On Disintegration

 The FIFA is actually the festival of films about art—which, in Montreal, delightfully, no-one confuses with a soccer franchise. I was most excited about the Anselm Kiefer film. Kiefer had an exhibit at the Contemporary Art Museum here about 5 years ago. I was captivated by his sculptures, particularly the one depicting a giant lead book with giant lead wings sprouting from its back. It seemed heavy and sad, despite the obvious symbolism.

The film did not disappoint. It let the cleverness, unexpectedness, and provocativeness of Kiefer’s work shine as sunlight through a clean window. But that metaphor is all wrong for today’s thoughts. You’ll never find a clean window in Kiefer’s maze of broken glass, concrete cubes, and metal sheets dappled with molten lead and dirt.

At one point, Kiefer mentions he likes imperfections, empty spaces. We see him flinging sheets of glass on the concrete surrounding a lead tableau. The fractured, the diffuse, the brokenness. Those things we avoid, see only to patch up or cover over, he forces us to look at them, think about them, marvel at them, grasp them without collapsing their disintegratedness. I’m reminded of the dazzling, shattered complexity of our current world. Wars are fought, not with armies but random little cells of rebels. Information is transmitted, not through a fixed number of newspapers or television channels but a multiplicity of organically, randomly interconnected internet sites. I cannot concentrate for more than 3 minutes on any task during my work day without being interrupted by my buzzing Blackberry.

What to make of this post-big-bang-style eruption of formerly packed particles into a million spots of light that has happened in the past 10 years or so? Confusion reigns, because our eyes are trained to see a music video as a seamless 3.5-minute flow despite the cut-a-second editing, because our minds yearn for perfect wholeness.

One of Kiefer’s tableaux, of the thick giant metal sheet variety, is textured with fissures. In the film, he pours molten lead and it runs along the cracks. Then he takes oversized plasters of molars and sticks them into the lead. “It’s the Greeks’ idea,” he shrugs, “they sowed teeth and harvested warriors. The legend of the Argonauts.”

Yes. Yes, how do we do that? How do we nourish ourselves in the multitudes of cracks, make ourselves at home in the brokenness, draw strength from the endless and unpatterned divisions, so that we rise up warriors?