BONNIE ROOS

                        ANSELM KIEFER AND THE ART OF ILLUSION:  DIALECTICS OF THE EARLY
                        MARGARETTE AND SULAMITH PAINTINGS

IN A WORLD WHERE ATROCITIES HAPPEN on a scale that would have been unimaginable prior to the twentieth century, we must contend with the inadequacy of language, whether visual or textual, to account for the horror of these experiences. What is the use of art, poetry, or, we might add, criticism, in light of these events? Theodor Adorno grappled with these questions when he commented that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. In contrast, Anselm Kiefer suggests the possibility that through art we can begin to be redeemed from these horrors. But because Kiefer’s philosophy relies on art’s representation of even the most reprehensible perspectives of history, he places some heady responsibilities on his critics—both to decide if “good” politics is essential to “good” art and to assess whether Kiefer’s art reflects “good” politics, even if it is “good” art.

Though his art is now rarely viewed as controversial, Kiefer’s notorious Besetzungen or “Occupations” photographs, in which he performs the taboo Sieg Heil gesture at major World War II battle sites and domestic spaces, provide a useful example of what is at issue in his work. These smaller works were exhibited at the 1980 Venice Biennale, together with larger paintings and sculptures by George Bazelitz that, as Liza Saltzman describes them, “delved into myths of the Nibelungen, Wagnerian scenarios, German intellectual history, and nationalistic militarism, all rendered on a scale and with a palette that was seen to bespeak a nascent, or renascent and potent, German national identity replete with all its ghosts.”  German critics were scandalized and deeply concerned about how international viewers might perceive these works. As John Hutchinson suggests, “[t]here would have been little in the way of controversy had Kiefer’s art explicitly condemned Germany’s fascist past. But although—and because—his iconography is refracted by irony and fragmentation, his images have always seemed equivocal, and even, at times, elegiac.”

Kiefer’s work is now understood as contributing to a discourse on post-World War II German nationalism and iconoclasm, and it is partly this subject matter itself, in the wake of what scholars have termed Germany’s “cultural amnesia” about the Holocaust, that lends Kiefer’s work such edge.  But Kiefer’s work is made precarious not only because he takes up the same Romantic painters that the Nazis used for their propaganda, but also because the epic, heroic, and Romantic qualities he exploits in his works are key elements of narratives that have historically perpetuated the oppression of marginalized peoples: they enable the illusion that there are clear delineations between good and evil, self and other, violent masculinity and subservient femininity, German and Jew.

Some of the Besetzungen photographs make the connection between Romanticism and Nazi totalitarianism explicit through citation. One, for example, alludes to Caspar David Friedrich’s Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (The Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog; see figures 1 and 2), the Romantic image par excellence. Even in non-narrative works like Der Wanderer, the work’s artistry lies in its creation of a Romantic “sublime,” so that the landscape seems to emanate from the central figure in a manner that blends “heavenly” and “earthly” perspectives. Leo Koerner observes:

[W]e are left uncertain whether we stand on solid ground behind the summit, or whether we float in space with the clouds. [. . .] Standing with its feet on the ground, however, is the Rückenfigur [traveler], installed in the midst of things, between the vast, insubstantial landscape and our own ambiguous point of view. It is he who mediates our experience of the scene, and who knits together the landscape’s disparate fragments. Indeed it is hard to imagine what the view from the summit would be without his centralizing and concealing presence, how, for example, the symmetrical hills radiating from just below his shoulders would actually meet in the valley.

Kiefer’s photographs similarly reproduce the controlling gaze of Nazi surveillance through which a chaotic world is unnaturally ordered. Yet Besetzungen also undermines such comparisons.  Whereas traditional Sieg Heil images portray crowds of people saluting in unison, Kiefer deconstructs the iconography of the image by saluting the empty ocean or by saluting in his own bathtub, and so emphasizes the futility of such a gesture. Moreover, in contemporaneous works like Für Genet (To Genet; figure 3) that also foreground the Sieg Heil, Kiefer ridicules the cult of masculinity associated with the gesture by performing the Sieg Heil in a woman’s dress. Once again, however, these figures are equivocal: while Kiefer’s photographs deconstruct the performance of the Nazi salute by staging it in “drag” and in domestic spaces, they also reify the Romantic idea of the male artist-as-shaman and Christ-figure, a claim for the healing and supernatural powers of artistry through its masculine appropriation of feminine (pro)creative abilities.3 By reviving this proscribed salute, and in repeatedly performing it himself, Kiefer also reintegrates an image of domination into critical currency and contemporary memory. This step is surely risky, even if successful. Defending the sort of artistic license used in his Besetzungen photographs, Kiefer explains, “I do not identify with Nero or Hitler, but I have to reenact what they did just a little bit in order to understand the madness. That is why I make these attempts to become a fascist.” Given these attempts, we can appreciate the concerns of the German critics at the Venice Biennale who condemned Kiefer’s work.