Varus by Anselm Kiefer (1976) described in A Man in Love. My Struggle: 2 by Karl Ove Knausgaard translated by Don Bartlett.
[The first speaker is the autobiographical character, the second his friend Geir, based on the author Geir Angell Øygarden, they are discussing the different meaning of land, wilderness and place and they are discussing the social and physical world and the idea of “vitality”.]
“Have you seen that picture by Anselm Kiefer? It’s of a forest. All you can see is trees and snow, with red stains in places, and then there are some names of German poets written in white. Hölderlin, Rilke, Fichte, Kleist. It’s the greatest work of art since the war, perhaps in the whole of the previous century. What does it depict? A forest. What’s it about? Well, Auschwitz of course. Where’s the connection? It’s not about ideas, it reaches right down into the depths of culture, and it can’t be expressed in ideas.”
“Have you had a chance to see Shoah?
“Forest, forest and more forest. And faces. Forest and gas and faces.”
“The picture’s called Varus. As far as I remember, he was a Roman army commander who lost a decisive battle in Germany. The line goes right back from the 70s to Tacitus. Schama traces it in Landscape and Memory. We could have added Odin, who hangs himself from a tree. Perhaps he does, I don’t remember. But it’s forest.”
“I can see where you’re going.”
“When I read Lucretius it’s all about the magnificence of the world. And that, the magnificence of the world, is of course a Baroque concept. It dies with the Baroque age. It’s about things. The physicality of things. Animals. Trees. Fish. If you’re sorry that action has disappeared, I’m sorry the world has disappeared. The physicality of it. We only have pictures of it. That’s what we relate to. But the apocalypse, what is it now? Trees disappearing in South America? Ice melting, the waters rising. If you write to recapture your gravity, I write to recapture the world. Yes, not the world I’m in. Definitely not the social world. The wonder-rooms of the Baroque age. The curiosity cabinets. And the world in Kiefer’s trees. That’s art. Nothing else.”
“You’ve got me there. Yes a picture?”
http://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/two-germanys-deutsches-historisches-museum/2003
