Hello all,
I have a long day ahead of me today, and I will be posting more feedback tonight. In the meantime, here is an interview to German artist Anselm Kiefer that you may find interesting since some of the things he discusses have a lot to do with what we are doing here.
Enjoy!
Interview with Michael Auping and Anselm Kiefer: October 5, 2004 Barjac
Michael Auping: Titling an exhibition Heaven and Earth, as we have done here, requires little explanation. Perhaps we should just begin with the very simple question, do you believe in heaven?
Anselm Kiefer: The title Heaven and Earth is a paradox because heaven and earth don’t exist anymore. The earth is round. The cosmos has no up and down. It is moving constantly. We can no longer fix the stars to create an ideal place. This is our dilemma.
MA: And yet we keep trying to find new ways to get to “the ideal place,” the place we assume we came from — to find the right direction.
AK: It is natural to search for our beginnings, but not to assume it has one direction. We live in a scientific future that early philosophers and alchemists could not foresee, but they understood very fundamental relationships between heaven and earth that we have forgotten. In the Sefer Hechaloth, the ancient book that came before the kabbala, there is no worry of directions. It describes stages, metaphors, and symbols that float everywhere. Up and down were the same direction. The Hechaloth is the spiritual journey toward perfect cognition. North, south, east, and west, up and down are not issues. For me, this also relates to time. Past, present, and future are essentially the same direction. It is about finding symbols that move in all directions.
MA: Our religions all have heaven.
AK: We can’t escape religion, but there is a difference between religion and heaven, and one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other.
MA: You have made reference to Speer’s buildings in a number of your works. Does Speer represent something specific for you?
AK: Speer’s architecture is interesting, but because of his connection to the Nazis he was not being discussed at the time I was using his images. There are many artists who run into trouble on their way to paradise, philosophers also: Marx, Hegel, Mao, Wagner. They have all looked for ways to find their place, their salvation, through philosophy, art, or religion.
MA: Could we go back and talk a little bit more about your education as an artist? You went to university in Freiburg.
AK: Yes. But first I had the nineteenth-century idea that the artist is a genius– that art comes out of him naturally and he doesn’t need any education. I had always thought this, even as a child. You could say that I had too much admiration for artists. I thought they came from heaven. Later I found out that artwork is only partly done by the artist, that the artist is part of a larger state of things– the public, history, memory, personal history– and he must just work to find a way through it all, to remain free but connected at the same time. Peter Dreher, and artist and professor at Freiburg, was very important for me in this way. I had come from law school and was trying to figure out the rules of this new world of art. Peter Dreher opened me to the freedom of thhis new world, to the milieu of the artist, and how to operate within this freedom. If you are a genius, you don’t need a milieu. So I figured out that maybe I wasn’t a genius. He said to me, “Do what you want.” And then we could talk about it later. He helped me to understand that first you have to work and then you can talk.
MA: In his interviews and writings, Beuys often evoked the word “spiritual.” How do you think he meant that?
AK: That is complicated. We were both in Germany at a certain time– a time when a dialogue about history and spirituality needed to begin. It was difficult to separate the two subjects. There was a sense of starting over. To evoke the spiritual not only looking at ourselves but into the history of our nation. It was not just a matter of critique. It had to be deeper than that. So yes, Beuys was a spiritual man. The artist is naturally spiritual because he is always searching for new beginnings.
MA: Your use of the artist’s palette image in many of your works seems to suggest various roles for the artist, not always spiritual in his effect.
AK: The palette represents the idea of the artist connecting heaven and earth. He works here but he looks up there. He is always moving between the two realms. The artists are like the shamans, who when they were meditating would sit in a tree in order to suspend themselves between heaven and earth. The palette can transform reality by suggesting new visions. Or you could say that the visionary experience finds its way to the material world through the palette.
MA: Sometimes your palettes are on the ground, a part of the earth, which is constantly referred to in your work, as a painted image or the material ground for painting.
AK: All stories of heaven begin on earth.
MA: In a number of works you have referred to The Hierarchy of the Angels, and the concept of a celestial hierarchy. Is there a hierarchy to your symbols and the materials you use when you refer to this idea?
