The High Priestess/Zweistromland
Scrap metal thieves destroy Lead Books of Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer, a colossus of contemporary art,1 has—among his many themes— books of lead which represent personal and collective memory.2
The sculpture, High Priestess/Zweistromland (1985) pictured above, its industrial shelving loaded with what one assumes are delphic archives to whose mysteries there will be no present or future initiation. These books are, as usual with Kiefer, entirely textless; the only lines in this case are thin wire filaments that twist uprooted among the volumetric forms, the only transparency that of shattered glass dispersed amid the volumes and strewn on the floor below them. In these anarchives of bare survival, logos has come again as chaos.3
A similar sculpture was destroyed by thieves looking for scrap metal.4
Four thieves were interrupted dismantling a giant sculpture of books made out of 10 tons of lead and 12 tons of marble that stood in a metal cage locked in the inner courtyard of the warehouse. The value of the sculpture was $1.4 million although the total value of the stolen materials is much lower: raw lead is only worth about $1860 per ton. The sculpture entitled Realisten ("realists"), consisted of giant lead books - one of the recurring motifs in Anselm Kiefer's work - covering a raw marble plinth. 5
Kiefer loves lead for its weight: he has said it is “the only material heavy enough to carry the weight of human history.”
Although the video below by Ole Robert Sunde is in Norwegian, the views of “The High Priestess/Zweistromland” demonstrate the scope of the work.
Royal Academy of Arts. Anselm Kieffer. “a colossus of contemporary art” Exhibit September 27-December 14, 2014. “the most significant exhibition of the German artist’s work ever held in the UK, spanning his entire 40 year career and unveiling new work created in direct response to our spaces.”
Haxthausen, Charles. "The World, the Book, and Anselm Kiefer." Burlington Magazine, 133:846-51, December 1991.
Stewart, Garrett. “Bookwork as Demediation.” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 3 (2010): 410–57.
Rea, Naomi (2016) Anselm Kiefer’s Workshop Robbed for Raw Materials Again. ArtNet News. (August 31).
Jardonnet, Emmanuelle. (2016) Anselm Kiefer sculpture destroyed by scrap metal workers. Le Monde (August 30).
Dear Kathleen, I'm so lucky to be able to see this work whenever I am in Oslo (one hour by train), and I understand what my old friend Ole Robert Sunde says (we were "comrades in arms" as military deniers in 1971-72).
He says that for him this is a German encounter with Jewish history. Kiefer was born in Germany after the war. Sunde refers to Jorge Luis Borges «The Library of Babylon». No two books are alike. They are written in languages no one understands. Proust has said in an essay that all great art is written in a foreign language. We do not understand it. Sunde interprets it as meaning that 300 books got wet and they are standing here drying. Each book weighs 300 kilos, a total of 30 tons. We can not open them; it is a closed library, but at the same time it tells how much books mean to us. What is a world without books? Then we are back to Germany again, where they burned books. It is incomprehensible. This is art at its finest. We do not understand it, but we are fascinated by it.
I am not sure, that if you put the remnants back together with the original sculpture, that it would be destroyed so much as just damaged; the invaders torched Ashurbanipal's library and the all the raw clay was fired into almost indestrucable hard clay tablets.
elm
it seems very fitting that books of lead would survive anyway