Anselm

 Grandiose, monumental, and a bit inhuman:  these words describe both Anselm Kiefer's art and Wim Wenders' laudatory documentary about the artist.  This last description is inaccurate:  Wenders' 2023 documentary is really about the artist's works; we learn next to nothing about the artist and his motivations.  The movie is spectacularly beautiful and, notwithstanding it's rather austere premises, compelling. I saw the picture streaming on Amazon Prime.  Viewed in a proper movie theater, in its authentic format (the movie is shot in very high definition video and designed to be projected in 3D), I presume the visual spectacle would be overwhelming.  As with his 3D film about Pina Bausch (Pina), Wenders assumes, reasonably in my view, that a documentary about an artist should be about his or her art almost exclusively and that the artist's biography, opinions, and personal affairs are, more or less, irrelevant.  This approach assures a glorious and detailed accounting of Kiefer's enormous art works viewed from an Olympian altitude, a bird's eye perspective (often literally since the picture makes extensive use of drone footage) that treats the work as abstract manifestations of nature.  The film doesn't show us anyone examining or reacting to Kiefer's work; we see the artist striding through his vast ateliers but there are no talking heads, no critics, no gallery-goers --  it's as if the artist works solely for himself, making environments and objects for his own personal delectation.  Of course, Wenders eschews any crass interest in the commercial aspects of Kiefer's enterprise -- on the evidence of the movie, Kiefer is fantastically wealthy, financially equipped to acquire huge landscapes that he stocks with his art and, obviously, employs a small army of assistants, librarians, accountants and the like.  None of this is documented:  we see Kiefer lying on his back, half naked in one of his studios and, later, he reclines on a tiny bed in an ascetic-looking garret, but these are metaphoric or symbolic images:  how Kiefer lives and where, his companions, wives, girlfriends, friends, children -- all of these things are completely absent from the picture.  This approach is rigorous and conceptually valid but a little astringent -- we really have no sense of what the artist is like; he is, Wenders posits, defined entirely by his work.  The film is a companion to Wenders' Pina, a documentary about the famous choreographer's works, also made in 3D and similarly remote and reticent in tone-- the first name titles of the movies suggest that they are intrinsically related, bookends as it were.  And despite the first name titles ("Pina" and "Anselm"), the pictures are clinically remote, respectful, even hagiographic.

In an early scene, shot from an aerial perspective (Kiefer's studios are cathedrals that seem to contain rooms a hundred feet high), we see the artist, a bald, lanky and athletic old man, tugging a huge work mounted on a dolly into his warehouse.  He nonchalantly shoves the vast object -- it's not really a canvas but a 20 by 40 foot surface all cauterized by fire, a landscape made from burnt reeds, gallons of excrement-colored paint applied impasto, and heaps of congealed lead -- across the floor toward a half-dozen similarly monumental 'paintings.'  It seems hazardous to simply let the object roll across the concrete floor -- what if it were to slam into one of the other paintings?  But, then, you think, what if it did collide with the other works?  all of them have similarly ravaged surfaces and any damage inflicted would just be part of the work's allure -- these things look like they have gone through volcanic eruptions.  In his current warehouse, somewhere near Paris, we see Kiefer riding his bicycle, touring a factory full of art objects and enormous stacks of industrial materials, a place that seems to be about the size of a rural Minnesota county.  The place is endless, dauntingly clean and well-organized, a vast storeroom extending to the horizon. The film commences with crickets chirping and huge exteriors -- Kiefer has made life-size armatures of women's clothing, spectral white figures without arms or legs and mostly headless (some of these apparitions have wood stacked up where their heada would be or are equipped with metal rings and loops like the orbits of sub-atomic particles.)  In the distance, towers rise, weird haphazard structures made from stacked concrete boxes, irregularly shaped artificial ruins.  The structures look like campaniles and the skyline is eccentric, dilapidated, a forest of towers like those in San Gimignano -- archival footage relates these buildings to the ruins of German cities devastated by aerial bombardment:   in several scenes, we see armies of women digging through rubble fallen from buildings whose facades have collapsed exposing the naked insides of the rooms in the wrecked structures -- these campaniles are similarly open, as if the sheathing that covered the tower has collapsed to reveal the interiors of the chambers stacked one atop another.  (Kiefer was born in 1945 and the film posits that much of his art is conspicuously post-war, that is, obsessed with the ruins of Hitler's Germany -- this is a commonplace about Kiefer's work and, certainly, there's nothing surprising or interpretatively innovative about Wenders' depiction of the art.)  The movie proceeds in a generally chronological fashion organized around imagery of Kiefer's studios, places that became progressively larger and larger.  There's a nod to the controversy surrounding the artist's Venice biennial pavilion, claimed by some to be proto-fascist or neo-fascist.  (Kiefer says that his work certainly is not anti-fascist because this would be a libel - Beleidigung -- impugning those who were legitimately anti-fascist in the war and paid for their political opposition with their lives; at this early stage in his career, Kiefer espouses some modesty about the role of art in life -- by the end of the film, Kiefer has constructed elaborately vast landscapes and enormous ruinous structures that blur any rational distinction between art and life.)  All of the familiar touchstones influencing Kiefer are glanced-at:  we hear the poet Paul Celan reading Todesfuge, his famous concentration camp poem, and. later, we see another poet, Ingeborg Bachmann reciting verse -- Kiefer has inscribed many of his art works with phrases from both writers, inscriptions scrawled into the magma-like surfaces of the painting, neatly handwritten.  Heidegger's famous encounter with Celan is duly mentioned and there are several shots of the famous philosopher at his cottage in the Black Forest or walking pompously in the woods.  Beginning in 1992, Kiefer set about creating a massive environment at Barjac, France.  The film tours the premises consisting of clay catacombs, some of them flooded, campanile towers, and what seems to be an elaborate rococo villa with its walls seared and charred with Kiefer's murals.  Underground colonnades and ruinous cloister walks on the surface extend to vanishing points hundreds of feet away -- Wender's 3D camerawork features steep perspective shots along seemingly endless arcades and walkways.  In one scene the camera moves through an aerial conduit, hundreds of yards long, suspended over the mangled red earth of the compound.  Gigantic mazes open to our view -- sometimes, the camera tracks behind the tall figure of Kiefer, clad like Frank Lloyd Wright, in a sort of cape and black hat.  Huge amphitheaters are full of "petrified" fighter jets and silos open onto crumbling clay missiles that seem kin to the forests of bell-towers on the hillsides.  Kiefer never makes one example of a thematic motif, but rather constructs hundreds of the things -- we see football-field size galleries full of bicycles with wings, or plane wings snapped off the fuselage and strewn around like the rotors of vast windmills.  Some sequences show Kiefer slapping mud-like pigment onto his works, raised high over the studio floor on a scissors lift.  In other scenes, the artist sprays fire from a torch onto his canvases while an assistant trails along splashing the burning surfaces with water from a hose.   Kiefer spills buckets molten lead onto canvases while a couple helpers admonish him to not let the lava splash -- "but I want it to splash," he says.  The film ends with a Kiefer marching around the Piazza San Marco in Venice.  He has an installation there in some sort of renaissance structure, his mangled surfaces seem to coexist with immense paintings by Tintoretto.  Although he now enjoys "old master" status, Kiefer says that he feels banned, always in exile, always "on the way"-- a formulation that cites Heidegger.  Wenders stages a dream sequence.  Kiefer walks a tightrope above a landscape of bombed-out ruins, several of his own campanile standing in the rubble.  To balance himself on the tightrope, Kiefer holds an eight-foot stem of a sunflower with a blackened blossom on one end.  This is a reference to Kiefer's youthful travel to Arles following the footsteps of Van Gogh -- the German has always been famous; in High School, he won an international award that financed his travels in southern France where he is said to have made over "300 sketches and paintings" of sites significant to the Dutch painter.  (Apparently, this exploit was covered in detail by the media in his home city of Duesseldorf.)  In one picture, we see him next to Joseph Beuys, both wielding scary-looking lances -- with a hundred other art students (under the leadership of the charismatic Beuys), this was a protest about the destruction of the German forests, that is, an environmental protest.  The film's penultimate shot is a landscape at Barjac, a site now abandoned, more or less, by Kiefer, with a huge statue of wings mounted on a pedestal on a ridge top.  Kiefer is standing next to the statue but, then, vanishes.  After the titles, we see a last work by the artist:  it shows a glowing golden void like a movie-screen in an empty excoriated auditorium with rows of seats like geological formations facing the illumined wall.  

