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

MATTHEW BIRO Anselm Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 327 pp.; 109 b/wills. $79.95

LISA SALTZMAN Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 186 pp.; 40 b/w ills. $39.95

In October 1990, I joined thousands of other people at the official celebration of Germany's Wiedervereinigung. There, in front of the Berlin Reichstag, the crowd watched and listened to Helmut Kohl's predictions about the future of a country once again made whole, a choir enthusiastically singing Deutschland uber Alles (all verses of it), and the percussive explosions of state-sponsored fireworks answered by countless renegade firecrackers. Amid the staggering groups of partying adolescents and tourists, one could spot the occasional expression of concern, 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 even be looks of worry, as some of the celebrants pondered the intimidating task that lay before them. For theirs was the task of not only integrating two sides of a country that had for decades been divided along political and economic lines, but also of initiating a new phase of remembering an d mourning. An entire country could now finally face in unison the horrific acts that had led 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 its opening the show had become a symbol for the ambivalent position in which Germany found 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 seemed a metonymy for West Germany's continuing economic miracle--a miracle from which some, perhaps naively, thought the East could eventually profit. At the same time, however, the difficult and often opaque messages delivered by Kiefer's lead planes and ash-covered canvases raised a more ambivalent set of concerns about the limits of memory and accountability for a society in a state of flux.

In the wake of this confluence of events, two American art historians began and have now completed studies that look at Kiefer specifically in relationship to the past and continuing complexities of German culture and history. Matthew Biro and Lisa Saltzman have both 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 deep cultural constants that have historically operated within German modernism. Saltzman, by 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, both Biro and Saltzman agree that it is the instability of meaning in Kiefer's work that offers an index to Germany's ambivalent past and present.

While previous scholars have acknowledged the impact of Heidegger's thought on Kiefer's work, Matthew Biro's Anseim Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heideggeris the first book-length comparison between these two titans of 20th -century German culture. [1] The project is thus a heady attempt to summarize and apply Heidegger's work to that of Kiefer, though at times the precise nature of the comparison remains indistinct. One is hard pressed to recall the last time a mere conjunction carried such a burdensome methodological load. The "and" of Biro's tide prepares the reader for the compare-and-contrast struggle that is to come, a struggle that points not only to the specific similarities between a philosopher and a painter, but also to the more general exercise of comparing philosophy to painting. The ground of this comparison is sometimes finessed by linguistic shortcuts in the body of the text. At times Heidegger "anticipates" Kiefer's work, as Kiefer reciprocally "echoes," "evokes," or "departs from" Hei degger's points. But beyond these more superficial verb choices, Biro offers a more intricate set of explanations for the reciprocal action he charts between these two figures.

As Biro demonstrates, both 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 1930s, Heidegger produced a body of work that legitimized the nationalist rhetoric of Hider's party. Even 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 1950s and 1960s, are, of course, far more than reflections of his Nazi sympathies. Nevertheless, Heidegger's work bears the enduring stigma of the intimacy the philosopher once felt between his jargon of "authenticity" and the Nazi cult of hero worship and racial supremacy. By contrast, Kiefer's art has seemed problematic in large part because the artist's exact purchase on the legacy of Nazism has remained vague. As an artist of the generation born just after the Second World War, Kiefer has frequently referenced Nazism and its impact on German culture, albeit in rather ambiguous terms. In his early work, Kiefer had himself photographed in his studio and outdoor locations as he raised his right arm in the "Heil Hider" gesture. In subsequent decades, he has produced "expressionistic" canvases of epic magnitude that, in both tide and pictorial content, evoke narratives of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. However, much of Kiefer's work, in all its Wagnerlust and return to the German soil, can seem Teutonic in the extreme, wavering between critique and complicity. Kiefer has thus been praised for his courageous attempt to recall wartime histories all too frequently repressed in Germany, even as he has been condemned for cavalierly reproducing pathos-laden scenes of wartime destruction without unequivocally condemning Germany's role in the conflict.

