David Plante will give a reading from Becoming A Londoner at the New York Public Library this Tuesday, September 24 at 7pm.  

Michael Craig-Martin has had an exhibition that consisted entirely of an ordinary glass of water on a high glass shelf, the glass itself the idea one would have of an ordinary glass. The glass of water on the glass shelf is high up on a blood-red wall, the whole length of Waddington Gallery. But, as an accompanying card informed, printed in red on white pasteboard, the glass of water is no longer a glass of water but an oak tree. Michael was brought up a Catholic, which he has, as I have, rejected, but what else but his religion informs the miracle of the transubstantiation of the glass of water into an oak tree?

But, more than our shared Catholic pasts, I have my own view of Michael’s work – which he seems to respect but not to be convinced by – in our both having been taught by Jesuits. I went to Jesuit Boston College and was taught Scholastic epistemology, which discipline has remained with me as my essential sense in my own apprehension of the world. I like to think that Michael was just long enough at the Jesuit university of Fordham to have been inspired by some idea of Scholastic epistemology, and to be intrigued by the mental process by which a specific object such as a glass of water is held in a state of momentary suspension before it is judged as this or that glass of water, so that in that state of suspension, of apprehension, the water glass becomes an oak tree.

– – –

We’ve become regular guests at the Queen Anne house of Adrian and Ann Stokes in Hampstead, with sherry first in the sitting room hung with a large nude by William Coldstream, and considered by Adrian a major work. Dinner downstairs in the basement, by the Aga, the table laid with Ann’s pottery, with large ceramic animals as centrepieces.
Adrian especially warm towards Nikos, whom he embraces whenever we arrive, Nikos appearing to revive in Adrian a youthful erotic attraction to someone as attractive as Nikos. As for worlds revolving around Adrian – think of Ezra Pound, think of Osbert Sitwell, think of all the Saint Ives artists including Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo and . . . And Adrian knew D. H. Lawrence, whom he visited when Lawrence lived in Italy, in the Villa Mirenda – not only knew Lawrence, but delivered Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Lawrence’s Italian publisher Orioli, no doubt reading that novel on the train! Nikos is very impressed that Adrian was analyzed by Melanie Klein, and thinks that the great disappointment in Adrian’s life is that analysis could not cure his daughter Ariadne of schizophrenia.

– – –

R. B. Kitaj is painting an almost life-size portrait of Nikos.
R.B. and his wife Sandra come to meals, or we go to them. At their large round dining table there are always interesting people to meet, as if R.B. (Nikos calls him Ron, but he prefers R.B. or, simply, Kitaj) sees his friends as references to the richness of culture as he sees the figures in his paintings as referring, too, to the richness of culture.
His library, with high shelves of books, forms part of his studio, there where a punching bag hangs, and I easily imagine Kitaj punching the bag when he gets frustrated at a painting not going well. He can have a mad look.
There are so many references in his paintings. In the branches of a tree hung what looked like red ribbon, and I asked him what it referred to. He said, off-handedly, ‘I just wanted a bit of red there,’ which impressed me, for I sometimes think that Kitaj will sacrifice composition to the references.

At the large round table in the basement kitchen, Nikos and I have met the very old American painter Raphael Soyer and his wife. R.B. is keen on artists of the 1940s Fourteenth Street School of painters that included Reginald Marsh, Isabel Bishop, Kenneth Hayes Miller, all figurative artists, as R.B. is trying to promote figures in paintings as opposed to abstraction.

Other people we’ve met at their dinners:

The painter Avigdor Arikha and his wife Anne.

The film maker Kenneth Anger, whose Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome I’d seen years before. As good looking as he was, I was frightened of him because I’d heard he was under a satanic bond to kill someone.

The poet Robert Duncan, whose portrait Kitaj has drawn and who clearly has exhausted both Kitaj and Sandra by his relentlessly inventive talk, as he exhausted Nikos and me when he came to supper, theorizing about, say, Gertrude Stein in terms of the inner tensions in her work, his mind, it seems, filled with inner tensions that flash out in different directions while one tries to make the connections among all the flashes. His lover Jess Collins sat back.

