In Kiefer’s work the waste and devastation of war merges with the wastefulness of our daily lives, as our own bodies and the things around us wear out, and the question hangs over us, as it hangs over his work: how do we value this material existence of ours, which is the only one we have? What do we do with it? This is our ‘world’ but shown to us as the passing of time of our material being-here. Our worlds are Heidegger’s Seiendes: Beings, everything in Being, but nothing for ever. Heidegger still just seemed to squeeze a metaphysical value out of that Being where I don’t think Kiefer does. Yet with his depiction of paths and fields, horizons and temples, equipment and work spaces, all so akin to Heidegger’s vision, Kiefer manages heart-stopping moments of accidental beauty. Although Kiefer says he is interested in ‘the technological possibilities of spiritual power’, the only translation he has found for that formula is to add gold leaf to his palette and to appeal with his open spaces to that faint hope we can never get rid of, that destruction is a prelude to creation. He is, avowedly, an alchemist, interested in the eventual process by which lead might be transformed into gold; but what he gives us is the aeons that must pass, not really a promise at all, though perhaps a good enough place sometimes lurks on his horizons.
Heidegger, when he talked about van Gogh’s painting ‘Boots with Laces’ in his 1936 lecture, embroiled the painter and himself in a deep controversy, for, according to his critics he made use of van Gogh’s work to express Nazi values of ‘blood and soil’, that is, a culture based on ethnic purity and the glory of labour. The American art critic Meyer Schapiro, after the war, had the offending paragraph pointed out to him, and in a brief 1968 essay pretty much accused Heidegger of being at once a Nazi and a bad art critic. But then the French postmodernist Jacques Derrida, whom I referred to just now, came along and found Schapiro’s essay a travesty of non-scholarship and a terrible impertinence, from one who knew nothing about Heidegger’s philosophy, but had meanwhile become caught up in the nascent Holocaust Industry. This is the quarrel I set out in A Shoe Story, as crucial to our understanding of so much postmodern art.
In fact I think Kiefer specifically painted his version of this controversy in a work of 1986 called ‘Eisen-Steig’. The title marries the iron of ‘the iron way’ of the German Eisenbahn (railway) with Steig, which is a path, albeit not one limited to Heideggerian field and forest. Made of oil, acrylic, olive branches, lead, iron, gold leaf and emulsion on canvas, this artwork shows a single railway track receding sharply into the distance, in a perspective that is immediately reminiscent of van Gogh’s ‘Crows over the Wheatfield’. The scrubland all around has Kiefer’s familiar swirling and bristling texture, another borrowing from van Gogh, only the bright colour and the goodness of van Gogh’s faith in nature are not there. In the foreground, to either side of the picture, but between the rails, lie what may be the remains of a pair of wellington boots. The one on the left might be standing, foot forward; the one on the right has fallen over and the foot points awkwardly away from the horizon. The boots are indicated by a single black line around their perimeter. They’re not solid. Indeed they’re disintegrating, and in both cases the soles have become detached and sit awkwardly on their respective rails. The landscape meanwhile permeates and reclaims the space each boot as a whole once occupied. Ahead of the boots along the rails there are points, and the iron way becomes two divergent paths. Two ways for Germany? Two ways with Heidegger’s reading of van Gogh’s ‘Boots with Laces’? Two ways with Heidegger himself? it might even be said that if one of these single-line tracks leads to Auschwitz, the other leads to Kiefer’s own work, via Heidegger’s comments on a now almost disembodied and no longer useful pair of boots.