Art I'm Seeing #12

anselmkiefer
Originally uploaded by Randuwa.

Anselm Kiefer is at the Hirschhorn.

Born a few months before the end of WW II in Germany, Anselm’s entire life has been devoted to the search for meaning. Raised a Catholic, he began the journey from an authoritarian Christian worldview. And to his credit and our great blessing, he did not stop there.

Kiefer is a pilgrim. His works reflect the many ideas that have informed and captivated him along the way. They evolve without rejecting the lessons already learned or the ideas previously encountered. This can be seen in both the subject matter and the materials. And so we are treated to intimate notebooks with scrapes of images cut from popular magazines and monumental volumes assembled of pages crafted in lead and painted with esoteric star charts. We encounter small watercolors simply framed and enormous canvases crafted with lead, paint, dirt, crushed glass and adored with snow skies, bird cages, dried sunflower stalks measuring a easy 12 feet in length!--and very many permutations and combinations of each and more. As an installation alone, the show is amazing.

And the catalogue, (that is another good one from this layman's perspective), culminates with an astounding interview with the artist. It's one of the most enjoyable reads I have ever discovered as part of any collection of exhibition catalogues.

The exhibition is titled: "Heaven and Earth" and I want to end this brief reflection with some of Anselm's quotes from the interview.

~1 "Heaven is an idea, a piece of ancient internal knowledge. It is not a physical construction."

~2 "There is always hope, but that must be combined with irony, and more important, skepticism. The context of knowledge is changing constantly. At one moment we pray from the top of a mountain and the next from a seat in a jet plane or a bomber cockpit. How can we not see that as ironic and skeptical?"

~3 "You don't have to be spiritual to get in touch with spirituality. I't easier, but it's not always necessary. It can happen that someone who does not think about spirituality, does not consider it in his life, can get in touch with the spiritual through circumstances he is not responsible for or aware of."

~4 "All stories of heaven begin on earth."