The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Anselm Kiefer · one free-standing object, scored as it can be shown now · a tall iron bookcase holding books of sheet lead; panes of glass set among and before the books, broken, with shards on the shelves and spread across the floor round the foot of the case; above the case an arched pane of glass, whole, lettered by hand with a name for the infinite; labels naming the sefirot, fixed by wire · 1990 · in a public museum collection · nothing known to be lost or replaced; the floor glass is laid again by hand at each installation, inside the artist’s design
Mode
A sculpture that bears a cosmogony; the bookcase made a cosmos, the library made a ruin
Mythos
Luria’s breaking of the vessels, built from top to bottom: the infinite above, the sefirot named down the case, the husks on the floor; and the library as the memory of a people
Phase
1990, after the lead books and lead library Kiefer had made his own in the late 1980s; the work of a German artist of forty-five, born in the last year of the war
Presentation
One free-standing object of lead, iron and glass, with lettering by hand and labels on wire; the floor glass laid again at each installation
Register
Dread and grandeur, by height and by weight; grey matter throughout, with brilliance only in the glass underfoot
Scale
Taller than the viewer, a tower crowned by a window; one object, one vertical, one theme
Governing Proposition
A tall iron bookcase holds books made of sheet lead, whole on their shelves and closed. Panes of glass set among and before them are broken; shards lie on the shelves and spread across the floor round the foot of the case, where the viewer stands. Above the case an arched pane, whole, is lettered with a name for the infinite. The title names the doctrine of Isaac Luria, in which the vessels made to hold the divine light could not bear it and broke. The wager of the work is that a cosmogony can be built rather than pictured, from the infinite at the top to the debris underfoot in one substance, whole above and broken below, and that a culture’s vessels of meaning can survive a destruction as objects that can no longer be read.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Breaking of the Vessels is a free-standing sculpture made by Anselm Kiefer in 1990, when he was forty-five; he was born in 1945 in Donaueschingen. It is a tall iron bookcase holding books made of sheet lead. Panes of glass are set among and before the books, and they are broken: shards lie on the shelves and are spread across the floor round the foot of the case. Above the case stands an arched pane of glass, whole, lettered by hand with a name for the infinite. Labels naming the sefirot are fixed to the work by wire.
The work scored is that one object, as it can be shown now. The shards on the floor are part of it, not debris round it. No part is known to have been lost, replaced or added. One later hand is built into its design: whenever the work is installed the floor glass is laid again by hand, so the arrangement of shards on any given day is an installer’s, inside the artist’s plan. That bears on the work’s survival and on nothing else. The work is held by a public museum and has been seen steadily there; its height, the count of its books and the record of its acquisition are not given here.
Four elements make it: the arched pane, the iron case, the lead books and the glass. Take any away and the work changes kind. Without the pane the case has no source; without the glass it is a library; without the lead the books could be read; without the iron nothing holds. What yields is lesser: the wired labels, which name what the arrangement already shows; the number of books, which a longer or shorter run of shelving would not alter; and the particular scatter on the floor, which changes by design. The work is required in its main parts and permitted in its count and its captions.
Movement II
The title names a doctrine. In the teaching of Isaac Luria, at Safed in the sixteenth century, made known in modern times above all through the scholarship of Gershom Scholem, creation begins with a breaking, shevirat ha-kelim: the vessels made to hold the divine light could not hold it, and broke, and their fragments, the husks, fell. The ten sefirot of the doctrine stand in the order of that world. The myth has a second movement, tikkun, the repair, the gathering of the scattered light.
Kiefer builds the doctrine as the structure of the object, from top to bottom. The infinite stands above in whole glass, a name and no image. The sefirot are named on labels and wired down the case. The vessels are broken. The husks lie on the floor, where the viewer stands. A second archetype bears load with the first: the library as the memory of a people, the book as the vessel of the word. The particular stays particular, an iron shelf, sheets of lead beaten and folded, plate glass, and the myth is built, not evoked.
Part of it is captioned. The labels name the sefirot that the arrangement already shows, and they belong to another order of thing: a diagram’s register, an instruction set among objects. A shelf of books is generic enough that the archetype rather than the thing does much of the work. And the frame of the disclosure is Luria’s and Scholem’s, borrowed more than uncovered. The charge that the work is the doctrine illustrated, with labels, is partly just. It is not wholly just, because the breaking is not illustrated: it happened to the glass.
Movement III
The lead is worked as if it were paper. Sheets are beaten and folded into folios that read as books at a distance and as metal close, their surfaces stained and oxidised into a range of greys. The iron case is built to bear a load of tons and to look as if it barely does. The books stand whole on their shelves, and they cannot be opened. Painted books could be read as images; these can only be stood before.
