Kiefer, out in the grass field

fig.87.09) Tremendous Awesome

Trauma and isolation in small circles throughout the room and hidden inside the walls themselves. There was this thing when we were kids at school, we really liked Kiefer's work. We'd talk about his ropes and the strewn hay laying on concrete floors in the images that were the hallmarks of his monograph. As his work was cast on their end pages in tart silver tones, all of us read about his openings. Frieze would have written about his paintings being stacked high, sandwiching bailing wire, twine and more straw between stretched canvas like a flattened cookbook just waiting for a strong match.

So much fantasy, big and brazen as it is, hiding the fear of a withering cock or a soul born bored and yet unlimited by circumstance. I've heard others speak for the actions of this man, or the great reach of some others. So how is it that each of them found their way, great as they might have been, to just being quiet. All of them finally sat down to learn the lonely art of shutting the fuck up and letting the room breath for itself. They stopped shoving aeroplanes up one another's assholes or imitating the faint squeak of the mouse errant, trap trap snap! They stopped procuring elephants and hiding them over sofas and they stopped telling that story about trains, the one in which Chris Burden shaves himself to pass as a security guard.

Trauma wasn't invented at the mall. The old people in their silent rubber shoes surrounding the young ones with their super sloppy dessert rolls and gallons of fish sauce waiting for a straw, they know this to be true. They know the masterful edge that's to be felt when a particularly long metaphor for history can be described with kitchen mop and a few precise gestures with some roofing tar. Young people today, with their Seth Price's and their Erich von Däniken's. They're so busy interpreting the fundamental nature that's the decaying orbit of social and political purity in our common experience, they have roundly forgotten how screwed our pooch really is.

Kiefer in his silent robes, his wool knickers and poorly brushed teeth knew all about it. He understood the spiritual machinations of history, how the faustian relics would not be so quick in releasing our subtly ball like modernity from its vice like narrative. Faust has always wanted a personhood that's dependent on pulling aeroplanes from its collective asshole. Kiefer understood what Virgil had seen, the lady and the lamb hustling it out of the fire exit before the shooting begins. That the toads need to be licked before they're cleaned and by no means should you ever drink from a dirty glass. Not even a nazi would do that. The signs all point to madness. Dim and simple but as irrefutable as the marriage of terrible things can be.