(soft piano music)
- [Steven] We're in the large contemporary galleries
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
looking at a really large canvas by Anselm Kiefer.
It's hard to even call it a canvas
because the surface is so built up
that there is no reference to the flatness
of the cloth underlayer.
- [Corey] This looks as much an object
as it does a painting.
- [Steven] If you look at it from the side
you can see it angulating, it's relief sculpture.
- [Corey] It's very thickly painted
and Kiefer's certainly taking advantage
of the sculptural qualities of the painting.
- [Steven] I'm not even comfortable calling it paint.
When we think about the application of paint
we generally think about relatively thin material
that's applied with a brush,
occasionally with a pallet knife.
When I look at this surface,
I think about the tools that one uses to dig in the ground.
There is something really earthen about this surface.
- [Corey] Especially considering the pallet
is very earthy as well.
And by the way a lot of this is not paint.
There's shellac, there's resins that are dripped
and sculpted in the surface here.
So, painting, question mark.
- [Steven] And this artist is known
to burn his material on the canvas.
He's known to apply molten lead
to the surfaces of his works of art.
- [Corey] He also adds a lot of natural materials,
like straw, which decay and discolor
and perhaps become dry and fall off quite rapidly.
- [Steven] It sounds like a conservator's nightmare.
(laughing)
- [Corey] Well, in a way yes.
If we think back to European traditional paintings
from guilds and academies etcetera,
there are very well codified recipes
for how a painter's allowed to make a painting.
Part of that is about how to make a beautiful painting
but in fact an equal part of it
is about how to make a painting that lasts,
because after all, many of these are religious paintings,
part of their meaning is their timelessness
or other ones are commodities.
This is a business transaction.
You don't want to buy something that falls apart.
- [Steven] But here in the late 20th and 21st century,
we have artists who are upending that idea
of the eternal nature of work of art.
Thinking about the idea that a work of art
can change over time.
- [Corey] In fact, this begins not in the 20th
but in the 19th century.
This is modernism.
On the one hand the idea that an artist can use any material
and any process to make a work of art is very exciting
because now creative possibilities explode
in so many different directions.
On the other hand, there are some very dramatic consequences
where things don't necessarily stay
as structurally sound and stable as they used to
since we're disregarding many of those recipes.
- [Steven] And even here with this painting
you get the sense of the stress from the weight of the paint
pulling on the under support, which in this case is burlap.
- [Corey] We're looking at an extreme example
of deviation from classical painting techniques
but what's really interesting here
is that now in the 21st century especially,
artists are beginning to find sources of meaning
in the aging processes of their materials.
- [Steven] It's such an irony because now
when we have a greater understanding
of the chemistry of works of art
than ever before in history,
we're creating works that ever more ephemeral.
- [Corey] And certainly this is not that new of an idea,
if we go back to the sculptures of Naum Gabo.
Gabo was using the first plastic invented
as soon as they were invented.
Now, there's no way this kind of idea
would ever been permissible
if you were working in a guild or an academy
because there's no guarantee how that's gonna age.
- [Steven] And Gabo was interested in them
because they were new.
But unlike Gabo,
Kiefer is still referencing traditional materials.
This is a vertical canvas, it is still a colored paste
that is applied to that surface,
it is still painting in some respects.
- [Corey] But as we look in this painting
we see huge cracks.
In fact we see big chunks of the painting
that have fallen off.
Now if we can imagine that same chunk,
if it had fallen off from, let's say,
a 19th century academic painting, this is disastrous.
You can't even see the painting anymore.
- [Steven] So this raises really interesting questions
for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Does it collect those pieces as they fall off?
Does it restore those pieces?
Where does it decide to intervene?
- [Corey] Well, having worked on a number of Kiefer's myself
I can tell you yes, we do collect them
but I've worked on Kiefer's that, believe it or not,
are three of four times as large as this one,
and I've large chunks of paint
that I just can't find where they came from.
So I save them, but I've no idea
where that puzzle piece came from.
- [Steven] And Kiefer himself has been
somewhat nonchalant in his response,
saying "If something comes off, let's just put it back on".
- [Corey] He's inviting paint to fall off these paintings.
- [Steven] What's the reason behind that?
How does the material help to effect his message?
- [Corey] Kiefer's a very poetic artist
and so much of his poetry is about
these very dramatic appearances of decay and fragility.
So much of his work references
this German and Austrian consciousness of history,
especially the dark chapters.
- [Steven] This is a painting that is clearly a landscape.
We see two tyre tracks that are moving
through the center of the canvas into the distance.
We see a black sky at the narrowest band
just above the horizon line.
So the fields fill our entire view
and for me this is always a reminder of the soil
of the German heartland,
which in the 1970s and '80s was a very brave act
at the moment when Germany was just coming to terms
with its immediate past.
- [Corey] So many of his paintings
addressed these dreams of history that no longer work.
It's a kind of nostalgia that he's addressing poetically
with these materials that themselves fail,
crack and fall apart.
- [Steven] I think it's easy for us to forget
how much Germany has contributed to civilization
and so many German intellectuals never believed
that somebody like Hitler could take power.
And it feels like, in Kiefer's layering process,
this archeology of paint,
that Kiefer's able to expose those layers of history,
even as he builds up paint
that he knows will eventually fall off.
- [Corey] On the one hand we can consider this
an excavation of a painting,
on the other hand I think we can consider Kiefer's work
an excavation of the German consciousness.
(soft piano music)