Karine & I were delighted when we saw that the Grand Palais was holding an exposition called ”Anselm Kiefer Pour Paul Celan”. A pandemic wet dream. Great visual art plus enough space to keep any virus concentrations in the air very low.
Kiefer honors the work of the remarkable German-language lyric poet by integrating his (Celan’s) words and lines and sense and sensibility into Kiefer’s own visual lyric.
We even came back to Paris a little earlier than usual to make sure to see it.
The experience of the show got me wondering all at once about the scope of dance creation. The logic of this wonder is of course complex. In part, I began wondering because I was struck with Anselm Kiefer’s, the show curators’ and Paul Celan’s intention and deliberation, with the venue’s place, placement and statement in its immediate environment. In part, I was struck with the show’s space, volume, size, light, shadow, with the editorial in the in the walls and ceilings, positions, with visual inventions, sculpted models and found objects, with tools, materials, material and immaterial effects… In part, I began wondering because of wider-world references in the show: Kiefer’s effect on Celan and Celan’s lyric world and on the sense of these effects Kiefer. Then there’s my own thinking on art structures in general and on dance structures in particular (see: Move that Cat, ‘Cleitus), thoughts on the indistinguishability of intention and accident (see: Machine de Cirque). And finally maybe a bit more in part than my other in-parts, the effects of a long chat I had with the dancer, choreographer, intellectual Mylène Benoît on why she thinks dance is an essential human need.
Kiefer’s show is a “whole show” in constant movement: everything around it is in it and everything within it can be found outside it. The neighborhood where it was held was pandemic-appropriate: at the Grand Palais Ephémère, a temporary annex to the Palais, which is in renovation. Ephémère is an enormous technical construction that has been repurposed as a bubble of space in a sort of urban Empty Quarter behind the Eiffel Tower, on Place Joffre, facing a dilapidated building that we suspect – Karine and I spent our time in line theorizing – it may have been, in Joffre’s glory days, death registrations.
Altogether, the Ephémère space, seeming made-to-order for pandemic times, is also an excellent piece of psycho-esthetic engineering where Kiefer’s art was to best advantage.
But, though accommodating and integrated into the exhibition, Kiefer’s gigantic canvases, life-model jet plane and the blockhouses, its intention and arrangement stands alone, as much a work affecting its showcase as being affected by it. Wherever it travels, and I hope it does travel, it can master its environment.
As spectacle, as in everything else, ”Anselm Kiefer Pour Paul Celan” works really well.
Kiefer, they say, had a large hand in laying out his homage to Celan.
He left behind a lot of tools, equipment, material and unused applications, back near the coffee shop. As if he meant to keep working, or might be called back for maintenance, he’d tidily sorted it all on shelving bearing up, as Atlas might, the Ephémère’s huge volume of tightly-operated light and shadow.
Kiefer’s a complete painter, an expert in producing line, color and texture as well as in the mechanics of perception. Celan is a complete poet, conjuring the texture & tone of a thought or an idea or of an unsayable image and make the surrounding air vibrate with them.
The first few lines of Death Fugue (Todesfuge), a poem that a great many young people in Germany learn in school, give an idea of Celan’s all-round grasp of poetics:
Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends / Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown
wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts / we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night
wir trinken und trinken … / we drink it and drink it …
Lift a glass to the banality of evil.
This “Schwarze Milch” is surely the universal food and mutter of the self-poisoned, the Kluxer, the Bircher, the Q-Anon dope in his basement lounge, the ultra-violent screed of the Turner Diaries, the black-shirt murder-tech who shoots granny in the face because regulations suggest she might be too weak to work before, before … What was that bureaucratic euphemism for mass murder? … Also, it feels like stumbling on Jeff Davis’ autographed copy of Essai sur les inégalités humaines. Also it feels of a certain moment of warm-beer hilarity, also of the joyful anarchy of Chagall, also, also, also… and, and, and…