Later Kiefer read Heidegger, and got to know of the philosopher’s own love of van Gogh, expressed in the 1936 lecture The Origin of the Work of Art. Heidegger talked there of how the materiality of our world ‘wears out and becomes banal’ as things that we construct lose their usefulness. Here’s a passage I’ve never otherwise seen quoted from early on in Heidegger’s lecture. The translation is mine:
Individual objects get used up and worn out; and with that the practice of using them declines, loses its shine and becomes banal. Something that existed for a purpose now rots away; sinks back into being any old thing. When something that once existed for a purpose declines into purposelessness its reliability [on which we can base our lives] vanishes from sight.
Compare that sentence with the accelerated oxidation that is a keynote feature of the sculptures Kiefer has made out of lead sheet. Kiefer’s fascination is with the way materiality deteriorates. A Heideggerian-Borgesian masterwork is his installation of lead books on lead shelves, which shows them falling out of their bindings, slumping in disorder. Perhaps this work takes literally Derrida’s assertion that the Logos, the Word of God and of Truth, that used to guide Western civilization, has collapsed. Finally instantiated in a hard sharp metal used extensively in warfare, the word of truth is now immobilized, and not even that for all time, for even in this last form it will decay.