Anselm Kiefer / The Seven Heavenly Palaces
Just like the intricate labyrinth described by Borges in The Garden of Forking Paths, “in which all men would lose their way”, in Kiefer’s art there is always a narrative trap intentionally left, that could lead to a cul-de-sac or could open the path to all the possible meanings. Words by Larisa Oancea.
Anselm Kiefer, The Seven Heavenly Palaces, HangarBicocca, Milan“I thought of a maze of mazes, of a sinuous, ever growing maze which would take in both past and future and would somehow involve the stars.”
(Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths)
A transhistorical journey, staging seven ghostly blocks made of reinforced concrete. Permanently fitted in one of the spacious halls of HangarBicocca Foundation in Milan, Anselm Kiefer’s “heavenly palaces” seem like floating on shifting sands. In his encyclopedic lineage, varying from religious and mythological allegories to philosophy and history, the towers are symptomatic at Kiefer; they trace a symbolic journey of spiritual initiation, alluding to an ancient Hebrew apocrypha entitled “The Book of the Palaces”.
Correlations with his previous monumental projects near Barjac (Kiefer’s 35-hectare studio in the South of France) can be recognized at a glance; as in La Ribaute complex, towers are not rendered here as symbols of the phallic power, nor repressed symbols of gradual destruction, but propose a vertical interpretation of the history as a theatrum mundus.
In her monographic documentary about Kiefer, Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow* (a title quoting a phrase from The Book of Isaiah), the filmmaker Sophie Fiennes accentuated the artists tendency to burden every symbol with a protean significance. In this case, the apparently fragile buildings – which state of decay could be associate, at a first sight, with mourning, destruction and ash – are rather seen like random, but inevitable steps of an intimate pursuit. In this sense, Kiefer gives a particular significance to the recycled materials used in his installation (containers, books, strips of paper, iron frames, pieces of glass) because they already have “a trace” and they are “what remains”. Moreover, ruins are an important part of his fragmentary artistic conception: “ruins of meaning and ruins of art”, as Daniel Arasse pointed out**. Just like the moments of crisis that can make history (and individuals) to reinvent itself, “with the debris you can construct new ideas, they are the symbols of a beginning”, the artist used to say.
Each of the seven structures at Hangar has a name and a specific significance***, illustrating a thin conjunction between memory, emotion and perception: Sefiroth (linked with the creation and the defined structure of the Tree of Life), Melancholia (a self-referential tower, alluding to the contemplative and privileged status of those who were born under the sign of Saturn, predestined to have mood swings and strong artistic vocation), Ararat (a paradoxical symbol of destruction and deliverance), The Magnetic Field Lines (referring to the major schisms and traumatic divisions in the history of politics and religion – from the iconoclastic struggle, to the racial policy of the Nazi Germany), JH & WH (emphasizing the myth of creation – the initials, put together, compose the name of Yahweh, the God of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah), and The Tower of the Falling Pictures (a distopic scenario of the history of representation, in which the broken and empty frames do not stand for an iconoclastic point of view, but symbolize all the possible images that can be visible or invisible).
The Seven Heavenly Palaces trace the reference to a dialogical multiplicity of histories, in an anachronistic manner; it seems built with fragments of personal and collective memory haphazardly assembled. But its coherence is to be found in the versatility of Kiefer’s artistic research, in which religion, philosophy, literary symbolism and history are intermingled. Just like the intricate labyrinth described by Borges in The Garden of Forking Paths, “in which all men would lose their way”, in Kiefer’s art there is always a narrative trap intentionally left, that could lead to a cul-de-sac or could open the path to all the possible meanings.
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* Sophie Fiennes, Over Your Cities Grass will Grow, France, 2010, official trailer.
** Daniel Arasse, Anselm Kiefer, Thames & Hudson, London, p. 306.
*** Anselm Kiefer,The Seven Heavenly Palaces, HangarBicocca, permanent and site-specific installation, curated by Lia Rumma, 2004 (presentation brochure).
Words by Larisa Oancea.
Anselm Kiefer’s studio at Barjac, South France
Alselm Kiefer’s set and costumes for Elektra by Richard Strauss, Teatro San Carlo, Naples, 2003
Bronze, Nude, Skin