Fire On The Earth: Anselm Kiefer and the Postmodern World (The Arts And Their Philosophie)

Born in 1945, the German painter Anselm Kiefer "represents the concerns and insecurities of postwar European intellectuals, confronted by a questionable past and a future so threatening that it tends to create despair." In this philosophical case study of Kiefer’s work, John C. Gilmour addresses a crisis that is common to twentieth-century art and aesthetic theory: the loss of confidence in the ideals and world view inherited from the Enlightenment. Modernism’s historical moment has passed, he claims, and Kiefer’s art—which was the subject of a recent national exhibition—reveals the contours of an emerging postmodern vision.

Considering the writings of Jameson, Foucault, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Nietzsche, among others, Gilmour shows how Kiefer’s use of literary, mythological, and other cultural texts parallels the intertextual approach common among postmodern theorists. At the same time, the artist’s cosmological questioning adds a dimension lacking among many of postmodernism’s leading proponents. The author interprets Kiefer’s art as a site where distinctions between modern and postmodern senses of representation, history, cosmology, and nature become thematic. He addresses individual paintings—the book includes forty-four illustrations—and gives the historical, biographical, art-critical, and philosophical setting for each piece.