Anselm Kiefer

Waterworld

Anselm Kiefer is a builder of systems: a painter who has had to retrieve from oblivion entire mythologies, rescuing the coordinates of half-forgotten narratives, recovering the map references for the cultural imaginary. Litanies of divine and heroic figures, supernatural genealogies, star charts, the names and agencies of classical and Germanic mythology, the hierarchies of beings referred to in the Kabbala – all have become the means by which the infinite expansions of space and time have been negotiated. The outer reaches of the imagination are at the centre of Kiefer’s work; his paintings are drawn towards regions unattainable by humanity but assimilable to human ambitions, to the trajectories of desire and fear that make them both tantalise and repel us. There, at the boundary of our understanding is the beginning of a knowledge of the world that must always remain ambiguous, cryptic, oracular. Given his preoccupations, Kiefer’s fascination with the figure of Velimir Khlebnikov seems inevitable. The Russian ‘Futurian’ is best known as an experimental poet, but his work includes various writings that elaborate theories about the structure of the universe and the laws of time. Of all the texts that comprise Khlebnikov’s strange oeuvre, the ‘Tables of Destiny’ have held the strongest appeal for Kiefer. They represent Khlebnikov’s attempt to understand history as a system of correspondences, as a series of mutually defining events that echo one another across different measures of time. The measures may vary enormously but, according to Khlebnikov, they always reveal the operation of the same mathematical proportions: ‘opposed events – victory and defeat, beginning and end – are united in terms of powers of three (3n).’
The more data Khlebnikov fed into his system, the greater the complexity of the calculations needed to make the theory work, with the result that a greater variety of multiples was required. Nevertheless, Khlebnikov managed to stabilise his equations around multiples of three and two (3n and 2n). This precision was, of course, absurd – Kiefer has referred to it as Dadaist. The central paradox of Khlebnikov’s system, and of the obsessive rigour with which the theory was applied, lies in the non-scientific basis of its inspiration, in the form of an overwhelming desire to control the movement of history. Khlebnikov’s initial motivation was a highly personal response to Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War: ‘I wanted to discover the reason for all those deaths’.
Kiefer’s fascination with this quest to find a rationale in history appears to stem from at least two related sources. Firstly, it arises naturally from the chronic responsiveness of his work to the pressures of history. Kiefer goes much further than most contemporary painters in his use of a spatial medium to capture the experience of time. He is less interested in the simple effectiveness of attempts to freeze the movement of time or to accentuate its passing than in the less immediate but more far-reaching drama involved in trying to evoke the relations of past, present and future in a two-dimensional plane. Thematically, his oeuvre has constantly branched out to incorporate speculations about the mythologies and traditions of thought of various cultures, but the different series of paintings that have been generated in this process all coalesce in mood and in conceptual structure, and in their common anxiety about the origins of specific historical episodes and the ends that they seem to imply. If Kiefer is haunted by the past, he is equally haunted by the future, by the subterranean continuities of thought and feeling that transform a decisive military defeat – or victory – into a means of discomposing the balance of power, in a way that simultaneously projects a desire for closure into the future and a fear that closure will never occur.
Secondly, although Kiefer has been aware of Khlebnikov’s theories since the mid-1970s, his work has engaged directly with their programmatic potential in two distinct phases separated by an interval of nearly 20 years. The earlier phase of activity took the form of a series of gouaches composed during the late 1970s and early 1980s on the theme of ‘The little mailed fist of Germany’ and ‘The big mailed fist of Germany’. These formulae refer to the events of 2 September 1870 and 11 July 1915: to the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, and to an entry in Khlebnikov’s ‘Tables of Destiny’ that reads: ‘Germany’s iron fist, which once threatened only France, now threatens the whole of Planet Earth’.
