Prototypes under construction at Barjac
The road to Barjac, the hilltop citadel where Kiefer has his living and working space, is long and serpentine if you approach it from Nimes. Nimes is the ideal starting-point for this journey, its antiquity making it an iconographical primer for many of Kiefer's preoccupations. Among its Roman remains, the amphitheatre in particular (standing in for the Colosseum of the early photographic sequence, Heroic Allegories) pays homage to a painter whose architectural spaces often remind us of the fatal legacy of the imperial idea, with its double dream of order and barbarism. But it is not this that makes me queasy so much as the lurching drive through the vineyards, in a business-class Mercedes piloted by an air-brushed lady chauffeur. I want to throw up, but am conscious that in this milieu, using a Mercedes as a vomitorium would brand me as distinctly vulgar, if not an absolute barbarian.
But it's OK. We are there and I am already inflating my lungs with the healthful South, with scents of pine, lavender, rosemary. The air of Provence in April, nothing more tonic. Of course, this airiness is not what Kiefer's work is about, and it is not, ultimately, what Barjac is about. If in one sense the hilltop complex is a vast depot, a concatenated series of magazines in which paintings and objects accumulate, a concentration of German DNA distilling patiently in a southern landscape, it is also a vast marshalling yard, from which a series of epitomes of an entire world are despatched to another dimension, that of the remote portals of the art gallery circuit with its forms of restless public attention, drawn fitfully to Kiefer's works via equal amounts of curiosity, suspicion, fear, and deep recognition. Those who view Kiefer's work do not easily forget it. Its imprint is decisive although its meanings remain hard to focus. Barjac feels very distant from the art world's practices of exposure and mediation-the principles on which it has been conceived and constructed are those of retraction, withdrawal, self-reflection. It is not meant for public consumption, although its arrangements disclose a system of relations and a means of classification that make sense of decades of artistic activity.
Kiefer's front drive is a kind of ceremonial way. Once through the security gate, you follow a route that girdles the summit of the hill, a small plateau in which the main holding areas are located. The mild gradients of this approach road, really a wide path, encourage a slow, almost stately, walking pace, suitable for meditation or for the tempo of a procession. The latter option springs to mind once you begin to register that there are stations on this route, a series of structures that resemble cultic buildings, with their walls much taller than they are wide, housing small installations of paintings and sculptural objects. Each of these artistic precincts is named for a figure or theme that occupies an important role in Kiefer's imagination: 'El Cid', 'Vergil', 'Vanitas', 'Asteroids', 'The Seven Palaces', etc. Many of them refer to celestial systems, described in either scientific or mythological terms, while others commemorate moments in political or cultural history that serve as indices of humankind's attempt to draw heaven down to earth, or emulate it, with disastrous results. The most recently completed structure, 'Velimir Khlebnikov', shares the same inspiration as Kiefer's new show at White Cube, exploring the Russian poet's theories of history, using mathematics to uncover its laws and to predict the course of future events.
Anselm Kiefer
There is a necklace of these shrine-like buildings looped around the curving approach to the centre of operations. They bring to mind Dante's description of the hilltop town of Montereggione, its circle of walls 'crowned with towers' (Inferno, xxxi, 41) resembling the upper halves of giants peering over one of the pits of Hell. This analogy to the infernal scene is not a casual one. Just as the Italian hilltop town is displaced by giants in Dante's imagination, so these architectural superstructures are paralleled in Kiefer's scheme by the cavities beneath them, deep down, in the tunnels and grottoes that run in all directions through the wooded ridge. Should you enter this network of underground spaces, irregularly lit from artificial, and occasionally natural, sources, you would soon lose your bearings and, perhaps especially, your sense of the depth to which you have penetrated beneath the surface of the landscape. At what you feel instinctively is the lowest and the focal point of this ensemble of burrows is the experience of a sudden gap, an intensified vacancy, given the form of a great square chamber, lined with lead, half-filled with water and illumined bleakly by a single bulb. Viewed in any context, this is a scary place. Perhaps its most disturbing aspect is not the fleeting thought that this sacral pool is a symbolic space echoing a profound deadliness inside Kiefer's own head (he is actually a very friendly man with a sunny smile) but the more certain belief that it embodies the conditions of a widely shared psychological state, of a cultural memory and a national trauma. It is not for nothing that Kiefer's staff refer to it colloquially as the 'bunker', encapsulating the historic fate of the most expansive and all-embracing of political ambitions, reduced to a state of entombment and asphyxia, the exhaustion of light and air.