Robert gave us some of his books of poems, with photomontages by Jess. So we are building up a collection of signed books given to us.

Also at Kitaj and Sandra’s, we met a coroner, who said that there was nothing more beautiful than the naked chest of a dead young man.

When you meet someone at Kitaj and Sandra’s, you feel the person must be rather esoteric to be of interest to them, and, in meeting this esoteric person, you hope you are rather esoteric too. Kitaj, an American, wants to belong to what he calls the London School of Painters, wants, I think, to become as much a part of the art world of London as Whistler and Sargent were.

He is close to David Hockney, with whom he appeared on the front cover of the New Review, both of them naked, arms across shoulders.

Sandra asked to paint my portrait – in the nude, if I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind. Then she suggested I come again and pose with another male model, very sexy, both of us nude. ‘And you never know what will happen.’

She and R.B. go to Amsterdam to the live sex shows and afterwards clap.

Kitaj likes to go to the airport and take the next flight out to wherever, the last time to Athens, where he went to a whorehouse and waited until a large woman came out and, raising her arms high, shouted, ‘America!’ He tells this story before Sandra, who laughs, I think a strained laugh.

Their understanding is: never with friends.

Sandra is very beautiful, with a wide white smile.

– – –

While I’m making pottery with Ann, Adrian works in his study, but at tea time she asks me up to his desk and we have tea from Ann’s cups.

I always bring Adrian little gifts, mostly postcards. One was of a Mughul miniature, which he liked. Another was of a Surrealist  painting, and this he did not like, though his way of indicating he doesn’t like something isn’t to say so, but to laugh a little. Later, he told me he didn’t like the Surrealists, but as an aside. My little gifts – besides postcards, a volume of three Greek poets, fancy cakes from a pastry shop in Hampstead – are offered partly with the wonder of how he will react to them.

I have no idea what Adrian’s likes and dislikes are, and I realize that this both intimidates me and excites me. All I know for sure is that he has a vision, and vision excites me.

Once, having been first to Stephen Buckley’s studio, I went to Church Row with a little work of Stephen’s under my arm which I showed to Adrian: he looked at it for a long time on his desk, and I, standing by, wondered what he was thinking. When he said, ‘Yes, I like it,’ I was very pleased.

I’m always aware that his appreciation of something is, in a way, refl ective, that it has to do with deciding something about the object. His appreciation is, I feel, based on the object’s standing up or not to Adrian’s awareness of it. I don’t think: Adrian is coming to terms with the object. I think: the object is coming to terms with Adrian.

– – –

Sonia invited Nikos and me for a birthday party for Francis. I sat next to Francis, and across the table was David Sylvester. I asked Francis if he ever worried about the meaning of art. ‘No,’ he said, and laughed.

‘I just paint. I paint out of instinct. That’s all.’ ‘Then you’re very lucky others like your work,’ David said. ‘That’s it,’ Francis said. ‘I’m very lucky. People, for some reason, buy my work. If they didn’t, I suppose I’d have to make my living in another way.’ I said, ‘I’m sure people buy – or, if they can’t buy, are drawn to – your work because you do paint out of instinct.’ ‘Perhaps it’s just fashionable for people to be drawn now,’ Francis said, and I said, ‘No, that’s not true, and you know it’s not true.’ He said, ‘You’re right. I do know. Of course I know. When I stop to wonder why I paint, I paint out of instinct.’ David looked very thoughtful. He sat away from the table, his large body a little slumped forward, his hands on his knees. Slightly wall-eyed, he stared at the table as he thought, and he fi nally asked Francis, very slowly, ‘How does luck come into your work?’ Francis answered, ‘If anything works for me in my paintings, I feel it is nothing I’ve made myself but something luck has given to me.’ David asked, ‘Is there any way of preparing for the luck before you start working?’