Biro links the two figures by claiming that Heidegger's ambivalent legacy was part of the general cultural atmosphere circulating around Kiefer and his generation. Biro explains that,

In part because of Heidegger's tremendous influence on German culture since the late 1920s, the central ideas behind existentialism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics [as developed by Heidegger] were standard components of an educated German's "intellectual baggage" by the time Kiefer began to contribute to and reconfigure German culture--at least, in their more "common sense" or everyday formulations. (p. 17) Amazingly, Biro does not itemize the contents of this historical baggage in greater detail, by, for example, explaining the specific connotations Heidegger's philosophy may have supported Kiefer and his generation. For secondary sources on Heidegger, Biro does wisely look to material written in the 1960s, the better to re-create a reading of Heidegger with which Kiefer would have been ostensibly familiar. And Biro mentions, if only in passing, direct though cagey references to Heidegger Kiefer has made in interviews and his art. [3] But this is not an intellectual history that investigates the ways in wh ich Heidegger was taught at German universities in the 1960s. Nor does Biro attempt to prove that Kiefer was by any means an expert on all things Heideggerian. Rather, Biro is after a deeper resonance between Kiefer and Heidegger that works on a cultural level, rather than on the level of direct influence.

To put Heidegger and Kiefer on a level playing field, Biro challenges the usual distinction between the modern and postmodern eras, as it seems only a dissolution of this historical boundary will allow a comparison between two figures who occupied such disparate moments in the course of German history. [4] Creating what he calls a "continuous view" of 20th-century German culture, Biro reads both Heidegger and Kiefer through the lens of Modernity. He argues that both Kiefer and Heidegger are prototypically modern in that they created works that present and then question any stable representation of cultural truths. Both artist and philosopher worked in the abyss opened up in the modern era, a chasm once occupied by the solid terrain of theological and philosophical belief systems that grounded human choice and action.

Notably, however, Biro points to the common interests of the philosopher and artist if often only to demonstrate differences between the two. He thus begins by articulating different philosophical modes within Heidegger's discussion of subjectivity in order to locate Kiefer's transformation of those very modes.

Biro's argument thus depends on an ambitious digest of Heidegger's methodology, the details of which find their counterparts and then rebuttals in the work of Kiefer. In Heidegger's Being and Time, Biro reminds the reader, beings usually inhabit the world inauthentically. Going about their goal-oriented business, beings lose themselves in societal structures and habits that determine their actions. It is only through an intricate process of self-interrogation that true being-in-the-world, authentic Dasein, can emerge. Such self-interrogation is occasioned by the disruption of instrumental life, as when, for example, a tool that one is using breaks down. Under such circumstances Dasein is made aware of the basic conditions under which one is in the world. With the breakdown of its instrumental existence, Dasein stops to perceive the horizons of its being, the limits of its relation to the world. Only then can Dasein think on the fundamental conditions and essence of its own being, separate from the exigencies of an instrumental life that puts claims on it. Most important, at this point Dasein realizes itself as being-in-difference, as being separate from the world, even as it only can be in the world. Dasein is, ultimately, a state in which the subject is never at rest, but is rather in a constant and pretty uncomfortable state of testing its own relationship to the world and ultimately to its own mortal finitude.

Biro then proceeds to dissect Heidegger's model of subjectivity according to three methodological phases. For example, Dasein first offers an existential description of the subject. In existentialism the individual is a fulcrum point between possibilities, at moments of choice in which he or she must negotiate between potential decisions that are at times contradictory. Existentialism focuses on the possibility of exercising will in the face of conflicting systems of societal cultural structures. Into the modern environment in which contingency reigns, Dasein can only enter by directly confronting the limits of its own self-knowledge and will in respect to the world around it.

Biro then describes Heidegger's model of subjectivity as phenomenological. Phenomenology begins with one's experience of the world and with his or her knowledge of language and then constitutes the meaning and identity of the real Out of these two sources. As a phenomenological method, Heidegger's personal exploration of Dasein is rooted in his own perception of average everyday or "ontic" experiences. From the sum total of such particular ontic experiences, Heidegger generalizes a set of constants that govern a broader "ontological" state common to all human beings. As a good phenomenologist, Heidegger brackets those categories that are not available to potential perception, such as the noumenal or things-in-themselves that cannot be experienced with certainty. Rather, only by contemplating ontological experience, by apprehending the fundamental conditions under which human beings experience the world, does Dasein thus define a physical and also a social space in which a being can act.

