The decaying Domus Aurea of Barjac has grown up like a forest made of objects, inventions, relics. Walking around it, you will wonder whose hands, working “incessantly”,1 silently, stubbornly, patiently, fearlessly shaped this impossible world, moving in the night of uncertainty, almost multiplying, in order to respond to a pressing need for expression. Remembering what Rilke had written about Rodin’s sculptures, you ask yourself: “Who is this man?”.2 You immediately grasp that he is an individual driven by the desire to “penetrate with all his forces into the humble and difficult significance of his tools”.3 And so I decided to go to the north of Paris. Thirty kilometres or so from the capital. Not far from the Charles de Gaulle airport. Direction: Croissy-Beaubourg. In the sky, the continuous, deafening noise of aeroplanes. Around, offices and multinational transport depots. A suburban air, wafting like a salutary poison, “a familiar yet foreign pill”.4 An anonymous neighbourhood, its pavements deserted. Long suburban arteries, travelled only by cars. The taxi drops me off at the entrance to an odd industrial facility. Where am I? Beyond the gate, I see glasshouses packed with works, cages with a hodgepodge of different fragments, abandoned grey aeroplanes. At the end, two cold pavilions, about twenty metres high, as tall as a block of flats. These buildings, lacking all decorative abandon, have been given the names of two characters from the poem of Gilgamesh: Enkidu and Ninsun. I enter and find myself in an immense expanse—like a small town. Around 36,000 square metres of streets, avenues, squares, crossroads. You are immediately seized by different feelings: stupefaction and hypnosis. As you walk it is like leafing through the pages of a rambling epic of stone. “Here’s how you could describe your studios: neither enormous nor immense, they’re exactly the size you need so that dogs think they’re outside”, said Ransmayr, mixing affection and irony, in a conversation with Kiefer.5
This is the space that Kiefer needs, owing to the cosmic reach of his poetics. He hides between these walls every day, to forget the burdensome night with its foreboding. Every day here he celebrates a never-changing yet ever-different liturgy, wearing a classic costume: a simple shirt, like a tunic, which collects the splashes of colour. It is in his refuge in Croissy that his Promethean gestures become manifest, pursued over days spent gathering, selecting and interpreting signs. In the awareness that behind it life conceals the absurd, delirium, meaninglessness.
I am in a sort of factory where an artist has lived and worked, alone, for several years. An artist who confessed: “I have always been fascinated by deserted spaces, the claustrophobic hollowness of abandoned factories that continue to resound with the voices and presence of the men and women who laboured in them. I discern similarities between such places and my paintings when, after being coated with water and mud, they seem at last to find a certain tranquillity even though they bear the traces of despair, effort, failure; even though their surface is but the reflection of lost wars—a virtual battlefield.”6 And he goes on, “industrial sites confront us with a tangle of pipes and ducts connecting different elements in a constant to-and-fro of currents whose purpose escapes the onlooker.”7
Spending a few days in Kiefer’s world—alone in Kiefer’s world—is a very different experience to when we see his pictures and sculptures in a museum, gallery or in the home of some wealthy collector. Only in Croissy can you almost touch the tensed muscles of the hand that paints, sculpts, arranges. Here you really can intimately inhabit, from the inside, the universe of a painter who never stopped feeling foreign to the world and its business, tending to protect himself in the silence of his craft, far from the ways of reality. It is here that Kiefer thinks, studies, writes, creates, preserves, destroys, corrects, reinvents, cancels. You go into the place where different substances are constantly assembled in majestic works. You are in the temple where the adventures of iconoclasm and “the image controversy”8 arose, where “ideas handed down from past centuries circulate” which, coming together in an ungraspable spot, produce that “sort of crystallization we refer to as art”.9
