On Anselm Kiefer’s Photography

Joshua ChuangLast fall I had the chance to see Anselm Kiefer: Photography at the Beginning, the exhibition you initiated at Musée LaM. I was both overwhelmed and enthralled by the muscularity and complexity of Kiefer’s longstanding engagement with photography. Many of the works in the current Gagosian exhibition, which Kiefer has entitled Punctum, come from your show at LaM. We all know Kiefer as a towering figure of contemporary art whose practice has utilized a variety of mediums, incorporating them in some of the most encompassing installations imaginable—no less a critic than Harold Bloom called him the most ambitious figure in Western culture of his generation—so I wanted to ask: How did your project on Kiefer’s photography come about? And why now?

Sébastien DelotWell, it was a long-term project that came to completion in ’23. In 2015, he had this wonderful show at Bibliothèque nationale de France, and it left on me a very big impression. I was impressed by all of the photography in his books, and I thought, maybe we have to approach Kiefer through a different path that would give the public an opportunity to revisit his work in a new way.

I remember when we had the press conference, journalists were dubious, not about the quality of Kiefer, obviously, but about what kind of new ideas you could bring to the conversation. So when we said it’s going to be about photography and revisiting all this work from his early, student days through the most well-known series, Occupations, the public and the journalists were excited to discover another face of Anselm Kiefer.

JCYou mentioned Occupations, which he carried out in 1969, making it his earliest body of work. Could you describe it?

SDTo set the stage, you have to think about the late 1960s and how much it was a time of change, a time of rebellion. There was the war in the United States with Vietnam, and in France there were the student protests of May 1968. So this sense of turmoil was in the atmosphere. For Kiefer, as for many artists of his generation, there was the idea that what came before was dead, that in a way painting was dead. As a student, Kiefer’s relationship to painting was ambiguous and complex. When he started doing his Occupations, his relation to Joseph Beuys and the concept of social sculpture really expanded his notion of art and politics. In Occupations, Kiefer uses provocative imagery, like subverting the Nazi salute by wearing a dress; it becomes fragile ridicule, and there is a lot of irony. Kiefer has always had a very sharp and edgy sense of humor. It’s disquieting, because it makes you think differently.

JCWhen pictures from Occupations were published in 1975, it made him one of the most notorious German artists of his generation.

SDRight. When you think of “occupation,” there are several meanings, including the idea of a military maneuver. I think this series is important in understanding how he is playing on the threshold of what’s acceptable and not acceptable—sort of a breaking point. On the verge of something that is disturbing. That’s the strength of art.

JCI came away from your exhibition with the understanding that photography for Kiefer is many things. It can be a form of notetaking, a record of fleeting observations and experiences, source material, a muse. He has employed it as a kind of underdrawing for his canvases. But I think what we see here in this exhibition at Gagosian is that a photograph for Kiefer is something to be transformed, manipulated, a ground for metamorphosis.

SDYes, and I think that’s part of what drew him to the process of film photography. Kiefer was developing his own photographs in the ’60s in the bathroom, and when the image would start to reveal itself, he was fascinated by that moment of transformation. We can think about Kiefer as an alchemist. He changes his materials, using different things and breaking and transforming and also accepting that it’s going to self-destruct, it’s going to go rotten. It’s part of the process.

Kiefer has said that when he has a moment of feeling dry or not feeling inspired, he goes back to photography and takes a picture and something starts again. He thinks with images, obviously—he’s a visual artist. And photography is one of his mediums. But the photos that have been taken can also be, in French we say “le positif”—they’re like raw materials, as you were saying. They could be combined in a sculpture; they could be combined into a painting. The painting could be photographed and then destroyed. So it’s part of a cycle of creation. Often when Kiefer is painting, he takes a photograph and puts it on the back of a painting.

JCIn Wim Wenders’ film Anselm, there’s a noteworthy scene near the beginning in which the camera homes in on a small photograph pinned to the back of this gigantic canvas in Kiefer’s atelier. Later we see massive shelves containing all sorts of raw materials that are sort of moldering away, including bins of photographs, which Kiefer is seen rummaging through.

SDYes, his archive is absolutely beyond imagination. I don’t know, it’s probably around 800,000 photographs, his archive. In his studio they’re waiting to be associated with a painting, maybe a sculpture.

JCLooking at the works in Punctum, one may conclude that, for Kiefer, photographs on their own are inadequate. He’s alluded to the fact that he’s not interested in the veracity of the photograph or in any straightforward rendering. He activates his pictures by enlarging them and using a variety of techniques to transform them. I get the sense that the indexicality of the photograph doesn’t hold much meaning for him. Rather it’s the associative aspect of the work, its capacity to conjure another world beyond that depicted in the picture, that primarily concerns him.

SDI don’t think I would entirely agree with what you said. I think it’s more that for him a picture, photography, is a trace that needs to be interpreted. He knows very well the writing of Roland Barthes, La chambre claire—the idea that photography becomes a proof of reality, but then you have to interpret it because it’s not a fact. And for him it’s like history. Obviously, it depends who writes history, we know that. When he went to school, he says that the Nazi period was barely evoked at school. And I think Kiefer has been obsessed with the idea of history and how you could destroy history and recreate history, and that’s why for him ruins are a point of departure. It’s not only the sadness of it, but it’s what you can build from it or what you can interpret from it. I think for Kiefer that relation to History with a capital “H” is a major aspect.

JCWe see a variety of experimental darkroom interventions in these works. Some of the pictures are solarized—a technique accidentally discovered by Man Ray and Lee Miller, who, as legend has it, noticed a mouse in the darkroom and flipped on the light as a photographic print was being developed. Realizing her mistake, she quickly turned the lights back off and ended up with a picture whose tones were partially reversed. Man Ray later popularized its use as a means “to escape from banality.” For other works, Kiefer has interrupted the development of the image with silver toner, which creates splotches that have a particular metallic sheen. In Osiris, the earliest and largest picture in this exhibition, a sheet of roughened lead has been melded onto the surface of the photographic print, which sags slightly in its frame.

SDHis use of lead is interesting. He often sticks photographs on lead, and there is obviously a big difference between photography paper, the lightness of it, with a kind of transparency, and lead that is opaque and weighty. He likes to play with contrasts of forms, of materials, and as we said, he’s an alchemist in his way. And he’s doing his cooking, trying many sorts of things, and serendipity and chance are also part of the process. He’ll make a selection of a few of the results and discard the rest. He wants to keep only the things that make sense to him.

JCAs a photography curator, one of the things that draw me to these pictures is how they recall my experience of the earliest “primitive” photographs by Niépce or Talbot, or the daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey, made during a time before photographs were standardized and ubiquitous, before the people instinctively knew how to make sense of them. These were one-of-a-kind, alchemical experiments, impossible to replicate in those first years, and even today they convey the excitement of discovery. Kiefer’s photographs have this character as well.

SDCompletely. In each work you discover anew the violence, the strength, the strangeness, the power of destruction that’s at the center of his work.