Anselm Kiefer’s World of Devastation Is Captured in the Documentary Over Your Cities Grass Will Gro
If Pompeii hadn’t been excavated, if the towns and villages on the Western Front hadn’t been rebuilt after World War I, and if the site of the World Trade Center had been left as it was after 9/11, they might partially resemble the ruins Anselm Kiefer constructed in the South of France. Moving from Germany in 1993, Kiefer took over the 35 hectares of the industrial wasteland La Ribaute, near Barjac, and turned the atelier into a sprawling Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art,” consisting of 47 buildings, an amphitheater, bridges, caves, an underground labyrinth that invoke the guts of the Pyramids or the gas chambers of the Nazi concentration camps. In the concrete rooms, he installed artworks — twisted strips of metallic film, a dormitory cast in lead, a child’s garment decorated with shards of glass, and other totems of catastrophe.
Kiefer has since moved on to another studio in Paris, taking “110 trucks” of the art with him, but La Ribaute remains. He and his small team of workmen were filmed in their labors by the British director Sophie Fiennes, whose mesmerizing Cinema Scope documentary “Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow” appeared at the Cannes Film Festival last year. Playing at Film Forum in New York from August 10-23, it doubles as a post-biblical, post-apocalyptic prophesy about the eventual fate of the earth and a self-reflexive meditation on the artistic process. Reflecting Kiefer’s canvases, it is etched in the colors of lead, earth, ash, charcoals, blacks, and discolored whites.
Occasionally, a splash of blue — that of industrial drums — obtrudes, or the muted golds and greens of the surrounding foliage. Kiefer comments in the film that he’s pleased vegetation is reclaiming La Ribaute, but this scarcely admits a return to the Arcadian, as did an unrelated exhibition bearing the same name as the film that ran at London’s Hidde Van Seggelen Gallery this spring, featuring work by Piranesi, Friedrich, Brouwn, Janssens, Almarcegui, and others. In contrast, Kiefer’s studio is a theme park dedicated to the notions of destruction, decay, annulment, and eventual absence.
“Over Your Cities” begins wordlessly as the disembodied camera glides up, down, along, and around the eerie subterranean passageways — made of corrugated iron and cement, some interspersed with stalagmite-like columns — to the sound of Jörg Widmann and György Ligeti’s spectral music. Shards of pottery and glass, broken slabs of concrete and rocks proliferate. After nearly 20 minutes of immersion in this dead zone, Kiefer and his workmen appear — pumping water, making a plaster-like substance, smelting ore. Among the artworks they make in the film are an installation suspending miniature lead battleships (a tribute to Céline’s novel “Journey to the End of the Night”) and a painting of the Ardèche forest, the boles stripped bare and stained with ground cement. The latter work is reminiscent of Kiefer’s great “Varus” (1976),Cheap Ed hardy bags, which deals with the birth and growth of German national consciousness via its inscription of the victory over the Romans in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD — Germany, year zero. Anselm’s Teutonic forests, influenced by Altdorfer and Friedrich, augur the Nazi horror.
At the center of the film, there’s a statically shot interview, conducted in La Ribaute’s library, between Kiefer and a German journalist who prompts the artist to ruminate on his ideas. Though we learn little about the historical or nostalgic influences on the Gesamtkunstwerk, Kiefer does refer to “The Odyssey,” the Kabbala (in reference to broken vessels), and Heidegger’s belief that boredom is useful in bringing about consciousness of one’s existence. Kiefer strongly believes in the importance of emptiness as a precondition for creating. “I fundamentally believe that through my work I can fill an empty room created in my childhood,” he says. “The space has not been filled yet things fall into it and take effect.”
Through his work, Kiefer has been a provocative and consistent critic of the Third Reich, and there are enough installations and imagery at La Ribaute to have prompted a detailed discussion of Nazi atrocities and the devastation of war — fabricated dragons’ teeth adorn some of the artworks, the teetering concrete towers suggest Dresden and Berlin after the Allied bombing (as well as Ground Zero). When Kiefer and the workmen drop sheets of plate glass on the floor of an installation room, or strew glass around a warehouse, it’s impossible not to think of Kristallnacht. Kiefer has a crane mount one of his massive trademark lead books onto a huge canvas; other books are burned — connoting the Nazi repression and the death of knowledge.
Regrettably, Kiefer doesn’t engage with this. Instead, he speaks about man’s origins as a sea creature who longs to go “back to our happy, unconscious being as a single cell in the ocean,” and about scientific theories such as the Big Bang describing “our lack of knowledge. They describe our ignorance…. All the scientific and technological progress only tells me how incomplete I am and that I know nothing…. How inhuman I am, and how inhuman humans are.” Well, not entirely. Shortly after he delivers this humbling peroration, two small boys, the artist’s sons, enter the frame, playfully scooting behind their father.
After the interview, Fiennes returns to the construction outside at La Ribaute. Kiefer and one of his workers pour molten metal, like so much lava, down a small hill of earth. A huge mechanical drill bores holes in the earth that they fill with cement and plant with metal rods — one thinks of what might have lain under the Nazi Party rally grounds designed by Albert Speer — and erect one of many skeletal towers made from concrete modules. In one shot, a cement staircase rises for a few steps and then, having broken, stops abruptly. Whither did it lead?
Kiefer says the towers were influenced by the Jewish folkloric figure of Adam’s demonic first wife, Lilith, who was expelled by him from Paradise and dwelled in abandoned ruins, threatening that “over your cities grass will grow.” “I think that’s fantastic,” he remarks, sweeping the devastated past historical into the ghost towns of the future.
Watch clips from “Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow” below:
ONE: Raising the Painting
TWO: The Towers
THREE: Melting Lead