Götz Adriani talks to Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer. Paul Celan - Jakobs himmlisches Blut benedeiet von Äxten (Paul Celan - Jacob's heavenly blood blessed by axes), 2005.
GÖTZ ADRIANI: In 1990, the Kunsthalle Tubingen displayed all the books you had made between 1969 and 1990. A comprehensive catalogue of your works accompanied the exhibition. In the meanwhile, you have continued to create books, and the latest ones are on exhibition in the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery under the title Für Paul Celan. Are these books different from the earlier ones, especially the lead books that were made from 1987 on?
ANSELM KIEFER: I do believe the later books are different, but not eminently. There is no linear development. My movements are rather circular; I come back to earlier matters again and again, change them and see them from a new angle. It is not like what Marxists do with history: take it as an ascending line...
GA: ... so there is no development that ought to document a supposed progress.
AK: No. There is no eschatology.
GA: How would you describe the close connections between paintings and sculptural works on the one hand and the books on the other? Are materials dealt with in a more liberal, conceptual way in the books? Do the books — as quasi-scores — contain leitmotifs that are afterwards taken up in the large pictorial compositions? Or is it the other way around: do the books reflect things that have existed before and place them in a new context?
AK: The way things are dealt with in the books is somewhat easier, because I do not have to strive for finality. The composition of books does not have to be fixed once and for all. A picture is an appearance; you see what is right and what is wrong straight away. A book will also reveal that after a while. But there are always more options to a book than to a picture, and sometimes that makes working on a book relaxing in a way. Also, working on a book often gave me new ideas. It’s like a laboratory, because things take place in the form of processes there. That is why a book always gives you an excuse: that page was done earlier ... A picture leaves no excuses. A picture Is either good or not.
GA: Do books still have the same importance as they did in the seventies and eighties?
AK: Yes. For me, the books are still more important than the pictures. In practical terms: they take up sixty percent of my time. I will probably never stop making books because — and now I'm getting very personal — I believe everyone has an unfulfilled ardent longing. And I would have loved to become a writer.
GA: Oh, that’s new to me!
AK: Well, yes. And I actually do write a lot. I have written entire volumes of books. But you have to concentrate on a single field to get to the bottom of it and pursue it profoundly. That is why, for the time being, I am still a painter.
GA: There are several examples for this twofold interest. Young Cézanne felt he had a vocation for poetry, and his close friend Zola had set his sights on becoming a painter.
AK: Stifter also wanted to become a painter. He painted for 45 years; he thought he was more important as a painter.
GA: But let’s get back to you. Is the change in the book materials — from paper to cardboard and paperboard, to the plaster-grounded canvasses or lead foils — that is, from handy and open materials to monumental, closed ones, from lightness to ponderosity — !s that change symptomatic of your complete works?
AK: Yes, as a transformation from openness to closeness. If I look at old libraries today, they seem closed to me as well, as far as the materials are concerned. I believe the term 'book' in a wider sense, considered as a tradition of messages, goes a long way back. There were stone, loam, parchment, clay tablets. palimpsests ... All these materials were used by men and women to express themselves. I have made pictures of clay as well. As far as that goes, there is no linear development regarding my materials, either. New ones are merely added. The latest works are the runes which are also a type of book, even though they are hewn in stone.
GA: Especially in the seventies — for instance with Dieter Roth — books often became three-dimensional objects.
AK: Well, Dieter Roth played with the term 'book' ...
GA: ... whereas for you, the contents always play a certain role.
AK: Yes, of course. To me, the contents are important in any case, even in painting. Without contents, I wouldn't paint.
GA: Could we bring it down to the following denominator: the more excessive the materials, the more sealed do the contents remain.
AK: I wouldn't say that. Or what do you mean by 'excessive'?
GA: The lead books, for example.
AK: Do you mean time-consuming?
GA: No. I mean the handling.
AK: Oh. their weight.
GA: The lead books are almost immovable, and the pages can hardly be turned.
AK: From that point of view, the large books there used to be in churches cannot be handled, either. You can’t hold them in your hand ...
GA: ... because they were symbols of godliness to some extent.
AK: My books also stand for something; perhaps for the God we have lost.
GA: Do the unreadable lead books, some of which have been compiled to gigantic libraries or piled up to monuments, with pages that can no longer be accessed, still have a meaning of their own? Or are they metaphors for what Is remote or what has been 'written off'?
AK: The lead books are in fact readable. In a joint effort, one could take them out. But you are talking about 'meaning', and I say, there is no such thing! I can't make out a meaning of the world. The world is simply meaningless. If there were a meaning, it would not become meaningless just because it is not apprehended. There would either be one, even if it were unrecognised, or there would be none.
GA: Does the form of the books triumph over the verbal contents in the leaden libraries?
AK: That is the old academic question of form and content. I have never really dealt with it, because it doesn't occur to me. As far as I am concerned, there is something that absorbs me: I have an experience or a thought. I bring it into a form. I either write or paint or I make a book. But I don’t think about whether or not the form is more powerful than the content. But you are probably getting at something else: in my case, the form is so elaborate that the craft or artistic skills have to become so great that, eventually, it’s expecting too much. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?
