'Art is difficult, it's not entertainment.'
Posted: 30/10/14 09:07 | 4 Comments
German artist Anselm Kiefer’s show at the Royal Academy opened at the end of September and the quote above appeared in an article about him in 2011 on the occasion of another London show of his work, at White Cube.
What does he mean?
Looking at Kiefer’s own work is a good place to start. When encountering his work it is apparent that he is saying something important about, well, about something important. His work tends to be epic in size and works to overawe an audience — you generally look up at a Kiefer — but it can be seductive too, rewarding close scrutiny. He has an impressive command of detail as well as scale. It is easy to feel ill-equipped to deal with the work, that you are missing some specific knowledge like the plot of an opera or a detail from German history. That can alienate an audience and is where his ‘difficulty’ comes in.
Kiefer comes from a generation of German artists (from East and West), troubled by post-war guilt and the division of the country, so perhaps it’s not surprising that he believes that art ought to engage the intellect and not just decorate the world. (Of course, using intellect to work stuff out can be a variant on entertainment. If it wasn’t, people wouldn’t do crosswords.) It’s a pretty bold statement, though. There’s no equivocation and I wonder where he’d place the recent show of Matisse’s Cut Outs.
What does he mean?
Looking at Kiefer’s own work is a good place to start. When encountering his work it is apparent that he is saying something important about, well, about something important. His work tends to be epic in size and works to overawe an audience — you generally look up at a Kiefer — but it can be seductive too, rewarding close scrutiny. He has an impressive command of detail as well as scale. It is easy to feel ill-equipped to deal with the work, that you are missing some specific knowledge like the plot of an opera or a detail from German history. That can alienate an audience and is where his ‘difficulty’ comes in.
Kiefer comes from a generation of German artists (from East and West), troubled by post-war guilt and the division of the country, so perhaps it’s not surprising that he believes that art ought to engage the intellect and not just decorate the world. (Of course, using intellect to work stuff out can be a variant on entertainment. If it wasn’t, people wouldn’t do crosswords.) It’s a pretty bold statement, though. There’s no equivocation and I wonder where he’d place the recent show of Matisse’s Cut Outs.
In an age when art institutions of all sizes are promoted as somewhere to have a coffee and meet friends, the art can sometimes seem like an after thought. Kiefer is standing up for the possibility that art can be more than a backdrop to brunch. With some work on the part of the viewer, can resonate beyond the encounter. Something that matters. His work is stubborn: it stands there, not needing you to exist and yet not ‘speaking for itself’. But with a little knowledge about his work and/or German and European history it becomes much, much richer. We are used to having no difficulty when encountering culture — entertainment — which can make seeing contemporary art a disorienting experience.
One way to break into difficult work is to compare two works. Consider Jeff Koons (born 1955, ten years younger than Kiefer), whose work might be seen as entertainment, but it is also epic and no less seductive than Kiefer’s. He presents an inverse of the problem we might have when seeing the German’s work: something along the lines of, “Surely it can’t be THIS superficial? I must be missing something, it looks like a giant puppy made of flowers.” Playing one off against the other gives us a chance to think about what they do differently (or the same) and why that might be.
I’ll leave that to you.
Art often requires something, if only our curiosity and some reflection, to work effectively and there is no shame in feeling that you should have done some homework. It is one of the few arenas of culture that refuses to talk down to us and for that we should be grateful.
More information on the show currently at the Royal Academy can be found here
One way to break into difficult work is to compare two works. Consider Jeff Koons (born 1955, ten years younger than Kiefer), whose work might be seen as entertainment, but it is also epic and no less seductive than Kiefer’s. He presents an inverse of the problem we might have when seeing the German’s work: something along the lines of, “Surely it can’t be THIS superficial? I must be missing something, it looks like a giant puppy made of flowers.” Playing one off against the other gives us a chance to think about what they do differently (or the same) and why that might be.
I’ll leave that to you.
Art often requires something, if only our curiosity and some reflection, to work effectively and there is no shame in feeling that you should have done some homework. It is one of the few arenas of culture that refuses to talk down to us and for that we should be grateful.
More information on the show currently at the Royal Academy can be found here
Posted by author: Bryan
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Having visited the exhibition this week this was a timely post – and a most interesting one with which I heartily concur. I saw the Matisse cut-outs earlier this year, and felt the experience largely superficial, in contrast to the Kiefer which made me work hard, but left me with lots to think about and a sketchbook of ideas to follow up.
Thanks for your posts which I find fascinating.
http://suegilmoreblog.wordpress.com/2014/09/29/exhibition-anselm-kiefer-at-the-royal-academy/
I visited and wrote a piece for my contextual studies, then had the chance to go again. Before going I started to read the essay ‘Forests of Myth, Forests of Memory’, in the catalogue, which made links between some of the motifs in his work and his early life. It started making me thinking about this in terms of my own current work, which made the second visit a different experience. So I think you have to want to engage with it and reflect on the questions the work raises, and the questions aren’t always easy ones. Also it takes time which doesn’t sit well in the world of instant gratification. For me art is work that captures my attention some way, makes me think, but also has more to give
I found this a very impressive show, with plenty to think about as Kiefer is deeply philosophical.
Fortunately, I had done quite a lot of reading-up beforehand – even if I haven’t had the chance to read the catalogue yet. It strikes me that most of the monographs which are (relatively) easily obtainable from public libraries deal mainly with his early work and fall short when discussing Kiefer’s rationale .
The best overview of the historical background to his early thought, that I have found so far, is not in an art book as such but in Simon Schama’s `Landscape & Memory’ – Chapter 2 `Der Holzweg: The Track Through the Woods’.
That Schama book is superb.