by Rod Mengham
This Warsaw is a city of disappearances, of a history leaching out through the stone and brick of a fabric that could not be more distressed, whose patched and stained facades offer maximum resistance to the wipe-clean surfaces of modernity. In a city whose foundations lie in sands and gravels, the archaeology is all above ground, the record of past conflicts only skin-deep beneath a thin layer of badly mixed plaster, apparently designed to fall away in time for each generation to have to rehearse its own strategies for oblivion.
In many ways, the most haunting of these images is Atkins’s Breughel-equivalent version of a new Babel, a monument to unrestrained ambition, to the desire for endlessly upward mobility that could not be more weighed down. This is his portrayal of the new television centre. The amount of pressure per square centimetre bearing down on this structure is like that on the ocean floor. But this solidified vacancy, this shrine to the dead zone, is also something else; it is the Colosseum, exactly as dreamed of by Hitler. It was only after the visit of Hitler and Albert Speer in the 1930s that the Colosseum was cleared of the centuries-old colonies of flora and fauna that had learned to live in its shadow, including several unique species. All this had to disappear when the building became the blueprint for a new culture, for a barbarous form of civilisation in which a ruin becomes the image of the future, not the image of the past; not a place that shows all the evidence of many cycles of growth and decline, of a process of continuous change. Photography is often thought of as a medium that fixes the moment, cryogenising it for future generations, but it can also become the means of showing how nothing is ever fixed, how the moment will always elude us, how all that can be recorded is irrevocable loss. And it is somewhere in the shifting sands between those two positions that Marc Atkins’s work is situated.
2003
Lares et Penates
The road to Barjac, the hilltop citadel where Anselm Kiefer has his living and working space, is long and serpentine if you approach it from Nimes. Nimes is the ideal startingpoint for this journey, its antiquity making it an iconographical primer for many of Kiefer’s preoccupations. Among its Roman remains, the amphitheatre in particular (standing in for the Colosseum of the early photographic sequence, Heroic Allegories) pays homage to a painter whose architectural spaces often remind us of the fatal legacy of the imperial idea, with its double dream of order and barbarism. But it is not this that makes me queasy so much as the lurching drive through the vineyards, in a businessclass Mercedes piloted by an air-brushed lady chauffeur. I want to throw up, but am conscious that in this milieu, using a Mercedes as a vomitorium would brand me as distinctly vulgar, if not an absolute barbarian.
But it’s OK. We are there and I am already inflating my lungs with the healthful South, with scents of pine, lavender, rosemary. The air of Provence in April, nothing more tonic. Of course, this airiness is not what Kiefer’s work is about, and it is not, ultimately, what Barjac is about. If in one sense the hilltop complex is a vast depot, a concatenated series of magazines in which paintings and objects accumulate, a concentration of German DNA distilling patiently in a southern landscape, it is also a vast marshalling yard, from which a series of epitomes of an entire world are despatched to another dimension, that of the remote portals of the art gallery circuit with its forms of restless public attention, drawn fitfully to Kiefer’s works via equal amounts of curiosity, suspicion, fear and deep recognition. Those who view Kiefer’s work do not easily forget it. Its imprint is decisive although its meanings remain hard to focus. Barjac feels very distant from the art world’s practices of exposure and mediation – the principles on which it has been conceived and constructed are those of retraction, withdrawal, self-reflection. It is not meant for public consumption, although its arrangements disclose a system of relations and a means of classification that make sense of decades of artistic activity.
Kiefer’s front drive is a kind of ceremonial way. Once through the security gate, you follow a route that girdles the summit of the hill, a small plateau in which the main holding areas are located. The mild gradients of this approach road, really a wide path, encourage a slow, almost stately, walking pace, suitable for meditation or for the tempo of a procession. The latter option springs to mind once you begin to register that there are stations on this route, a series of structures that resemble cultic buildings, with their walls much taller than they are wide, housing small installations of paintings and sculptural objects. Each of these artistic precincts is named for a figure or theme that occupies an important role in Kiefer’s imagination: ‘El Cid’, ‘Vergil’, ‘Vanitas’, ‘Asteroids’, ‘The Seven Palaces’, etc. Many of them refer to celestial systems, described in either scientific or mythological terms, while others commemorate moments in political or cultural history that serve as indices of humankind’s attempt to draw heaven down to earth, or emulate it, with disastrous results. The most recently completed structure, ‘Velimir Khlebnikov’, shares the same inspiration as Kiefer’s new show at White Cube, exploring the Russian poet’s theories of history, using mathematics to uncover its laws and to predict the course of future events.
