The Ruins of Barjac: Politics, Alchemy, and Learning to Dance in Anselm Kiefer's World: Karen Wright

Anselm Kiefer. Laßt Tausend Blumen blühen! (Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom!), 2000.

Anselm Kiefer. Laßt Tausend Blumen blühen! (Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom!), 2000.

Before Anselm Kiefer moved to the south of France, in 1992, his German studios included one former factory near Buchen and another occupying a school in the Oden forest, To encourage the move, Jack Lang, then the Minister of Culture in France, gave him a list of some 90 properties to consider, He looked at many before settling on a former silkworm nursery encompassing about 172 acres in Barjac, a small town near Avignon.

After entering a massive steel security gate, I approached the estates main building via a long, curving driveway, along which various structures appeared. These were some of the 42 individual pavilions that Kiefer has designed and constructed since moving there. To give a sense of their rapid proliferation, I gather 4 new pavilions have been added over the past year, and foundations have been prepared for several more. Looking out of the arched windows in the kitchen of the main building, where Kiefer lives with his German partner, Renate Graf, and their children, I had a bird’s-eye view of some of his seven-storey lead-and-masonry towers. He recalled, laughing, that he recently toppled one in order to watch it fall, attaching a strap to it and enjoying the moment when it teetered.

The numerous buildings at Barjac do not tell the whole story. Kiefer has tunnelled for miles to create subterranean spaces, some lofty, others claustrophobic. Many of the tunnels link up with external pavilions, such as those containing simple installations of lead beds or a ship seemingly beached on a sea of sand. Entering these rooms gives one the feeling of having come upon a complicated archaeological dig. It was here that I met the photographer who shot the pictures that accompany this article. He looked dazed. “The scale is amazing”, he exclaimed.

It isn’t just the scale of these spaces, though; it is also Kiefer’s inventive use of them that is striking. The artist described himself to me as an “old alchemist”. Indeed he is—not in the traditional sense of turning lead into gold, but in turning a small chunk of provincial France into a laboratory to test ideas and materials, and in doing so transforming it into an unforgettable and moving artistic experience.

Karen Wright: When did you move here?

Anselm Kiefer: I came to Barjac in 1992; I realised that I like to interfere in places while working on an installation in a little church in Paris called San Petriére. I now have 42 buildings on my property here and am so content working in them that it can sometimes be disillusioning to see my paintings outside the spaces in which they were made.

KW: Did you design all 42?

AK: Yes, and I’ve sold some too. Sometimes my assistants don’t transport the building to whoever bought it because that’s too expensive, so we simply rebuild it in the same way somewhere else. When they are moved or rebuilt, for example in Salzburg and Argentina, they look the same but become different to me through different people looking at them. The work changes significantly with each new person who sees it.

KW: I assume the changes in light must also make an important difference. I remember thinking during your ‘White Cube’ show last year that the Khlebnikov paintings seemed luminous, but that they were probably more so in France. They made me think of Turner and his seascapes. Despite all your sculptural work, I think of you first as a painter.

AK: Turner, yes. I am very influenced by him and by Constable, which might seem contrary. But no, I’m not talented enough to be a painter. I’m not like Picasso or Matisse. I need nature to help me, to collaborate with me. I use the weather, the heat, and the cold, sometimes leaving my canvases out in the rain. I put acid, earth, and water on them. I don’t use conventional colour. I don’t even use paint. I use substances. What you see as red, for example, is rust, just rust. I have pools of acids, chemicals and steel all over my studio. Many of the ships I’ve made have been kept underwater in a big pool to get rusty. I sink them and leave them there for years.

KW: You seem to enjoy working with materials that aren't controllable.

AK: Yes, you have to find a golden path between controlling and not controlling, between order and chaos. If there is too much order, it is dead; or if there is too much chaos, it doesn’t cohere. I’m continually negotiating a path between these two extremes. I am always experimenting with new materials. I made a wonderful green not long ago by using aluminium and lead as electrolytes. Once, I got a blue by adding some new combination of acids in the bath, but afterward I couldn’t remember how I’d made it!

KW: I have a mental image of you as a mad professor, stirring potions.

AK: I like that. Me putting all sorts of strange chemicals together.

KW: Like a cook.

AK: Like a cook or an old alchemist! The alchemist’s aim was to accelerate natural processes, which is dangerous. The atomic bomb is the result of an acceleration, of course.

