Anselm Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger. - Review - book review

MATTHEW BIRO Anselm Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger fresh York: Cambridge University Press, 1998 327 pp; 109 b/wills. $7995

LISA SALTZMAN Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz novel York: Cambridge University Press, 1999 186 pp; 40 b/w ills. $3995

In October 1990 I joined thousands of other race at the official celebration of Germany's Wiedervereinigung. There, in forehead of the Berlin Reichstag, the herd watched and listened to Helmut Kohl's predictions about the subsequent time of a country once again made whole, a choir enthusiastically singing Deutschland uber Alles (all line s of it), and the percussive explosions of state-sponsored fireworks answered by means of countless renegade firecrackers. Amid the staggering clusters of partying adolescents and tourists, single could spot the occasional expression of touch usually on an older face. At the time I convinced myself that these were expressions of conscience and reflection within the jubilation. I assumed that these might smooth be looks of worry, as a certain number of of the celebrants pondered the intimidating task that lay before them. For theirs was the task of not single integrating two sides of a political division that had for decades been divided along political and economic lines, on the other hand also of initiating a novel phase of remembering an d mourning. An entire political division could now finally face in unison the horrific acts that had l to its division in the first place.

The public spectacle of the official Reunification had its art world counterpart at the retrospective exhibition of Anselm Kiefer's work the following spring in Berlin. Although organized before the Wall came down, by the agency of its opening the show had become a token for the ambivalent position in which Germany place itself that year. By then Kiefer had become, at least in part, the focus of national pride, as the high prices his work commanded internationally looked a metonymy for West Germany's continuing economic miracle--a miracle from which more [i]or[/i] less perhaps naively, thought the East could eventually profit. At the same time, however, the difficult and many times opaque messages delivered by Kiefer's lead planes and ash-covered canvases raised a more ambivalent place of concerns about the limits of memory and accountability for a society in a state of flux

In the wake of this flowing together of events, two American art historians began and have now complet studies that gaze at Kiefer specifically in relationship to the past and continuing complexities of German tillage and history. Matthew Biro and Lisa Saltzman have the two focused their monographs on the crisis of German subjectivity Kiefer's art exemplifies, although in strikingly different ways. Biro compares the art of Kiefer to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger in a sustained attempt to locate down-reaching cultural constants that have historically operated within German modernism. Saltzman, by the agency of contrast, nimbly approaches Kiefer's work from a variety of methodological standpoints, seeking to address the predicament of artistic production for a German male born after the Holocaust. For all their differences, one as well as the other Biro and Saltzman agree that it is the instability of meaning in Kiefer's work that tenders an index to Germany's ambivalent past and present

While previous scholars have acknowledged the impact of Heidegger's thinking on Kiefer's work, Matthew Biro's Anseim Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heideggeris the first book-length comparison between these sum of two units titans of 20th -century German agriculture [1] The project is thus a heady attempt to summarize and apply Heidegger's work to that of Kiefer, allowing at times the precise nature of the comparison remains indistinct. individual is hard pressed to recall the last time a nothing else but conjunction carried such a onerous methodological load. The "and" of Biro's tide prepares the reader for the compare-and-contrast endeavor that is to come, a strive that points not only to the specific similarities between a philosopher and a painter, on the other hand also to the more general exercise of comparing philosophy to painting. The clod of this comparison is sometimes finessed through linguistic shortcuts in the material part of the text. At times Heidegger "anticipates" Kiefer's work, as Kiefer reciprocally "echoes" "evokes" or "departs from" Hei degger's points. on the other hand beyond these more superficial verb choices, Biro tenders a more intricate set of explanations for the reciprocal action he charts between these sum of two units figures.

As Biro demonstrates, the pair Heidegger and Kiefer share positions of dubious notoriety in relationship to Germany's Nazi past. As an active supporter and beneficiary of Nazi power in the 1930 Heidegger produc a material part of work that legitimized the nationalist rhetoric of Hider's party. level after the war he demonstrated an egregious lack of remorse for his Nazi collaboration. [2] His magnum opus Being and Time (1927) as well as his writings of the 1950 and 1960 are, of course, far more than reflections of his Nazi sympathies. Nevertheless, Heidegger's work bears the enduring stigma of the intimacy the philosopher one time felt between his jargon of "authenticity" and the Nazi worship of hero worship and racial supremacy. by dint of contrast, Kiefer's art has looked problematic in large part because the artist's exact purchase upon the legacy of Nazism has remained vague. As an artist of the generation born just after the next to the first World War, Kiefer has often referenced Nazism and its impact upon German culture, albeit in rather ambiguous terminuss In his early work, Kiefer had himself photographed in his studio and outdoor locations as he raised his right arm in the "Heil Hider" gesticulation In subsequent decades, he has produc "expressionistic" canvases of epic magnitude that, in the one and the other tide and pictorial content, call forth narratives of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. However, plenteous of Kiefer's work, in all its Wagnerlust and go [i]or[/i] come back to the German soil, can have the appearance Teutonic in the extreme, wavering between critique and complicity. Kiefer has thus been praised for his courageous attempt to recall wartime histories all too often repressed in Germany, even as he has been sentenceed for cavalierly reproducing pathos-laden sights of wartime destruction without unequivocally condemning Germany's character in the conflict.