That closure is what the work says about inheritance. A culture’s vessels of meaning survive the destruction as objects, whole and closed to reading: inheritance after catastrophe is weight, not access. Lead carries more: the metal of Saturn and of melancholy in the alchemical tradition, a weight the shelf must bear, and a poison. How the alchemist’s lead and Luria’s light sit together in one object is one of the questions the work leaves open.
The library is Kiefer’s type. Lead books and a lead library were already his by the late 1980s, and the type served him before and after for other subjects, so part of what this form knows the type already knew. What this object adds is the arched pane, the glass and the cosmogony. The making has its costs: the lettering is functional rather than drawn with the authority of Kiefer’s painting, the wires and joints are rough by intent but also simply rough, and scale is reached by assembly more than by touch.
Movement IV
The glass is at once the vessels and their breaking. Shards on the shelves read as caught in the fall, those on the floor as settled. The breaking is an event that happened to the material, and its remains lie on the ground the viewer shares, so the work’s fallen world is the viewer’s floor. Glass catches the light, and so the lowest point of the work is also its most brilliant: lead and iron are grey by nature, and only the debris shines.
The work is read along one vertical. The arched pane at the top reads as a church window or a tympanum, light where there is no image, only a name. The eye goes from it down the shelves of lead, the weight held overhead by iron, to the glass at the feet, and the descent repeats each time one looks up. The infinite stands at the eye’s limit and the debris at the body’s base. The elevation is of dread and grandeur, carried by height and mass in one register, and it does not change in kind.
One law runs through it. The pane at the top, whole and lettered, and the shards on the floor, broken and unlettered, are one substance: every element is a vessel, either holding or broken. The lead books hold a word no one can read; the shelf holds the books; the panes held light and broke. The law is visible in a single material, whole above and shattered below, and the range runs from the infinite to debris without a break. The range is tall, but it is one theme.
Movement V
Luria’s myth ends in repair. The work stops at the breaking. It leaves the shards where they fell, at the viewer’s feet, and the gathering, if there is to be one, to whoever stands among them. Whether that is despair or a task is not decided by the object, and the open question is part of what it shows.
A reading that sets this glass beside the glass of November 1938 is brought to the object by its date and by its maker, a German born in the last year of the war, and by the criticism; nothing in the object names it. The charges that have followed the work stand beside it: mystification, the aestheticising of catastrophe, a German artist borrowing a tradition not his own. They are the stake the work placed. Its other questions stay open as well: whether it mourns or mythologises, and whether Kabbalah is taken up here as a frame for mourning or as an appropriation.
At thirty-six years the work is whole as far as is known. Lead is soft, creeps under its own weight and corrodes, and the loose glass must be laid again by hand whenever the work is moved; the present condition of the fabric is not verified here. Seen steadily in one museum, reproduced in the literature on Kiefer but not among the most seen images of its decade, the object stands as it was made: a library above, whole and closed, and below it the glass, broken, on the floor where the viewer stands.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged part by part. The arched pane cannot go: it is the source, the infinite named at the top, and the one element the case does not carry. The glass cannot go: it is at once the vessels and their breaking, and without the shards on the floor the work is a library. The lead cannot go: books that cannot be opened are what the work knows about its inheritance. The iron case cannot go: it holds and bears, the vessel’s armature. What yields is the wired labels, which name what the arrangement already shows and do a caption’s work; the number of books, which a longer run of shelving would not change; and the scatter on the floor, reset at each installation and so contingent by design.