‘It comes by chance,’ Francis said. ‘It wouldn’t come by will power. But it’s impossible to talk about this.’

This excited me, and I immediately asked, ‘Because it’s a mystery?’

Francis jerked round to me, his eyes wide. He said flatly, ‘I don’t think one can explain it.’

I knew that I was trying to push Francis into saying something that I wanted him to say but which I also knew he disdained, as he disdained all forms of the mysterious.   Nikos warned me. ‘Do you know what you’re asking of Francis?’ I took the risk and asked Francis, ‘Do you ever think that if one knew enough one might be able to explain the mystery of chance? And if one could explain would the mystery go and the work be destroyed?’

Francis pursed his lips. He could sometimes appear to be parodying the expression of deep thought. He asked me, ‘Are you asking me if I ever think I could destroy my work by knowing too much about what makes it?’

‘More than that. I wonder, have you ever wanted to explain what makes a painting work even though you knew the explanation would destroy it? I mean, do you ever worry that your work is too explicit in its meaning, not latent enough?’

Francis said, ‘I can’t wonder about that, because I know I would never be able to explain.’ He laughed.

– – –

Whenever I am in the West End, I stop to look in at the shows galleries are putting on. I stopped in the Kasmin Gallery in Bond Street and found the entire large clear white space filled with one work by Anthony Caro, Prairie, a vast bright yellow sheet of metal supported as if magically at one corner so the vast bright yellow sheet of metal appeared to fl oat. I was struck: this is a great work of art. This is sublime!

– – –

I asked R. B. Kitaj what he thinks of Francis’ painting, and he wrote me, on many postcards, his favourite form of communicating:

For me, Bacon is not a great painter like Matisse or Picasso. He is a narrower talent, and he seems to have refused to draw, but from my perspective he is the best, most original and engaging painter . . . I cherish unusual paintings and, boy oh boy, are they rare and hard to achieve! Bacon keeps doing them . . . Of course it’s all a matter of taste, so I don’t wish to argue Bacon with those who are turned off by him, including brilliant friends of mine . . . But I do think he sings the song of himself. His pictures are every bit as elegant as the high American abstraction, but he engages his urbane nihilism to one’s one neurotic unease and achieved a psychological bloody pitch which almost always holds my attention.

– – –

A conversation with David Sylvester. He wondered if Yeats, great a poet as he was, failed to be the greatest because he lacked ‘helplessness.’ Nikos said that Yeats is limited because he is, however subtle, rhetorical – his poetry is constrained by its complicated intentions.

I said I wonder if this applied to Francis’ paintings, but with an essential difference: he himself is aware of the constraint of intention and tries, with more than will power, with passion, to go beyond intention and give his work ‘helplessness.’ I wondered if Francis in fact succeeds, if there is too much intention in his attempt to give himself up to the unintentional, even by throwing paint on the canvas then to work it into a figure. Nikos smiled and said nothing, but, as he always does, David looked at me for a very long time, and after a very long time he slowly, carefully said, ‘That is very interesting,’ as if he himself had not thought, among many, of such an obvious comment about the works of Francis Bacon.

When I think of ‘helplessness’ in writing, I think of Victor Shklovsky, who started out a novel with an intention but at the end he found he had written a novel completely different from what he had intended it to be, a novel that had occurred and expanded beyond his intention; so, when he started a new novel, he gave in helplessly to whatever novel would occur, that novel expanding as if on its own intentions beyond his, and he did this by writing whatever came to him, however seemingly disconnected, taking it on faith that everything in the end would connect, but not as he had thought. The unintended is truer than what is intended, because – and this I wonder at – what can’t be helped is truer than what can be helped, what is allowed to happen is truer than what one tries to make happen, what one gives in to is truer than what one imposes oneself upon.

