Kiefer, Ground Turned to Ash

One

A large surface.

Taller than a person and wider than outstretched arms.
Stand close and it feels like a wall rather than a surface.

You have to step back to see the whole.
And stepping back, the surface is no longer visible.

This painting demands two distances.
The distance for looking from far and the distance for looking near.

Look from far first.

A field is visible.
Furrows narrow and recede from the bottom of the surface upward.

And nothing has grown.
There are only furrows and no crop.

There is no sky.
Soil has come up to the top of the surface.

What is seen in the distance is not a horizon but the end of the soil.

Now come close.

Straw is attached to the surface.
Dry straw.
The color has gone out and it looks about to crumble.

It is not straw stuck onto a painting but straw that has become the painting.

Beneath it ash is spread.
Gray, and not only gray.
It is the color of what has burned.

The paint is thick.
There are places that have split.
It cracked by itself as it dried.

The cracks were not drawn by the painter.
The material made them.

Seen from the side the surface is uneven.
The lighting of the gallery makes small shadows on it.

The shadows are not painted.
They were made by the light of this present place.

Move the lighting and the shadows move.

So this painting is a little different every time.

The painting already carries the trace of having endured time.
And it is enduring still.

Two

Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945.

The year the war ended.
In a small city in southwestern Germany.

The first world he saw was ruins.
Collapsed buildings, cleared heaps of stone, empty lots.

A child does not call that ruins.
He simply calls it the world.

There is a child who grew up in a world where the collapsed is normal.
That child learns the intact later.

Something has to be thought through here.

Read fūdo as natural condition alone and there is no explaining Kiefer.
The climate and terrain of Germany have little to do with his surface.

His ground is ground that history passed through.

Fūdo has two layers.
The layer nature made and the layer people made.

Nature makes wind.
People make ruins.

But for a child there is no division.
Both were simply there.

War too becomes fūdo.
When a generation is born and grows up on it, that is what it becomes.

The proposition widened in the Prologue is clearest here.

What happened on that land is also fūdo.

This widening is needed for reading Jeju as well.
Wind alone does not read all of it.

Kiefer first studied law.
Then he moved to painting.

In his young years he made photographic work.
He photographed himself in various places making the salute of a former era.

It was 1969.

Many people were uncomfortable with it.
That work is still argued over.

What he meant to do is read in several ways.
Only one thing is clear.

He walked into a place German art had long avoided.

In Germany at that time myth and history were difficult material.
Because everyone knew who had used them and how.

Kiefer chose not to avoid.

It was not an easy road.
He was not only praised.

In the generation before him there was Joseph Beuys.
Beuys used felt and fat.
He first opened a road of working with what is not paint.

Kiefer went further on that road.

If Beuys chose materials, Kiefer moved a land with materials.

He read poetry for a long time.

From the poetry of Paul Celan he took the names of two women.
Margarete and Shulamith.

One has golden hair and the other ashen hair.

Celan wrote in German.
He could not write in any other language, and writing in it was not easy either.

Kiefer attached straw where the gold was.
Where the ash was he laid ash.

He turned the figure into matter.

He made what he read in a poem into something the hand can touch.

This is his method.
He returns what was made of words back into matter.

Later he moved his workplace to France.
On wide ground he built structures and passages and set the work inside them.

He did not make a place to hang paintings but a place for paintings to live.

Three

Here is the argument of this chapter.

Kiefer did not paint the ground.
He moved it.

He spread soil on the surface.
He attached straw.
He melted lead and laid it on.
He scattered ash.

Not representation but transfer.

Landscape painting looks at ground and paints it.
The ground is outside the surface, and inside the surface there is only its appearance.

On Kiefer's surface there is not an appearance but a thing.
Not the appearance of soil but soil.

What changes when this is done.
Four things change.

First, time enters the surface.

Paint stops when it dries.
Soil and straw keep changing after they dry.

The color goes out, it crumbles, it falls off.

The painting ages.
It ages like a person.

In an ordinary painting time is something painted.
It is evening or winter or old age.

