Anselm Kiefer - The Cauterization of the Rural District of Buchen

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• published: 08 Oct 2015
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Among the different media Kiefer has worked with over the years, artist's books have been a consistent and central part of his practice. "The book—the idea of a book or the image of a book—is a symbol of learning, of transmitting knowledge," he has said. "I make my own books to find my own way through the old stories." To create one of his early book projects, a seven-volume series called Cauterization of the Rural District of Buchen (1975), Kiefer burned a selection of his paintings, cut the scorched canvas into pages, and interspersed them with photographs representing staged explosions in landscapes around Buchen, the district where he was then living. The term cauterization—the medical procedure by which tissue is burned to facilitate healing—alludes to the restorative properties of fire, invoking the metaphorical rehabilitation of a wounded landscape and, by extension, the renewal of German national mythology. The burnt, carbonized pages of the book suggest both the material of destruction and the basic constituent of all life forms on earth, again illustrating Kiefer's longstanding interest in alchemy, dualism, and paradoxical states. Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945), alongside contemporaries Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, was one of the first contemporary German artists to achieve international recognition in the early 1980s with his neo-expressionist paintings. Among his peers, however, Joseph Beuys—the most influential figure in the postwar European art world and Kiefer's mentor at the Dusseldorf Academy—had the greatest and most direct impact on Kiefer's work. music; Day Before Us - Excerpt from "Misty shroud of regrets"