In The Four in One, Anselm Kiefer explored the nature of demons through human imagination.
Anselm Kiefer's art has richer connotations. His so-called creative intentions related to the German issue have been constantly debated, resulting in right and wrong, and until now there is no agreement. His paintings of the Third Reich—the fascist buildings of Elpert Speer (Hitler’s architect and minister of arms), the myths of Wagner and the Teutonic peoples—are often deeply disturbing, more or less Rarely is it said to be an unnecessary reminiscence of the dark days of Nazi Germany (a common German view), or a manifestation of redemption and purity (mostly an American view).
Whether people like or dislike Kiefer's art depends largely on its position in the debate. A generation of Germans who have lived through the war neither blames him for revising the past, deliberately talking about sinful moments in history, nor doubts that Kiefer might use the issue for his own personal gain. Americans, and especially many Jewish collectors of Kiefer's art, despite the possibility of seeing his work through a "prism," have good reason to ask people not to forget the past.
Kiefer is not a history painter, nor does he need to tell people those instructive stories. In his contradictory motifs, both salvation and destruction appear in the same picture. One of the most shocking and powerful aspects of Kiefer's art is that he never visibly takes either side when he presents very thorny moral issues. The symbols he employs have opposite sides. Examples are the painter's palette and the tanks of the new Franco-Spanish armour, or the ditch-riddled landscape, dotted with milky white stars. Painters have always tended to grasp the two ends against the middle when depicting the broader poems of good and evil. In the middle is the center full of unclean things.
Kiefer's work often carries implications from the complex categories of religious and philosophical thought. These include alchemy-esque mystical claims, Norse, Greek, Egyptian, and early Christian mythology, and Jewish mystical philosophies. Through his research on these ancient peoples, he has at least one foot on the dark side of the human imagination. His art is reminiscent of Wallace Stevens (American poet) and his 1945 group poem The Aesthetics of Sin
. . . the calamity giant is not a sentimentalist,
he is both evil and evil itself. For his
raging spirit and sin, in the cry of despair,
descends upon all beings.
Kiefer's group of paintings from the 1970s called The Attic is particularly fascinating in this regard. The group paintings are painted with huge linen cloth, and the content is not closely related to each other. But through these "prisms", people can understand the world imagined by the artist. The epic "Quad in One" is the most fascinating one in the group of paintings. It was completed in 1973 and was collected by Georg Baselitz, the most famous German neo-expressionist painter and friend of Kiefer, for 25 years. , which was purchased for the Ford Worth Museum of Modern Art in Germany in 1998, so it was rarely seen before. The painting presents a grand philosophical drama, hovering between religious and historical themes, striving to fuse concerns with the status quo into larger, more general, and perhaps more disturbing truths.
In 1973, when the painting was completed, the painter was living in a small remote village in the Odenlin Mountains, a narrow forest tourist resort between Frankfurt and Stuttgart. The small village is not far from the Black Forest Mountains and Nibelungen Strass, or the Nibelungs Road. It is a mythical scenic area. A mysterious people in ancient Germany once lived here. Kiefer's residence at the time was a large building that used to be the house of a former elementary school. Kiefer uses one of the lofts as his studio. In this way, the attic is like a stage, playing the role of the background in the group paintings.
"Four in One" is the second painting in the group painting "The Attic". The first is "Father, Son, Holy Spirit", also completed in 1973. It depicts the Holy Spirit of the Holy Trinity in Christianity in the center of the attic. It is reflected in the flames burning on three chairs. German cursive writing with the names of the deities they represent. The Four-in-One is a huge painting, 10 feet high and 40 feet long. It also shows the three gods in the Trinity as three piles of flames, but here the flames are directly depicted on the wooden floor.
The interior scene covered with wood grain can be said to be a delicate charcoal pattern. It covers the entire wall and floor of the interior and becomes the main image in the painting, symbolically implying that this is the old German forest where many mythological stories take place. It tells the story of the struggle between good and evil. Kiefer gave his studio such a dramatic content to facilitate the fusion of this depicted world and that of the viewer's imagination.
The image of the giant serpent in "Four in One" is the representative of the devil or the devil. It crawls out of the shadows on the right side of the frame and engages in a visual dialogue with three piles of flames. The attic in the painting is a symbolic space. It stores our past. This is a kingdom of darkness and mystery, a place that is usually not easy for us to come to. If you come, even if you don't feel alarmed, you will be shrouded in complicated feelings. There are many hidden things here. But we don't need to imagine too much to deduce that Satan is a hint of Hitler. To put it more vividly, it is the incarnation of the "swastika" character. At this point we can't help but wonder, is there an implied tradition of Teutonic ferocity that makes fascism so crazy? Is Kiefer implying that there is still unspeakable terror hidden in the hearts of all Germans, perhaps both. For a learned artist like Kiefer, the implications are far more than that.
The title "Four in One" also implies a big theoretical debate in the Christian Church in the 4th century. If the Trinity represents an invisible, sovereign holiness and power, what is the origin and function of the devil? The conclusion is that the devil is not a part of God. But there is still an unresolved question in that debate, and that is what is the actual role of the devil in society. In "The Four Persons", Kiefer combines the devil, or Satan, with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Become a combined element of God and use connecting lines to represent their transformation from one energy to another. While Kiefer doesn't give Satan full power -- if the serpent gets too close to the Trinity, it risks being devoured by flames -- nor does he dismiss it as a useless sidekick, with the devil playing a major role.
The entire work is built on contradictory opposites. The burning Trinity, imposingly suggesting spiritual transcendence, also shows a threat that the building where the Trinity is located may be reduced to ashes in the flames of the Apocalypse. Satan's snake body is half shaded and half illuminated. It is a symbol of redemption and destruction, symbolizing the relationship between good and evil, and it is also the central theme throughout Kiefer's art. In those paintings, such as the burning branches and brushes, there is this obvious function. The burning branches are both luminous and symbolize the ruined forest. In 1998, the painter exhibited 4 new works depicting the ancient Mexican pyramids, showing the ancient architectural ruins that combine spiritual transcendence and bloody sacrifice. The sunflower flowers there are rather lively and lively, but they are covered with modified sunflower seeds, and they may be black stars, or from a distance, some flies living in a degenerating world. There is no morality here, there is just filth.
The Four in One brings us to the fact that the location of characters and the origin of culture are not simply a political issue, but relate to something much broader and more complex. It implies that demons exist in all human consciousness. Many of Kiefer's outstanding works simultaneously pose a thorny question: since the devil is a part of nature in reality, what role should it play in our aesthetic principles and moral construction is a major question. Stevens' "Aesthetics of Sin" reflects the poet's cautious approach to the complexities of postwar reality he faced. The main lines of the poem are completely consistent with Kiefer's sentimental hallucinations.
"For the imagination,
the death of the devil is a tragedy."
Here, Kiefer poses a stark reality question as to whether the devil is an indispensable factor in the increasingly rich imagination of mankind, or whether he It is the intentional choice of human selfish behavior. Bishop John Paul II has rekindled the debate on this age-old theoretical question in a recent discussion of heaven, hell and purgatory. Hell, for example, is indeed a place of burning fire, or the realm of reflections of the cold and empty mind far from God. The bishop has now concluded with critics that he has chosen the latter, noting that it is ultimately a psychological reaction. But that's just one of many sayings.
Kiefer's Four in One certainly isn't trying to solve this conundrum, but he does raise some questions dramatically.
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