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From Melancholy to Mourning: Historical trauma in the artworks of Anselm Kiefer

Jin-Sung Chun 1

1부산교육대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Anselm Kiefer is acknowledged as one of the most distinguished and polemical German artist since the Second World War. Huge catalogues of his artworks place themselves in the context of the peculiar memory culture of Germany which was primarily shaped by traumatic war experiences and political catastrophe. Originating from the psychoanalytical theories, this paper argues that Kiefer’s artworks both functioned as a symptom and a remedy of the historical trauma. Kiefer, as a postwar artist, explored the German image-reservoir and attempted to monumentalize it in his own fashion. Such provocation resulted in opening the Pandora’s box of postwar German psyche, which was familiar with repressing its traumatic past and also impregnated with the process of self-dissociation, such as melancholy. Kiefer’s dealing of fascist icons is not necessarily linked to his preoccupation with fascism but should be interpreted as a compulsion to repeat the trauma. His art-world specifically represents an artist’s pendulum that swings between “acting-out” and self-reflection, where the term “aesthetics of the sublime” symbolizes the swing. The absolute negativity in Kiefer’s works was intended to represent the unpresentable trauma, since the aesthetics of the sublime refuses any “sublimation” of irredeemable loss and any facile replacement of “melancholy” by the “mourning.” A true mourning, in the eyes of Kiefer, never precludes an earnest confrontation with the melancholy, but rather presupposes it. This paper contrived to follow his artistic trajectory, which circulates from melancholy to mourning. From the rude performances over the monumental melancholy to the self-distancing mourning works, Kiefer’s art-world figured out a way to represent and forget the intractable trauma. Through the multi-medial uses and misuses of the hybrid historical images, Kiefer finally reaches the “sublime objects” in the sense of Lacan and Zizek which tends to represent the trauma in the form of a “thing(das Ding),” whose “gaze” plays a role in awakening spectator’s self and his/her traumatic past. In Kiefer’s work it appears in the motif of artist’s palette.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.