Anselm Kiefer This dark light that falls from the stars: Interview with Bernard Comment

Anselm Kiefer. Die Donauquelle (The Source of the Danube), 1978.
At the top a hill in the Ardèche. a rural region in southern France, Anselm Kiefer has developed a living complex in an old spinning mill which he bought up in the early 1980s. Going through the imposing metal door one encounters the first elements of this unique world: sheets of lead recuperated from the roof of Cologne cathedral, some of which date from the fifteenth century. Kiefer has folded them like heavy cloths and laid them in rows. Then, in the courtyard, you come to monumental paintings on mobile easels. These paintings are not here because of the blue sky; they have already been exposed to the elements and are considered complete only when they have gained the patina that comes from weathering. Their comings and goings from studio to courtyard is watched over by the painter, for their maturation is conducted according to his personal, “culinary” rules. Not all of them undergo this ordeal, however; some do not “need” it, others, with their covering of sunflower seeds in glue, would be too tempting for the birds. Kiefer himself designed his work-spaces. Everything has been done to facilitate the handling of the heavy stretchers, some of which are up to eight metres square. As for the famous lead books, they weigh 300 kilos each and constitute a library of 30 metric tons. It is no surprise, then, that the studio is equipped with elevators and cranes, especially since, when the artist moved from Germany to France (an operation requiring 70 trucks), he downsized his “business” from 20 to 5 assistants. Reflecting a general aspiration to autarchy, the kitchen garden and greenhouse are one with Kiefer’s artistic project, founded as it is on a dialogue between the fragment and the world in accordance with a logic or cycle of correspondence. It is also worth mentioning the library, where contemporary books share the shelves with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ones. The dominating relief maps underline the totalizing dimension of the world recreated here in an isolation that is not incompatible with awareness of the outside world, or with life’s pleasures, including good food. Anselm Kiefer is a pictor doctus, a cultivated artist who engages with history as a medium for erudition but also with a concern for the future, and a constant sense of humour.
Bernard Comment: You left Germany to come and live in France. What was it that attracted you about the change of location?
Anselm Kiefer: The idea of a different landscape, and a change of language too. In fact I was familiar with French from school. I grew up on the banks of the Rhine. France was on the other side. As a child, I saw the river as an insuperable obstacle, something you couldn’t swim across. It thus acquired a mythical status for me. When you came to this barrier you could turn left or right but not go straight ahead, except in your imagination, in fantasies.
BC: The theme of water recurs frequently in your work—in the series entitled Donauquelle, or source of the Danube, for example.
AK: A source is something deep and mysterious. You don't know where the water comes from. I am fascinated by the surface of water. It’s like a barely perceptible membrane between air and water. I also used water in Women of the Revolution, an installation with lead beds, the hollow part of which sometimes holds a puddle. But this is standing water, which has more to do with a vertical attraction: to imagine a lake, you have to enter it vertically, whereas a river is horizontal, you can see it flow. Lastly, there’s the use of electrolysis, with water as a vector of materials and ideas. There is a transformation via the exchange of ions. It’s totally alchemical, about dissolving what is solid. In electrolysis, for example, zinc is dissolved in water. It is taken to the other side. There is the idea of water as a power able to dissolve and transform anything.
BC: Would you say your work reveals a fascination with metamorphosis?
AK: That is what creates a state where hope is possible. If there is no metamorphosis, we have nothing to hope for after death. Spiritual understanding of the idea of metamorphosis makes it easier to die. That is what the figure is thinking about in some of my paintings. Sometimes you see the firmament all around him, sometimes flowers—for example, the sunflowers growing near him, or even in his belly. There is this primitive idea of incarnation in the ground leading to transformation. The other aspect is the transformation of humus, a transformation analogous to that of flowering plants. This is the most triumphant but also the saddest moment: after that they die and the flower becomes an urn for the seeds.
BC: Is art a way of stopping time?
AK: Absolutely! When I am painting I am frustrated because I know that during this time the river of life is flowing past me. At such moments one has a strong sense of death.
BC: Greek has this opposition between rhuthmos and schéma. Rhuthmos refers to the flux of atoms, the flow of life, whereas schéma describes the more or less durable configurations taken by this flow when it is blocked.
AK: Heidegger expressed it in the word stiften, to found. The poet “stift ein Werk” founds a work. This means he stops something. Heidegger considers this a sublime moment, and he’s right, but for me it’s also sad. I feel there is a kind of conflict in working on something limited in my studio while life goes on around me. Perhaps my way of constantly moving the paintings about, of leaving them alone to evolve before going back to them several months or years later, is an attempt to respond to that frustration, to give the painting a kind of life as it goes on working on its own.
BC: You told me that your property was almost autarchic. That seems to bear some relation to your work.
