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In crafting his 1939 masterpiece, Finnegans Wake, James Joyce—by then almost blind and hyperattuned to the intrinsic musicality of the throat and tongue and the infinite compositional potentialities embedded therein—seated himself upon the trash heap of historical past, forging a brand new artificial hybrid language that went past all of the constraints of English, his ostensible medium. In doing so, he found an entirely new use of the language as junk, as detritus, as joyful extra; language as sculpture; language as uncooked materials. Nonetheless radical from at the moment’s perspective—we’re presently dwelling via a interval through which even novels and poetry are broadly anticipated to meet some propagandistic purpose, typically via cringe-inducing spouts of sentimentality—Joyce’s undertaking of literary maximalism has arguably discovered its visible parallel within the works of “every part” artists similar to Dieter Roth and Paul McCarthy, artists for whom the cultivation of fabric (and, fairly often, bodily) excesses serves to stem the tide of artwork historical past within the forging of an uncreated conscience.
Anselm Kiefer has lengthy plumbed the depths of this “finish of historical past” trope in his impossibly large-scale two-dimensional mixed-media works. One hesitates to name them “work,” as they have a tendency to defy each pictorial and materials conference; they typically come padded with all kinds of three-dimensional detritus that makes them perform nearly as wall sculpture (if such classes even matter at this level). In his newest exhibition, Kiefer pays homage to the round narrative of Joyce’s masterwork. The core of the present is Arsenal, 1970–2023. Assorted rusting “parts” (as per the checklist of supplies) overflow from industrial racks stacked to the ceiling on either side of a tunnel-like hall that splits off into a number of rooms housing equally imposing sculptural installations like Marx my phrase fort, 2021–23. The latter contains a large sand pile dotted with upturned metal procuring carts and an vintage wheelchair, in addition to scrawled quotations from Joyce upon the partitions.
What Joyce would have considered this reinterpretation is anybody’s guess, however shifting round and amongst all these forlorn piles, it turns into clear that nobody dramatizes the tip of historical past fairly like Kiefer.
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