A weight hangs over Bermondsey. A crushing load, heavy with history and war, placed there by German artist Anselm Kiefer.
His latest show at White Cube – the third in a trilogy of similarly huge, ambitious, immersive, oppressive exhibitions, the first of which was brilliant, the second less so – takes as its starting point James Joyce’s famously unreadable experimental final novel ‘Finnegans Wake’. It’s an impenetrable work of puns and metaphors, synecdoches and illusions, solipsistic language and endless word plays. Heavy stuff. Lines from the book are scratched across the walls of Kiefer’s show, almost making sense but never quite coalescing into cogent meaning.
Instead, what you’re left to decode are the vast, towering, claustrophobic assemblages of rusted metal, broken vitrines, huge dead sunflowers and endless rubble he has strewn across the gallery.
You enter past hanging sheets of lead. The corridor before you is lined with shelves, all piled high with bones, tools and bicycles. There are boxes filled with ash and shattered bricks, cabinets of mouldy, stiffened clothes, stacks of broken machines.
This is Europe, its corpse left to fester
In the first room, shopping trolleys and a wheelchair have been left abandoned on a sand dune. Mounds of lead fill the next room, the one after is packed impossibly high with dead trees and machinery. The last room has been reduced to rubble, giant sheets of concrete have collapsed, crashing onto the gallery floor.
This exhibition is a battlefield. The soggy trenches of war have dried, the bodies have rotted, the bombed buildings have finally tumbled to the ground. All life is now gone, homes have been fled, graves have been filled. This is Europe, this is the twentieth century, its corpse left to fester.
In the real world, the scars of the great wars have been covered over, atrocities have been forgotten, that violence is now a fading memory. But not for Kiefer. He can’t forget, won’t let himself. So he saves this rubble and trash as a monument to the past, an inescapable, shattered reminder of history.
Then ‘Finnegans Wake’ comes in. Because the further we get from the past, the more twisted it becomes, the more our memories bend and morph and fold in on themselves. Narratives split and atomise and double back in Joyce’s novel, time fractures and dissipates. Kiefer sees that happening to us, to him, like we’re living through a kind of collective dementia.
The monumentality of the work, it’s imposing bigness, is a bit of crutch for Kiefer, and has become one of his cliches. It’s failed in the recent past, but it works here. This brutal, affecting, necessary work is him taking the weight of the past that he’s been carrying, all this memory and war, and forcing us to share the load.
It’s a heavy burden, but one well worth shouldering.
