Unpublished, 2023.
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In April last year, I received a short video message from artist Brett Graham. He was in Venice for the Biennale vernissage. I wasn’t. I was lying on the couch at home—jealous. Panning across Anselm Kiefer’s spectacular new show in the Palazzo Ducale, the clip was accompanied by a note: ‘Truly inspirational’. Graham was in the sinking city to speak at Aabaakwad, the Indigenous-art hui. I fancied he had nipped out to enjoy Kiefer’s spectacle as a guilty pleasure, but I could also see its relevance. Not only is Kiefer a reference point for him, an exemplar from art-school days, there’s a real connection between his recent work and Kiefer’s. Both artists combine ambitious architectural scale and historical erudition; both conjure with myth to telescope past, present, and future; both are concerned with trauma and healing; both want to knock us off balance with wow factor; both do towers. I messaged back. ‘If you liked that, we should visit Kiefer’s studio in Barjac.’

Kiefer was a child of World War II. He was born in 1945, just months before the War ended, in the small town of Donaueschingen in Germany’s Black Forest. He spent his formative years playing in its bombed-out remains. He would later say, ‘Ruins, for me, are the beginning. With the debris, you can construct new ideas.’ In 1969, as an art student, he exemplified this thought by photographing himself in his father’s Wehrmacht uniform giving the ‘Sieg Heil’ salute in locations in France, Italy, and Switzerland. This raised eyebrows. Was he being ironic or sincere?

In the 1970s and 1980s, Kiefer made powerful paintings that scrambled references to the War and to German political, cultural, and intellectual history. They featured haunted forests and killing fields, rhetorical Nazi architecture and pragmatic Nazi railway tracks (recalling those that conveyed millions to the camps). Stirring the pot, Kiefer explored a once-glorious tradition that now seemed irrevocably poisoned. Ultimately, his gestures would be embraced as a brave response to his generation’s unwillingness to confront its uncomfortable past.

Alchemy was always a big reference point for Kiefer, optimistically implying that his transformation of materials might induce some wider spiritual transformation, or pessimistically implying that this quest may be futile or naive. His paintings incorporate symbolic substances (straw and lead) and found and made objects (ladders, palettes, and books; dried sunflowers and tree branches; clothes). Surfaces are literally and symbolically distressed. Despite their hefty, brutal appearance, his works can also be fragile—a conservator’s nightmare. (I remember, back in 1986, when we unpacked the Kiefers in the Wild Visionary Spectral show at Wellington’s Shed 11, there were plastic bags in the crates to collect the bits that inevitably fell off.)

In the 1980s, Kiefer was on everyone’s lips, but, when the Berlin Wall fell, the discussion turned against the German neo-expressionists. Kiefer’s work would also change. It would increasingly reference ancient histories: Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Jewish. Flirting with kabbalism and string theory, Kiefer’s encyclopaedic know-it-all erudition could seem preposterous, its reach absurd. He moved increasingly into sculpture and installation, and his work went from big to massive. 

In 1992, Kiefer uprooted, leaving Germany for the South of France. He established his residence and studio, La Ribaute, in an old silk factory on a forty-hectare site in Barjac, a picturesque Renaissance town—population 1,600. The land would supply materials for his work (sticks, clay, and sunflowers). It became his playground, cut off from the outside world. He erected fanciful architectures and installed works in giant pavilions and glasshouses. He remained in residence until 2007, when he moved operations to an old department-store warehouse in Croissy-Beaubourg, on the outskirts of Paris. 

Since then, La Ribuate has been legendary, but inaccessible. It only opened to the public in May last year. It seems likely to become a new art-pilgrimage site—the ideal place to view Kiefer’s work on its own terms, in splendid isolation. On 22 September, Brett Graham and I joined fifty-odd devotees for the three-hour tour. Nothing prepared us for the scale.

Our tour started with Die Himmelspaläste (2003–18), Kiefer’s iconic tower complex. Crude concrete boxes—cast off shipping containers—were precariously stacked to form towers, up to seven stories high. Some towers were linked by concrete-box bridges. Badly built, with rebar jutting out, they both suggested and countered minimalism. Kiefer had raised his towers without the help of architects or engineers, and, with bits and pieces littered around the site, it was hard to know if they were being built (rising up as ‘ruins in reverse’) or falling down. The towers have been compared to concentration-camp watchtowers and to Pisa’s precarious tower. However, the literature says they illustrate a Hebrew narrative of celestial ascension, which involves progressively shedding your material body until you reach the palace where your soul resides forever. I don’t like the explanation. I find the towers more evocative without it, in simply suggesting an archaeological site—the remains of some mysterious civilisation that rose and fell—leaving us to speculate at the details.

