Image: superkidlinh

Yesterday, we walked to the metro, my friend and I, in chilly sunlight, some gulls were squawking around, I saw trees just beginning to bud and thought to myself that Montreal was unmistakably edging into spring. Then we went through the heavy doors of Lionel-Groulx station and disappeared, for the next three hours, from the outside world. We rode the train to Place des Arts, disembarked, wound our way through underground chambers and emerged in the foyer of the Musée d’Art Contemporain, never having exposed ourselves to exterior air. We paid eight dollars each, climbed some stairs and stepped into the mind of Anselm Kiefer. But it’s not accurate, I think, to equate somebody’s work with their mind, that is, to confuse the artist with the art. But, then again, I’ll keep that sentence there as the record of a sensation.

Standing in front of Meteoriten, a sculpture of a giant steel bookcase that holds enormous tomes made of lead sheets, I felt, for a moment, like Alice in Wonderland after drinking the shrinking potion. They were the books of some long-abandoned god: ancient, unintelligible and mighty. Meteorites had crashed into them, splaying the pages and burning them. The whole thing gave off an air of ruined grandeur.
I did not feel any affection for Anselm Kiefer’s work, I did not leave the show wanting to buy a book of his work to keep near me, but I was transported, I was unnerved. If you stand in front of an artist’s work and feel, however briefly, convinced that you are standing inside their dream world, on the soil of some interior landscape that preoccupies them, that, surely, is a measure of success. And it wasn’t Kiefer’s imagination alone that was at work, his art recalled to me dark corners of my own dreams. It takes powerful art to poke around in the shadows of my brain.

I was most impressed by his recent work, the stuff of the noughts, or whatever we’re calling the first decade of this century. The work is big, heavy, sometimes heavy-handed, grim, sometimes grimly humorous, and grand. The themes are massive, this comes as little surprise since the title of the show is Heaven and Earth. As a title, it seems accurate enough. Kiefer is concerned with alchemy, which, according to my limited understanding, involves the attempt to unify matter and spirit, to transform base metals, like lead, into gold, and to locate, or invent, immortality. Little art that I've seen these days dares to be so ambitious, so portentous. And no wonder, it's very hard to engage these themes without coming off as a pompous ass. Some of Kiefer's work does fall flat, but I like the fact that he's willing to risk failure with a grand gesture, instead of consigning himself to the safety of whimsical doodling as so many contemporary artists seem to have done. When I left the museum, out in the wind and sun, walking past the strip joints, with the show still sitting heavily in my mind, I began to think that a number of the paintings and the sculptures were, at their best, not merely about alchemy but were, themselves, alchemical in nature.

Many of the paintings are of vast, primeval, or apocalyptic landscapes and seascapes rendered in thick, sludgy paint that is sometimes caked and cracked, even burnt. They are earthbound, fastened to the ground by their material, but their titles are ethereal: Heaven on Earth, Hierarchy of Angels, Heavenly Palaces. Many of them involve rusting or desiccated objects (a toy tank, a propeller, a dried sunflower) attached to the canvas upside down, as though crashing to earth, emptying themselves into a blasted landscape or ash-strewn building. The whole effect is one of destruction with a view to resurrection.

Standing in front of “Autumn’s Whisperings of Runes” for Paul Celan, a desolate wintry scene ruled by twigs glued onto the painting in parallel lines that converge on a far horizon, I felt a physical jolt, a vertigo, as though I had been, for an instant, hit by the painting and dragged inside it. Then I withdrew, I contemplated it’s textures, I pondered the invocation of war, trenches, concentration camps, etc, as instructed by the curatorial text. But for that one moment, the art and I had fused, lead became gold, the painting had alchemized me.