On Kiefer's surface time is not painted.
It happens.

Second, weight appears.

A large surface is hard to move.
A surface with lead on it is harder.

The painting comes to have a place.
It cannot be moved easily, so it stays where it is.

A light painting travels the world.
A heavy painting makes people come.

The direction is reversed.

Third, the material carries meaning.

Lead is heavy and poisonous.
In alchemy lead is the matter before it becomes gold.
What has not yet become, what is waiting.

Ash is evidence that something was there.
Without something burned there is no ash.
Ash is the material form of absence.

Straw is what is left of grain.
What remains after the ear is taken.
The body remaining after its use is done.

That these materials were chosen is itself a sentence.

Fourth, the painting makes one want to touch it.

A museum forbids touching.
And the surface calls the hand.

A painting to look at and a painting one wants to touch are different kinds.

The moment one wants to touch it the painting becomes a thing.
Becoming a thing, it is set in the same place as us.

Instead of looking up at the painting one stands beside it.

So for Kiefer materiality is not technique.
It is a way of speaking.

What did the ground of Germany burn and what did it bury.
The painting asks that back with material.

Ask with words and it becomes argument.
Ask with material and it remains.

Argument ends and ash remains.

Four

Stand before Byun Shi-Ji's surface.

The size differs from Kiefer's.
Mostly smaller than a person's height.
Many can be held in the arms.

The thickness differs too.
Kiefer's surface is thick and Byun Shi-Ji's is thin.

And the two men handle the same thing.
Endurance.

Kiefer carried the ground that endured onto the surface.
Byun Shi-Ji raised the body that endures on the surface.

If Kiefer painted the ruins of Germany, Byun Shi-Ji painted the wind of Jeju.

The direction is reversed.

Kiefer stacks.
He puts on soil and ash and lead.
The surface grows heavy.

Byun Shi-Ji takes away.
He erases the clouds, erases the road, erases the house.
The surface grows light.

A surface made heavy and a surface made light say the same thing.

How is this to be understood.

Because the character of the ground differs.

The ruins of Germany are stacked.
What collapsed remained as layers.
Dig and it comes out.

The wind of Jeju does not stack.
It passes.
Passing, it wears things down.

From stacked ground a stacking form comes, and from worn ground a form of taking away comes.

Two answers to the same question.

One more thing must be seen.

Kiefer's material is what he brought.
He got straw and attached it.

Byun Shi-Ji's material is not what he brought.
He used oil paint and canvas.
Material that came from the West.

It was also the manner he learned in Japan.
The hand trained in Osaka moved the same way on Jeju.

Instead he changed the color.

The paint was bought, but the color of dried grass was not bought.
That color came from the island.

He did not change the material; he changed the color.
He did not move matter; he moved the name of matter.

Here is the difference in condition.

Kiefer grew up in his own land.
The material to use was underfoot.

Byun Shi-Ji left the island at five.
When he came back he was forty-nine.

The hand had already been made elsewhere.

So what he could change was not material but color.
He changed what could be changed.

There is no ranking between the two ways.
The conditions held were different.

Kiefer had ruins and Byun Shi-Ji had wind.

There is one more thing.

People rarely appear on Kiefer's surface.
Ground and buildings and names appear.

There are people on Byun Shi-Ji's surface.
Almost always.

One old man stands.

So there are two ways of painting ruin.

Showing what is gone.
Showing the person who remains.

Kiefer took the first and Byun Shi-Ji the second.

Five

The straw on Kiefer's surface will fall off some day.

The museum works to prevent it.
It matches temperature, matches humidity, forbids touching.

It will fall off anyway.

Kiefer knew that and chose the material.

The color of dried grass on Byun Shi-Ji's surface will not fall off.
It is paint, so it stays.

But the grass that color points to is already gone.
The grass that dried that winter scattered that year.

One said what remains with material that disappears.
The other said what has disappeared with material that remains.

Both men looked long at what goes away.

Step back from the large surface.

Straw is attached.
Ash is spread.

In the field nothing has grown yet.