Anselm Keifer - The Waves of Sea and Love

Viewing Anselm Keifer's current exhibition at White Cube Hoxton after the Japanese tsunami turns the pathos quotient up high as Keifer's work explores the fragility of humanity in the face of oceanic forces.

Keifer's installations commonly form rooms which submerge the viewer in their imagery, an approach which is particularly relevant to his theme of Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (The Waves of Sea and Love) with its sense of barely keeping our heads above water.

Twenty-four panoramic seascapes hung three deep fill the side walls of the main gallery. These are photographs which Keifer has distressed using various techniques including electrolysis. Peaceful static scenes of beach and ocean are stirred into violent life by these methods and superimposed on each is a gynaecological instrument suggestive of figures running, jumping or swimming in the maelstrom. Five vitrines in the centre of the gallery each hold a book of seascapes over which Keifer has drawn geometric diagrams and mathematical formulae, a reference perhaps to humanity's attempts (ultimately futile in responding to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami) to map and measure the forces of nature. A final work fills the end gallery wall, a massive abstract canvas before which an armed but rusting frigate has been hung. This is, perhaps, the end to which the sea returns the resistence of humanity. In an upper room, Keifer has set a series of smaller-scale photographic seascapes each featuring an image of himself swimming which is to varying degrees overwhelmed by his distressing of paper and image.  

Keifer creates spaces for contemplation. His spaces bring viewers to a full stop through their sublime scale and through the awareness they impart of our place within nature and the cosmos. The title of the upper room series 'I hold all the Indias in my hand' is a quotation from the seventeenth-century Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo who writes of a man gaining a burgeoning consciousness of the universe and his place within it through contemplation of a ring bearing a portrait of his lover. "I hold the starry plains of heaven," he writes, "I hold all Indias in my hand." Keifer's work undercuts our hubris.

Click here to read my meditation on Keifer's Palmsonntag (Palm Sunday).

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The Velvet Underground - Ocean.