ART CITIES:N.York-Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer’s monumental body of work represents a microcosm of collective memory, visually encapsulating a broad range of cultural, literary, and philosophical allusions. Fusing art and literature, painting and sculpture, Kiefer engages the complex events of history and the ancestral epics of life, death, and the cosmos. His boundless repertoire of imagery is paralleled only by the breadth of media palpable in his work.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Public Art Fund Archive
The first site-specific outdoor public sculpture ever to be commissioned for the United States from Anselm Kiefer is unveiled at the top of Rockefeller Center’s Channel Gardens, commissioned by the Public Art Fund and the real-estate company Tishman Speyer. The sculpture extends his vocabulary of striking mythic forms, presented at an arresting new scale. It explores longtime motifs in his work that, in this context and contemporary moment, resonate in powerful new ways. Titled “Uraeus”, it consists of a gigantic open book with eagle’s wings 914 cm in span, both made of lead, on top of a 600cm-tall lead-clad stainless steel column. Clustered around the base of the column are further outsize lead books, while a large snake coils up the column. Lead is one of the artist’s preferred materials for its soft, fluid properties traditionally associated with alchemical transformation, especially its second stage: dissolution. In Kiefer’s mind alchemy is “a symbol for the artist…you have to destroy and then recreate”. The title refers to the erect shape of the Egyptian cobra, associated with the serpent goddess Wadjet and a symbol of power and divine authority. The wings evoke the headdresses and necklaces worn by Egyptian royalty in homage to the vulture goddess Nekhbet. Wadjet and Nekhbet were the guardians of Lower and Upper Egypt, respectively, and following ancient Egypt’s unification, became the joint patrons of the civilization. When conceiving this work, Kiefer was recalling Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (1891), with its ideas of the will to power, the death of God, and the Übermensch or superman, as the ultimate aspiration of human beings. In Kiefer’s imagination, word and image, sacred text and icon, have the power to soar upwards, transcending reality and offering hope of redemption. Uraeus is both gigantic lectern and altar. The presence of the snake that insinuates itself at the foot of the column introduces an element of danger and death, as if the monument is being undermined. Yet in more than one mythology the serpent is a creature of wisdom and secret knowledge. Kiefer’s wide-ranging art, which embraces historical memory, politics, religion, and myth, is layered with such multiple meanings and paradoxes.
Info: Curator: Nicholas Baume, Commissioners: Public Art Fund and Tishman Speyer, Rockefeller Center, The Channel Gardens, Fifth Avenue, between 49th and 50th Streets, Duration: 2/5-22/7/18, www.publicartfund.org
