Anselm Kieffer and I grew up in the same era in the wake of WW2 but while he was surrounded by the destruction of a nation, his identity and what it meant to be a German was under question. The old order had gone and no one knew what lay ahead. For my part, I was brought up in the soporific blandness of a rural England succumbing to the needs of a displaced London population. While Kieffer played in bomb craters, saw what firebombing had done to cities and experienced the devaluing of appropriated high culture by National Socialism, my only evidence of a war and associated death came in the form of the odd concrete bunker consumed by weeds on the edge of a former airfield which gradually became a housing estate. Jingoistic war films were the soundtrack to my upbringing while for their part my parents committed to total silence about that part of their lives.
Death has become ‘passing’ in literature and films with an obsessive devotion on the one hand to extending human life indefinitely and on the other finding ever- interesting ways of ending it. Death is most often referenced as a grim reminder of numbered days and an existentialist motivator to live well while you can. Memento Mori and still life [nature morte-dead nature] exist in themes across the art world and every culture has always had rituals surrounding death often appearing symbolically as icons. Hourglasses and wilted flowers for the Dutch, the Cuckoo bird in Japan and the Totenkopf in Germany are examples. Church architecture and memorials have been of particular note. The use of skulls in a recent exhibition of paintings is more problematic. It’s one thing to see images of Cambodian killing fields but another to see gratuitous images of skulls in contemporary art when forensic examiners hold forth on skull fractures every night on tv and the body count rises by the moment in action films. I wouldn’t say that I am desensitised to death so much as conscious of my own mortality.
Death has been a common theme in art and as with all of humanity, mortality comes to haunt us all as we reach a certain age. Is it inevitable that artists have to eventually deal with their past as well as what remains of the future. It is often written that van Gogh’s Crows over a Cornfield presaged his impending death, although such fanciful notions dot art history courtesy of art writers. Picasso feared loss of potency in old age while Renaissance artists paved the way to an eternal life on behalf of the church, Bosch showed a different path coloured by living through pulverising northern winters and a belief that humanity was doomed from the start. However, dealing with such a theme in this day and age is problematic when society largely avoids the topic.
The themes of regret and a certain guilt have permeated my work through a series entitled Conversations with my Father. He died three years ago having lived through most of the 20th century and into the 21st but the title is ironic in that there were no conversations. Mortality or life were never mentioned and such conversations that there were, were inevitably perfunctory and devoted to his later life-love of formation dancing or the weather. Distance played a major part in that as did his lack of comfort with the phone and the written word.
Perhaps my only possible response is to resort to metaphor. The Elegy series on which I am currently working utilises the poetic quatrain as a sculptural form with an ABAB rhythm. The elegy form allows for contemplation of things coming to an end, not that I intend to come to an end any time soon, with one of the most famous poems set in a country churchyard as the day winds down and cattle come in from the fields. In my metaphor a quartet of wood forms stand in a line, linear patterns flowing from one to the other, and a symbol of decay in black rising up from the base of two of them. Whether it is representative of death or mortality per se is open to interpretation, but a line represents a journey in my mind. I used to think of life not as strictly linear but a wandering path with seminal points through which it had to pass. This new work could be seen as inevitable although beyond actual prediction. It had to happen but could not be planned for.
Kieffer’s mining of his German past in an attempt to discover who he was as a German looked to the past. Whether he has ever moved beyond that frame is open to question and his whole oeuvre reworks that frame in a timeless way. In several interviews he talked about early ideas of becoming a priest [his whole family were actively involved in Catholicism] and eventually, a Pope. Faith was always present. While artists can look to their presents and their pasts for inspiration, dealing with death artistically is inevitably a shallow and callous exercise in sensationalism driven by the way it continues to be portrayed in the media. Death has to ‘mean’ something and yet, for most people it is simply a punctuation mark.
While WW2 is well in the past, the threat of war remains, albeit half a world away, but is just as abstract and distant as WW2 was to my upbringing. Do we envy Kieffer for having the seeds of his art all around him as he grew up and value only art that deals in the internally personal or is the mining of culture the most valid of approaches in this time of angst and self- reflection? The candidates for this year’s Turner prize all work with their political and social pasts, injustice, prejudice and colonialism as the reworking of history seemingly exists to teach us lessons. While art has always been utilised as propaganda, those lessons essentially fall on deaf ears.