On Saturday, in the courtyard of the Royal Academy, in snivel-inducing cold and bitter wind, a tall man wearing a ridiculous woolly hat, a white safety helmet and a dramatic full-length black coat stalked around two towers of scored concrete. How bizarre it looked. (The towers — then two-storey — will by today have risen to six.) Gallery visitors eyed them suspiciously. Construction workers hopped in and out of them. A big and crane and a little one lowered materials on to the structures. You could just feel, deliciously, the brewing of an art controversy. The beautiful Academy playing willing host to these two ugly beasts.
By today, it is hoped, the two cube-shaped towers will be finished. You will be able to walk inside them and look through holes in each floor up to the sky. The towers will be almost as tall as the Royal Academy itself. They look purposely unstable and their brutalist bearing will probably excite much debate — here they are, slap-bang in the courtyard of one of London’s most beautiful buildings.
Anselm Kiefer, the chap in the woolly hat and safety helmet, designed the towers; indeed he is known for his towers. He builds them as philosophical meditations.
Kiefer is German, 61 and stern, with a hint of playfulness. And he is a deep, deep thinker, whose intellectual preoccupations — religion, belief, philosophy, the essence of life and how society is organised — are channelled into his multilayered paintings and sculptures.This overtly serious work comes with scrawled quotes from Paul Celan, Isaiah and Aeschylus. Kiefer references classical literature including the fall of Troy, Norse myths, Goethe, Wagnerian opera and German history. His works are made from a range of materials: glass, straw, wood, oil, soil, paint, a typical canvas containing a combination of the above.
For Kiefer a tower is “something which looks stable but is not. All is changing all the time, always transforming — change, time, resurrection.” The Royal Academy towers look as if they are about to fall over; the levels — stuck together with special rods — are uneven, set at an angle, their façades alternately closed off and sometimes broken by slits of windows and doorways. Kiefer says their meaning is rooted in the notion of “the renewal of landscape. The Royal Academy seems like a stable building but it is not. It is unstable and it doesn’t know it. I wanted to give the impression of change, insecurity.”
It seems there is an even more obvious allusion to the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, destroyed in 2001. “No,” he says adamantly, “I make sometimes seven towers or three. Here I thought one would not be enough, and three would be too many. So two.” Kiefer is an honorary Royal Academician and there was no dissent from other RAs over the towers, insists Edith Devaney, head of membership. “The proposal went to the exhibition committee and was approved without any objections,” she says. “What’s fascinating about it is how it works with and against the surrounds of the gallery.”
Kiefer is softly spoken. But, boy, he’s esoteric. He’s studied pretty much every religion and belief system going, so when I ask if the towers also stand for some kind of link between heaven and earth, he assents but then adds gently that “we now know that heaven is not ‘upstairs’ as the monolithic belief has it”. So where is Heaven? I ask gingerly. “Heaven is in each of the little sparks of the body.” Really? “Intelligence is in each of these elements,” he says pin-pricking his arm as if to locate the most infinitesimal of cells, “Heaven is in the interconnection of these elements.”
Besides the RA towers, Kiefer continues to interrogate belief and transformation in a series of works at White Cube’s new St James’s gallery a few minutes’ walk away. Aperiatur terra et germinet salvatorem runs the title of one work above a landscape of blasted earth (Kiefer tells me he takes great pleasure in chucking soil on to the canvas). This apocalyptic vision is pock-marked with life: lilac, yellow and red poppies splish-splosh across the desolation. For all heathens, the title comes from the Book of Isaiah and translates as, “Let the earth be opened and bud forth a saviour” (the line continues: “and let justice spring up at the same time”).
Two other massive canvases, richly layered and scored, enshrine similar themes, while on the upper floor of the gallery 18 paintings are hung above a 13ft (4m) palm tree laid on the floor. This is Palmsonntag, a work focused on Palm Sunday, a key religious moment too long ignored by artists, says Kiefer. Again, the theme is regeneration, renewal: the pictures are of plants in budding life. Christ’s death led, Kiefer reminds us, to his Resurrection.
Kiefer was raised a strict Roman Catholic in a small town in southern Germany. He was a very serious boy, buried in books, and from an early age a keen painter and storyteller; Ali Baba was a favourite. “I still know how to say Mass in Latin,” he says, laughing. “I have a very precise memory of my first communion. You are told that Jesus will come to you. I was very disappointed that nothing happened.”
He left the Church “ten, 20, 30 years ago”, not so much in rejection of its beliefs but rather the dogmas — “this is good, this is not good” — which he felt made the quality of belief that much poorer. He turned to kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, “which I found richer, wider, more open”. And now? “I have no beliefs. It’s a black, black hole. You can never know why you are here. These are questions which are completely unresolved. It makes you have vertigo, thinking about this,” he says.
It could drive you mad, I say. “Yes, but if it did I wouldn’t have my art,” he says. “I think of the manager, having to fly around the world every day for his work, thinking about these questions. What a horrible life.”
But he’s doing the same thing, just making art instead of negotiating deals, surely. “No, I don’t produce work to get away from the black hole. I produce work in the black hole. In way it makes me more connected to a possible answer. You feel something but you cannot grasp it.”
But, given the recurrence of the themes of apocalypse and renewal, you sense that Kiefer feels some kind of hope. He says Hinduism is his favoured religion now, because it recognises the value of other religions. “Mythology is the only way you can try and understand the connections in the world. Science can’t do that.”
It is also significant that Kiefer grew up in post-Nazi Germany. “I never heard anything at home or school about the Holocaust or Hitler, nothing at all. That changed in the mid-1970s, but when I went to law school my lecturers were former Nazis and no one said anything. Germany didn’t want to know. I only found out by listening to records Americans had made to teach us about our history. I remember being shocked by hearing Hitler’s voice, its furious energy.”
Kiefer’s father, he says, was an army officer, not a Nazi, but a “planner on a low level”. An early work of Kiefer’s depicted the artist giving the “Sieg Heil” salute.
Kiefer studied law, not art, at the beginning “because I had a genius complex. I thought I was a genius. I never wanted to practise law but I was interested in its construction and philosophy.” He mentions Thomas Hobbes and seems surprised that not all British people would automatically know his importance. “He once said that ‘Man is a wolf to men’ (‘Homo hominis lupis’), by which he meant that we need laws and social codes so we don’t destroy each other.”
Kiefer might call the RA towers Behemoth and Leviathan, in honour of key works by Hobbes (for Kiefer “Behemoth is land, Leviathan is sea, both are monsters”), but he isn’t sure yet. “I name works after they are finished.”
The towers at the RA are mesmerising, not just because of their height, apparent precariousness and brutalist bearing in such a graceful courtyard, but because some of the storeys are slashed open, others closed. “I am interested in claustrophobia and openness,” says Kiefer. “A container is closed while an open space can be home to all kinds of ideas.”
They may look ready to fall, but the RA insists that structural engineers and civil engineers have decreed the towers safe. As for how close they look to toppling over, Kiefer smiles, then says very firmly: “I like things on the edge, because you know art is on the edge all the time. It’s not decoration for me.”
- Anselm Kiefer: Aperiatur Terra is at White Cube, Mason’s Yard, London SW1 (020-7930 5373; www.whitecube.com), from Friday to March 17; the as-yet unnamed towers are at the Royal Academy, W1, until April 30
