For MONUMENTA 2007, Anselm Kiefer is dedicating the group of new works presented in the nave of the Grand Palais to the poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. More than a straightforward tribute, this dedication witnesses Kiefer's intense dialogue with the art of poetry over many years. What connects these three artists? And what references and connections does Anselm Kiefer weave into the epic saga of remembrance at the heart of his work?

'…your age and my age and the age of the world
cannot be measured in years.'
Ingeborg Bachmann, Das Spiel ist aus
(trans. Angelika Fremd: The game is over)

The dedication as art

How should we interpret the decision by a major international artist like Anselm Kiefer to dedicate a series of works to two poets? A simple gesture of recognition, a tribute, or something more? In Antiquity, the act of dedication marked the  solemn inauguration of a building or statue consecrated to a particular deity. Far more than a simple phrase inscribed on a book or disc cover, such dedications gave profound meaning to the particular work of art or architecture: a temple was of no significance without a dedication to confer its essential spiritual dimension. The 'dedicatee' – a pagan deity or, later, a Christian saint – would then come down and 'inhabit' the edifice. Anselm Kiefer's works – his paintings, towers, libraries or houses – are closely related to these ancient edifices. Each functions as a work of visual 'architecture' which the artist has chosen to dedicate to a tutelary or guardian figure, whose presence will quite literally 'inspire' it with meaning.

The art historian Daniel Arasse has rightly described how Kiefer's pictures function like the 'templa' of Antiquity – patches of sky framed by priests for the purposes of augury based on the flight of birds. There can be no temple without a dedication. By dedicating the installations at the Grand Palais to Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, Anselm Kiefer invites the two poets to 'inhabit' his work. Kiefer is not, then, trying simply to illustrate a poem, but to extend its inspirational power. More than a tribute, the dedication is what gives the works their meaning. It spreads across the painted surface of the canvas, it envelops and penetrates the fabric and volume of the 'dwellings' in the nave, it accompanies each visitor like a spirit, on their visual and emotional discovery of the installation.

A shared memory

The dedication of a work of art is a commemorative gesture. By dedicating a work, the artist signals its function as part of an effort of recollection. Every visitor discovering MONUMENTA 2007 is reminded of the work of Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. In so doing, Anselm Kiefer is furthering and deepening his exploration of memory – a memory scarred by the catastrophe of the Shoah. Paul Celan's ceaseless interpellation of the German language was born of the tragedy of the concentration camps; Ingeborg Bachmann was a member of Gruppe 47, the literary circle founded after World War II on the notion that in order to build a new world, it would be necessary to invent a new language. For both poets, the tragic irruption of Auschwitz confounds the very idea of memory: how can we remember after Auschwitz? How can we remember absolute horror? For Anselm Kiefer, as for Celan and Bachmann, the central issue of all art is the need to recover the co-ordinates of a collective memory disorientated and bewildered by the experience of the unspeakable. By reminding today's visitors of the work of these two poets, inhabited as it is by their difficult, painful confrontation with the past, Anselm Kiefer invites us to share in a collective act of remembrance. Kiefer's dedication does more than simply commemorate Celan and Bachmann; it opens a very real dialogue between them and the visitor, a dialogue expressed beyond words and quotations, in images, form and matter.

Poetry as a theme in Anselm Kiefer's work