But what is the unintended that expands on its own, to which the writer and the artist give themselves up helplessly? What expands beyond intention? What is it that we can only ever have a ‘sense’ of, can never give a rhetorical name to? What? We can’t say, but it is in us – it strains in us, it strains with a longing in us – to want to say what it is, to release it, to see it formed out there around us into – what? – a bright globe of everything, everything, everything all together held in that one great globe, is that all I can imagine of what it is?

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Seven years ago in his Prickly Paradigm Press pamphlet, What Happened to Art Criticism, James Elkins claimed that art criticism is in a state of crisis worldwide. The chief marks of this crisis are on the one hand the omnipresence of art writing (academic, essayistic, journalistic,) and on the other its lack of common ground. A sign of this latter is the abandonment of judgment , because to offer a judgment, and to convincingly sustain what’s offered, presupposes the ability to say why something matters or does not. Elkins insist that a simple return to a more judgmental art criticism is unworkable, because necessarily afflicted with “anachronism and historical naivete.” Still he hopes for an ambitious sort of criticism that exhibits three virtues: it would relate contemporary with past artworks; practice a kind of reflexivity in writing and then reflect upon the need for and the limits of its judgments; and it would attempt to take the measure of modern art. Given what Elkins says throughout the book about the conditions under which contemporary art criticism is practiced, this renewed and improved criticism seems unlikely to arise, and the conditions under which it would flourish are not on the horizon. Elkins turns the unlikely into the impossible by further demanding that art writers show intellectual responsibility by reading “everything,” a task unfulfilled by anyone since Milton.

Into the fray comes the distinguished linguist Roy Harris who has published, also with Prickly Pear, his own pamphlet, The Great Debate About Art. Harris takes up Elkins’ diagnosis and places it within the long history of discussing art, claiming, however, that as something worth analyzing and debating, art is over. The arts continue: painters shall paint, sculptors sculpt, and installers install; but the sort of ambitious criticism Elkins urges shall be stillborn. This is not because criticism won’t have works to attach itself to, but because the conditions for criticism mattering are long gone. The arts died with Dada, since which criticism has been a kind of diversion of attention from their absence. Art’s mattering was expressed in the urgent modernist questions: Is this art? Is it good or great art? Can it stand comparison with the great works of the past? But the break with the past renders the debate moot.

Harris’s pamphlet elaborates an account given in a previous book, The Necessity of Artspeak, wherein he insisted that all arts are conceptualized in terms of linguistic categories, but that not all arts are accompanied by incessant chatter. ‘Artspeak’ arises when some of a culture’s arts come to seem gratuitous or lacking an evident function. With modern art’s break with tradition, the “supercategory” of Art became problematic, and the discourse fragmented, as Elkins had argued.

The newer book, if not an obituary, diagnoses a terminal condition: the Great Debate is over. Harris’s prime exhibit is the chatter that surrounds the Turner Prize and the “boringly predictable, carefully orchestrated fuss about the annual winner” (p. 93). He is particularly exercised by a lecture given in 2000 by Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, which hosts the prize, and chairman of the Turner jury, in which Serota championed a work by Michael Craig-Martin, “An Oak Tree” (1973). The work consisted of a glass of tap water on a shelf, accompanied by a text ‘explaining’ that the work is not symbolic because the artist has as a matter of fact changed the glass of water into an oak tree. Serota undertakes a predictable set of verbal gymnastics to explain and justify the work, which Harris takes to illustrate the structure, both deep and incoherent, of contemporary artspeak.

Modern artspeak, according to Harris, was inaugurated by the proclamation of the doctrine of ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ at the very beginning of the 19th Century by the great French political philosopher Benjamin Constant. The problem  (more of a problem for artspeak than for art-making) is that the doctrine is unintelligible: nothing is purely for its own sake. Harris claims that the acceptance of the doctrine produces the modernist obsession with the ontological status of art and of particular artworks. But this questioning is accompanied by an unthematised concern for what sort of language  could address these concerns. With some originality and considerable insight, Harris sees three ways of answering these modern questions: the institutionalist, familiar to readers of Anglo-American philosophy from the writings of George Dickey, who considers the social acts of artworld professionals as conferring the status of art upon otherwise unendowed artifacts; the idiocentric, which claims that artistic status is conferred as the effect of an essentially private recognition of an artifact’s viewer; and the conceptualist, which centers on the claim that an artifact is an artwork if it is or embodies the right sort of idea, a claim that is as commonly held as it is difficult to state intelligibly.

