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PARTISAN REVIEW
tonic aspects of its culture and the cleansing power of irrational
forces. Anselm Kiefer is one among many young artists who revisit
legend, his painted photographs metaphorically blending the
heroism of war with the putatively heroic behavior that daring
creativity demands of the artist.
It
would seem we are to construe
his painting as an arena where war and art mix. For superimposed
on a photograph of farmland, the murky obscurity of pigment
evokes a muddy battlefield when tanks are planted on it, and,
similarly, smoldering tone and gesturally uncouth brushwork
suggest a war-torn plain. The artist-as-soldier sees action in such
painting, if one is to believe that aggressive painting is symbolic of
a creative mortal contest whose outcome is risky and unknown.
"Road Marked with Sand, " the painting' s caption reads.
Through dramatic setting and irrational, subjective technique
Kiefer attempts to reinvest abstract expressionism with the ro–
mance of its storm and stress origins.
That the sentimentality of our response towards our cultural
past recurs in today's art is a given. Kiefer is fully under the influ–
ence of its popularity, as a spread created for the pages of the
summer 1981 issue of
Art/orum
shows. The story of Cilgamesh
appears in a three-part sequence of painted photographs. In–
scribed "Complaint of the Holy Cedar," it retells myth in a man–
ner at once recalling melodrama and mimicking present-day
artists' performance practice. Admittedly amateurish, these ar–
tists' performances have evolved a vernacular now standard and
varied, and include Joseph Beuys's (an artist with whom Kiefer
studied) shamanistic interpretations of artpolitics and Eleanor
Antin's playacting of childhood fantasies. Kiefer simulates the
theatrical mode of dramatic alienation, disengaging belief and
leaving the audience with the superficiality of the present's en–
gagement with the past, abandoning them to romance without
the inspiring myth.
With bobbinlike figures posing in niches, Jedd Caret's early
theatrical paintings might have originated in Oskar Schlemmer's
mechanical ballet; now, however, they have yielded to decadence.
In Caret's paintings prone, serpentine figures languish on plinths
beneath heavily curtained canopies, while violently decorative
pattern and nauseous color schemes compound the melodramatic
atmosphere. Caret's canvases gain their drama from exaggerating
the tension between the antithetical qualities of offensiveness and