Finally, Heidegger's method is hermeneutical, and is thus a self-reflexive methodology that examines the implicit principles of its own interpretations. Hermeneutics examines the contingencies of interpretation according to the impact of sociohistorical conditions on both interpreter and the interpreted object. In other words, the world in which Dasein achieves its being will have been produced by history, as will the means by which Dasein goes about examining the world it rejoins.

For Biro, Kiefer's art frequently enacts this tripartite model of subjectivity defining Heideggerian Dasein. On an expansive landscape like of Cockchafer Fly (1974), for example, Kiefer worked up a high impasto surface pockmarked with patches of mud brown, red, and black. For Biro, the solitary spaces depicted in this and other works seem reminiscent of the lonely existential condition under which Dasein struggles into being, separate from the society that demanded of it a more docile instrumental existence.

Further, Biro notes that the surface of Cockchafer Fly reads simultaneously as an expressionistic abstract pictorial field and as a ruined field of land scorched in battle. The two readings of this painterly surface, one as the representation of a burned landscape receding into the distance, and the other as an "abstract" expanse that runs flush with the surface of the canvas itself, hinge on a horizon line located close to the top of the canvas. The particular terminology of the horizon may seem at first a rather facile application of Heidegger's Lieblingswort for difference in relation to the world, since for Heidegger the horizon was a dynamic site of difference-between and gathering-together heaven and earth, men and gods. But Biro is able to develop a rather contrapuntal reading of Cockchafer Fly and other canvases under the concept. For the author, the notion of the horizon in this canvas shifts the body of a viewer in respect to different viewpoints, as one's vision oscillates between the deep and sha llow spaces simultaneously at work. The horizon is thus the literal and figurative limit where painterly conventions converge and conflict. It defines the phenomenal limit in distance a human being can see, just as it posits the unstable conditions by which perception and choice take place. At the same time, the pictorial conventions that guide conflicting readings of the picture speak to the hermeneutical grounding of the subject in certain modes of viewing that have been historically defined.

Most important, the pictorial oscillation of the canvas, by which the subject contemplates the conditions of its own reading, meets with a complimentary oscillation in the painting's narrative message. On the horizon line, Kiefer scrawled part of a post-World War II German lyric sung by children; "Cockchafer fly, Father is in the war, Mother is in Pomerania, Pomerania is burned up." Thus, the horizon line is the site of difference between heaven and earth, between depth and flatness, as well as between different moral lessons that may derive from the scribbled message. As language, the written words bring a new level of signification (this time linguistic) to the painting, once again forcing the subject to confront the dynamic of interpretation in which he or she is engaged. And the lyric perched on the horizon of the decimated landscape also attaches the scene of destruction to the war, though the nature of that attachment remains ambiguous. The lyric alludes to the atrocities of battle and yet places Germa ny more in the position of the victimized rather than in that of the aggressor. The inscription, Biro says, "brings historical loss into the present" without establishing any specific political or historical context for that loss.

In the wake of such comparisons, Biro begins to float possible differences between Heidegger and Kiefer. While both apparently concern themselves with the existential, phenomenological, and hermeneutical means by which a subject may develop self-awareness, only Heidegger privileges the eventual unfolding of authentic subjectivity. Kiefer, on the other hand, allows for a persisting "undecidability" in his works. Kiefer offers pictorial structures that defamiliarize the subject's own operations of being as an interpreting subject without ever privileging a single true reading. As Biro writes,

...even if Kiefer, like Heidegger, hermeneutically lays out the authentic and inauthentic structures of meaning that constitute his world, he does not seem to be able--as Heidegger believes he is--to separate the experience of the two. In Kiefer's works, inauthentic possibilities appear just as rich as authentic ones--every element is caught up in the same rich polyvalence. Thus, while Heidegger believes that a true disclosure is possible (and that the truthfulness of the disclosure is in part marked by the richness or contextual nature of its happening), Kiefer suggests that any disclosure, if constituted properly, can appear to be true. (p. 58)

It is this difference to which Biro returns in his comparison of Heidegger and Kiefer. While the former acknowledges the contingencies of Dasein's being in the world, it is always in a process that could eventually lead to the unfolding of authentic truth and the eventual evolution of an integrated being-in-the-world. Kiefer's work, by contrast, keeps the subject in an existential, phenomenological, and hermeneutical holding position. In other words, Kiefer produces what Biro calls "undecidable" works. The openness or undecidability of Kiefer's art thus interprets the predicament of being according to Heidegger's thought, but only under postwar social conditions that disallow the final authenticity for which Heidegger argued. Within each chapter, Biro masterfully reads Kiefer and Heidegger beside and against each other, in order to demonstrate that under various salient categories (the relationship of the individual to society, the concept of history that evolves in discrete and identifiable world epochs, th e impact of technology on the subject), Heidegger favors reification while Kiefer privileges the multiple and conflicted.