Kiefer’s later phase of activity is represented by the paintings in the White Cube show and by an extraordinary installation at Barjac in Provence; the latter consists of an ensemble of works that are collectively entitled ‘Velimir Chlebnikow; die neue Lehre vom Krieg Seeschlachten wiederholen sich in 317 Jahren oder deren Vielfachem’. They are organised around a central, lead-lined tank that is filled with water containing a sunken battleship; to one side of this cistern are seven wheeled frames from which rusting ships are suspended by wire, with an eighth ship hanging from the ceiling, and a ninth listing on the floor; to the other side is a wheeled frame holding a massive canvas, against whose background of greys and ochres 11 ships are wired upright, with lumps of shattered terracotta resting on their decks.
Although Kiefer’s development as an artist has been characterised by a practice of circling back round to the same themes and motifs (sometimes after intervals of several years), the two periods of time when he has focused on Khlebnikov’s ideas seem to reflect external developments in the socio-political world, almost as if Kiefer himself is detecting a pattern of historical cycles. In the late 1970s and early 1980s it was political turbulence in Eastern Europe that galvanized attention, while in the first few years of the twenty-first century, it is the radical disturbance to the global balance of power that has been the defining feature of American-led military conflicts since the fall of state communism.
All of Kiefer’s Khlebnikov paintings are dominated by the iconography of the sea battle; this decision to concentrate on the history of naval conflicts has decisive repercussions for the viewer’s understanding of the artist’s engagement with Khlebnikov’s ideas. From Homer onwards, literate culture in Europe has recognised the sea as the most appropriate emblem for everything that is most difficult to control in the human sphere. In Euripides’ Hippolytus, it is the sea itself that acts as a metaphor for precisely those elements in the human psyche that are least predictable and least governable. The sea’s capacity for sudden and complete transformation, its very fluidity, is what renders it a particularly apt symbol for history as lacking any order or pattern, as unmanageable, as something that always eludes one’s grasp. Kiefer’s ironic use of Khlebnikov’s predictive models reflects his conviction that history can never be programmed or given a fixed form, but is like mud that can be given an entirely new shape with the lightest touch.
This allusion to mud as the primal material for creation is converted almost literally into the textures of Kiefer’s seascapes, where oceanic depths are never translucent or crystalline, but opaque, thickly-layered, encrusted. The constant evocation of history in representations of the sea, with its irresistible associations of changeability, of hidden depths, of the unknowable, was anticipated by Khlebnikov himself, in the preamble to the ‘Tables of Destiny’: ‘The fate of the Volga may serve as a lesson for the study of destiny. The day the Volga riverbed was sounded was the day of its subjugation, its conquest by the powers of sail and oar, the surrender of the Volga to mankind… In the same way we can study the fissures and shifting shoals of time.’ The steady confidence with which Khlebnikov unfolds this analogy belies a fundamental misgiving about the tractability of future time and the extent to which it can be guided.
There is little doubt that Kiefer’s lasting preoccupation with the imagery of ships and seafaring recapitulates an earlier phase of German art in which representations of voyages and wrecks abounded as political metaphors. This was during the period of intense political upheaval that followed Napoleon’s defeat of Francis II in 1806, and the failure of the Congress of Vienna in 1814 to achieve German national unity as a means of resistance to French rule. Perhaps the most important German painter of this period, and one to whom Kiefer is consciously indebted, was Caspar David Friedrich, who included depictions of ships in over 50 of his canvases. Friedrich covers the gamut of moods in these compositions, ranging from the idyllic buoyancy of On Board a Sailing Ship to the grim pessimism of The Wreck of Hope. In the former, the viewer contemplates the backs of two voyagers who face the bow of a ship that is heading towards a far horizon, an image that expresses a deep yearning for a distant utopian goal; in the latter, a whaling ship is seen dwarfed by the elements, in the process of being broken up by Arctic pack ice. There are few horizons in Kiefer’s seascapes that are not obscured, or shadowed by foreboding, and on occasion, the relation of sea to sky is literally inverted – one way or another, the horizon functions as a place where weight descends, not