Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow

I’ve been following him for years. Tracking his paper trail. Writing about him in my journal. Googling him late at night. Imagining living with him on a sweeping ranch in southern France. No, not Robert Pattinson. Anselm Kiefer. I just can’t seem to get enough.

I saw Kiefer’s (Donaueschingen Germany, 1945) work at the Hamburger Bahnhof this past week. Here’s the short list of why I can’t move on:

1. He makes water look like dust. The seas in his paintings (loosely labeled as they are mammoth constructions of lead, dirt and straw) evoke the powerful swelling, cresting motion of waves that drown and flood. Yet, just as you are about to dive into the expansive image before you, your mouth begins to water as if you haven’t had a drink in days. You realize that if you reached your fingers out to it, the surface would crumble at your touch. It is split and cracked. Parched. A dead sea. It is simultaneously a churning river and the dry riverbed it will become. In this way, it holds two separate times suspended. Even more improbably, parts of it are scorched. At once water and fire. Their cyclical battle of destruction and rebirth is endless and still.

Hoffmann von Fallersleben auf Helgoland, 1983-1986

2. He builds things to knock them down. It’s part of his philosophy about life’s ephemeral nature. For a while he had his very own multi-acre universe on which to build towers and raze them with bulldozers. (Which we will all get to witness in HD when “Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow” comes out in August! http://www.hulu.com/watch/260400/movie-trailers-over-your-cities-grass-will-grow)

I have a hard time being reckless with my work. My studio neighbor was incredulous when I told him how deeply I felt about Kiefer. He didn’t think our work had much in common. Although my response at the time was to scream ‘We are the same person!’ and stomp out of the room, upon reflection, it is those differences that keep me mesmerized by his process. They prevent me from ever fully understanding his work, at which point the well of usefulness would dry up. I can’t copy his work like I could an old master painting (the giant slabs of lead would do me in), nor could I ever fully decode it. In a way, it is comparable to having a relationship, perhaps with someone of the other gender, where the momentum comes from striving to understand each other across an insurmountable gap of difference.

3. He digs myths. Literally. He mines old stories (biblical, mythological, historical) with stores of wisdom from previous generations, powerful time-tested tropes and layers and layers of interpretations. By taping into them, Kiefer harnesses their strength. When you are confronted with his piece about Lilith, for instance, no matter how far you dig (symbolically, historically) you can’t find the bottom.

Okay, so why doesn’t every artist just reference an old story in their work, if through that reference they harness its power? (Let’s nerd out for a moment on this one.) If you channel this kind of heavy-duty magic you’d better be wizard enough to wield it. Otherwise, it can overpower your purpose with its own, causing highly unpredictable consequences and interpretations. Also, the story could remain closed to you if you don’t know how to properly unlock it and what to look for once you do. You may be denied access to its rich insides and be left to poke around its cheap cliché -riddled exterior. Worst yet, as described by Lev Grossman in ‘The Magicians,’ the immense energy could overwhelm your system, making you at once supremely powerful and fatally unstable, and you could burn up as a niffin. (Many musicians have gone out this way.)

The point being, Kiefer has done his homework. He is hyper aware of his country’s emotional state, historical trajectory, literary and artistic background and the place he’s carved for himself in all of it. That’s why he gets to carry the big guns.

Lilith am Roten Meer (Lilith on the Red Sea), 1990

Both photos taken by me at the Hamburger Bahnhof.

4. He looks to the trees to talk to the people. Birch, oak and ash -- each heavy-laden with German cultural significance – are often the figures in his work. Sometimes, by etching names into the wood or posting heads as leaflets to the bark, we know the names of these characters. Other times, they are anonymous sentinels or vessels for the viewer.

Some of his landscapes include actual earth or bark from the place he is describing, allowing him to harness its true colors and something less tangible.

In “Landscape and Memory,” Simon Schama explores why Kiefer’s use of landscape to speak about the human condition is so effective. He explains the complex connection, of which Kiefer is acutely aware, that humans have with their environment. Schama proposes that we see the landscape around us as a reflection of our inner, emotional terrain. Therefore, it is a highly subjective view and largely composed of what we project onto it. He quotes Thoreau, “It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that dream.” Then, of course, there are the physical scars of our actions on the earth. And the influence goes both ways. Schama proposes that each culture around the world has been largely shaped by the way it has survived in, adapted to, and revered its natural surroundings.

All this is to say that when Kiefer paints a wounded, frozen forest, he is not just painting trees. He is painting about the Battle of the Teutoburger Wald when the Germans first defeated the Romans with a treacherous, forested home court advantage and he is painting about the war that took place there two centuries later. By remembering these things through the landscape, it eases some of the pain. Whereas some of the more recent wounds that Kiefer unearths, such as internment camps, racial violence and the Holocaust might be searing to look at straight on, the forest reminds us of the bigger forces at play and the merciful way nature has of growing things out of scorched earth.