Kiefer's art shows an earth and world relation that is fraught with peril,arelationship where no identityhas been established, leaving it up to us to decide.Somethingnew may come out of this tension, but then again,it may not.His piece,The
Birth of theSun, illustrates this tenuous relationship.TheBirth of theSun is
a book thatincorporates a number of drawings illustrating the Isis and Osiris story from Egyptianmythology. The title suggests the creation of a star .The book is filled with images of fighter planes and reactor cores.It begins with an image of a fighter plane, made of lead,as it was photographed suspended from the ceiling in one of Kiefer's studios. Along the bottom edge of the image, Kiefer haswritten,"
Isis searches for the parts of Osiris
," linking his plane to the myth.Isis is the wife of the sun god Osiris, who has been hackedto pieces and whose body parts she must find in order to resurrect him. The next eightimages in the book are sky and landscape paintingsfeaturing crumbling ziggurats, earthscattered with bits of ceramic, washes of red clay and strings of copper wire, which areseen from a plane's perspective as it hurtles through the sky in a reconnaissance mission; that is, asIsis flies along searching for the scattered remnants of Osiris's body. The planeseems to pick up shards of ceramicwith wires attached