GA: Yes. Exactly.
AK: At that stage, things run the risk of becoming l'art pour l'art. And I want to avoid that, of course.I have never tried to create an art movement or a new style. That was never my intention, and I wouldn't be able to anyway. I have always merely tried to express what occupies me, In my own way. In that, I act as though there were meaning, of course. I give, I create meaning. But on treacherous ground. Without any foundation whatsoever. I cannot say what we are based on. I do not know why the world exists. I have no idea. I cannot speak of a -thing-in-itself: as Kant did, or even Schopenhauer. I do not know our foundation; I do not know what makes for our basis. All we can do is try to get from one cliff to the next.
GA: That reminds me of Hölderlin’s desperate words: '... like water thrown from cliff to cliff, year after year, down into the unknown'. While Picasso said 'l do not seek, I find', Hölderlin wrote '... we are nothing; what we seek is everything'.
AK: There is not actually much of a disparity, because Picasso is not saying that he finds meaning. All he is saying is that he makes no effort. He simply finds. We shouldn't over- interpret that. Picasso is gifted, whereas other artists exert themselves tremendously. Hölderlin means the same as I do.
GA: For thousands of years, mankind have stored their knowledge, experience, and memories, their myths and religions on clay tablets or, later on, in books, and have kept them from falling into oblivion. In early Christianity, a book was even the symbol of the undepictable God. Just think of the mosaics in Ravenna, where the enthroned book can represent God taken literally. Are you erecting final memorials to books in an upcoming age of other storage mediums and methods? Are books shown monumental deference one last time?
AK: Well, I have a laptop myself, and I always wonder what it actually is. When I use my typewriter, I always have heaps of books gathered around me. With the laptop, there is nothing!
GA: How do you work with this nothingness?
AK: In different ways. There are certain things I write by hand. But for everyday things that are done automatically, so to speak, I use my laptop. And then there are the characters on the pictures which are 'writing' in the classical sense.
GA: So the books or the piles of books are a memorial to a medium that is about to become obsolete?
AK: I haven't decided yet whether I want to consider books obsolete. I don’t think so. The human brain is organised in a certain way. When I read a book, I know exactly what was written on a left or on a right page, what was in the beginning and what was at the end. With a laptop, there is no such thing. I can't work with it if I have to compose what I write. In that case, I need a printout.
GA: Your books have various functions, of course, and those of the book piles reach all the way to actual sculptures (Für Paul Celan — Ukraine, Für Paul Celan - Archiv, Für Paul Celan — Runengespinst).
AK: The piles of books are like stratums. They have been stratified, and they rest on each other. Books standing on a shelf are different. In that respect, the piles are memorials. Geology is a memorial as well, because it displays historical times. There is the time of mankind, of history, of geology, and of our universe. So, from that point of view, we are talking about a memorial! The reason why I hesitated to answer was because I did not want to say that the piles of books were a memorial for our lost culture of books.
GA: I would even say that books and reading will experience a renaissance.
AK: Yes, because of the haptic experience and the event character involved. On the Internet, everything is always there. When I go to my studio in the morning, very early, I first choose a book, almost half asleep. For instance, when I made those rune pictures, I had found a book about runes in the morning. But that was really a coincidence. When working with a laptop, you search differently. But that is hardly important to me. For me. unity evolves from the library as a stock of books, from what I am currently working on, and from the photos I made half a year ago, for example.
GA: Do the book monuments stand their ground against the dissolution processes of what is transitory?
AK: That touches on subjects that go beyond the contents of a book. A book as a library, a book as a sediment, a book as a palimpsest. I often take a book as a cover, too, and thus as a monument. A library is a selection, so it is a private matter. The Internet, on the other hand, aims at completeness. It is not a selection.
GA: When you expose your works to the elements, to the influence of the weather and the environment, is that to demonstrate that, in the end, nature wins out against the products of our culture?
AK: That rather has something to do with the idea or preference of mixing or exchanging times. When exposing a book to the weather, I make use of geological time. That is important to me.
GA: As well as the fact that nature changes the material?
AK: Yes; things change without me interfering, in a geological framework.
GA: Does the baroque notion of vanitas play a role here, or the idea that the achievements of our so-called civilisation hardly stand a chance against the elements and their sometimes devastating transformations?
AK: I do not display the vanitas concept; I take it as granted. For me. it is more important to grapple with a time we cannot live in ourselves. I place materials in another period. It is a kind of alchemy. What alchemists do is nothing unnatural. They make things happen that will happen anyway. They want to create gold, but in this sense of transformation. The only problem is that things ought to happen faster, and that is what makes it so dangerous. The alchemists combine a lifetime with geological, universal time. That’s the interesting point, because they place themselves in a wider context in doing so.
GA: There are fewer references to the universe in the books than in the pictures.
AK: There are books with planetary constellations, also, where certain plants have been incorporated.
