in many of Damien Hirst works, also re-emerging in the “wreck aesthetic” of Kiefer and Boltanski that helps us understand the contemporary iconology Cogita mori, and the unavowed anxiety of the myth of progress. In order to evoke the icons and symbols of our time, artists do not only rely upon the use of images and objects, but make interpretation easier conveying its meaning and their intendments by the use of accurate captions, explanatory statements and interviews.

Recently, the oeuvre of the German artist Anselm Kiefer, brimming with references to historical events, Germanic, Nordic, Egyptian, and Middle Eastern mythology as well as assorted religions features intensified interest in Jewish mysticism. The intention of the author of this article is to decode the artist's particular works explicitly referring via the title or the visual stratum to ideas derived from the written sources of the Kabbalah (The Book of Creation, Etz Chaim) as well as those preceding them (Hekhalot). Particular conceptions of Jewish mysticism present in the works of Anselm Kiefer - the journey across seven celestial palaces and communing with the Throne of God, His emanations (Sefirot), the female element (Shekhinah), the Tree of Life, the pre-catastrophe (shattered vessels), God's withdrawal (tzimtzum) and the rectification of the world (tikkun) - comprise the structural axis of the text and were presented upon the basis of works by Gershom Scholem. A discussion about successive mystical ideas is accompanied by matching them with the artist's concrete works. The author also proposed to insert into the context of Jewish mysticism those of Kiefer's works that originated before the artist became interested in Judaism as well as those, which literally referred to cultural circles other than the Judaeo-Christian one (e.g. the myth of Osiris and Isis). At the same time, the analysis refers to such themes as material (e.g. lead). The author perceives the presence of the Kabbalah shevira - a mystical catastrophe - in a considerable number of the artist's works referring to destruction, including those evoking the Holocaust and thus opposing the universally held view linking Kiefer's oeuvre with readiness to work through the traumatic lineage of the German nation.

Uma vez mais parece que a modernização urbana se coloca em pauta, não só  no Rio de Janeiro e em São Paulo, como na passagem do século XIX para o século XX, bem como em várias cidades brasileiras, produzindo reações de movimento socais. Nesse contexto, não deixa de ser curiosa a presença de ruínas urbanas em Matéria de composição (2013), de Pedro Aspahan, e HU (2011), de Pedro Urano e Joana Traub Csekö, entre outros filmes, como contraponto a um discurso modernizador que retorna.
Contudo, longe das grandes cidades e da dinâmica acelerada de construção e destruição, associadas ou não à especulação imobiliária , dois filmes brasileiros evocaram, mais recentemente, imagens de ruínas no mundo rural. Em Som ao redor (2013), de Kleber Mendonça Filho, seu mapeamento da cidade de Recife, em especial, de suas elites, passa pela paisagem de um engenho em ruínas na Zona da Mata Pernambucana, imagem do declínio do ciclo da cana de açúcar. Já o filme Histórias que só existem quando lembradas (2011), de Julia Murat, recupera a paisagem das cidades-mortas, termo tornado célebre por Monteiro Lobato para se referir às cidades marcadas pelo declínio da cafeicultura no Vale do Paraíba. Seu filme parece ir mais longe na investigação da atualidade dessas ruínas frustradas da modernidade.

Anselm Kiefer and Olafur Eliasson, even if divided by generational differences and the material of their art, they share a similar understanding of the function of the work as a narrative medium. The place where the work is exhibited, its historical value and the story it contains force us to reverse the conventionally accepted significance of the presence of contemporary art in two globally recognized, most important museums of France: Kiefer's at the Louvre and Eliasson's at Versailles. The exhibition of the works of these artists at places that represent historical, symbolic and artistic significance both for the French, as well as the whole world, allowed their narrative function to extend and thus to change the perception of the place of a contemporary art exhibition. The connection of contemporary times with history is also an attempt to open the borders defined by the traditional location of the place. Both presentations aim to show how the perception of contemporary ...