AK: No. There is no strict hierarchy to my images. They seem to be always evolving from one from or condition to another. This relates to the thinking of the Greek saint Dionysius the Areopagite. Do you know about the ideas attributed to him?
MA: The idea that heaven is organized in orders of different forms of angels?
AK: Yes– angels, archangels, seraphim, cherubim. More important was the concept that the spiritual realm is a spiral going up and down. So the spiritual realm is moving and twisting. This is important to the way I organize my pictures. I work with the concept that nothing is fixed in place and that symbols move in all directions. They change hierarchies depending on the context.
MA: An airplane propeller could be an angel or the spiral universe itself.
AK: Yes. And of course flying machines have played important roles in history, representing ambitions of transcendence or military power, from Icarus to moon rockets.
MA: I was also thinking about the different levels of spheres and subspheres in the kabbala that deal with the evolution or hierarchies between matter and spirit, and how that might relate to your use of materials. Your studios are warehouses of everything from dead plants and human teeth to sprawling stacks of lead. Are you suggesting a kind of symbolic ladder through your materials?
AK: Not that directly. I collect all of these things as I read and they find their way into my reconstructed stories, but I usually become attached to materials that have more than one side to their meaning. So they can be used to go up and down the ladder. Lead is a very good example. . . The large sheets of lead that support the 20 Years of Solitude books are from the roof of a cathedral. . . Lead can transform itself in all directions.
MA: I’ve also noticed that many of your paintings can be turned upside down and still carry their message, as if the heaven and the earth just switch identities. It seems to me the orientation is only fixed when you write on the canvas.
AK: I work on my paintings from all sides, so when I am working on them there is no up or down. The sky can be reflected in the water or material can come down from the sky. That is part of the content of the paintings. Heaven and earth are interchangeable. The writing is an attempt to fix a moment or a place, to suggest a fixed state, but the imagery denies. It is active.
MA: Like the stars, galaxies, and constellations you have been referring to — the Astral Serpent or the Milky Way.
AK: The title or language on my paintings is a starting point. The images should expand the meaning of the words. In Die Milchstrasse, I thought of the large cut in the land as a puddle of water. Then the clouds are reflected on its surface, it looks like milk. A puddle is a very simple thing, but it has the ability to reflect into something much larger. It could be the Pacific Ocean.
MA: On this canvas it look monumental, but it also looks like a wound in the belly of the earth.
AK: Yes. It could be. When you dig into the ground, you may find something– water, a buried meteorite, a piece of heaven. These kinds of pictures are always operating between the macrocosmic and the microcosmic. The lead strings reach to the sky and then converge down into the funnel, which dips into the puddle. the Milky Way, which has been observed for millenniums as a great and expansive constellation, is really a small thing in the cosmos. it is like a puddle in the cosmos. Establishing a heaven and earth is a way to try to orient ourselves, but cosmic space does not understand this. It is all relative. What is big can in fact be very small. What is up can be down.
MA: Recently you have made immense books the size of a human body that you can almost walk into, with the pages covered with stars. But you have given the stars numbers and connected them with lines. These star drawings have also appeared in huge paintings that include observatories and what look like navigation instruments.
AK: They are numbers given to stars by NASA scientists. Each number in the string of numbers indicates the distance, the color, the size, etc. This is the scientific heaven. But of course it is all illusion. All of the constellations are illusions or ghosts. They do not exist. The light we see today was emitted millions, billions of years ago and of course their source was constantly changing, moving, and dying. These lights we see, this heaven has nothing to do with our current reality. We are afraid, so we have to make sense of the world. We cannot stand not to have a heaven in our minds. If there really was a heaven, it would exist outside of science or religion. I am speaking of religions, with the plural; not just a religion.
MA: So the scientists are making up their own dome of heaven.
AK: Of course. They want to find heaven too, but their stars are always moving, always dying, and some breaking off, making new stars. Scientists are a little bit like artists. Their stars are like pieces of memory that find their way into a painting. You pull them out and stop them for a moment in the painting. It is stopped only for the instant you recognize it and then you change position and you see something else, another relationship in the image, but again, only for an instant. There are only glimpses.
EE
