{"id":11466,"date":"2019-11-18T10:00:58","date_gmt":"2019-11-18T15:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=11466"},"modified":"2019-11-18T10:02:24","modified_gmt":"2019-11-18T15:02:24","slug":"terrifying-odyssey-through-a-cursed-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=11466","title":{"rendered":"Terrifying Odyssey Through a Cursed World"},"content":{"rendered":"

The great German artist Anselm Kiefer now has a show up in London at the White Cube Bermondsey gallery, with a review in the Guardian entitled Terrifying Odyssey Through a Cursed World<\/a>. The review describes some of the works as follows:<\/p>\n

Another room is given over to panoramic blasts of brown and black that map sweeping vistas of desolate fields. A road twines through a morass of mud and collaged sticks. Lines of fence poles vanish in the distance. These scenes are drawn in black on a vertiginous scale. Kiefer uses perspective, the Renaissance technique of showing the real world shrinking towards a single vanishing point, to define his landscapes \u2013 but the perspective view is a transparency on top of a muddy tumult of colour and texture, with real, 3D stuff stuck over that in turn. From the right distance, the picture of a landscape can be read clearly, like a painting by Van Gogh. Go closer and the picture dissolves in a mess of bulges and muck.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What’s the inspiration for these works (besides the Holocaust)?<\/p>\n

These landscapes are entitled Superstrings, a reference to string theory, an influential idea in contemporary physics that seeks to unify quantum mechanics with Einstein\u2019s relativity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and the show is entitled Superstrings, Runes, The Norns, Gordian Knot<\/a>. The gallery website explains:<\/p>\n

White Cube is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Anselm Kiefer. The exhibition brings together many of the interests that have characterised Kiefer\u2019s work for decades, including mythology, astronomy and history. Located across the entire Bermondsey space, it features a large-scale installation and paintings that draw on the scientific concept known as string theory.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Guardian review continues:<\/p>\n

The main gallery at White Cube Bermondsey is already pretty bleak in its featureless emptiness. Kiefer makes it work for him by heightening the chill, turning the White Cube into a morgue for Europe. Snow-covered landscapes with none of the cheer of Bruegel stretch away to infinity. They are marked with sticks as black as gravestones and nets that catch at nothing. Kiefer\u2019s science reading clearly hasn\u2019t cheered him up. The curvy grids of space-time become horrible wire traps in a devastated nowhere. We might be on the no-man\u2019s land of the Ukraine border. Anyway, this place has got death in its hard black furrows.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another review, at City A.M. tells us more about Kiefer’s motivations<\/a>:<\/p>\n

This is where we come to string theory \u2013 the monolith of Kiefer\u2019s new show. Though he admits that he doesn\u2019t quite understand what string theory is, Kiefer professes complete fascination with the idea that there is a scientific equivalent to the allegorical Gordian Knot \u2013 an idea that he picked up after thirty years of subscribing to Spektrum, a German monthly science magazine…<\/p>\n

String theory cannot be verified empirically. Rather, it is an attempt to provide an all-encompassing description of the universe. And that, says Kiefer, is just why it is beautiful. \u201cI suppose it\u2019s like painting,\u201d he says. \u201cYou cannot prove if a painting is good or bad. That is the point of it \u2013 it is descriptive\u2026 and there\u2019s something sublime in that.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From the images available, the work does look quite amazing. Kiefer quite possibly has gotten to the very heart of superstring theory, seeing in it a dark, desolate and blasted mythology which “cannot be verified empirically.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The great German artist Anselm Kiefer now has a show up in London at the White Cube Bermondsey gallery, with a review in the Guardian entitled Terrifying Odyssey Through a Cursed World. The review describes some of the works as … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11466"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11471,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11466\/revisions\/11471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}