ISM: Exhibition Review: Anselm Kiefer and the Beauty of Discomfort
- Yuna Kim
- Nov 9, 2024
- 4 min read
This post is originally dated to August 2023, but it was never published. We publish this retrospectively to respect the intended, albeit now outdated, nature of these words and to also bring attention to an artist we feel deserves... attention.
This month (August, 2023) we examine Anselm Kiefer (1945-), a contemporary German artist whose personal experience of post-World War II Germany is brought to life (or death?) in intentionally visually shocking and metaphorically overwhelming manifestations of black and grey, carefully curated bursts of color, and metal and paint.
The exhibition was Finnegan's Wake, at the White Cube gallery in Bermondsey, London, United Kingdom. Held from June 7th to August 20th, 2023.
Born in Germany at the cusp of international conflict and the beginning of an ever-prevalent and ever-sensitive question of German national identity, Kiefer is an academy-trained artist who studied art in Germany and carried on a career primarily in France since the nineties. Today he is an internationally present persona and reputation with past and present exhibitions at both museums and galleries-- such as the much-coveted position of a permanent installation at the Louvre in 2007, a privilege only previously granted to Georges Braque (1882-1963).
A question as one enters the large entryway of the White Cube Bermondsey exhibition might be, "What will this show have to say about the Holocaust that's new?" It might be, "How much confusion or tension can I expect?" As a newcomer to the Kiefer narrative and culture, I found myself certainly considering the question as I brushed past the film negative ribbon curtains to approach a darkly-lit hallway flanked by rust-worn, looming steel storage brackets and shelves filled with various objects. The nearly nonsensical phrases and words, evoking both doublethink and Joyce's flow-of-consciousness style of writing, scrawled on the shelves, found objects, and dusty fingerprint-stained vitrines immediately complement the "wreckage" and post-disaster impression created by the crowded yet clearly intentionally curated passageway. It felt intimate and raw, an uncomfortable tension present in the idea that we are capable of recognizing, and indeed recreating, such scenes of disaster that humans are, and have been, responsible for. There was beauty in the ugly.
The gold is what is most left in my mind. Amidst all the broken shards, the twisted cords of metal, the raggedy bits of various mixed media strewn about (not haphazardly, mind you), one is made to think that paradise has been found once the paintings of Liffey loom into view around the corner. The golden showers evoke the myth of Danaë and Zeus, immediately bringing to mind the connections between gold and life (pregnancy). Indeed, the golden showers melting down into what appears to be brownish bogs of unidentifiable matter, an otherwise somehow "belowness" beneath the gold, make you wish that this gold can just be separated from the darkness-- that the beautiful and pure can be untouched from what appears so different and inappropriate. Indeed, a child would likely complain, just as a child would whine about why they cannot have all the candy in the world. And this is exactly the kind of mentality that humanity is responsible for, and what causes suffering, comparison, a "difference," and ultimately as we have seen, genocide. Yet history does not touch, does it? "Liffey" is widely recognized as the name of a lake in Ireland. One of the top Google questions is, "Why is Liffey brown?" The top answer is "DOM," or decomposed organic matter.
The idea of wantonness was what personally stayed most prevalent. Chaos doesn't choose where to land, or who to hold responsible. Unfortunately, the only part of chaos that tends to be controlled is the action of the culprit, the person responsible for triggering, or extensively carrying out, the chaos. It felt appropriate that so much of the exhibition caused a constant anxiety of things falling over or being accidentally scraped-- yet you know that will not happen, because this is all curated. Every nail, every angle, every suspension and intentionally "haphazard" suspension has probably been checked and cleared multiple times by professionals. And this makes you even more uncomfortable, because it feels like a privilege to see the experience and feel the pain through such a controlled environment, like the genocide and the casualties of millions have been made into a zoo. There is a Culprit at the end: what appears to be a furnace.
Children's clothes; a DNA double helix; the case of "gynecology" experiments. These are the three things that proved most uncomfortable. The children's clothes need no explanation. Especially hung on hangers as they were, above the bare, skeletal metal shelves and scaffolding instead of on top of soft, young skin still pulsing with blood, one cannot help but see the entire exhibition as one big skeleton, one big body, one big corpse.
The vitrine of gynecology was quite a feeling. The author is not Jewish or German, or has any familial connections to survivors or participants of the war, so the identity of "female" proved to be the only feeling that could be personally explored with pride. The idea of experimentation on a personal body part, the idea of reforming an identity from human into a producer and/or product. The idea that dystopian fiction is a creation of human imagination, the idea that "man" is the greatest monster to fear. All of these culturally significant clichés and idioms were evoked.
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