Anselm Kiefer, from 'Palmsonntag', 2006
Anselm Kiefer, 'Aperiatur terra et germinet salvatorem', 2006
The stillness, darkness and coldness of this place could not be further from the thyme-filled atmosphere of the French countyside, or, for that matter, from the play of breezes in a spacious avenue of linden trees. The unusual sense of pressure experienced at this relatively shallow depth below ground is owing largely to the use of lead. Lead is one of the most frequently used materials in Kiefer's practice as an artist, at least for the last quarter century, during which time its implications have varied although certain emphases have remained constant. Lead is the base metal from which the alchemist aspires to produce gold. Kiefer's interest in alchemy has centred in the metaphorical resonance it has for his own painting, although he has also taken seriously the spiritual ambitions of the alchemist and his vision of parallel universes. The artist told me he had been 'persecuted for years' by a dictum of Robert Fludde: 'everything on earth has its equivalent star in heaven'. This conception of nature as reflecting a cosmic order gives value and coherence to the base, material existence of humanity even if cannot be grasped by the individual consciousness. On the other hand, the spectral correspondence produces restlessness and dissatisfaction, incessant striving of the intellect to outreach its limitations and possess its heavenly equivalent. That way, madness, the Faustian wager and the will to power. Kiefer uses lead most spectacularly in his atlases of the stars, cross-sections of the galaxy visible from earth. The relations between individual stars are proposed in the tracing of geometrical diagrams, while at the foot of the painting, the surface material is torn aside to reveal an underlying representation of architectural structures on earth repeating the same proportions. These structures are often modelled on the observatory buildings at Jaipur, themselves monumental equivalents of hand-held astronomical instruments. The scaling up and scaling down holds in tension idealism and self-delusion. The plane of the stars is represented on sheets of lead, suggesting that the material the artist hopes to spiritualize is finally recalcitrant and non-convertible, and that his attempts at transformation are liable to back-fire. The stars themselves are denoted by their astronomical numbers, reflections of a NASA project whose insane drive for completeness in an infinitely expanding universe is ironized by the deposits of number tags collecting in drifts beneath paintings and elsewhere on site. The final degradation is the silting up of these fallen stars in run-off channels and drainage gutters.
Kiefer's design for Barjac translates into three dimensional form the obsessions of so many of his paintings that divide their attention between the material and the spiritual, the terrestrial and the celestial, the historical and the mythical. Dominating the entire property is the most grandiose and ambivalent fabrication of all, the prototype of the stage design for the 2003 production of Richard Strauss's opera, Electra, at the Teatro San Carlo, Naples. This gigantic structure consists of four tiers of fluted concrete, arranged as a series of terraces, like the enormous mould of an inverted ziggurat. As a building project, it reaches higher than anything else at Barjac, yet is organized around an immense and inexorable downward pull that expresses the fortunes of the house of Atreus and, more generally, a sense of history as dilapidation, as a series of narratives the more vulnerable the greater the scale of their ambition. One gets the feeling that if he could have done, Kiefer would have constructed it of lead. The whole building is a plummet, dragging the viewer down into its depths, just as the cistern beneath it reflects in its leaden ceiling the imagined plane of the stars. Nothing at Barjac rests on its own level. Kiefer is still adding to the design, drawing new buildings onto the existing plans, tunnelling into previously untouched areas of the hillside. Each move tightens the system of cross-references. Occasionally, we see the satellites of this system crossing our paths through the art-world, but this is the constellation to which they naturally return.
Rod Mengham
Rod Mengham is Reader in Modern English Literature at the University of Cambridge, where he is also Curator of Works of Art at Jesus College.
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