(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
But when all the above has been said about contemporary art, there was silence in me in another way, when I entered the Salla dello Scrutinio in the Doge's Palace surrounded by German Anselm Kiefer his new picture gallery. The paintings are a comment on the city's history and the fire in 1577 and on the city's former painters (Tintoretto and others) but also a comment on how the past and the present historical moments converge. For Kiefer, art is not just play, but the deepest seriousness. It is about clarifying the most important questions in history, philosophy and mythology, what it means to be up to date with one's own time, about why there is something and not just nothing.
"When they are finally burned, these writings will shed a little light."
The exhibition is framed with the Italian philosopher Andrea Emo#'s words "When they are finally burned, these writings will shed a little light." Emo is a form of Christian nihilist, whose philosophy, according to Kiefer himself, describes the core of his own view of art and perception of reality. Only in a transformative contact with nothing does creation gain its power. The moment I put something into the world, it is also a negation of what I do. The empty nothingness seems to be the light that shines through being. The artist is an iconoclast, who destroys his work.
Kiefer also destroyed his works for many years and even today, many of his pictures give me the feeling of being faced with a process of decomposition or decay. The work can never be finished, nor can it depict history as it is, but it can show this process of destruction and construction.
Seen in the light of the global crisis, one has to ask whether Kiefer and Emo are not putting too much pressure on the destruction. Although violence and destruction are part of nature's process both before, after and during creation (construction), we can still speak of nature as being driven by a purpose, understood as a process that works towards a more complex composite order, a form of inherent tendency, an organic order, a pattern formation, an embedded reason in nature and the plant kingdom, as the other philosopher Emanuele , ccia describes it in his book The life of plants. The Metaphysics of Mixture.
See also about Venice Biennale.