This paper explores essential qualities, possibilities and everyday relevance to living a transpersonal life. In more mainstream psychotherapeutic communities, inferences to living a transpersonal life are often viewed with suspicion (Kasprow, & Scotton, 1999).  This paper illuminates a variety of psychology researcher’s (Assagioli, 1959; Davis, 2011; Grof, 2013; Maslow, 1966; Washburn, 1988; Watts, 1973; Wertheimer, 1923) conceptual definitions of transcendental living. I argue, these are concepts which infer a real applicable and pragmatic advantage to living such a life. To illustrate this, I compare and connect the theoretical qualities found in an archetypal character, the art-alchemist, with a real person. As an artist and a practitioner, the archetypal character’s purpose is transcending ego and helping others do the same, synergetically (Maslow, 1969). This character is humanized by applying the same characteristics to the artist Anselm Kiefer and his artwork, the Anathor

This text supports the exhibition, “Geographies I Have Not Lived in” and it is not to be considered as a text on its own without the exhibition. “Geographies I Have Not Lived in” is a text based on the artistic production process through the things seen and experienced. The issues and questions that helped me frame the text are: Momentary events, the socio-political conditions of Turkey, the time passed commuting every day to university, observations at these times, things collected—whether they can become materials for art? What kind of a process would this constitute? I intend to look at the impact of this method, observe this process and analyze the studio as a site of accumulation. While examining the works that constitute the exhibition, “Geographies I Have Not Lived in”, I aim to produce a sphere that each reader can relate to through their personal history.

Bu metin, “Yaşamadığım Coğrafyalar” sergisini destekleyen bir çalışmadır ve sergiden ayrı olarak değerlendirilemez. “Yaşamadığım Coğrafyalar” gördüklerim ve deneyimlediklerim üzerinden bir sanatsal üretim süreci metni olarak tasarlandı. Şu sorulardan hareketle bu metni oluşturmayı amaçladım. Yaşadığımız coğrafyada (Türkiye’de), yaşanan anlık olaylar, sosyo- politik durumlar, yolda geçen zamanlar, bu zamanlar süresinde görülenler ve toplananlar sanat malzemesi olabilir mi? Bu süreç nasıl bir süreçtir? Yöntem ve gözlemlerin bu sürece sağladığı etki üzerinden, benim için biriktirme alanı olan atölyenin sanatsal üretim üzerine etkisini sorgulamayı amaçlayacağım. “Yaşamadığım Coğrafyalar” başlıklı sergimi meydana getiren işleri analiz etmeye çalışırken, kişinin kendi kişisel geçmişiyle bağ kurabileceği bir alan yaratmayı amaçlıyorum.

Interpreted both as a theoretical rationale and a practical custom, Iconoclasm has been often said to represent the common thread of German artist Anselm Kiefer's fifty-year-long activity. Nevertheless, none of the studies openly aimed to explain to what extent. Questioned on the significance of his iconoclastic gestures during our first interview in Croissy, Kiefer affirmed: "Initially [Iconoclasm] was a necessity, then [it] became a method”. From this stable point of departure, the thesis aims to retrace the elements that nourished Kiefer's original iconoclastic drive, from a historical, political, and biographical perspective, to further analyse the iconoclastic traits of his painting method, crossing some cornerstones of Kiefer's work in connection with its context and critical reception. After a brief overview of postwar Neo-figurative German painting, the second chapter focuses on Kiefer’s acts of reaction towards the "domain of silence" that descended upon Western cultural production during the late Sixties. Subversive behaviors can be traced, indeed, within the adoption of a violent figurative style and the restoration of forbidden iconographies, which contributed to placing his art in open contrast to the impersonality of Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism movements. Examples of literal iconoclastic operations towards his own "Heimat", moreover, were encountered inside the range of Kiefer's early production of landscapes. Subsequently, the third chapter discusses the development of a theoretical iconoclastic motive in Kiefer’s art during the 80s and 90s, adamant moments of which can be observed in the cycle of paintings dedicated to the Byzantine Iconoclastic Controversy, as well as in the artist's multifaceted investigation of the Jewish biblical interdict on images (Bilderverbot). It has been also pointed out how Kiefer's awareness of the traditional mimesis' ultimate failure progressively conveyed his early figurative style to make way for a natural, metamorphic, gestural language. To conclude, the fourth chapter intends to highlight the numerous tight knots between Andrea Emo’s philosophy and Kiefer’s Art theory, with a focus on the recent exhibition "Für Andrea Emo", 2018, and on the artist’s mature painting style. The research seeks to demonstrate how, in both authors' oeuvres, reflections on cultural memory inevitably intertwine with inspections of the power and limits of representation. Furthermore, it raises the possibility that a broad analysis of Andrea Emo’s Negative Aesthetic could lead to unexpected understandings of Kiefer’s creative act, especially concerning Nature as an active agent, the essence of alchemical transformation, and the constant fluctuation between annihilation and reaffirmation of meaning. Part of the research has been conducted at the Anselm Kiefer Atelier in Paris thanks to a scholarship awarded by La Sapienza University of Rome, and personal conversations with the artist took place both in Croissy-Beaubourg and Venice in 2021.