AK: I love to watch plants. It’s a way of watching life. For many years I thought that nature was interesting in itself, but as I see it, the most interesting landscape is one where you have a bit of civilisation and a bit of wildness. In the remote valleys of the Cévennes there are still a few terraces, but they're crumbling and overgrown. You can see civilization and nature at the same time. It's the same in Mexico, where the vegetation has grown into the forms of the pyramids: you can make out the steps, but they are covered with creeper I really like that.
The Importance of Being Ironic
BC: This idea of plant life is manifest in many of your paintings. For example in the sunflower series.
AK: Sunflowers have been a mythic subject ever since Van Gogh. But you can't just leave it at that. When I look at ripe, heavy sunflowers, bending to the ground, with blackened seeds in the middle of their corollas, I see the firmament and the stars. This is nothing new. Robert Fludd has established a precise relation between stars and plants. For him there is not one plant that does not have a corresponding star in the sky. Consequently plants are influenced and guided by the stars. It’s an interesting idea, very beautiful. All these things are interlinked, not only on earth, but in the cosmos too.
BC: When you say that it’s beautiful, is that because you believe it or because you think it’s a beautiful fiction?
AK: Everything we say is fiction. “It’s a nice day” is already fiction. That is why we must avoid constructing dogma with language. The idea that plants are directly connected to the stars is very pretty. It’s an explanation that works for me, for my dasein. It’s a consolation. Having said that, irony is indispensable. These are words pronounced by human beings, they can only be used ironically because they are always incomplete, What we say is always a bit ridiculous. People who use words without irony are fanatics, not full human beings. One should always be ready to laugh, because everything is ridiculous. I distrust belief, and all dogma. They are nothing but ways of gaining power, of exciting chauvinism.
The Thought of Ruins
AK: What I find profound and what I most admire in the world are clowns. I try to put some humour into my work also. But some jokes are too threadbare, you can’t use them. For a joke to be good, I must give you a sense of the abyss. Humour places the spectator on the brink of the gulf, it makes him tremble. So one must avoid being “witzig,” indulging in easy wit. At the moment, for example, I am wondering if the idea of placing a milking machine on top of a painting of the Milky Way is not too obvious, if I shouldn't find a solution that creates a greater sense of disorientation.
BC: Many of your works sound the German collective memory. The fact that you were born in spring 1945 means that your childhood came after but was haunted by the horror of Nazism. Was your need to express yourself on this related to the historical situation?
AK: Yes. Nobody lives in a vacuum There exists a collective memory that goes much further than that of the individual. To know yourself you have to know your nation, your history. It was perfectly normal that at the outset of my artistic career I should have asked about what had been done in the past. And sometimes provocatively, ironically in fact. I felt as if my memory was blocked. Even for the revolutionaries of May 1968, the past was not a major concern. Very few Germans actually studied it, especially in the media, which only began to look at history after 1974 of 1975, when the first articles and programmes about Nazism appeared. Before that, people were mainly busy building houses. I therefore felt a need to reawaken memories, not to change politics, but to change myself
BC: In your probing of Germany's repressed memories you make considerable use of myth.
AK: The reality was so overwhelming, so incredible that I had to use myths to express my emotions. The facts were figures. places, buildings. The reality was too onerous to be real, I had to work through myth to recreate it.
BC: But some of your evocations are more direct, like those involving the architecture of Speer.
AK: But that is different from the Holocaust. That has to do with transformation. I have always said that the buildings, the visible evidence, should not be destroyed but transformed. Just to blow it all up with dynamite, as they did after the war, would get us nowhere. On the contrary, I think we need to keep the physical traces as they were but transform them in our mind. There is this macabre side to German history, Hitler had ordered that all buildings and bridges be built in stone, so that they would make beautiful ruins. Which of course is in total contradiction with what he did.
BC: You have done paintings on the theme of the “unknown painter”. That could be Hitler.
AK: Yes, but as a joke. It’s true that he had an artistic character. In the early days he didn’t know what to do with himself, he was disoriented. That's something you often read in biographies of artists. He thirsted for the absolute. These artistic aspirations led to a totally insane situation, because they became reality. Artists’ thoughts should not be made real, they should stay in the sphere of future possibility. If a work deserves the name of art it is with regard to the future, not for its realisation in the present.
BC: Where are you now with your work on the German collective memory?
AK: I have done a certain amount of work which stirred this memory, but I never wanted to use German history as a prop, or to create a style based on this theme. It was a process of exploration that was effective at a given moment, in certain conditions. For me it had an existential dimension. But now this existential dimension has gone. I know what happened. I developed certain themes in order to work on them, but the subject was never supposed to have a value in itself. It was completely impossible to make art for art’s sake with that. If I had started cultivating post war gloom, it would have a become a manner, a mannerism, and that is dangerous for an artist because it’s the antithesis of art.
B.C: When they restored Cologne cathedral, I believe you bought the old lead from the roof.