There is a necklace of these shrine-like buildings looped around the curving approach to the centre of operations. They bring to mind Dante’s description of the hilltop town of Monteriggione, its circle of walls ‘crowned with towers’ (Inferno, xxxi, 41) resembling the upper halves of giants peering over one of the pits of Hell. This analogy to the infernal scene is not a casual one. Just as the Italian hilltop town is displaced by giants in Dante’s imagination, so these architectural superstructures are paralleled in Kiefer’s scheme by the cavities beneath them, deep down, in the tunnels and grottoes that run in all directions through the wooded ridge. Should you enter this network of underground spaces, irregularly lit from artificial, and occasionally natural, sources, you would soon lose your bearings and, perhaps especially, your sense of the depth to which you have penetrated beneath the surface of the landscape. At what you feel instinctively is the lowest and the focal point of this ensemble of burrows is the experience of a sudden gap, an intensified vacancy, given the form of a great square chamber, lined with lead, half-filled with water and illumined bleakly by a single bulb. Viewed in any context, this is a scary place. Perhaps its most disturbing aspect is not the fleeting thought that this sacral pool is a symbolic space echoing a profound deadliness inside Kiefer’s own head (he is actually a very friendly man with a sunny smile) but the more certain belief that it embodies the conditions of a widely shared psychological state, of a cultural memory and a national trauma. It is not for nothing that Kiefer’s staff refer to it colloquially as the ‘bunker’, encapsulating the historic fate of the most expansive and all-embracing of political ambitions, reduced to a state of entombment and asphyxia, the exhaustion of light and air.
The stillness, darkness and coldness of this place could not be further from the thyme-filled atmosphere of the French countyside, or, for that matter, from the play of breezes in a spacious avenue of linden trees. The unusual sense of pressure experienced at this relatively shallow depth below ground is owing largely to the use of lead. Lead is one of the most frequently used materials in Kiefer’s practice as an artist, at least for the last quarter century, during which time its implications have varied although certain emphases have remained constant. Lead is the base metal from which the alchemist aspires to produce gold. Kiefer’s interest in alchemy has centred in the metaphorical resonance it has for his own painting, although he has also taken seriously the spiritual ambitions of the alchemist and his vision of parallel universes. The artist told me he had been ‘persecuted for years’ by a dictum of Robert Fludde: ‘everything on earth has its equivalent star in heaven’. This conception of nature as reflecting a cosmic order gives value and coherence to the base, material existence of humanity even if cannot be grasped by the individual consciousness. On the other hand, the spectral correspondence produces restlessness and dissatisfaction, incessant striving of the intellect to out
reach its limitations and possess its heavenly equivalent. That way, madness, the Faustian wager and the will to power. Kiefer uses lead most spectacularly in his atlases of the stars, cross-sections of the galaxy visible from earth. The relations between individual stars are proposed in the tracing of geometrical diagrams, while at the foot of the painting, the surface material is torn aside to reveal an underlying representation of architectural structures on earth repeating the same proportions. These structures are often modelled on the observatory buildings at Jaipur, themselves monumental equivalents of hand-held astronomical instruments. The scaling up and scaling down holds in tension idealism and self-delusion. The plane of the stars is represented on sheets of lead, suggesting that the material the artist hopes to spiritualise is finally recalcitrant and non-convertible, and that his attempts at transformation are liable to back-fire. The stars themselves are denoted by their astronomical numbers, reflections of a NASA project whose insane drive for completeness in an infinitely expanding universe is ironised by the deposits of number tags collecting in drifts beneath paintings and elsewhere on site. The final degradation is the silting up of these fallen stars in run-off channels and drainage gutters.
