Great choices. I love Kiefer as well, it's amazing the way he somehow manages to make morally serious and profound art that avoids being rank didacticism. You look at all the bad political propaganda in contemporary art and you want to shout "HE can do it...why can't YOU!!" Though part of me wonders sometimes if it's cheap heat; I went to his exhibition in Los Angeles that had two story paintings with metal submarine sculptures on them and I was honestly really moved but the ruder part of me was thinking it's kind of Immersive Van Gogh for people who love Walter Benjamin.
(Although I was defending Immersive Van Gogh to a friend recently, I know I should hate them but I read an article about them and I found all all the pictures of couples on dates and families with young kids in them strangely sweet and somewhat moving......)
With all the romantic talk recently I would think you'd be a big Turner fan. I think of his project as a little like the ones we discuss here, torn between realism and a wild abstraction trying to burst through. But I guess there are no people in them, except by implication.
I had a hard time with the Dutch masters for a bit until one day I saw Rembrandt's Juno (https://rembrandtinsocal.org/virtual-exhibition/juno/) at the Hammer museum and from there I suddenly began to see the extreme tenderness and anguish in him, especially his late work. I get it though-- it's a lot of brown. (As much of a tv blowhard as he can be, I also love Simon Schama's dual biography of Rembrandt and Rubens).
Thanks! I think there are probably worse things than Immersive Van Gogh too. I'm sure you're right about the kind of appreciation Kiefer invites from the cognoscenti, but I might take his grandiosity as a provocative challenge to the Benjamin sensibility, refusing Benjamin's call to politicize art, as if to say the only thing that could really exorcise Nazism is something as larger as or larger than Nazism, hence the susceptibility to a Jungian reading per my footnote.
I do like Turner in theory, for just the reasons you say. In practice, I find him somewhat..murky.
Agreed on Rembrandt: his Lucretia here in Minneapolis had a similar effect on me. I should have exempted him; I was mainly thinking of Vermeer and his pensive domestic women.
Yes, well put-- my main takeaway from the Kiefer exhibition I mentioned was this intense sense of the interconnectedness of human tragedy -- the Exodus is the holocaust is the drowning migrant is the poverty and homelessness on the street. Which of course sounds sort of corny and obvious when you say it, like coming down from a psychedelic trip and saying love is everything or we're all connected. But hey, it is and we are.
Ha, fair play on Vermeer, he's hit or miss for me but I go wild for the street scenes - View of Delft and The Little Street. They're just as perfect and still and harmonious as it gets.
Yeah “The John Pistelli Reader” would probably benefit from some sympathetic annotations of the type you provide here were it to exist. It’s funny, when I started reading you I did’t grasp the contextuality of your work at all, and absorbing a decent amount of it came to the conclusion that you were basically a kind of neoconservative! I always think it would be a fun game to try to map every German thinker of the last two or three hundred years onto that painting.
Yes, you’re certainly heavier on the residual leftism and anti-imperialism than they were, (although it sounds like you were a better stalinist than they were trots)
The residual anti-imperialism comes from my embrace of my American destiny as a libertarian! The residual Stalinism is ironically most appreciable in my aesthetics: hard as I try to restrain it, when I encounter ugly art that doesn't make any sense, my inner Lukacs comes out.
Great choices. I love Kiefer as well, it's amazing the way he somehow manages to make morally serious and profound art that avoids being rank didacticism. You look at all the bad political propaganda in contemporary art and you want to shout "HE can do it...why can't YOU!!" Though part of me wonders sometimes if it's cheap heat; I went to his exhibition in Los Angeles that had two story paintings with metal submarine sculptures on them and I was honestly really moved but the ruder part of me was thinking it's kind of Immersive Van Gogh for people who love Walter Benjamin.
(Although I was defending Immersive Van Gogh to a friend recently, I know I should hate them but I read an article about them and I found all all the pictures of couples on dates and families with young kids in them strangely sweet and somewhat moving......)
With all the romantic talk recently I would think you'd be a big Turner fan. I think of his project as a little like the ones we discuss here, torn between realism and a wild abstraction trying to burst through. But I guess there are no people in them, except by implication.
I had a hard time with the Dutch masters for a bit until one day I saw Rembrandt's Juno (https://rembrandtinsocal.org/virtual-exhibition/juno/) at the Hammer museum and from there I suddenly began to see the extreme tenderness and anguish in him, especially his late work. I get it though-- it's a lot of brown. (As much of a tv blowhard as he can be, I also love Simon Schama's dual biography of Rembrandt and Rubens).
Thanks! I think there are probably worse things than Immersive Van Gogh too. I'm sure you're right about the kind of appreciation Kiefer invites from the cognoscenti, but I might take his grandiosity as a provocative challenge to the Benjamin sensibility, refusing Benjamin's call to politicize art, as if to say the only thing that could really exorcise Nazism is something as larger as or larger than Nazism, hence the susceptibility to a Jungian reading per my footnote.
I do like Turner in theory, for just the reasons you say. In practice, I find him somewhat..murky.
Agreed on Rembrandt: his Lucretia here in Minneapolis had a similar effect on me. I should have exempted him; I was mainly thinking of Vermeer and his pensive domestic women.
Yes, well put-- my main takeaway from the Kiefer exhibition I mentioned was this intense sense of the interconnectedness of human tragedy -- the Exodus is the holocaust is the drowning migrant is the poverty and homelessness on the street. Which of course sounds sort of corny and obvious when you say it, like coming down from a psychedelic trip and saying love is everything or we're all connected. But hey, it is and we are.
Ha, fair play on Vermeer, he's hit or miss for me but I go wild for the street scenes - View of Delft and The Little Street. They're just as perfect and still and harmonious as it gets.
Yeah “The John Pistelli Reader” would probably benefit from some sympathetic annotations of the type you provide here were it to exist. It’s funny, when I started reading you I did’t grasp the contextuality of your work at all, and absorbing a decent amount of it came to the conclusion that you were basically a kind of neoconservative! I always think it would be a fun game to try to map every German thinker of the last two or three hundred years onto that painting.
If I am a *kind* of neoconservative, it's a very unusual kind! Yes, I want to map all modern western thinkers and artists onto that painting.
Yes, you’re certainly heavier on the residual leftism and anti-imperialism than they were, (although it sounds like you were a better stalinist than they were trots)
The residual anti-imperialism comes from my embrace of my American destiny as a libertarian! The residual Stalinism is ironically most appreciable in my aesthetics: hard as I try to restrain it, when I encounter ugly art that doesn't make any sense, my inner Lukacs comes out.