AK: It's something that resonates in the mind, the thought that you have some lead from a cathedral begun in the fifteenth century and finished in the nineteenth. I also like the idea that lead, which as a highly impermeable material is impenetrably to X-rays (lead aprons are used to protect parts of the body from them), was used for the roof of this Gothic cathedral which sought a kind of union with the skies. I like this lead a great deal: it has been deformed, it is loaded with history and traces, and you can fold it, it’s malleable. Time is another material you can work with, just as it works on us.
BC: I noticed the studio has several works representing cows.
AK: Cows inspire me to meditate—the way they stand there peacefully out in the open air. It’s like a painting by Guido Reni. Their big eyes are like those of a saint. Then there are the bells, the meadows, and that tremendous digestive capacity, with those infinitely long intestines that wind around in their bellies. They suggest ideas of temporality and transformation which, for me, are related to the stars. Hence the idea of perforating some of my paintings and having the firmament appear in the cow’s belly. We've already talked about flowers transiting from one existence to another, about a flower becoming a seed, and about the correspondences between plants and stars. Anyway, I put my stars in the cow’s belly.
BC: In another painting, there is straw coming out of the belly, through the lacerated canvas. You seem to like mixing real objects with painted ones.
AK: It’s a reflection about illusion. If a painter paints apples, and they are round, it is because he has produced the illusion that they are round. If you place an object on the canvas you are playing on the material aspect. I don’t think of myself as a painter because for me a painter is someone who works with illusion, who makes something that exists on a surface, with shadows, light and colours. I work with matter. Picasso and Braque were painters. So was Pollock. He worked with colour and produced a kind of illusion, that of infinite space. Perhaps one could say that the pictures I made recently with poppies in are paintings as I use colour where before I used other substances. I think the post-war movements such as Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism and so on, and the work on the resources of painting by Toroni, Buren and others is very interesting. But I also think you have to go further. Take the works of Carl Andre: they are very powerful but, with time, they have become design. It’s a style you see everywhere, in museums and apartments, whereas before it was revolutionary. l am not criticising the original value of such work, it was an important step, but now we need to make a synthesis of all these experiments.
Without Artistic Revolutions
BC: What should “painting” aspire to do?
AK: If you are making a visual work, you should think about a situation that will go beyond art history, that brings in an existential feeling or the history of the world. I am not out to revolutionise art history. That doesn't interest me. As I see it, art history is not something you can work on; it comes afterwards, when you have already done something. It can't be a goal. What I work on is both more intimate and more general. If you want to change painting then that is an art history issue, whereas I want to change something in the history of the world. What it is I cannot say. Otherwise I would be a politician with a manifesto and ways of making it happen.
BC: What about the books you burnt? It was a very violent thing to do.
AK: In fact what I burnt were paintings cut up into pages. I wanted to burn a landscape, that of a region where I had lived. It was a kind of scorched earth tactic. I inflated the painting using all the techniques of war, I treated the painting as a skin containing a whole bag of aggressive, bellicose events. It was a transformation related to the mythical power of fire, the phoenix that rises from the ashes. Fire has a cathartic function, and I wanted to burn a region using the resources of the painter—in other words, symbolically. I am not like the Futurists who wanted to ignite rockets because they thought it was cathartic.
BC: Even so, one senses that you often feel the need for a certain degree of violence.
AK: I wouldn’t say violence but decision. A decision is always a brutal thing. It means that there comes a moment when you undertake something and drop everything else. As an experience it’s less rich than trying to do everything at the same time, but it’s often necessary when you want to give visual form to something. You have to decide you are going to make something happen.
BC: What about the writing on many of your works?
AK: Writing is used to irritate viewers. It opens up another layer of memory. You can do anything with writing, you can fill the painting with another meaning. If I write “the Milky Way” it can become clownish or animistic. I did a painting representing a very beautiful, almost Romantic landscape, then I added red spots, like eczema, and wrote “Krankenkunst,” degenerate art. That altered the meaning. There was also the idea that you cannot have an innocent representation of a landscape, that it will always be impregnated with history and warfare: “may impure blood irrigate our fields,” as the Marseillaise puts it.
BC: One notes that you have a taste for names, those of the queens of France, for example.
AK: Some words or names have this aura. Like the names of Merovingian or Carolingian queens. Or of places. I can spend hours reading the atlas, looking at the names in the Sahara, say. I just read the names and it does something to me, without necessarily having been there. Henry Miller said that before he went to Paris he studied the street names, and it had a powerful effect on him. It’s almost mystical. Well, we call it mystical because we don’t know what happens between beauty and the person experiencing it.
BC: What about the title you chose for your exhibition at Yvon Lambert?
AK: It’s a sentence that I've had in my memory since I learnt it at school when I was about 16 or 17: “This dark light that falls from the stars.” Its from Corneille’s Le Cid. I love that sentence. When I started working with sunflowers there was an obvious parallel with the black seeds on the flower and the night and stars. The seeds were the stars. When I stuck them on white canvas, black on white, they become inverted stars, black on white, like a negative.