Anselm Kiefer

In crafting his 1939 masterpiece, Finnegans Wake, James Joyce—by then nearly blind and hyperattuned to the intrinsic musicality of the throat and tongue and the infinite compositional potentialities embedded therein—seated himself upon the trash heap of history, forging a new synthetic hybrid language that went beyond all the constraints of English, his ostensible medium. In doing so, he discovered a wholly new use of the language as junk, as detritus, as joyful excess; language as sculpture; language as raw material. Still radical from today’s perspective—we are currently living through a period in which even novels and poetry are widely expected to fulfill some propagandistic aim, often through cringe-inducing spouts of sentimentality—Joyce’s project of literary maximalism has arguably found its visual parallel in the works of “everything” artists such as Dieter Roth and Paul McCarthy, artists for whom the cultivation of material (and, very often, bodily) excesses serves to stem the tide of art history in the forging of an uncreated conscience.

Anselm Kiefer has long plumbed the depths of this “end of history” trope in his impossibly large-scale two-dimensional mixed-media works. One hesitates to call them “paintings,” as they tend to defy both pictorial and material convention; they often come padded with all sorts of three-dimensional detritus that makes them function almost as wall sculpture (if such categories even matter at this point). In his latest exhibition, Kiefer pays homage to the circular narrative of Joyce’s masterwork. The core of the show is Arsenal, 1970–2023. Assorted rusting “elements” (as per the list of materials) overflow from industrial racks stacked to the ceiling on both sides of a tunnel-like corridor that splits off into several rooms housing equally imposing sculptural installations like Marx my word fort, 2021–23. The latter features a giant sand pile dotted with upturned steel shopping carts and an antique wheelchair, as well as scrawled quotations from Joyce upon the walls.  

What Joyce would have thought of this reinterpretation is anyone’s guess, but moving around and among all these forlorn piles, it becomes clear that no one dramatizes the end of history quite like Kiefer.