Kiefer’s design for Barjac translates into three-dimensional form the obsessions of so many of his paintings that divide their attention between the material and the spiritual, the terrestrial and the celestial, the historical and the mythical. Dominating the entire property is the most grandiose and ambivalent fabrication of all, the prototype of the stage design for the 2003 production of Richard Strauss’s opera, Electra, at the Teatro San Carlo, Naples. This gigantic structure consists of four tiers of fluted concrete, arranged as a series of terraces, like the enormous mould of an inverted ziggurat. As a building project, it reaches higher than anything else at Barjac, yet is organised around an immense and inexorable downward pull that expresses the fortunes of the house of Atreus and, more generally, a sense of history as dilapidation, as a series of narratives the more vulnerable the greater the scale of their ambition. One gets the feeling that if he could have done, Kiefer would have constructed it of lead. The whole building is a plummet, dragging the viewer down into its depths, just as the cistern beneath it reflects in its leaden ceiling the imagined plane of the stars. Nothing at Barjac rests on its own level. Kiefer is still adding to the design, drawing new buildings onto the existing plans, tunnelling into previously untouched areas of the hillside. Each move tightens the system of cross-references. Occasionally, we see the satellites of this system crossing our paths through the art world, but this is the constellation to which they naturally return.
Spatial Utopias
Earlier this year, the Kabakov habitat was altered dramatically when the immense beech tree overshadowing their house on Long Island began to disintegrate. The dryads had fled. The once protective canopy became an arboreal juggernaut that had to be stopped in its tracks. Regretfully, the artists commissioned a team of axe-murderers, who made the last act of The Cherry Orchard look like a posse of boy scouts gathering tinder. It is possible that this tree provided inspiration for a vocabulary of ‘trunks’ and ‘branches’ peppering the Kabakovian descriptions of the utopian city that forms the main reference point for the exhibition opening at the Albion Gallery in October. The utopian city is, or should be, constructed over one of the ‘energy centres’ of the earth. These are places in which the energy of the globe itself is concentrated and augmented by an invisible vortex, an imaginary lens capturing the energy that radiates from the cosmos. The architectural and metaphysical scope of the Albion Gallery projects is staggering, and seems wildly disproportionate in the context of the Great Peconic Bay. The Kabakovs’ domestic and studio spaces are restrained – theirs is a generic Long Island property made with wooden shingles, overlooking a shallow arm of the sea criss-crossed by dinghies and canoes. But behind the stereotypical facade, an unceasing flow of new concepts is generated. In a sense, all the spatial containers of the Kabakovian imagination are generic; even those installation scenarios that employ autobiographical material are based on a selection of typical rather individualising memories. The recurrent paradox in the oeuvre is that stereotypical houses are inhabited by comrade citizens all of whom are idiosyncratic participants in ‘fantasy production’. Their secret lives do not reflect what is psychologically unique, but project the desire for a universal condition of being, an idealised, utopianised version of the standardisation of Soviet life that the Kabakovs’ art both focuses on and aims to transcend.
In conversation, Ilya Kabakov is at pains to underline the extent to which his art does not reveal his own personality but represents an assimilation to the point of view of the reader or viewer. Placing the emphasis not on the point of origin of the concept but on the moment of reception has been characteristic of his installations from the beginning. The ‘Ten Characters’ that feature in his earliest major installation are fictitious residents – seemingly chosen at random – of a typical communal apartment. They are all average citizens, but they are simultaneously artists dreaming of invisible worlds. They include Kabakov’s first installation-protagonist, ‘The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment’, a figure who first appeared, or who failed to appear, in the artist’s own Moscow apartment, where the evidence for his departure was represented by a giant catapult suspended beneath a hole in the ceiling. Much of the subsequent output, whether of Ilya working solo, or of Ilya and Emilia operating in tandem, has comprised an expansion in scale of this early scenario, since a whole range of later projects has been attributed to fictitious characters, to imaginary personae, and even to pseudonymous substitutes for the originators themselves.
