Landscape and Memory
- 24 February 2025
In particular, Schama's comments on Anselm Kiefer.
p.19
"...after the sunny confidence of the Enlightenment had been engulfed in catastrophe, after landscapes picturesque and sublime had been chewed up by war and fertilized by the bones and blood of the unnumbered dead, another German created a different type of wooden book."
".. the optimisim of the eighteenth century's culture of nature is consumed in smoke."
"... scorched by the conflagrations of total war, of the consummation of nature in atrocity."
Cauterization of the Rural District of Buchen is a 1975 book project by German artist Anselm Kiefer. The project involves burning his own oil paintings to create pages for the books. ;The burnt pages are interspersed with photographs of staged explosions in the Buchen district.
p.120
"Since then the broadleaf hardwoods of the Odenwald had surrendered to farmland, which was restocked in the 19c with commercial conifers. Though it would not be until the 1980s that the German government would begin to take systematic scientific surveys of the damage done by sulfur dioxide emissions, and for the term Waldsterbein - forest-death - to become the common coin of Green environmentalism, it was already apparent that the Odenwald... had suffered dreadfully during the heyday of uncontrolled industrialism."
p.123
"Did Kiefer take the morbidity of the trees to heart?
"Did Kiefer take the morbidity of the trees to heart?
"... "The past was taboo, (my) dragging it up only caused repulsion and distaste." He was committed to becoming a cultural nuisance, worrying away at the scabs od memory until they revealed open and livid wounds again."
".. an authentic determination to explore the modern fate of landscape myth."
p.126/127
"Kiefer came to think of his painting as an aggressive reenactment of historical destructions, literally as a 'burning'. So where Romantic art reiterated the sentimental celebration of native landscapes, his art did what history did: it burned them."
"Kiefer came to think of his painting as an aggressive reenactment of historical destructions, literally as a 'burning'. So where Romantic art reiterated the sentimental celebration of native landscapes, his art did what history did: it burned them."
This sentence was so relevant to me, to my proposal question - How do I depict the loss, the destruction?
"Later he would literally burn books in Cauterization of the Rural District of Buchen..."
"Later he would literally burn books in Cauterization of the Rural District of Buchen..."
CITE: Schama, Simon. 2004. Landscape and Memory. London Harper Perennial.