Wenders stages some scenes from Kiefer's youth using the artist's son who is now middle-aged.  Wenders own child or grandchild appears as a spooky-looking urchin wandering around the artist's installations or reading poetry.  The little boy looks like a lemur, a nocturnal creature.  The film is fascinating and like Kiefer's late works built on an enormous scale.  It exudes a fatal magnificence -- it's not a critique of the Fascist architecture of Albert Speer (his designs are frequently alluded to in Kiefer's work) but a revival of Speer's work in another context and by other means.  As far as the picture is concerned, Kiefer does nothing but make art; he has no other existence and, on the evidence of insanely prolific creativity shown in the film, this seems to be a truthful characterization of the old man's life.  In one scene, we watch him wandering through a library of art books -- the library seems to be about the size of train-station.  Kiefer gets down a book and carefully studies it.  Many of the books are as big as a man, creations by the artist -- in one, there are yard-long pictures of Greenland, images of the Arctic landscape taken from the air.  The book is bound in leather and it takes a forklift to move it:  "here," Kiefer says, "we have the skin of the earth."

(Around 1986 or 1987, Kiefer's work became famous in the United States, primarily through a big retrospective mounted at the Chicago Institute of Art.  I planned to go to the show with my son, Martin, who was then about seven.  But things had gone wrong in my life and I was in the middle of a divorce then and had no money.  I couldn't afford the gas and lodging to drive to Chicago.  I recall wondering if I could come up with enough cash to make the trip.  Ultimately, I decided that it wouldn't be prudent to travel at that time.  I was sad about this and, when I walked out to my car, having concluded that I couldn't attend the show, I slipped on the ice, flew through the air, and landed on my back hard on the sidewalk -- the wind was knocked out of me and, for some reason, I always associate Anselm Kiefer with my bad fall.  I solaced myself by buying the catalog of the exhibition which I read several times and studied fervently.  Kiefer is so insanely productive that he has initiated about a dozen new schools of work since that time and, it seems, that every collection in the United States has one or more of his grandiose objects -- for instance, there is a great Kiefer in the contemporary wing in the art museum in Des Moines, Iowa.  Viewed in reproduction, Kiefer's work is impressive but lacks the monumental "wow" factor that the objects induce when seen in person.  I attended a show of paintings by Otto Dix and his followers at the Deicherhalle in Hamburg.  There was a floor-to-ceiling Kiefer, forty feet tall, showing a pour of lead running down the surface of the canvas at the center of a pale, cream-colored shaft of light -- the thing literally took my breath away.)