Anselm Kiefer and the Art of Allusion: Dialectics of the EarlyMargareteandSulamithPaintings

Abstract

IN A WORLD WHERE ATROCITIES HAPPEN on a scale that would have been unimaginable prior to the twentieth century, we must contend with the inadequacy of language, whether visual or textual, to account for the horror of these experiences. What is the use of art, poetry, or, we might add, criticism, in light of these events? Theodor Adorno grappled with these questions when he commented that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. In contrast, Anselm Kiefer suggests the possibility that through art we can begin to be redeemed from these horrors. But because Kiefer's philosophy relies on art's representation of even the most reprehensible perspectives of history, he places some heady responsibilities on his critics-both to decide if good politics is essential to good art and to assess whether Kiefer's art reflects good politics, even if it is good art. Though his art is now rarely viewed as controversial (see Hutchinson 2), Kiefer's notorious Besetzungen or Occupations photographs, in which he performs the taboo Sieg Heil gesture at major World War II battle sites and domestic spaces, provide a useful example of what is at issue in his work (see, especially, Arasse 3840). These smaller works were exhibited at the 1980 Venice Biennale, together with larger paintings and sculptures by George Bazelitz that, as Liza Saltzman describes them, delved into myths of the Nibelungen, Wagnerian scenarios, German intellectual history, and nationalistic militarism, all rendered on a scale and with a palette that was seen to bespeak a nascent, or renascent and potent, German national identity replete with all its ghosts (108). German critics were scandalized and deeply concerned about how international viewers might per-