For a man who creates massive, magnificently moody meditations on mortality, Anselm Kiefer is remarkably chipper and chirpy when interviewed. Tim Marlow, his interviewer in oe of a selection of Kiefer films able to be viewed at White Cube Bermondsey throughout Il Mistero delle Cattedrali, clearly enjoyed the encounter while professing himself slightly mystified by some of Kiefer's more mystical responses.
Kiefer was very clear about his creative processes, beginning with a clear concept which inspires him to create but which then undergoes significant change in the process of creation with the resulting work often not relating to the original concept at all. Concepts are clearly of significance for Kiefer with this exhibition deriving from his interest in alchemical ideas and processes but his works are so layered with significance that they are much more than and are about much more than the animating concept.
Ronald Goetz has claimed Kiefer as 'a deliberately, if idiosyncratically, religious painter.' He argues that allusions to Kiefer's 'own strangely skewed versions of Christianity, Judaism, gnosticism and alchemy abound, and he has acknowledged that he thinks a great deal about religion ‘‘because science provides no answers."' 'Somber, guilt-ridden, accusing, mocking, enigmatic -- Kiefer’s vision of life, religion, ideology, national identity and history has been charred by the flames of the Holocaust ... The ‘‘God is dead’’ theologians and our current theological deconstructionists can claim a profound ally in Kiefer.'
This is to overlook however the extent to which Kiefer's is a transformative art; one that deals out distressed, decaying or dying imagery and objects in ways that create awe-ful, powerful works which overwhelm with their size, physicality, emotions and ideas. He scores and scars his images into thick paint which dries and cracks to form expansive wastelands in front of which symbolic found objects are hung. His oxidisation technique, another alchemical aspect, seems to mean that these works are never resolved but are always changing, always in flux.
'You have to find a golden path between controlling and not controlling, between order and chaos' Kiefer has observed. 'If there is too much order, it is dead; if there is too much chaos, it doesn't cohere. I'm continually negotiating a path between these two extremes.' This is the creative process which, as he notes, accelerates 'the transformation that is already present in things' and which brings his dead objects and images back to significant, signifying life.
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Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - People Ain't No Good.
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