You breathe in the sense of the vastness and, at the same time, a secret intimacy. It might seem paradoxical. But, albeit on a larger scale, this studio has something of the legendary Parisian atelier of Giacometti, at number 46 rue Hippolyte-Maindron, about it. A kind of cavern, inhabited by a solitary sculptor, engaged in testing a scant number of figures and topics, stripped of all anecdotal abandon. A vibrating environment: the precarious walls are full of random pencil and charcoal scratches, like furrows in a cave or travel documents. All over the place, piled up, spindly, pained, worn, eternally incomplete characters, like little elongated larvae. Here, Michel Leiris remembered, you can “believe that the studio cluttered with objects that were manufactured there was not only a theatre of work and a cue for themes to deal with, even if for backgrounds, but could, if need be, fully collaborate with he who bit by bit had made it an extension of his person”.10
These are words that come to mind when you go to Croissy. It is like getting into a time machine. You feel history being frenetically woven, rewritten and re-formed over and over again. A reservoir of relics dug up and offered to us, lost wanderers. So, Croissy is like a hieroglyph of the painter’s head. “The Croissy studio is a sort of model, a model of my brain. Evening times, I stroll among the objects and paintings and at times a new connection forms in my brain”,11 Kiefer said. Continuing: “As you stroll through these spaces you […] come upon memories I have stored within myself, registered in my neurons”.12 You are in a sort of dilation of the painter’s invisible inner room, as he seeks a correspondence between will and work, tending to move among suggestions, tools and materials, doubts, second thoughts, tremors and uncertainties. A palimpsest of dissonances. Which in some moments is highly reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s studio/tip in South Kensington. Unchecked untidiness. “I cannot work in places that are too tidy. It’s much easier for me to paint in a place like this which is a mess. […] When I begin, I might have some ideas, but most of the time the only idea I have is of doing something. There’s nothing well-ordered in my head; I respond to some kind of stimulation […]. This mess here […] is rather like my mind; it may be a good image of what goes on inside me”,13 said Bacon.
But that is not all. You walk, and it is like losing yourself among a painter’s dreams and intentions. In Croissy, you grasp the sense of what remains our ineliminable, almost ontological condition: our condemnation to be in the project. Every person’s life is always marked by that tendency to plan, discuss, cancel, revise and rehash hypotheses, which leads to a parallel and heterogenous dimension, disconnected and out of sync with the normal passing of time. They are pre-viewing exercises, which remove us from the temptations of the finite and the obligations of communication. Proposals that aim to change the linear rhythm of the world, announcing a possible, different future. The many little garments I saw in Croissy point to this utopian tension. Cassocks made of lead. And lots of tiny shirts sewn following the models given by the artist to an Algerian dressmaker: some are the size of newborns or dolls, others are not much bigger than a child’s finger. They are the clothes of the non-born as Kiefer loves to repeat. An invisible, unknown, mysterious community. As Ransmayr wrote, “the pure possibility, everything waiting to be created, realized, completed, here, in our lives and up there, in space, is wonderful… marvellous”.14
1 R. M. Rilke, Auguste Rodin, Mineola, NY, Dover Publications, 2006, p. 54.
2 Ibid., p. 1.
3 Ibid., p. 54.
4 A. Kiefer, L’art survivra a ses ruines. Art Will Survive Its Ruins, Paris, Regard, 2011, p. 325.
5 C. Ransmayr’s assertion is in the collection of interviews: A. Kiefer, Paesaggi celesti, Milan, Il Saggiatore, p. 210 (own translation).
6 Kiefer, L’art survivra a ses ruines. Art Will Survive Its Ruins, p. 299.
7 Ibid., p. 330.
8 Ibid., p. 315.
9 Ibid.
10 M. Leiris, Sul rovescio delle immagini, Milan, SE, 1988, p. 97 (own translation). Original title: Au verso des images, Saint Clément de rivière, Fata Morgana, 1980.
11 Kiefer, Paesaggi celesti, p. 165 (own translation).
12 Kiefer, L’art survivra a ses ruines. Art Will Survive Its Ruins, p. 317.
13 F. Bacon, In Conversation with Michel Archimbaud, London, Phaidon, 1993, p. 163.
14 C. Ransmayr, Radiosa fine / Il non nato, trans. G. Giri, Macerata, liberilibri, 2009, p. 77 (own translation). The Italian edition contains the two stories: Die Unsichtbare. Tirade an drei Stränden (2001) and Der Ungeborene, oder Die Himmelsareale des Anselm Kiefer (2002).
Excerpted from Prologo celeste. Nell’atelier di Anselm Kiefer © 2023 Giulio Einaudi Editore.