KW: But danger seems part of what you do. Would you tell me about the genesis of using one of your favourite materials, lead? What precautions do you have to take with it?

AK: As far as its being dangerous is concerned, I worked in a cellar without windows for tens of years and I have never shown any symptoms of lead poisoning. I remember the first day I saw lead. I lived in an old house in Germany—a cheap place, because I had no money—that had lead plumbing throughout. I needed to fix some pipes, and I was fascinated by the material. You could smell it, form it, mould it. It was a shock, and then I started to learn about lead, to read books about it, and also about transformation, about alchemy. I’ve never stopped using it since.

KW: Now that you know it so well, what do you consider to be its enduring properties?

AK: It has different qualities, even contradictory ones. One is that it doesn’t reflect, another is that it protects. It has a life of its own. It’s a quite spiritual material. Indeed, I would go as far as to say that lead has a spirit. Whatever material I work with, I feel I'm extracting the spirit that already lives within it. This is quite the opposite of the Platonistic way of working and thinking, in which you impose your ideas on the material.

KW: You are liberating it. Even with your paintings, I imagine you abandoning the easel altogether.

AK: Yes, I sometimes work with the paintings on the floor and move them around a lot. For me this is natural, for the painting is not static—even my easels have wheels. The paintings move around in the night! When I move them, they generate new combinations and relationships. One painting is never one painting in my studio. Each is always seen in the context of others. It's only at the end of the process that a painting becomes one thing. But even then, showing my work in a gallery or a museum seems quite an unnatural thing for me to do. It’s increasingly a condition that the paintings have to be sold together or as part of a whole pavilion. My works are very fragile, and not only in the literal sense. If you put them in the wrong circumstances, they can lose their power completely. So what I do in Barjac is give them a space. I didn’t want to bring them to a space, I want to give a space to the painting. First the painting, then the space.

KW: I have always felt that scale is an integral part of your working method.

AK: No, absolutely not. Scale in general is not that important to me. Small works can be monumental—de Kooning’s Havana paintings, for example. It’s a question of personal temperament whether a painter decides to make big or small works. I like to work with my body. I like to dance, and you need a certain format in order to do that. It’s not only a physical act but an investment of my whole body and mind. You know that at the end of his life, even as his body was deteriorating, Nietzsche drew a connection between dancing and philosophy. He made the point that dancing is making philosophy. I was always impressed by this approach: not to leave the body out, but to see the human being as an inseparable unit of the spiritual and the material.

KW: It seems you're enjoying your dancing. Are you happiest when you're working?

AK: To do a painting is a big battle between different and opposite possibilities. It is an act of desperation not only because of the battle but because I become aware that for one visible result, I give up a much better, a more beautiful, and a much more refined painting. So I am always unsatisfied, and one painting demands another.

KW: What I felt about your Khlebnikov paintings is that they re not about specific battles at all, they're more about infinite battles—universal battles. Could you tell me more about Khlebnikov himself?

AK: He was a poet living in Russia in the 1920s, a friend of Malevich. He led a nomadic life, travelling all the time. I discovered him in 1973, and he intrigued me as someone who had an unstable life yet created something absolutely stable: his system of sea battles, which is nonsense, of course.

KW: It comes back to finding our own realities.

AK: Yes, truth doesn't exist in history. Each one has his own history and looks at the same event with different eyes. My work is not just about the history of art, or my history, or the history of the Western Europeans. It goes much further back. Normally, “historical” people think chronologically. I don’t. We are still horrible people. We are still slaves. I cannot think eschatologically.

KW: Tell me a little about your personal history, where you studied and so on.

AK: First I studied law at university. I never wanted to become a lawyer, but I was interested in constitutional law, the philosophy of law, and divisions of power—in the works of Montesquieu and Hobbes in particular. Then I decided to go to art school in Freiburg, and in 1971 I met Joseph Beuys. I was already something of an artist and had done several performances.

KW: What kind?

AK: I began the Occupations series in 1968. I was performing Hitler salutes in different places around Europe. In those days the Nazis were not present in the media. In the mid-’70s the media became interested, and I stopped doing the performances.

KW: Are you as political a creature as Beuys was?

