Anselm Kiefer's Walhalla and Paul Celan Encounters

A few weeks ago I went to the Anselm Kiefer exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey, near London Bridge. This new exhibition, called Walhalla, runs until 12 February and it's free.

Anselm Kiefer, the German artist who was born just as World War II ended, produces art which is in a continual dialogue with Germany's history, with poets and philosophers, and with the times of rupture that we are living through. I went to his retrospective exhibition at the Royal Academy a couple of years ago and was blown away - which is a rare occurrence for me with contemporary art. You can read my thoughts about that exhibition here.

Kiefer's work feels shocking in the way that visiting the site of a concentration camp shocks. It's not so much what you see before your eyes as what seems to be in the air. It's a feeling of living in aftermath. The first thing I saw at White Cube was a long, dark hallway of hospital beds dressed with lead sheets. There was a warning not to touch the installations, as the lead could be dangerous.

Huge paintings of burning, crumbling towers - a spiral staircase draped with robes - a library-cum-apothecary bleeding film reels and pages... I found, as with the previous exhibition, that I was having an almost physical reaction to Kiefer's work. It seemed as though the world around me was going in and out of focus in a very unsettling way.

I went to that 2014 exhibition at the Royal Academy mainly because I had read that Kiefer was strongly influenced by Paul Celan. I wasn't disappointed, because there were works specifically inspired by Celan's poems. In Walhalla, the influence wasn't signalled quite so clearly. But then, in the cluttered room of giant drawers and film reels, I saw this:

Mohn und Gedächtnis (written on the bottom drawer) means Poppy and Memory, and it is the title of Celan's second book of poetry. In an installation which reminded me very much of some crazed, broken apothecary, and in an artist's work which continually tries to deal with the worst of memory, it seemed very appropriate.

Later, on another work, I saw this:

I had an eerie feeling when I saw this piece of writing. I don't actually speak German, but I was sure I recognised the words. I was sure I knew the poem and the exact lines it referred to. And when I checked later, I found I was right:

bone-Hebrew
ground into sperm
ran through the hourglass
through which we swam, two dreams now, chiming
against time, in the squares.

(from 'In Prague', translated by Michael Hamburger)

This happens to be one of my favourite poems by Celan, and the shock of recognising lines from it on the side of a work of art, in the original German, was considerable. I have to read his poems in translation, but usually I do so with the original on the facing page, and I do try to read and compare both. I was of course looking out for references to poetry and particularly to Celan, but it was a moment which brought home to me the intensity of my relationship with Celan's work.

You can read another review of Walhalla and find some good photos here: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/nov/21/anselm-kiefer-review-walhalla-white-cube-bermondsey