Anyone familiar with discussion of recent art will, I think, recognize these three ways. Harris notes how Serota moves unwittingly among them, as they are sufficiently indeterminate in content and scope to blend unnoticeably: Criag-Martin’s piece is art because displayed in a gallery and approved by Serota (institutionalist); the accompanying writing declares to those who have eyes to read, if not to see, its status as art (idiocentric); and the role of the material is exclusively its use as a vehicle for the idea (conceptualist). Harris does not spare his reader other examples of contemporary artspeak, including the inevitable random quote from Rosalind Krauss, “so bad as to test the limits of comprehension”.

Although it is well and interestingly put, none of this seems to me in the least bit controversial, except in the choice of examples. But Harris also wishes to argue a much larger claim, that speaking not just about ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ but about art as such, is a futile attempt to valorize a set of the world’s artifacts. He claims that ‘art’, like religion, politics, law, and economy, is nothing but a kind of contingent linguistic category of the most general sort, a ‘metacategory’. The point of the use of the category of ‘art’ is to collect otherwise disparate phenomena, the ‘arts’, in order to use them to provide models for analyzing each other, create metaphors for each other (such as “architecture is frozen music”), and to organize discussion about the need for and uses of the arts. Harris interestingly notes that the applied arts are much less discussed than the so-called fine arts, supposedly because the former are more directly and transparently related to the satisfaction of needs. But the metacategory of art has collapsed under the two burdens of attempting to justify something ‘for-its-own-sake’, and of holding together the unsurveyable breadth of the visual arts since Dada. The persistence of the unintelligible trio of justification (institutionalist/idiocentric/conceptualist)  is only ever an increasingly failing attempt at deceiving ourselves into thinking that there is some secure basis of judgment in the diverse contemporary visual arts. Harris suggests that this state is coming to an end, but there is no reason to hope for Elkins-style ambitious criticism: as ‘art’ collapses, artspeak becomes a dialect of a much broader contemporary discourse, ‘mediaspeak’. What were formerly thought of as works of art are now considered (potentially) mass amusements, and what were once art critics will increasingly become servants of the entertainment industry.

There is some truth in this larger story, but many will  balk at the scope of Harris’s diagnosis. One runs into the limits of trying to talk about artspeak without talking about works of visual art as inducing and guiding irreducibly visual (and non- or pre-linguistic) experiences. In a strange chapter of what he calls the art of “I spy,” Harris claims that the basic drive in Western art is to produce a visual image of linguistic items: that table in Van Eyck, for example, looks just like a ‘real’ (that is, linguistically categorized) table. This unappealing and implausible claim is linguistic reductionism with a vengeance, and reads like a very exaggerated distortion of the least durable of the great Ernst Gombrich’s themes, the story of the rise of naturalism in Western art. Oddly, it is the large theme of Harris’s important work in linguistics that language gains whatever meaning it has only in its primary context of use; so on Harris’s own view artspeak should be analyzed in relation to the particular works it aims to elucidate and justify. Craig-Martin’s piece is not untypical of contemporary art, but it is by no means paradigmatic or exhaustive of it. But if, as Harris acknowledges, paintings and sculptures and installations will continue to be made, people will continue to discuss them. But also (and here’s the point missing in Harris’s account) some of these makers will continue to aim to produce works that are, to the maximum, meaningfully and richly self-reflexive; and correlatively the makers and the viewers of the works will continue to evoke in language some sense of these meanings, and to place these works historically. If so, there will be some artspeak that cannot be a type of mediaspeak. Whether this future artspeak is more than a highly marginalized activity, only time, as they say, will tell.

