Spiritualism to Experience: Anselm Kiefer’s Venice Cycle

DeLaura, Olivia

Item

Spiritualism to Experience: Anselm Kiefer’s Venice Cycle

DeLaura, Olivia

Abstract

This thesis explores the nexus between Anselm Kiefer’s recent spiritual works and the experiential turn in exhibition strategies, analyzing as its case study Anselm Kiefer: Questi scritti, quando verranno bruciati, daranno finalmente un po ’ di luce (Andrea Emo) exhibited at the Palazzo Ducale in 2022. Focusing particularly on the Jacob’s Ladder canvas of the cycle, the thesis considers the issues of cyclical history, temporality, and myth that preoccupy much of the scholarship surrounding Kiefer’s œuvre; however, these themes are analyzed through the framework of intermediality. Consideration of the thematic and spiritual connotations within Kiefer’s materiality are not limited to his creative process, therefore, but also applied to the expanded field of the viewer and their metaphysical“ experience.” While engaging with previous decades of scholarship on Kiefer (particularly Andreas Huyssen, Matthew Biro, and Lisa Saltzman), this thesis will shift away from the preoccupation of his art as a reworking of national history and memory, while also avoiding the ambivalent claims that his post-1990 spiritualism is merely universalist transcendent ritual. Rather, in considering certain of Kiefer’s monumental, immersive installations over recent years,1 I aim to reveal that these exhibitions ’ leitmotif of transhistorical, mythical origins increasingly positions Kiefer as the stager of “spiritual experiences,” reconciled and enacted in the individual viewer. Until now, the spiritual content of his work has not yet been thoroughly examined, but rather used as a segue to discuss other issues (often returning to German identity after the Holocaust). Focusing on the intermedial conduits between the artist’s creative process, alchemical connotations of materiality, and the viewer’s act of co-creation through signification, I rely specifically on Dorothea von Hantelmann’s conception of the experiential turn to inform these relationships. My methodology presents another viewpoint from which to consider Kiefer’s constantly expanding corpus of pseudo-religious mystical works in order to clarify some of his ambiguities without attempting to assign meaning to his recent production. Lastly, this thesis questions whether Kiefer’s shift into experiential, monumental qualities of art are a natural extension of his earlier practice, or a calculated repositioning of his artistic enterprise within today’s “experience” society, implicitly suggesting the issue of cultural relevance for an aging artist. The methodology employed will, like extensive scholarship surrounding Kiefer since the 1980s, necessarily engage with post-modern “memory work,” however this will now be applied to his syncretic spiritualism concerning human origins rather than to specific questions of German national identity. It will also engage with curatorial strategies, demanding a thorough examination of press releases, interviews, exhibition catalogues, and the artist’s own publications and correspondences with curators, in an attempt to reveal the current climate of artist production, reception, and designed viewer engagement. This thesis therefore reframes the relevance of Kiefer’s art by inquiring whether the existential nature of his Venice Cycle can function as a cultural commentary—or whether its syncretic spiritual experience serves as a commodified response to the 21st-century experiential turn in museum and curatorial strategies.