Lichtzwang and All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses
Anselm Kiefer, Lichtzwang, 1999
It's getting rarer and rarer to be able to look up at the night sky and see stars. Really see them. Sure, a wink or two here and there piercing through the smog could do the trick, but there's something about being able to  lay back and take stock of the heavens that's truly moving. Too often we move about in our own orbits thinking we're the center of the universe. The night sky gently, but beautifully, reminds us that we are next to nothing compared to the raging balls of gas millions of light years away. Anselm Kiefer captures the majesty of the night tableau with his panoramic painting, Litchtzwang.

 When I stumbled across this painting on Artstor on a late Thursday evening, my mind immediately jumped to a striking passage in Cormac McCarthy's novel, All the Pretty Horses. As I viewed the painting slightly askew from my head's resting place on my outstretched arm, I realized I was staring at the Milky Way. The more I took the painting in, the more my eyes unfocused - most likely due to lack of sleep - and the image on my screen started to come alive with movement. For a minute, I felt like John Grady Cole as

“…he lay looking up at the stars in their places and the hot belt of matter that ran the chord of the dark vault overhead and he put his hands on the ground at either side of him and pressed them against the earth and in that coldly burning canopy of black he slowly turned dead center to the world, all of it taut and trembling and moving enormous and alive under his hands.”

And then I blinked. 

The magic of the night sky and paintings like this is that the harder you look, the less you see. If you stare intently at a star, it'll start to fade. There are biological reasons for this - shenanigans involving photoreceptors and sweet spots in the your vision - but the philosophical repercussions interest me more. This painting is supposed to be experienced like you would the night sky. You need to be completely relaxed, in good company, and you can't be looking for anything in particular. Litchtzwang puts things into perspective and reminds all of us to stop obsessing over the details of the day-to-day and step back to see the big picture - because nine times out of ten it's much more meaningful. 

  • 8:00 AM

Siegfried Forgets Brunhilde and Cat's Cradle

Anslem Kiefer
Anslem Kiefer, Untitled (Siegfried Forgets Brunhilde), 1975-80
Depicting a pitch black, dystopian world, Anslem Kiefer's Untitled gelatin silver print captures a hauntingly eerie scene. Illuminated by a harsh spotlight, the mushrooms stand as testament to nature's tenacity, while the glass bottle is a stand-in for man's presence. Reminiscent of photographs taken after the dropping of the atom bomb, the contrast in this photograph makes the white snow taken on an ashy quality. The singed nature of this photograph is further explained by the text written in with pen, reading after translation, "Seigfried Forgets Brunhilde." 

Alluding to Richard Wagner's epic opera in four parts, "The Ring of the Nibelung," Untitled documents the devastation Valhalla after, according to Norse mythology, all of the gods and demons have an epic battle that engulfs the entire world in flame. 

But what drew me to this photograph wasn't its mythological content. I found this world to be more like Vonnegut's Snowball Earth from his 1963 novel Cat's Cradle.

"There were no smells. There was no movement. Every step I took made a gravelly squeak in blue-white frost. And every squeak was echoed loudly. The season of locking was over. The Earth was locked up tight." 

Slashing through the photograph is what seems to be a valley formerly filled with water. Now it gleams metallic. The long shadows cast by the light source have more substance than shapes casting them. Only the glass bottle seems held firmly in place. I imagine it was this uncapped bottle that housed the shard of Ice-Nine before it was released. 

Drawing on ancient and modern influences, Anslem Kiefer captures with his camera what writers aspire to describe in hundreds of pages of text. This photograph serves as commentary on past destruction as well as a warning against future devastation. 

  • 12:00 AM