Biro's summaries of Heidegger's work are breathtakingly thorough and efficient. His close readings of Kiefer's artist books, paintings, and works of sculpture are subtle and often convincing. He sometimes enriches the art historical context of his analysis by relating Kiefer's work to the other canonical art "movements," such as Dada, de Stijl abstraction, Pop, and Conceptual art, to further explain the historical, hermeneutical conditions under which Kiefer approached the predicament of the individual subject within society at large.

Biro does not, however, ask the big question that lies at the very heart of his project. What is the relationship of painting to philosophy? Biro presumes, but does not explicitly state in any conclusive way, that painting need not be a mere illustration for theory. Admirably, he does not attempt to make Kiefer fit too snugly into Heidegger's shoes, as in his view the artist engages but does not slavishly reproduce Heidegger's philosophy. For Biro, painting is quite capable of rebutting previous philosophical arguments, as Kiefer's work argues for, even crafts a certain kind of subjectivity that differs from Heidegger's prescription.

Of course, the relationship between painting and philosophy is not entirely commutative. While Kiefer may seem to depend on Heidegger's philosophy, Heidegger's philosophy does not need Kiefer. This circumstance is in part mandated by the different historical positions occupied by these Germans. Kiefer could respond to Heidegger, but not vice versa. It is also a function of Biro's organization, as it is the chronology of Heidegger's publications, starting with Being and Time in 1927 and ending with his final publications on technology in the 1960s, that dictates the flow of his chapters. But in general, Biro is still making an implicit argument here for the potency of art to describe modes of being and thinking.

Further, the logic of Biro's comparison, as he develops his "continuous view" of German modernism, also depends on the presumption that both painting and philosophy are particular to the cultures that produced them. While this is a commonplace assumption as far as painting is concerned (hence the methodological animal we have now named a "social art history"), it is not indisputably the case with philosophy. If a philosophy, the very development of which has been associated with the distillation and production of transcendental truths, can be characteristically German, can one also assume that there is a characteristically German mathematics or chemistry? Appropriately, it is Heidegger himself who would have answered this question regarding philosophy in the affirmative. Heidegger's own hermeneutical method demanded an approach to truth that was grounded in a people and in a historical place. While in the 1930s, such a position allowed Heidegger to claim that Germany was the legitimate heir to the legacy of Greek thought and culture, it also allows Biro to investigate Heidegger's own philosophy according to its rootedness in German modernism. [5]

Indeed, Biro could have developed a greater metacritique to show how Heidegger's work provided the very foundation for the comparison on which this project was built. The true weight of Biro's comparison lies, for example, in the fact that Heidegger himself believed art was capable of performing the work of philosophy. Indeed, Heidegger saw his work in part as a rescue mission for art. He attempted to steer art safely between the twin perils of Kantian aestheticism (in which the art object was simply a sensuous means by which the subject came to terms with its own processes of judgment), and Hegel's ontological argument in which art (because it was sensuous) had to defer to philosophy as ultimately the most adequate expression of truth. Throughout his complex career, Heidegger remained committed to the notion that art could establish a world and define history. For Heidegger, art was a medium of thought. Only in light of this argument can Biro effect a comparison that gives so much philosophical weight to Ki efer's project.

I assumed that Biro's conclusion was going to deliver this analysis of method. Instead, he tangles the end of his text in a plea for the continued appreciation of Kiefer's work. Biro worries that, as Kiefer's work now commands such outrageous prices and has not changed much over the past decade, the art historical community will no longer take his efforts seriously. I am not at all convinced that such concerns are relevant to a study of this nature. Further, the anxious call to adore the genius of a single artist lets this book tumble into the unalloyed hero-worship that is so frequentiy the pitfall of monographical studies. [6] Nevertheless, in the substance of his book Biro suggests the possibility of negotiating a space between philosophy and painting in the specific context of German culture. He argues for the viability of painting as the means of developing existential, phenomenological, and hermeneutical thought, not only by comparing Kiefer to a philosopher who described those categories, but by compa ring him to a philosopher who argued for the possibility of such a comparison in the first place.