Roy Harris, The Great Debate About Art, 2010. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, ISBN 9780984201006, 130 pages, $12.95

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Anselm Kiefer: Merkaba ran from November 8 to December 14; the catalogue is available from Gagosian Gallery at $80.

What extraordinary scene changes an art gallery can witness. Take the Gagosian Gallery. One week it’s Anselm Kiefer, the next Michael Craig-Martin. Where else can a charnel house become a nursery within seven days? The make over gives new meaning to the expression, from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Truly, Craig-Martin’s rip off (Adami/Caulfield) neo-conceptualist wallpaper represents a low point in contemporary artistic culture. But maybe it’s just the eye candy we all needed chez Gagosian after all that sturm und drang. And just maybe, I hear a doubting Thomas sound in my head as I try to sort out my feelings about St Anselm, the change is not so drastic after all.

If I am understanding correctly the claim made by legendary literary critic Harold Bloom in his catalogue essay for Larry Gagosian, then Anselm Kiefer, dean of romantic neo-expressionists, has taken on the Almighty as a counter-creator ex nihilo. Professor Bloom magisterially vaunts Anselm Kiefer as the most intellectually and spiritually ambitious creator in any medium at work today. The critic’s prose, written it would seem in a kabbalistic trance, finds its match in the artist’s materials as far as bombast and density are concerned. Kiefer’s monumental installations in lead, concrete, and rusted steel, his landscapes painted, literally, in scorched earth, heaped-on straw and other appropriated matter, have an eerie, post-nuclear grandeur about them. The German artist, who was born in 1945, transformed the already hangar-like Gagosian Gallery into an occult cathedral with his installation, Merkaba, the title of which alludes to the celestial visions of the prophet Ezekiel.

The scale alone of Kiefer’s fiercely monumental works seems to lay claim to a contemporary sublime, and that’s before the viewer focuses upon the heady themes and issues at stake. The disasters of modernity, including the Holocaust, jostle disconsolately in a bubbling cauldron of ideas and associations with explicit references to Jewish mysticism and European poetry. But to a skeptic unwilling to see the new Michelangelo in all this melancholy murk, Harry, Larry and Anselm form a veritable triumvurate of hubris.

Bloom and Gloom certainly both know how to lay it on thick. The essay is a mystical-heretical romp through occultism, literary theory, and modernist poetics, a heady heap of allusions, wild associations, and creative misreadings. Kiefer’s art, meanwhile, is every bit as highly textured, literally as well as intellectually. There is paint on photographs, with lines of verse and portentous names and references scribbled in the artist’s nervous hand. There are broken up staircases, burned books, wire cages and steel traps. NASA star numbers transform this artful mess into a map of the universe. It is easy for artist and viewer alike simply to wallow in all this gorgeous texture. These earthy, charred, rusting swamps of primordial chaos are a kind of post-apocalyptic lily pond. Underneath all his heady metaphysics, Kiefer is a supremely tasteful decorator.

And I don’t mean this as a slight. Meaning has an entirely different currency in criticism and art. In art, mystification is fine; “fool’s gold” can buy you a retirement plan. The mere sensation of metaphysics, a little highbrow name-dropping, “purposiveness without purpose” as Kant called it – texture, in other words – are swell. But in criticism one really is after boring old-fashioned clarity; whereas grand claims, befuddlement, false leads, bravura connections are somehow perfectly fine for art, where posture and ambiguity can point to deeper meanings. To me, it feels less blasphemous for Kiefer to play God than for Bloom to play artist.

To pursue the fool’s gold metaphor – the currency crisis with Kiefer, whose paintings genuinely awe the responsive viewer, has to do with form, not meaning. Sure, they sustain consistent emotion over an incredible space – no mean achievement – but once one comes to terms with the scale and one is duly impressed by the bravura handling and the intensity of the artist’s symbolism, there is this debilitating sense of gratuitousness. The conundrum in Kiefer is that to decipher is to detract, but left as charred books, rusty cages, and angst-ridden scrawls this stuff doesn’t really lead to formal satisfactions. Say, meanwhile, they did, Kiefer would be in worse trouble. For, if as Gauguin said, nothing that is pretty can be beautiful, then, even more so, is this true of the sublime.

