Real Life Rock Top 10: June 3, 2024
Zeno, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Nazis, and a 79-year-old German artist all singing the same old Dylan song
1. Anselm Kiefer, “Angeli caduti / Fallen Angels,” Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (May 18, through July 21). In a short video (2) at the end of this show dominated by recent work—most of it, like Kiefer’s constructions and half-built or half-destroyed structures, his created landscapes that look like sets in the first Terminator movie of what the world looks like after the robot conquerors are searching out the last remnants of human resistance, made here of huge paintings and assemblages and reliefs, an overwhelming sense of being in the presence of metal—Kiefer speaks about “What happened in Germany” with the Second World War, “before I was born and when I was alive.” Kiefer was born in Germany on March 8, 1945, exactly two months before VE Day, when Germany surrendered: born into a vortex, when the war was lost but could not end. This nowhere has always been his terrain. He plays out, he enacts, the dislocation of Europe, an epistemological dramatization of why any such institution as the European Union, which politically he probably supports, is an impossible fiction, just as, at the same time, the fascist creep into the history of Europe in this century—with the National Rally in France, Viktor Orban’s Fidesz in Hungary, Giorgia Meloni and the Brothers of Italy, the Alternative for Germany, in the Netherlands, Serbia, and more, all working in concert and with the backing of Putin in Russia and, when he was president and surely again if he gets the chance, Trump in the U.S.—is real.