AK: My work is political in many senses, but I never got directly involved in politics, because I’ve never agreed with any of the political systems I’ve encountered. I think that direct democracy is a mystery. It’s populist, it’s demagogic; you know what I mean. We had a referendum in France a year ago, and they said no to Europe. But perhaps now they would say yes. Direct democracy is very difficult, it’s very complicated. If they could have a referendum about the death penalty in France today they would probably vote for reintroducing it!

Around four years ago, I started working on some pieces relating to Mao. He'd always intrigued me because so many of my student friends joined the Communist Party in the 1960s. I was always something of a critic, even in those times, but then I found out that he made a good beginning, was wonderful, and then became tyrannical. It was completely crazy and became an atrocious disaster during which millions and millions died through starvation and prison brutality. I chose “Let a thousand flowers bloom” as my theme because that was the slogan from the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, and Mao, of course, went back to the young when everything started to go wrong, using this pedagogy in a demagogic way. The Cultural Revolution was a truly horrible thing.

KW: There’s a contradiction in those works, which are beautiful but are about something so ugly.

AK: It is a paradox, but it is a paradox when somebody tells you to let a thousand flowers bloom and it’s just terrorism.

KW: There is a strange beauty in war, in the planes and ships that add to the destruction, yet you as an artist get criticised for using beauty to describe ugliness.

AK: It is impossible to avoid beauty. If my work isn’t beautiful, it’s nonsense.

KW: It can’t just be beautiful though?

AK: Beauty needs a reason. Do you know the poetry of Paul Celan? It’s about concentration camps, about his mother, who died, and yet you cannot say his poetry isn’t beautiful. I never aim to make something beautiful, but at a certain point after 30 years have passed the work becomes beautiful. If it doesn’t become beautiful, it's nothing, it’s not there anymore. I don’t make paintings for the sake of making paintings. I’m not interested in doing another painting, another painting, another painting. I get a shock from something: I read something; I see something; I hear something—that’s the motivation, and I start to work immediately. And to survive as an artist and as a person, I have to work like that.

KW: You've always been fascinated with poetry, writing, and creating books. I can see that you're still making them.

AK: I make books all the time. Sixty percent of my work is books.

BK.W: Do you see yourself as a poet?

AK: I want to be. I write a lot. Every day since I was 16, I’ve written a little bit. It’s not like keeping a diary. I don’t write what I had for breakfast and so on, but if I have an idea, any idea, then I need to write about it.

KW: In the catalogue for your forthcoming San Francisco MOMA show, it says that Die Himmel (The Heavens, 1969) is the first book that you didn’t destroy. Why was that?

AK: I didn’t intentionally destroy my early work. When I left Karlsruhe, I had to leave a lot of work behind as I had nowhere to put it, so the students had a nice big bonfire!

I still have The Heavens because I think it is important. It’s about using something simple to explain something complicated. It's about fetishism. You take a little bit of blue fabric and declare it heaven with all its connotations. You take a little ripped piece of red paper and you say this is heaven as seen from the cockpit of an English bomber pilot over Hamburg. This is happening now when the media show war. You never know if what they show really happened or not.

KW: When we were in your tunnels we saw remnants on the floor from past works that you told me were becoming new works. This reminded me of one of your quotations in the catalogue: “Creation and destruction are one and the same.”

AK: Yes. I was born during the war, and there were still a lot of ruins around as I was growing up. But I don’t regard ruins as normal people do: as a scandal or a catastrophe. I see them as a beginning.

For much the same reason, I've never liked finished houses, including those I build for paintings and sculpture. I like the moment when I put down the first stone, when all is potential. When the form is only beginning to take shape in my mind— that’s always the most enjoyable moment for me.

KW: Your towers feel like perpetual ruins.

AK: A journalist who heard about my towers wrote that I'd made them because of 11/9, but I’d actually started working on the towers well before then. My work is never about today. There is a long history of towers and vanity running through many civilisations. I haven’t been to America since the Iraq war, as it's clear that he [George Bush] produces terrorists. I’m not talking about imperialism. I speak of stupidity. Iraq is a fragile entity with many opposing forces and religions. To go in there and think you can manage that country was stupid. But I don’t want to talk about politics, I want to speak about the mythology of towers. They are between heaven and earth. They attract something other than lightning. They are exposed and fragile. I made a painting in 1986 of a plane going into a skyscraper. Both are high up. It was inevitable that they would meet once. It is logical that an aircraft finds a tower, that a tower finds an aircraft.