The sublime is that which engenders deeply ambiguous emotion- fear, terror, the horror vacui. We are just too damned used, however, to the textures of angst and the tones of despair, learning all too easily to aestheticise them. Unless that is the point, that Kiefer is trading on an acutely post-war German frisson of guilty pleasure, of finding beauty where it should not be.

In this respect, Kiefer’s whole joust with German history is eminently typical of the neo-expressionists who dominated the 1980s. His renderings of Albert Speer’s fascistic architecture and his allusions to Wagnerian themes were symptomatic of the Bad Boy stance of that period. Nazi paraphernalia teased the consciences of the new Germany in the work of countless painters such as Georg Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz. The zeitgeist determined that, for avantgardist street cred, painting (the very act of painting was transgressive after a 1970s dominated by conceptual art and installation) needed to be in giant, ever-so-intellectual quotation marks.

Kiefer launched his career with anything but subtle irony. He would dress as a storm trooper and stage performances “annexing to the Reich” art galleries in countries like Belgium which had not so long ago suffered occupation for real. He would stand at landmarks like the Colisseum in Rome and give the Hitler salute. On one occasion it was sig heil by the seaside, in emulation of Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic icon, Wanderer Over the Misty Sea.

Then came a “brown period” (literally, and still politically), a scorched earth policy of debunking romantic myth. By now, however, Kiefer was beginning to believe his own once-mock metaphysics. Irony fast evaporated as artist and audience alike somehow managed to forget the historical and political disasters his romanticism and mysticism were cooked up to confront. In this respect, I can’t help feeling that Kiefer is like an avantgarde composer who once, in a radical move, quoted an um-pa-pa band only to be stopped in his tracks by a lovely tune, thereafter devoting himself in earnest to pastiche waltzes.

In Harold Bloom’s Kiefer essay, a rare departure into art writing for Yale’s Sterling Professor of Humanities, the critic becomes prophet in the wilderness, his German artist a kind of art messiah. Bloom’s self-professed career obsession has been “the anxiety of influence”. He staked his reputation on audacious, brilliantly argued interpretations of poets like Blake and Milton “misreading” their predecessors in their oedipal struggles for originality. To Bloom, Kiefer presents the awesome spectacle of the divine artist who generates his own tropes, defying “what seems to me the immutable principles of influence in the arts.” Bloom sends us back to Joyce, Stravinsky, and Picasso in search of originators as original, but finds the pioneers of modernism lacking, by way of comparison. Even Blake is faulted for relying too heavily on Michelangelo. “Kiefer knowingly transcends the limits of any visual art.”

In point of fact, Kiefer is supremely conscious of his connections to art of the recent and distant past alike. Frankly, a Yale Art School freshman could put the Sterling Professor of Humanities right on this point. For a start, all that texture in Kiefer, the matière stuck onto his canvases and sprawled on the floor, is impossible without the French existentialist graffiti artist Dubuffet and without arte povera, the Italian minimalist movement, and without Rauschenberg, inventor of gray mush over photographs, and without Cy Twombly, master of the artful scrawl. None of this is to deny that Anselm Kiefer is highly inventive, possibly indeed superior to peers and forebears alike. But his art derives some at least of its meaning in relation to other art, and Professor Influence of all people should know this.

As for the artist as shaman, the melancholy romantic genius, giver of art life to gloom-filled detritus: totally impossible without the guru of German postmodernity, Joseph Beuys (also, incidentally, a big scribbler, in his case on blackboards.) It so happens that, on visual and conceptual grounds alike, I would take Kiefer over Beuys any day, but exalting the originality of the former without bothering with the latter is rather like attributing all the cinematic inventions of Alfred Hitchcock to Brian de Palma.

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