While in the end Biro's book may brighten the aura of artistic triumph that surrounds this dark figure of contemporary German painting, Lisa Saltzman's Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz looks to Kiefer's artistic shortcomings as well as successes. Saltzman pries open what could be called fault lines in Kiefer's work--conceptual fissures within his art that mark Germany's postwar terrain of memory and guilt. More specifically, her reading forces Kiefer's work to account for its own problematic position in relationship to Theodor Adorno's provisional dictum that "After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric." [7] Saltzman thus elaborates on the simultaneously impossible and inevitable burden of artistically engaging traumatic memories of the Holocaust for a German man born after the war.

Rather than impose the legacy of a single philosopher on Kiefer, Saltzman expertly threads a network of theoretical and sociohistorical material through and around Kiefer's art. While Biro's marathon summary of Heidegger at times tests the endurance of the reader, Saltzman quickens her text with complex theories that leave the reader breathless. And while for Biro the "undecidability" of Kiefer's work is an artistic accomplishment, for Saltzman it is more a problematic condition that is part of Kiefer's cultural inheritance as a member of the Nachgeboren--those born after the war.

For example, in Saltzman's analysis Kiefer's work occupies an incompatible position in relationship to iconoclasm. Saltzman argues that after World War II an international vein of criticism emerged in which figures as different as Theodor Adorno, Laura Mulvey, and Jean-Joseph Goux observed a taboo on the sensual appreciation of images. Saltzman summarizes that Goux's model of iconoclasm associated the lure of the material image with the immanent relationship a subject once experienced with the body of the mother. By giving up sensual pleasure in images, Goux's subject sublimates incestuous desire for the maternal body Out of respect for patriarchal law, more specifically for the Mosaic Law that forbade worship of images in the first place. Adorno, wary of an art that (like Fascism) demands adoration and total immersion, advocated a kind of modernism that encouraged intellectual distance, rather than pleasure. And Mulvey likewise warned against visual pleasure, characterizing it as a masculin1st means of alla ying the patriarchal threat of castration. [8] Saltzman admirably complicates her discussion of this critical iconoclastic trend by noting that both Mulvey and Adorno recanted some of their earlier positions. Most notably, Adorno later acknowledged the persisting necessity of making works of art, even if such an activity would be problematic after the war.

Against this ambitious summary of postwar criticism, in which iconoclasm is presented as both a form of political resistance and as a manifestation of oedipal angst, Saltzman reads Kiefer's ambivalent task of memorializing the Holocaust. Looking at paintings such as Kiefer's Aaron, a mixed-media work of 1984 that shows Aaron's staff jutting across a dim landscape, Saltzman notes that the artist represents the Jewish figure by metonymy, letting the accouterment stand for the Old Testament priest who momentarily encouraged idolatry at Mount Sinai. The staff stands for Aaron and his power without mimetically representing him, as the painting seems paradoxically to observe the Hebraic ethos of iconoclasm that the Jewish leader first violated.

But in other paintings Kiefer loosens the metonymic mode of representation he elsewhere deployed. For example, Kiefer created two large-scale works that allude to Paul Celan's "Fugue of Death," a poem that compares the German woman Margarethe with her Jewish counterpart Sulamith who was imprisoned in a death camp. In one of the paintings, Margarethe of 1981, Kiefer represented both Germany and the golden-tressed German woman of Celan's poem by metonymy. The application of straw to the surface of the canvas simultaneously references both the blond hair of the woman and the fertile Boden from which the Nazi Germany believed it had sprung. In the 1983 canvas Sulamith, however, Kiefer represents the doomed, dark-haired woman of Celan's poem by absence. Sulamith pictures only the cavernous brick interior of Wilhelm Kries's Mausoleum for German War Heroes. At the back of the otherwise empty space, tongues of flame seem to flicker, at once suggesting a menorah, the perpetual flame of a Nazi memorial, and the fires used to incinerate the bodies of death camp prisoners. Sulamith herself has disappeared. Indeed, one might say that the notion of the vanishing point gains manifold significance here, as the lines of Sulamith's exaggerated perspectival scheme go up in flames at their point of convergence.

