Siegfried’s Difficult Way to Brunhilde, 1977
Among the different media Kiefer has worked with over the years, artist’s books have been a consistent and central part of his practice. “The book—the idea of a book or the image of a book—is a symbol of learning, of transmitting knowledge,“ he has said. “I make my own books to find my own way through the old stories.“
When, in order to adapt to his destiny as an artist, Anselm Kiefer attempts to throw himself open to a dimension larger than himself, he does not retreat in the face of a force that may overwhelm and daunt him. He allows himself to be possessed and swept away by it, to become the arbiter of a challenge which ultimately implies the construction of the formal energy of art. To let ourselves be overwhelmed means to agree to be impregnated and to mediate that which submerges and overtakes us: to discover ourselves in order to discover. The artist, like the poet, eludes any system, whether good or bad, religious or moral: he negates himself, dies in favour of an unknown and indefinable force, and aspires to establish the right relationship with forms and their origins. He wants to succumb to their primacy and lets himself be shattered and overwhelmed not for any banal or general reason, whether it be ideological or sociological, anonymous or impersonal, but only for one exceptional reason: the survival of the language of art.*
Music; Day Before Us - Orpheus lament