The Force of Poetry

by Beth E. Wilson, December 21, 2007

A few years ago, at an early press junket to Dia:Beacon, I had an acute, life-emulates-art experience. Entering the cavernous ex-factory building in Beacon, New York, then still undergoing renovation and largely bereft of installed sculpture, I turned a corner to find myself facing a vertiginous expanse of open space, the clear orthogonals provided by the architecture striking me like an unexpected clap of thunder. My first thought was: I’ve fallen into an Anselm Kiefer painting!

With this experience in mind, when I heard that MASS MoCA, the prototype for the Beacon museum, would be hosting a Kiefer exhibition, I could only imagine how his actual work would function in such a space.
The artist, as all the press releases and canned biographies duly note, was born in Germany in 1945, during the waning days of the Third Reich. The cellular memory of this accident of birth resonates throughout his work. The damnation and the living conundrum of being German in the aftermath of the Holocaust have propelled Kiefer’s ongoing project of artistic atonement, beginning with the specifics of this situation, but ultimately extending to embrace a sweeping vision of humanity as well.

In an early, controversial photographic performance, Occupations, Kiefer posed himself giving the straight-armed Hitler salute in various locations throughout Italy, Switzerland, and France. This gesture placed him in a position to powerlessly “occupy” the lands he was visiting, ironically assuming the role of the Nazi occupier himself, in order to demystify and, finally, to defang such a display of power. After studying with Joseph Beuys (who had been developing his own methods to address this thorny historical legacy), Kiefer developed a powerful style of painting that utilized unconventional, deeply symbolically charged materials such as tar, dirt, lead, and straw. Playing on the power of pitched perspective to suck the viewer into these often huge, sculptural works, he opens a deeply visceral yet spiritually transcendent door onto all that lies behind our contemporary, superficial world of transitory images.