We entered nearby greenhouses full of sculptures. One contained giant lead books, implying the weight of history, of knowledge. Impossible to open, the books looked world weary, deformed by time. Perhaps they were artefacts from the culture represented by the towers, as if we had passed from these architectural ruins into a museum housing its artefacts. Hanging from the ceiling, an amorphous lead blob—an ectoplasm-like ‘emanation’, a frozen flash—suggested some miraculous, transformative event. Another greenhouse was haunted by ghostly female figures. Die Frauen der Antike (1999–2002) presented women from mythology and history as spectres; their dresses petrified, their heads replaced with allegorical items: chains, books, globes, barbed wire.  

We climbed uphill in order to descend into La Ribaute’s other great architectural set piece, Kiefer’s brutalist Amphitheatre (1999–2002). This inverted ziggurat is also made of cast-concrete boxes. Five stories and fifteen-metres deep, its stepped structure recalls theatres, prisons, quarries, and ancient wells. The space feels theatrical and ritualistic, but its purpose remains obscure. The structure was again improvised. Kiefer built it without foundations, comparing the process to child’s play, recalling when ‘I had only the bricks of the bombed houses around and I made houses with them’. Individual works were installed here and there, on the landings and in the cells. Some felt like afterthoughts, somewhat upstaged by the set. 

The Amphitheatre backed onto a cavernous but otherwise conventional gallery space, with massive paintings. Instead of being hung on the wall, they were fixed to stands with wheels, so they could be moved. Scale is crucial for Kiefer. Early on, his trick was marrying the authoritative size and internationalist feel of American abstract expressionism with his own assertively figurative German content—as if in a return of the repressed. Among this group of epic paintings, I was particularly drawn to several speckled views of the cosmos. White spots were annotated with NASA-assigned star names, numbers written on scraps of paper and glass, as if some occult code. They are, in fact, the names we—here and now—assign to those pinpricks of light that address us across millions of light years. Some labels were peeling off, some had already fallen to the floor, as if we were looking back on our current scientific knowledge from the distant future, when it will have been superseded. Some paintings featured join-the-dots constellation lines, recalling earlier attempts to understand the heavens.

From there, we descended further still, to explore subterranean areas. In addition to exposing existing basements, Kiefer created a primitive crypt suggesting a prehistoric temple, by drilling into the ground and filling the bores with concrete to make crude columns, then excavating around them. He made tunnels connecting to other parts of his complex, including pavilions above ground. He said: ‘I have often compared my studios to laboratories. But one can also picture them as refineries or mines.’ The overall effect was curious. It was hard to know what Kiefer found and what he made, what he discovered, and what he invented. One tunnel was lined in beeswax by another German artist, Wolfgang Laib.

Returning to the surface, we toured a string of more conventional white-cube pavilions. One, devoted to an installation on the theme of Palm Sunday, featured an array of glazed frames containing palm branches, suggesting pressed botanical samples, with a uprooted palm tree laid on the floor. Another housed canvases dedicated to the poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan, whose ‘Death Fugue’ has been a touchstone for Kiefer. Yet another contained an installation about the Russian futurist philosopher-poet Velimir Chlebnikov and his oddball theory that, every 317 years, cataclysmic sea battles shift the course of human history. Passing in and out of these pavilions, I thought how strange it was to be encountering these maudlin works on a sunny day in the idyllic French countryside. But it also made me appreciate that trauma is Kiefer’s rich, happy place. It’s where he prefers to linger. He’s allergic to the lite. I fancy he would be more nauseated by a pastel Alex Katz scene.

We ended on a bang. The last pavilion, the biggest yet, contained tennis-court-sized paintings that made me feel like I’d stepped into an episode of Land of the Giants. On the end wall, Sol Invictus (2007)—10.2 metres high, 4.4 metres wide—showed a sunflower looming triffid-like over Kiefer prone, resting in peace. It seemed telling that the final work on my itinerary would address ‘the death of the author’, as if the whole fantasy of this place ultimately turned on Kiefer’s literal and symbolic departure, making La Ribaute his necropolis. 

Walking around La Ribuate with Brett Graham, considering how he might see it, I wondered what Kiefer may have to say to us now. Our current postcolonial, eco-minded art moment is a tug of war between the demands of an identity politics that centres us (locating us within our ethnicities, our tribes, our genders, and our dispositions—where, perhaps, once we were defined by our nations) and more-than-human ecological and mystic thinking that decentres us (prompting us to transcend ourselves, our personal needs and corporate interests). Can these imperatives be reconciled? Could Kiefer’s work bridge this antinomy? 

La Ribaute may exemplify alpha-male-artist presumption—and possess a giant carbon footprint—but it’s also the opposite. Kiefer’s project began by speaking to identity, to Germanness, but surpassed it, losing itself in distant places and times. On the one hand, it’s an Ozymandian folly, an ego palace. On the other, it dwarfs and dilates its creator, leaving him for dead under a sunflower, to be reclaimed by nature. Is La Ribaute a vain, escapist ‘world unto itself’ or an Archimedean point offering us leverage on the here and now? Time will tell.