Perhaps the most dramatic and ambitious demonstration of the latter form of contrivance took place in the recent Cleveland exhibition that proposed an ‘alternative history’ of Russian painting in the twentieth century. The alternatives were all dreamed up by Ilya himself and took the form of three separate artists that he had invented: Charles Rosenthal, Ilya Kabakov and Igor Spivak. Rosenthal came equipped with a biography that made him a student first of Chagall, then of Malevich, that associated him with a positive use of figurative realism during the utopian phase of the soviet experiment, and that killed him off in 1933. ‘Kabakov’, confusingly, was not the same as the installation-artist called Kabakov, but a follower of Rosenthal, inspired by photos of his mentor’s paintings, and active mainly in the 1970s. Perhaps the most dizzying aspect of this duplication of identities was the dating of pictures painted, for example, by ‘Kabakov’ in 1972, but also by Kabakov in 2002. Last in the series was Spivak, born in 1970, an unwilling postmodernist whose work was filled with nostalgia for the conditions in which the first generation of soviet artists had worked, and whose segmented style based on the fragmentation of media photographs derived from the observation of torn-off strips of newspaper used as toilet paper in communal apartments. The extraordinary scope and variety of this exhibition, whose scale did indeed suggest the resources of three separate lifetimes’ worth of production, unsettled the relationship between style and authorship, and between representation and expression, in quite profound ways, creating deep unease among collectors unwilling to purchase canvases by Rosenthal and Spivak that did not also bear the signature of Kabakov. Even greater uncertainty might have been generated had the Kabakovs been able to carry out their recently devised plan of selling off Ilya’s estate in advance of his own death. The disposal of property and use of the proceeds to establish a foundation would have severed the link, conceptually at least, between the work and its biographical stimulus.
The ‘parabola’ of Russian art in the twentieth century, as interpreted in Kabakov’s ‘alternative’ history, reaches away from realism and reflection in the direction of idealism and projection. Kabakov stresses the superiority of unrealised projects to all those conceptions that were actually given concrete form. In political terms, fantasy production is preferable to the spatial embodiment and temporal performance of ideas. Fo
r the artist working in three dimensions, the best solution is the maquette. For the curator, the goal should be to reinvent the museum or gallery as a storehouse for fantasies. The mutual abrasion of haunting fantasy and brutal realism has been encapsulated most economically in The Red Wagon, now installed permanently at Wiesbaden, where a cramped and rudimentary housing, seemingly neglected, encloses panoramic visions and obsolete chorales inspired by a sense of collective purpose. A conspicuous amount of the Long Island studio space is devoted to archives, a library, storage. Moving slowly from one area to another, one is conscious of the accumulation of desires, not just of individual sensibilities, but of an entire culture, the symbolic deposits of a way of life that dominated half the planet not so long ago, but which already seems strangely remote. One particularly large room is filled with maquettes, many for projects which are never to be realised. They tap into a reservoir of dreams that were the myths of at least three generations. A similar focus on the power of dreaming is at the core of the Kabakovs’ design for their new installation soon to be unveiled at the Serpentine Gallery. A radial plan is dominated by an array of couches on pedestals that prepare the viewer to imagine a ritualised form of sleep. The circular structure recalls that of an observatory, while the raised couches also suggest sarcophagi. Beneath and inside each pedestal is a chamber in which a magic lantern show is projected over something resembling a hospital bed. Above and facing outwards is a form of sleep in the universal with evocations of the dreams of the dead. Below and facing inwards are the manifestations of delusion, medicalised, narcotised and maybe pathological. The most important component in the installation is intangible and elusive and yet more powerful than its material counterpoint. It makes complete sense that Ilya should understand his working methods in terms of primary and secondary forms of composition. Many of his works have a narrative element, particularly the albums where the visual focus is qualified by a literary elaboration, but also many of the installations which involve the viewer in a sequence of movements and reflections. Despite this, the initial germ of each new phase of work, in what he describes as a daily practice, is a visual idea that becomes the basis of a ‘virtual tour in the head’. Grasping the size of the work and refining its detail is consigned almost entirely to the business of mental preparation, so that the actual, physical realisation of the work is regarded as little more than a ‘reproduction’ of the work already finished in the head. This prodigious investment in the work of the imagination, rather than of the hand or the eye in their engagement with matter, has deep roots in the experience of a samizhdat culture. Ilya compares it to the process of preparing to make a film. Now transplanted to the eastern seaboard of the United States, he sits in front of a novelty version of a Hollywood clapper-board, inscribed impishly but tellingly with the following legends: ‘Production: SO-VART / Direction: Kabakov / Camera: Kabakov.’ Soviet Art is not only the subject matter of the Kabakovs’ work and the source of its inspiration, it also projects what many Russians and Eastern Europeans still carry round in their heads and live through on a daily basis, whatever the material changes in the world around them.
