Anselm Keifer: Take one: Small Spaces

 Small Spaces:

     Last semester I went to the Gagosian gallery in NYC where they where exhibiting "Next Year in Jerusalm" which exhibited a number of pieces by Anselm Kiefer. For me this wasn't any old show; I had been looking at Keifers work since art became a large part of my life. Yet I had never seen any of his works in person, which until this experience I had never realized how important it was to see art in person. Naturally I much anticipated seeing this exhibition. His work after all has been a major influence in how I work, how I experience the making process and also informs much of my own asthetic. It wasn't until nearly the end of the trip that I finally got to see the show. I walked in and the gallery was packed with people, but more so it was unbearably filled with Kiefers work. Art that was on a scale I could had never fathomed before, to me these paintings where the sizes of houses. I meekley entered the gallery (for some reason, fearful that some one would take one look at me and say "what the hell are you doing here! You don't belong here!") and stood infront of the first piece and stared, not even knowing at first what to think, or should I say I simply could not think.

The sheer magnitude of the work towering infront of me was beyond any art I had yet to experience. I had no idea that the work I had been looking at all this time in books, was so much more than what I could see on those minescule pages. It was here, standing in this room filled with people I didn't know, and filled with work I had never "seen" before, work I didn't know could exist, that I began to cry. I cried because I had been living under the presumption that I knew Anselm Kiefers work better than any one, that I had seen it all and yet infront of me was this thing I had never imagined, I had never seen this. Not only did I feel ignorant and powerless, but I also realized that this was art. To me this was the kindling to the fire that drives what I define myself by, yet I knew nothing about this art. I continued throught the gallery examinging every mark, every fire carved in to the hill scapes, one painting/sculpture after the other I would stand and pull in every inch, stund at its power, conflicted with enigmatic jealousy. This is the art I wanted to make but had no idea how to. Tears would fall with each piece and all I wanted was to consume every ounce of unabated intensity. I started getting frustrated with this gallery space filled with people who couldn't see what I saw; Frustrated by the fact that I couldn't move to a place where I could engross the work with my whole mind, the space was far to small to withstand this sort of power. I couldn't move, I couldn't see, I couldn't think and so as the dissatisfaction built in me I finally left when I could not bare it any longer.

 I roamed the streets of New York City in a haze. I had atleast two hours left before I had to leave this wonderful city, I had hundreds of gallery's I could have gone to, but I couldn't stand to go into one more gallery, too look at another piece of "art", that would have been an intolerable dissapointment. So I sat and waited for the bus that would take me back to this small town I called home most of the year, and for the first time since I had lived in this place I did not want to go back.

       Since then the show has gone in and out of my mind, poping up as reminder of what art can accomplish. Looking back and thinking about the space that frustrated me so much, I realize that the intolerance towards the people there should be directed more to the fact that the space no matter how large in comparison to the other gallerys I went to, was too small to exhibit all of the work that it did. I felt crowded because it was. There was no place to step back; To walk from a far and let the works unveil themselves as the viewer is enticed closer and closer until its no longer an image, but becomes a structure of overwhelming marks and surfaces just as intricate as the structures of DNA that make up everything that lives. That being said, I also have realized once again the importance of experience. For example to others the work may have been powerful but not so much as it was for me. This was, after all, my first pilgrimage to New York City. This was my first time going to a gallery that was more than the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, which is an amazing gallery... for Rochester. These where gallerys that people talk about the world round and held works from artists that I have, just like Kiefers work, only seen in books. Works that I saw, such as... Jasper John's Flag, or Mark Rothko's No. 5/No. 22, or Louise Nevelson's Sky Cathedral and Lucien Freud's Naked Man, Back View, no matter how much influence these artists have had on me none could compare to the effect that Anselm Keifer has.

       Experiences are key in the way that any given person views art. For example, when I changed high schools after my parents divorce, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, I had no goals and there was nothing that made me consider what the future could be for me. This was when I met Bill Stephens, the art teacher who worked at the school I just transfered too. The very teacher that when I had an indepentendent study with for painting, told me where the brushes and paints were and that was the only instruction I got (even though I had never painted before that). While I was working, Bill saw what I was doing with the medium and handed me a book on Anselm Keifer's work. With Bill as my guide and Keifer as inspiration I found something that ment more to me than anything else before, it was Art. This is why no one else in that gallery was wandering from painting to painting with tears in their eyes, they hadn't had the same experience with the art that I had. Once again Keifer has impacted me from a far, and maybe one day I will meet the man who has instilled such inspirating in me, but until then I will have to settle on two life changing experiences.


*Images provided by the Gagosian Gallery, MoMa and MET websites.