"In a realm of common histories and myths, and yes, clichés, Kiefer acts not to express or manipulate but purely to empower sensation, thought, and feeling. He provides grist to the mill that is every responsive and civilized human being. In so doing, he fans the fire of yearnings that spill far beyond art, becoming the vision of a world redeemed by wisdom and pity."
Conceptually rigorous and viscerally charged, Wölund-Lied (Wayland’s Song) from 1982 is a consummate exemplification of Anselm Kiefer’s provocative explorations into the vicissitudes of mythology, history, and German identity. Inescapably confronting and enveloping the viewer through its sheer scale, the present work transmutes the haunting Germanic mythological tale of the blacksmith into a laden visual and psychological landscape. As with its sister work of the same title and year of execution, held in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the present work is an sculptural distillation of Kiefer’s conceptual aims and exemplifies the artist’s masterful ability to weave the disparate threads of personal biography, materiality, collective cultural psyche, and myth together in his work. In so doing, Wölund-Lied cements Kiefer’s eminence among a generation of German artists active following the Second World War.
Wölund-Lied stands as a superlative example of Kiefer’s aesthetic mission that interrogates the matrix of German history, literature, and identity through an interweaving of distinct working materials. Under the tutelage of Joseph Beuys, who underscored the symbolic relations between mythology and the present day, Kiefer wielded the parallels of control and mutual metaphors of battles, wars, struggle and freedom found in myth and religion to examine the legacy of Nazism and World War II. Forging a new rhetoric of history painting charged with the atrocities of Hitler's Germany, Kiefer has built an oeuvre replete with all-encompassing works whose surfaces are as complex and multi-layered, as their subjects are fragmented and overpowering. Art historian Daniel Arasse underscores, "On their own, on the strength of their primal brutality, these works are the product of an interminable mourning: for the meaning that withdrew from the world at the moment of creation that myths work to feign and history disfigure, for the meaning Anselm Kiefer tries to find by making great fetishes of a lost, expected transparence." (Daniel Arasse, “In Paintings' Memory” in: Exhibition Catalogue, Paris, Galerie Yvon Lambert, Anselm Kiefer: Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles, 1996, n.p.)
Demonstrating his aptitude for a complex amalgamation of a variety of materials and paint within a narrative structure drawn from such grand mythological and literary sources, Wölund-Lied monumentally conceptualizes the Old Norse narrative of the master blacksmith Wölund (Wayland) that is itself derivative of the Greco-Roman myths of Daedalus and Vulcan. In this tale, the king Nidud lacerates the tendons of the protagonist’s feet to prevent escape, and Wayland exacts revenge by murdering his two sons. After furnishing drinking cups from the sons’ skulls, he forges wings for himself in order to fly away. Metal blacksmithing tools are seemingly suspended from a wooden support, bearing evidence of Wayland’s manufacture of the gridded and corroded wing that overlays a central portion of the present work.
Tied by rope to an epically cauterized terrain, Kiefer visually binds these manifestations of a parable of evildoing to a land contending with its recent moral nadir. Amalgams of black paint and straw form heady torrents of distinctively earthy impasto sculpt the artist’s archetypal evocation of a scorched, eviscerated, and barren landscape. Heaving with such epic corporeality, this canvas communicates a melancholic withdrawal and symbolic obliteration evocative of German society and identity in the wake of World War II. Viewing German soil as marked by its history, Kiefer here makes tangible a “scorched earth” rendered as such by the parallel brutalities of Wayland and Nazism. Evoking the transformative effect and alchemical potential that is inherent to and characteristic of his best work, Wölund-Lied overwhelms the viewer’s visual field with a spiritualistic contemplation of land in line with Kiefer’s longstanding efforts to identify and evaluate the fundamentals of human existence.
Astoundingly ambitious in its sculptural presentation and multivalent emotional impact, Wölund-Lied implores the viewer to detangle Kiefer’s profoundly significant, historically informed and uniquely poetic aesthetic dialect. The present work testifies to the import of text as an aesthetic tool for Kiefer, tantamount to technique, medium, and compositional arrangement in terms of significance to his aesthetic ruminations on the effects of World War II. Wölund-Lied's intellectually complex topography is imbued with the abiding power to provoke immensely honest and visceral responses from its viewers. As such, it is wholly demonstrative of the effect underscored by critic Peter Schjeldahl, “Kiefer’s art holds out mighty rewards to all viewers who, having taken the trouble to learn his lexicon, can see with their own eyes, think with their own heads, and feel with their own hearts…In a realm of common histories and myths, and yes, clichés, Kiefer acts not to express or manipulate but purely to empower sensation, thought, and feeling. He provides grist to the mill that is every responsive and civilized human being. In so doing, he fans the fire of yearnings that spill far beyond art, becoming the vision of a world redeemed by wisdom and pity.” (Peter Schjeldahl, “Anselm Kiefer,” in London, Saatchi Gallery, Art of Our Time: The Saatchi Collection, Vol. 3, 1994, pp. 17)
Anselm Kiefer: “My paintings change"
