ALLEN FISHER: Engagement and Reservation: Anselm Kiefer at the White Cube Gallery

Anselm Kiefer’s installation at White Cube. 11th March – 9th April 2011

“Engagement and reservation with Anselm Kiefer’s recent installation at the Hoxton White Cube raises matters that I want to revisit or bring to the fore. DES MEERES UND DER LIEBE WELLEN [The Waves of Sea and Love] is the installation title and the name given to the main displays.”

“I start with a description of the installation, the title and the theme. A preliminary discussion of Kiefer’s use of Euclidean diagrams follows. I then elaborate on the description of the main displays and potentials for meaning. This leads to a brief discussion of the use of more than one media and the use of vitrines. The article then branches into a deeper consideration of the use of geometry and drawing as modes of thought. The installation is discussed as a whole and with a brief note on a lecture recently given by Kiefer. There is then a glimpse of Kiefer’s change of thematic attention and the apparent shift from paradox to simplification. The contemporary human condition and environmental damage, as part of his thematic thought, is then considered.

“After this a different excursion is made into the world Kiefer appears to associate with through theosophy and psychology with particular reference to Rudolf Steiner, Carl Jung and alchemy. There is then a return to drawing and geometry as part of the thought-feeling-willing process involved in Kiefer’s facture. This business is elaborated, almost as a tangent into an extended selection of quotations from The Origins of Geometry by Edmund Husserl, some brief commentary from Jesse Norman on Euclid and then Claudia Brodsky Lacour on architectural thought. The article concludes with an abrupt statement, without recourse to reconciliation.

To read this article click here: Engagement and reservation

To access the Anselm Kiefer exhibition page at the White Cube website, click here: http://www.whitecube.com/exhibitions/ak%202011/

Allen Fisher is a poet, artist, publisher and art historian, lives in Hereford. first published in 1968. Publisher of Edible Magazine and Spanner and co-publisher Aloes Books. Worked in performance and installations from 1971. Exhibited in many shows from Fluxus Britannica Tate Britain to Lifting from Fear, King’s Gallery York.  Examples of his work are in the Tate Collection, the Living Museum, Iceland and various private collections. His long poetry sequence 1982-2005, Gravity as a consequence of shape, was published in 3 volumes as Gravity, Entanglement and Leans; other recent books were Proposals: poem-image-commentary 2010; Birds, poems 2009; Confidence in lack, essays 2007; Singularity Stereo, poems 2006, and the collected poetry of Place 2005, from the 1970s; his recent tour of work has been under the banner Complexity Manifold in Buffalo, Albany, Ohio, New York, London and Cambridge. check out: http:www.allenfisher.co.uk

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