Saltzman reads these canvases not only through Celan's poem, but also through Adorno, as it was supposedly in response to "Fugue of Death" that Adorno declared it barbaric to write poetry. Contrasting Kiefer's two approaches to memorializing the Holocaust, one in which representation happens by metonymy and the other in which representation is itself thwarted, Saltzman notes the predicament of representing the Holocaust for the artist, as he grapples with both Adorno's and Hebraic iconoclasm. At first, Saltzman suggests that a work such as Sulamith is Kiefer's testament to the second commandment, as Kiefer paints the absence of the Jewish woman out of respect for the Jewish law that might proscribe her very representation. But Saltzman is not so quick to let Kiefer off the hook. She also proffers that Kiefer's iconoclasm may he simply a convenient means by which he can avoid depicting more explicit, and therefore more politically legible, scenes of atrocity for which his countrymen were responsible. Saltzman then argues that Kiefer's predicament is one shared by his generation, as she compares Kiefer's work to other "counter-monuments," such as Christian Boltanski's 1989 Missing House, that have attempted to memorialize World War II atrocities through absence.

In the end, Saltzman reaches a rather Adornoesque conclusion, She explains that the ambivalent means by which Kiefer grapples with representation (and the iconoclastic traditions that have problematized it) can only reproduce the general crisis of representation at work in Kiefer's cultural milieu. Like Adorno, Saltzman argues that art cannot exorcise the ghosts of history, Only societal change can. Saltzman heroically declares,

Until we have a world without suffering, until we have a world without injustice, until we have a world in which ethical law is so internalized as to preclude the necessity of images standing as either visualized taboos against or witnesses to past, present, and even future wrongs, we cannot maintain a position of unqualified iconoclasm. Both Adorno and Mulvey, two foundational voices of iconoclasm in the postwar era, come to recognize this. Each asserts the fundamental importance of the image, even as they decry the danger represented by its continued existence. And Kiefer, for all his iconoclasm, literally and figuratively, continues to make pictures. (p. 47)

As Saltzman shows, Kiefer's work embodies the crisis of making pictures after the Holocaust. But Saltzman also demonstrates that Kiefer works through the crisis of the postwar German male body itself. To investigate the ways in which codes of gender enter into Kiefer's art, Saltzman offers a psychoanalytic reading grounded in a specific postwar crisis of masculinity in Germany. For the author, the predominantly male artistic movement of Neo-Expressionism was caught up in larger cultural discourses involving the fractured post-war male imago. As she says, the efforts of the Neo-Expressionists, especially of Kiefer, "indicate the labors of a son, toiling against the legacy of a historically tainted father, or paternal signifier" (p. 30). For example, Georg Baselitz's Picture for the Fathers (1965) heaps flaccid forms of bodies and objects in a pile, suggesting a model of masculinity in which impotence predominates.

Kiefer's concern with the stymied transmission of masculine power from father to son often emerges in his paintings of, for example, the wings of Icarus. However; Saltzman offers some other, more interesting examples. In his project Occupations (1974), Kiefer published photographs of himself in riding pants making the Nazi salute in Switzerland, Italy, and France. Literally occupying leisure spots (not capitals) of Western Europe, Kiefer conflated casual tourist snapshots with both documentary photographs of the war and news photographs of political figures like Willy Brandt kneeling before Holocaust memorials in the early 1970s, More specifically, Saltzman notes that in his Occupation of Montpellier, Kiefer positioned himself in front of that city's equestrian statue of Louis XIV--a figure whose raised right hand of authority unwittingly rhymes with Kiefer's own gesture. The silliness of the juxtaposition defuses the otherwise highly problematic image of a man "occupied" with Germany's own imperial aspirati ons. Further; Kiefer's ambiguous masquerade seems in Saltzman's analysis like the mischief of a little boy at play, as his attempt to equal the monumental masculinity of the equestrian figure turns into the gesture of a diminished son.