GA: In some of the piles of books, there are layers of plants that penetrate the books. Are they also to be seen as elements of nature within the framework of culture?
AK: I was rather thinking of the monuments of the Aztecs. There, nature is an element of transitoriness. In this context, I am interested in how the plants make their way into the lead which is said to be everlasting.
GA: Referring to something else, you once said you 'think vertically'. This vertical approach is supplemented by the wide horizons and the horizontal superposition in your works, and it spells out history and stories, layer by layer, thus making them accessible and experienceable.
AK: Yes. History does evolve in the picture. It may take two days, two years, or twenty years; that depends. Even that is an analogy to history. I penetrate the material vertically.
GA: In your buildings and installations, layers of nature are skimmed and replaced by layers of culture.
AK: I wouldn't call that skimming, but sounding out. Skimming is always done layer by layer, but I sound things out vertically.
GA: Is it your intention to open up the depths of time spans until you reach their myths and legends, or to grasp the endless celestial spheres of our universe — even though we often do not see the light of stars until they have long become extinct?
AK: Both — as far as possible. The macrocosm corresponds with the microcosm. Like the beautiful saying goes: 'Each plant on earth matches a star in the sky'.
GA: Your books are, above all, picture books. They contain only few words, phrases, and quotes. The traditional relation between text and illustrations no longer applies. Before, however, you mentioned that books are unlike pictorial end products, because things take place in the form of processes.
AK: Yes. But not in the sense of a story. The books tell us about the process of the work.
GA: In your latest works, you 'apply' books to pictures (Für Paul Celan, Jacobs Himmlisches Blut - Für Paul Celan, Dein Hausritt die finstere Welle, Für Paul Celan - Meersschaum). How come picture titles taken from Germanic mythology (Das Balder Lied, Was sagte Odin zum toten Balder) or rune landscapes that bring to mind Nordic characters (Tannhauser, Das letzte Fuder) were associated with the German-speaking Jewish poet Paul Celan, for whose poetry — made up of remembering and forgetting, of Margarete and Sulamite — you have found impressive pictorial ciphers even before?
AK: It simply turned out that way. With Celan, there is a similar rupture: His poems are written in German, and he is very attached to the German language, but he lives in France. Now, the runes are Germanic or Nordic ... The fact that the National Socialists misappropriated them is a different story.
GA: After having moved to the Provence, you concentrated on Jewish mysticism. Ever since the late 12th century, its representatives had thought up the Cabbala to hand down what cannot be handed down.
AK: Jewish mysticism is so interesting because it is much more complex and wide-ranging than Christian mythology which deliberately restricted itself politically by distancing itself from Neoplatonism and the gnosis. Such an institutionalisation is, of course, an impoverishment. The Jewish tradition, on the other hand, Is wider, because It accepted more.
GA: Why don't you place Celan in this context? Did the fact that Celan once wrote about the 'Runengespinst' inspire your rune pictures?
AK: No, I was surprised when I read it.
GA: In his poem Tubingen. Janner, Celan deals with Hölderlin as an ill man who had withdrawn from public life, and he writes about his utmost obliviousness to the world.
AK: (reads aloud): 'Zur Blindheit tiberredete Augen [...], Erinnerung an schwimmende Hölderlinturme, mowenumschwirrt [...].'
GA: Hölderlin’s out-of-touch notion of God can be traced back to the Spanish Cabbalists of the 15th century. For the poet, too, the Gods have turned their backs on the world; they spare mankind their all-pervasiveness: '... zwar leben die Gotter, aber droben in anderer Welt. Endlos wirken sie da und scheinens wenig zu achten, ob wir leben. So sehr schonen die Himmlischen uns ...'.
AK: Of course. God has abandoned mankind. In the Cabbala, that is the inception of the world. In Jewish mysticism, God is much more than he is to us. He is not a person; he is everything. And that is not spoken of any longer. But God must make way. That is why he clears room wherever something evolves. It remains unsaid whether things evolve thanks to him or independent of him. With Hölderlin and Heidegger, all that comes from the Cabbala.
GA: You often take photos as a starting point for your works. They are supplemented by other materials and reworked. It is noticeable that the latest book works show winter landscapes that were photographed around Salzburg and resemble earlier landscapes in the Odenwald. Time and again, the pronounced perspectives in your pictures stir me. What are these special perspectives really about?
AK: Perspectives have something to do with vanishing points. so, with something artificial. That is an aid. A vanishing point. because all lines vanish towards the background. The vanishing point is the point they disappear into. It’s an odd word, come to think of it.
GA: Paul Celan who left clear traces behind in your works with his anthologies Mohn und Gedachtnis, Der Sand aus den Urnen and, not least, with the Todesfuge which was written in the year you were born, also seems to be a kind of vanishing point, or rather a focal point of the current exhibition. Why was the exhibition dedicated to Celan?
AK: That was a result of the working process. An exhibition is always a compilation of certain works and thoughts. For me. that compellingly led to the dedication to Celan.
Barjac, 1 June 2005