where pressure is released. Only a few of Kiefer’s ships are overturned or foundering on shoals, but there is an almost uniform sense of futility in the isolation of these vessels amid worsening weather conditions, and a paradoxical sense of claustrophobia deepened by the use of a severely restricted palette. There are no deliberate landfalls in the Kiefer scenario, although several of his vessels drift close to the shore or end up beached on spit or sandbank. The method of display, which joins together individual canvases in a single rectangular tableau, gives the impression of multidirectional passages, of ships wandering aimlessly, of voyaging without navigation – in an Odyssean world of suspended destinations, of open seas crowded with echoes of the Flying Dutchman, or in the ocean of Solaris as it fills up with the contents of a nightmare.
This post-diluvian projection is the reverse of a history that can be sounded, mapped and steered through. It is also a reminder of Kiefer’s earlier tributes to Vergil, the imperial poet whose epic turned the end of one cycle of history into the beginning of another, with the departure from Troy and the journey by sea being the prerequisites for the founding of Rome. Kiefer’s composition Fur Vergil blocks out the expected ship with an open book, placed squarely against a seascape background, the rusting pages of the text corresponding to the great corroded welts of a dying ocean. The Aeneid gives the prehistory of an origin, the voyage into the unknown that must be endured before roots are put down in the future, but that future is already marked by its own terminus, by the inevitability of decline and fall. The series of Kiefer’s works associated with the Vergilian theme and the Khlebnikov series are also linked by the repetition of the Italian phrase ‘odi navali’, which Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio used as the title of his ‘Marine Odes’ of 1892–1893. These militaristic texts are identified with D’Annunzio’s proclamation of the resurgency of Italian power through the consolidation of its navy: ‘Italy will either be a great naval power or a nonentity’. This desire to programme history in advance and to plot its course in terms of naval confrontations meshes precisely with the terms of Kiefer’s reimagining of the ‘Tables of Destiny’.
The ‘odi navali’ paintings form the largest subset of the Khlebnikov series, but equally significant are those inscribed with the word ‘Aurora’, a historically resonant name that bridges two separate episodes of Russian history. The cruiser Aurora, the most famous ship in Russian history, not only fought at the battle of Tsusima in the Russo-Japanese War (providing the stimulus for Khlebnikov’s theories), but also triggered the events of the Bolshevik Revolution by firing a single shot at the Winter Palace on the night of 25 October 1917. The ship is now preserved in St Petersburg, but in Kiefer’s renditions of the vessel, the dilapidation of the values it once stood for is reflected in the condition of a battered submarine stranded among burned and blackened seas; or by a damaged and misshapen vessel in trouble beneath a blotchy and ailing sun (whose distorted appearance seems to be punning on the Greek origin of the name of the painting’s inscription) – this apocalyptic sunset or blighted dawn provides an ironic commentary on the idea of history as a grand narrative composed and transmitted by those in political power.
But perhaps the most haunting of the images construed in response to the challenge of history is buried deep in the hillside at Barjac. In this installation, the largest of Kiefer’s leaden ships, with buckled superstructure and twisted gun barrels, sits on a sea of sand inside a cave dug out of the rock. This hollow in the earth has several false portals, out of one of which the ship seems to have emerged. The work represents the complete inversion of land and sea, inside and outside, surface and depth, and seems to argue that although the so-called laws of history could never be externalised and made to impinge on a shared reality of space and time, they remain no less powerful for being embedded in the deep interior of the twenty-first century mind. Kiefer provides a model for the political unconscious as something anachronistic, redundant, battle-scarred, yet irreducibly militaristic in the stubborn persistence of its attempts to translate the rest of the world into its own obsessive terms.

Rod Mengham is Reader in Modern English Literature at Cambridge University where he is also Curator of Works of Art at Jesus College.

First published in Power, Kevin and Mengham, Rob, Anselm Kiefer Für Chlebnikov, White Cube, London, 2005

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