Then, at one of the highpoints of her often inspirational analysis, Saltzman describes Kiefer as a man in drag. Looking at one of Kiefer's early artist books, For Genet (1969), she notes the full-length robes and house frocks in which the artist also pictured himself hailing Hitler. Once mentioned, this remarkable and previously unobserved detail opens Kiefer's work up to a refreshing avenue of investigation. For Genet, which in its title at least, references a homosexual writer; destabilizes the usual opposition between the heroic masculinity that was the conceit of Hitler's Germany and a more "effeminate" form of maleness suggested by Kiefer the cross-dresser. Kiefer's pose troubles the stability of Nazi identity, just as it indicates the troubled relationship he maintained in respect to his historical past. Saltzman moves very quickly through this point, and I think it would have merited some expansion. She assumes that Kiefer's cross-dressing at once points to the crisis of both maleness and heterosexual ity as they have been historically defined in respect to Nazi Germany. She does not, however; differentiate much between the workings of gender and sexuality in this section, which is a little surprising given the weight of literature that has recently been devoted to complicating the relation of the two. [9]

But Saltzman is not concerned with the specific position Kiefer maintains to codes of sexuality. Rather; she offers works like For Genet as a means of exploring the general psychic fracture of the postwar male subject. Thus she is content to argue that Kiefer's cross-dressing suggests that "perhaps it is Nazism itself, its legacy and history, which is the inassimilable kernel which makes impossible anything but a fragmented, schizophrenic, destabilized, finally, implosive identity" (p. 62). The terminology of this description derives from the trauma theory Saltzman deploys in other sections. At such points, Kaja Silverman and Slavoj Zick make cameo appearances in support of Saltzman's argument that Kiefer's is a kind of historicity painting. Less concerned with representing historical episodes, Kiefer pictures scenes that work through (or rather, cannot successfully work through) a traumatic concept of history. The Holocaust in this respect is the wound that won't heal, the "inassimilable kernel" of history that possesses the subject. Thus, paintings like Melancholia (1988), in which Kiefer mines Durer's famous allegory for iconological material, indicate a habit of remembering that is doomed to obsessive repetition, rather than therapeutic redemption. And the "cauterized" surfaces of some of the artist books that Kiefer made in the 1970s occlude memory even as they seek to uncover it through its representation.

As a coda to her book, Saltzman shrewdly surveys the history of Kiefer's critical reception. Beginning with a political, rather than primarily artistic event, Saltzman describes a 1992 Berlin peace-protest at which "extremists" bombarded the German chancellor and president with eggs and garbage. Saltzman demonstrates that the German media seemed overly concerned with international coverage of the episode, as American, British, and Israeli news sources focused on the disruption rather than on the generally peaceful tenor of the event. Saltzman extrapolates this preoccupation with international reputation, in which Germany is eager to demonstrate its politically correct position, to trends in Kiefer criticism. The responses to the notorious German Pavilion of the 1980 Venice Biennale are most conspicuous here. The masthead for the German Pavilion was a volkisch wooden figure, Model for a Sculpture, by Baselitz--a highly controversial piece that represented a Hitler-mustachioed man making what looked like a Naz i salute. Heralded by this problematic work, Kiefer's contributions to the pavilton, mostly monumental scenes of the Nibelungen and figures from German military and intellectual history, seemed to strike a disturbingly affirmative tone. German critics, with a few exceptions, joined in a collective condemnation of the show, apparently concerned that Kiefer's work might compromise Germany's international image.10 Only after some American critics and gallerists swooned at the sight of German painters courageously painting the repressed of German history did German critics recant their former positions. In her provocative summary of this criticism, Saltzman suggests that some of the negative criticism leveled at Kiefer's work by German critics contained an implicit nationalism and anti-Semitism. Indeed, Saltzman quotes a number of critics who imagined that Kiefer's appeal to American and, notably, Jewish collectors represented a possible impeachment of his work."

Saltzman's chapters build on each other effectively, but they could also survive as discrete arguments. Indeed, to whatever essay by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh that might appear on a syllabus for courses on contemporary German art, one of Saltzman's chapters would make a satisfying complement.

In the end, Cambridge has published two very different treatments of Kiefer. For all their differences in method and scope, however, both Biro and Saltzman have each torn another piece away from the wall that has too frequently been maintained between Kiefer and the society in which he worked.

Notes

(1.) Mark Rosenthal made cursory allusions to Heidegger in his exhibition catalogue essay for Anselm Kiefer, exh. cat., The Art Institute of Chicago and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987. Germano Celant's delphic contribution to Anselm Kiefer, exh. cat. (Milano: Charta, 1997) also suggests the relevance of Heidegger's thought to Kiefer.

