Anselm Kiefer – Palmsonntag, 2006

At the weekend I made a final visit to the Futurism show at Tate Modern to see a few favourite pieces, Fernand Leger’s La Noce, David Bomberg’s In The Hold and Robert Delaunay’s L’equipe de Cardiff to name but a few. The exhibition, though neither fantastically received, nor fantastically curated, did harbour some incredible works. I am more than happy to look beyond the unexciting and largely unusable white walls of the Tate when the works on show are fantastic.

What’s more, I am more than happy to look beyond the usual lazy attacks on futurism for its fascistic dalliances, being as they are entirely removed from the true wonder of futurism. Art is supposed to talk of its zeitgeist, great art particularly so. Bring back the days when artists cared about something I say. I’d rather a great revolutionary/extremist artist than a feeble minded inbetweener cashing in on a fad.

And so we come back to that great meditator, Anselm Kiefer.

I had almost forgotten that the Tate had been fortunate enough to acquire his Palmsonntag as part of the d’Offay donation, and was overjoyed to stumble across it. What’s more, the experience of seeing out far outweighed that of seeing even some of my favourite works, mentioned above.

Kiefer is the sort of artist we desperately need in society right now. I look at his works, and I respond to them with awe, with interest, with hints of scepticism, but most of all, with excitement. Here is an artist making big comments, and yet giving us nothing in the process. Here is an artist who I feel we will be speaking about for generations to come, even after his works have rotted away or fallen apart, or crumbled, maybe, into something more closely approaching the destruction they embody.

This works speaks, fundamentally, of Christ’s return to Jerusalem, but also the biggie of life and death. Of course, Kiefer makes no comment on the Passion to come, and hints more closely at Christ’s reception than the man himself. Receptions of death and life. Receptions of the unknown.

It is impossible to speak about Kiefers work in soundbits, more impossible to describe it to a friend who has never encountered him, as I found shortly after my visit.

Suffice it to say that in a world of kitsch dross, day glo advertising boards and inane comments on the aforementioned, a man whose works emerge from the barron landscapes of his home in Provence, imbued with tangible recollections of the earth, the ground, base matter and decay, might we find something more transcendental than the refuse of society’s want.

In a felled tree might we see ourselves and our consumption.

In Kiefer might we find something more real than the reality we have adopted for ourselves.