Apocalypse at the White Cube: ‘Finnegans Wake’ exhibition by Anselm Kiefer
A contained apocalypse currently torments the White Cube in Bermondsey, London. An immersive symphony of naturalist destruction by Anselm Kiefer mutates James Joyce’s novel ‘Finnegans Wake’ into an immersive dreamscape.
The exhibition is inspired by Joyce’s writing style and grammatical experiments, with its disjointed components imitating a Joycean narrative. Kiefer, a pioneer in the ‘New Fauves’ movements emerging in the 1970s, currently unites literature, painting and sculpture. His creations honour the bond between his materials and their spirituality, stating that he “extracts the spirit that already lives within them”. This manifests in Kiefer’s laboured materials among the cracked paint, oxidised metal and aged flowers.
At the exhibition entrance, you’ll be greeted with a warning: “The works are covered in a safe amount of lead”. An ode to Kiefer’s love of alchemy, lead is a staple used in most of his work for its visually pleasing melting process. The chemistry of the materials is cautiously chosen to create a mystical and organic environment. In this exhibition, Kiefer’s work transforms the entire gallery into a storytelling vacuum. The white gallery walls are covered in glass boxes containing straw, bones or metal, reminiscent of a cabinet of curiosities, from top to bottom. With the low lighting and the cramped spaces that these objects invade, the sterile gallery environment is replaced by a slightly antiquated and mildewed atmosphere.
Once passed the threshold of the light-obscuring curtains covered in film photography, the audience is greeted with a long, daunting corridor overwhelmed with Kiefer’s visual poetry. To your right are a collection of bones, a ribcage and rusty gardening tools, and Kiefer’s experiments with plaster to your left. The expansive artwork, called ‘Arsenal’ (1970-2023), is peppered with quotes, scribbled onto water-colour stained scrolls and written on the walls, a literary folly serving as a reminder to Joyce.
The deluge of sheer objects has the audience captivated and ambling to absorb every artefact in their midst. With sculptures and organic matter such as dried palms, wheat and casts of poppies behind glass vitrine, it evoked the memory of a school trip to the Anatomical Museum in the Old Medical School building of Edinburgh University. Likewise to the exhibition, the Anatomical Museum contained limbs and particles of different organs sealed in jars – their discolouration reminiscent of Kiefer’s beige, organic colour palette.
Another microcosm opens up in a colossal space for an immense installation. An amalgamation of shopping trolleys disintegrating in the sand flecked with casted sunflower heads and scrolls of discoloured paper, interweaving poetry into this desolate landscape. A similar dystopian landscape pervades an even larger room; this time, it is the remnants of a fractured floor. The barbed wire creeps around its perimeter, with long strands of sunflowers upheaving the destruction. Kiefer has said in an interview for The Guardian that he sees the destroyed floor as a “beginning”, as he was born in the doomful hours of the war in 1945.
Kiefer’s paintings are in the orbit of these all-consuming installations. Borne out of roughness and crude materials, with paint thickly layered upon layers, fractured dusted with gold leaf, and objects such as palettes and shoes stuck onto the canvases, encroaching the entire vertical length of the walls. Kiefer’s process of developing these materials to their physical limit gives this exhibition a prophetic ambience of destruction.
Books made of oxidised thin steel sheets, sprawled beneath the paintings in another room of the exhibition, serve as a reminder of Kiefer’s esteem for literature. Despite Joyce being the muse for his ‘Finnegan’s wake exhibition’, Celan, a holocaust survivor and a German post-war poet, also has a grip on the artist.
The uncanny and slightly unsettling atmosphere created by Kiefer’s collection of ruins turns the White Cube into a liminal space. The audience is guided through this three-dimensional interpretation and transformation of a novel, with each page transgressing the limitations of Joyce’s words into visual interpretations of his linguistic exploration.
Anselm Kiefer – ‘Finnegans Wake’ is running from June 7th to August 20th, 2023. Find out more information here.