(2.) Heidgger was a member of the Nazi party from 1933 to 1945. As the first National Socialist rector of the Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg, he delivered speeches in support of Hitler's agendas and coordinated university and party policies. For further information about Heidegger during the Third Reich, Biro suggests Hugo Ott's Martin Heidegger; A Political Life, trans. Allan Blunden (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Gunther Neske and Emil Kettering, Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers, trans. Linda Harries (New York: Paragon House, 1990); and Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, trans. Paul Burrell, Dominic di Bernardi, and Gabriel Ricci (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).

(3.) Biro quotes from an interview between Kiefer and Donald Kuspit in which the artist explained, "I am interested in Heidegger's ambivalence. I am not familiar with his books, but I know he was a Nazi. How is it that such a brilliant mind was taken in by the Nazis? ... How do these thinkers, who seem so intellectually right and perceptive, come to such socially stupid and commonplace positions? I have shown Heidegger's brain with a mushroom-like tumor growing out of it to make this point. I want to show the ambivalence of his thinking-of all thinking"; "Anselm Kiefer," interview with Donald Kuspit, in Art Talk: The Early 80s, ed. Jeanne Siegl (1988; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1990), 85-86 (quoted in Biro, p.6).

(4.) Such a beginning may seem a bit fatiguing for the reader, as one questions the necessity of yet another debate concerning the insufficiencies of the category "postmodern." This approach, however, makes some sense within the specific history of Kiefer scholarship, as previous monographs have attempted to make Kiefer a poster-child for the simulacral society. Most conspicuous in this respect is John Gilmour's Fire on the Earth,: Anselm Kiefer and the Postmodern World (Phitadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). Having composed his monograph at the high-water mark of academia's fascination with all things postmodern, Gilmour served Kiefer's work up with a smorgasbord of theoretical sources provided by Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard.

(5.) Heidegger's philosophy depended on the philological exercise of extracting original truths of Greek thought as they were specifically expressed in language before Roman translations. His philosophy of art attempted to recuperate the Greek truth-as-revealing within a German context. See his "Origin of the Work of Art," in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), cap. 21-24.

(6.) Indeed, based on a dissertation written at SUNY-Stony Brook, Biro's hook sometimes smacks of the redemptive flavor characterizing Donald Kuspit's earlier approach to Kiefer. For Kuspir's notorious claim that German Neo-Expressionists "perform an extraordinary service for the German people [as they] lay to rest the ghosts... of German style, culture, and history, so that the people can be authentically new," see his "Flak from the 'Radicals': The American Case against Current German Painting," in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 137-51. For Ruspir's updated version of Neo-Expressionism-as-therapy for a melancholy Germany, see his "Mourning and Melancholia in German Neo-Expressionism: The Representation of German Subjectivity," Signs of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 212-27.

(7.) Theodor Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society" (1949), in Prisons, trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), 34; quoted in Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 2.

(8.) Saltzman cites Jean-Joseph Goux, "Moses, Freud and the Iconoclastic Prescription," in Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca: University of Cornell Press, 1990), 134-30; Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lehnhardt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), passim; and Laura Mulvey, "Narrative Cinema and Visual Pleasure," in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 14-26; see Saltzman, 19-23.

(9.) At the top of the gender/sexuality cross-dressing berg would be Judith Butier, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993); and Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992).

(10.) The loudest voice in the lamentation was, of course, that of Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, whose now canonical critique of nationalist tendencies in German Neo-Expressionism has come under unnecessary criticism for cementing style and politics too solidly; see Buchloh, "Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression," in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, 107-35.

(11.) Among the most troubling examples (which do not include Buchloh) was Petra Kippoff a remark, "That (the works of] Anselm Kiefer are today as desired in Jerusalem as in New York or LA and that a good half of them can be found in the possession of Jewish collectors does not at all reduce their ambivalent thematic but instead confirms their ambiguous fascination"; Kippoff, "Das bleierne Land. Im Odenwand entstanden, in London ausgestellt und bewundert: 'Zweistromland,' die crate grosse Skulptur des Kunstlers," Die Zeit, no. 31 (July 28, 1989): 36; trans. Saltzman, 120.

COPYRIGHT 2000 College Art Association
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group