Here Comes Everybody:Anselm Kiefer @ the White Cube, Bermondsey.

Many years ago I read an article in which the writer (whose name I can't remember or find on the Internet) proposed that out of all art forms, pictorial art (or, simply, 'art') was the least emotionally powerful. They made the case that it is not uncommon for people to cry when listening to music, when watching a film, or even when watching television but the idea that somebody would break down in tears in an art gallery is pretty much unheard of.

 

The argument held water for me. I've seen some amazing art over the years, I've been touched by it, I've been enthralled by it but never has any of it made me, or anyone else I know of, cry. That belief was firmly challenged yesterday when me and my friend Vicki visited the White Cube gallery in Bermondsey to see Anselm Kiefer's Finnegan's Wake.

In the final room of the show, in front of the above painting, a young woman asked us to excuse her as she was having a very emotional moment in front of it. Now, I couldn't read the painting (and I haven't read James Joyce's notoriously difficult Finnegan's Wake that inspired the show) but the young lady informed us that the initials at the top of the painting, HCE, stood for Here Comes Everybody and that Here Comes Everybody was the (nick) name of the chief protagonist in Finnegan's Wake. He was dead and as such was represented by a blank space. Like the initials, just out of view in the photograph I took.

I explained to her I'd not read Finnegan's Wake, and had struggled with Ulysses, and she claimed she'd been assigned to read it at school or college and that, though she'd loved it, she'd not got very far with it. Which goes some way to underlining just how tricky a read Finnegan's Wake is.

So it was, we attended the show more than a little green and the show was nothing if not confusing. There were skeletons, feathers, buckets, rusty bicycles, paint splattered overalls in all sizes, and there was a room full of smashed up concrete and dust surrounded by paintings of sunflowers. Another room had all sorts of junk on the floor and paintings of elegant, if doomed looking landscapes and Klimtesque sunsets. Vicki said she'd liked to live in that room.

It's probably fair to say she liked the show more than me. I liked it but I didn't understand it. There were strips of text everywhere, presumably from Finnegan's Wake itself, and most of it didn't make much sense. Kiefer's lengthy career has involved a lot of ruminating about Germany and its history and how the Nazis have had such a pernicious influence on that history. Kiefer was born in 1945, at the end of the war, so it's a shadow that has always loomed over both the man and his work.

But that still didn't explain a load of shopping trolleys chucked on a pile of a sand, a lone wheelchair, and metal sculptures of golden snakes. The White Cube's website tells us that Finnegan's Wake is a novel of "circles and echoes", a book that "begins in the midst of things" and "turns back on itself in its final pages". It makes use of over seventy languages and incorporates references to Norse mythology, German metaphysics, and the poetry of Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. 

Two poets I'm unaware of. I'm not doubting that Finnegan's Wake is a worthwhile read, an 'improving' book, but I do know that if I were ever to read it I'd probably need to have a whole plethora of reference sources (other books, the Internet) to fall back on and help me understand ity. A group in Ireland have been meeting regularly for years to discuss the meaning of the book and they've still not cracked it yet. What chance a comparatively uneducated dunce like myself?

So, instead, I went to an exhibition inspired by the book and I tried, but failed, to truly understand it. We wondered what happens to these works when the show, or tour, has finished. Does Kiefer have a huge warehouse where he keeps all this stuff or does it just become trash? That doesn't seem a very nice thing to do with art that has clearly been worked on for years.

Like Finnegan's Wake itself (probably), Kiefer's installation was vast and dense in its scope and it was almost impossible to completely comprehend. But it was good to look at. In fact there was so much that Vicki and I had to have a not inconsiderable debrief in the Vinegar Bar and the Simon the Tanner pub afterwards. When I woke up this morning, though, I was still no clearer as to what it was actually all about. But I did, at least, carry on thinking about it. That's something, eh?