White Cube Bermondsey: Anselm Kiefer's Finnegans Wake
Within the realm of Anselm Kiefer's exploration of Finnegans Wake, the artist's fresh depictions emerge, encompassing paintings, sculptures and installations that interact with, wrestle, and metamorphose James Joyce's 1939 novel. Kiefer's initial encounter with the Irish author transpired during his youth, as he delved into Ulysses (1920), thus embarking on a gradual, spiraling rapport with the later and more demanding Finnegans Wake. This literary work is characterized by its circular and reverberating nature, with overt and veiled repetitions; its fluid narrative commences amid ongoing events and retraces its own steps on the concluding page.
The narrative seemingly contains all vocabularies, all cognitions, all chronicles. Correspondingly, the works curated by Kiefer in this exhibition brim with motifs and substances previously witnessed within his oeuvre. The elements include fields of debris and mesh, skeletal sunflowers, the DNA double helix, and the ouroboros serpent consuming its own tail. Concrete, copper, glass vitrines, enigmatic lead-made books, Joycean inscriptions interspersed throughout. It's almost as if language itself has transmuted into a tangible, sculptural medium.
Occasionally, Finnegans Wake is depicted as a literary relic or a radical yet unread vestige. However, observing or vocalizing even a solitary page (perhaps a lone sentence or word) reveals a plethora of wordplays, allusions, and summonings. Over 70 languages are interwoven, along with an array of cultures—Egyptian, Irish, Norse, Islamic, and more. All melded together, reminiscent of the term "Jewgreek is greekjew," as previously coined by Joyce in Ulysses. Kiefer's artistic enterprise has perennially drawn from a mosaic of written origins: poetic, philosophical, theological, scientific.
"They resemble buoys on the ocean. I navigate towards them, from one to another." Norse mythology, German metaphysics, the verses of Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann—such diverse scripts coexist within the temporal and spatial confines of the artwork. With Joyce as an influence, Kiefer evokes a wordsmith who braids the past and the future of language into a singular opus, as if temporal boundaries were nonexistent, almost suggesting that Joyce could have been inspired by Kiefer.
Anselm Kiefer's Finnegans Wake concludes a trilogy of exhibitions hosted at White Cube Bermondsey, London. The inaugural event, 'Walhalla' (2016), summoned sculptures and paintings that conjured the celestial hall of Norse myth, interwoven with its intricate afterlife in the realms of art, music, and literature. In 'Superstrings, Runes, The Norns, Gordian Knot' (2019), Kiefer's sculptures and paintings united sinuously dark forms and writhing materials, fusing Greek mythology, ancient scripts, and the hypotheses of string theory.
The latest exhibition, seemingly tethered to a solitary literary source, stands as the most audacious of the trilogy. Much like within Kiefer's workshop where creations spanning decades lie in anticipation of completion, this display offers a multitude of cognitive tangents and linguistic variations, replete with painterly and sculptural sojourns that have previously captivated Kiefer.
We hope you enjoyed Finnegans Wake exhibition.
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