Anselm Kiefer’s Asylum for Malignant Memories

In St. Augustine’s Confessions, the priest visits the Manichees, an ancient non-Christian religion devoted to the notion that our world is comprised of good and bad particles. Atomic level good and evil. Some of these particles, according to their doctrine, we can control through digestion. For instance, if one eats an apple and expels a belch from that apple, good particles are liberated into the air. In this way, a human agent is able to maximize the quantum of good atoms by merely eating an apple and belching.

It’s no more fanciful than devils and angels, surely, though its symbology is inverted, at least when it comes to apples. It’s also an elegant and playful variation on human agency. With equal playfulness, I’ve wondered over the years whether or not the mathematically inclined Manichees found themselves calculating the number of apples per bad deed. A lie equals three apples, while minor theft equals eight. One imagines the California-sized orchards required to offset the lot of human misdeeds, not to mention collective evils like war.

I thought of the Manichees this week while revisiting the stupefying artistry of Anselm Kiefer’s Barjac. No mere canvas or installation, Barjac is a renaissance town in southern France. Kiefer’s town. Kiefer’s Barjac is its own commune amidst the series of communes known collectively as Barjac. He bought a roughly 200-acre plot and commenced years ago, creating this art township with only the help of his assistants. Visitors are rare and only upon invitation.

Punctuating the landscape around Kiefer’s studio are a series of rickety towers reminiscent of medieval Italy, but likewise allusive to a Dr. Seuss trip. A series of outbuildings and seeming chapels occupy this artscape. Having grown up in Montana, the landscape reminds me of the old state asylum in Warm Springs, a self-contained city-state devoted in equal parts to treating and separating the mentally ill from the population at large. While Kiefer’s artistic muses have been described as demonic by some, his city-state is more of an asylum of memory, or a laboratory for the artistic treatment of malignant memories.

As wickedly unique as this landscape is, it is not Kiefer’s first Siamese-like twinning of studio and gallery space. In the 1980s, he purchased a brick factory in Buchen, Germany, former site of the extermination camp Buchenwald. In the course of creating monumental canvases and installations, he amassed all manner of leftovers, all of which remain in the transformed factory. Burnt books from a school fire line the wall on one floor, while a small hill of straw in near-adobe state mixed with dirt, sand paint and wreckage occupy yet another room on another floor.

Sitting silent and untouched are the factory’s brick ovens, suggestive of sinister happenings nearby, and evocative of questions like: What must these brickmakers have been thinking as the smoke from their kiln-baked clay mingled with the curiously acrid smoke from the camp? As the stench from the camp settled over the town? And how many examples of exactly this type of chosen blindness can we indicate in other towns, times and places outside of Germany?

Returning to Barjac, we see the wreckage and rubble of war carefully curated, bathed in light and seemingly, curiously, growing huge, gray ash-stuffed sunflowers like mushroom caps from scat. In this hothouse of memory, it’s difficult not to think of Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra:”

“Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray / shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on / top of a pile of ancient sawdust— / [....] dead baby carriages, black / treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem / of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, / nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the / razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past— / and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, / crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog / and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye— / corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like / a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon- / to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays / obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire / spiderweb, / leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures / from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen / out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear, / Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O / my soul, I loved you then!”

In Kiefer’s compositions of saturated sunflowers and war debris, the sunflowers arc from the debris, an upcropping both random and orchestrated, in mid-transformation. And indeed, this transformation is intentional by Kiefer, as he’s carefully situated the debris—in this case, two wrecked plane fuselages atop piles of near-demolished concrete with rebar dangling mid-air like legs. He has set these here to grow, to transform, to sublimate into a new form. He gives hint to his task while walking its acreage, commenting how he used to have nightmares, “but not anymore.”

Has Kiefer, like that fictional, mathematical Manichee derived an equation for the transformation of the darkest of dark human deeds? An equation for the sublime? Wouldn’t this be alchemy? Not that nonsense of turning lead to gold, but the sludge of human evil to mulch that is rained upon, decomposing and recomposing as mud receptive to gentler seeds blown in from elsewhere, manifesting first as the sooty protuberance of a dying sunflower but eventually as the ecstatic and exuberant sunflower of Van Gogh’s visions. That vision is generations away, perhaps, or it may be as close as Barjac. Perhaps.

Here’s a Barjac tour to whet your appetite for such transformations: Kiefers Barjac

-MRM