Score: 8.3 / 10
What can be stated, and holds. A culture’s vessels of meaning can survive as objects and be closed to reading: the lead books stand whole on their shelves and cannot be opened, so inheritance after catastrophe is weight, not access. The breaking is shown without the repair: Luria’s myth has a second movement, tikkun, the gathering of the scattered light, and the work gives only the first, leaving the shards where they fell, at the viewer’s feet. These are meanings, not moods. What holds the axis is threefold: a reading that sets the glass beside November 1938 is brought to the object by date, maker and criticism, not inscribed in it; much of what the room gives is melancholy, a state; and the frame of the disclosure is borrowed from Luria and Scholem more than uncovered.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Elevation of dread and grandeur, by height and by matter. The case rises over the viewer, and the lead is felt as weight overhead, a mass held up by iron. Glass lies underfoot and catches the light, so the lowest point of the work is also its most brilliant. The arched pane at the top reads as a church window or a tympanum: light where there is no image, only a name. The eye’s path from that pane down the shelves to the floor is the work’s own descent, and it repeats each time one looks up. What holds the axis: one object, one encounter, one register; the height lives in scale and mass more than in recurring summits; and lead and iron are grey by nature, so the elevation does not change in kind.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Myth built, not evoked: the Lurianic cosmogony is the structure of the object from top to bottom. The infinite stands above in whole glass; the sefirot are named and wired down the case; the vessels are broken; the shards, the husks of the doctrine, lie on the floor where the viewer stands. A second archetype bears load with it: the library as the memory of a people, the book as the vessel of the word. The particular stays particular: an iron shelf, sheets of lead beaten and folded, plate glass. Held at the gate rather than above it, because part of the myth is carried by labels that name it, captioned rather than acquired, and because a shelf of books is generic enough that the archetype does much of the thing’s work.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance: Beuys’s sculpture of charged materials, felt, fat and copper as carriers of meaning; the raw matter of Arte Povera; the industrial shelf and serial unit of Minimal art; and Kiefer’s own idiom, in which lead books and the lead library were established by the late 1980s. The departure: a sculpture that bears a cosmogony, the bookcase made a cosmos with the infinite above and the fallen world on the floor, and Jewish mysticism taken up as the frame of German memory. The stake was real and partly paid: the charges of mystification, of aestheticising catastrophe and of borrowing a tradition not his own have followed the work. Held below the gate because the turn is made inside an idiom the artist had already made and been rewarded for, and because the language of material sculpture was living, not left.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Mostly yes. Lead is the knowledge: books that cannot be read, a weight the shelf must bear, the metal of Saturn and melancholy in the alchemical tradition, and a poison. Painted books could be read as images; these can only be stood before. Real glass, really broken, is the knowledge: the breaking happened to the material, and its remains lie on the floor the viewer shares, so the work’s fallen world is the viewer’s ground. The vertical is the knowledge: the infinite at the eye’s limit, debris at the feet, the descent along the body’s own axis. Held below the top because the library is a type Kiefer used before and after for other subjects, and because the labels put into words what the form might have carried.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence over promise: thirty-six years in a public collection, and the questions stay open. Does the work mourn or mythologise, and is that a difference here? Is Kabbalah taken up as a frame for mourning or as a German appropriation? Is the missing repair despair, or a task handed to whoever stands on the shards? How do alchemical lead and Lurianic light sit together in one object? Does the glass mean November 1938 when the work does not say so? The object yields at two distances: a tower crowned by a window, and close up the stained lead, the lettering, the shards. Held below: decades, not centuries; much of the writing concerns Kiefer’s project as a whole rather than this object; and the doctrine is a key that closes some questions once it is found.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Shown and published, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of German and international sculpture and installation about 1990. Intrinsic force: the library as ruin, the book as sealed vessel, a mystical cosmogony built from industrial matter; with the lead library before it, it made the archive a sculptural subject of memory and gave the art of its century one of its sterner images of what survives a destruction. The discount: much of that force belongs to the lead library, and Kiefer’s reach to his paintings of the 1980s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Kiefer’s own later returns to the Lurianic theme, and the book and the library as figures of memorial art in the decade after, though derivation from this object is not demonstrated. It is seen steadily, but in one regional museum, and little that followed can be traced to it alone.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole as far as is known, the work as it can still be shown, with no loss reported. Presence: steady but local; reproduced in the literature on Kiefer but not among the most seen images of its decade, so presence lifts nothing. Fabric: lead is soft, creeps under its own weight and corrodes; the glass lies loose and must be laid again by hand whenever the work is moved; the present condition is not verified here. The image is not fixed to its moment: Luria is four centuries older than the work, and the debate on German memory that framed its reception is its context, not its image. A tenth is charged for the fabric and for the floor reset by hand.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged as command of a medium of materials at architectural scale, to the same anchors as any medium. Credited: lead worked as if it were paper, sheets beaten and folded into folios that read as books at a distance and as metal close, their surfaces stained and oxidised into a range of greys; the iron case built to bear a load of tons and to look as if it barely does; the glass placed so that shards on the shelves read as caught in the fall and those on the floor as settled; the lettering, a hand’s mark on industrial matter. The making is load-bearing. The costs: the lettering is functional rather than drawn with the authority of Kiefer’s painting; the wires and joints are rough by intent but also simply rough; scale is reached by assembly more than by touch.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the arched pane at the top, glass whole and lettered with the infinite, and the shards on the floor, glass broken and unlettered. They obey one law, and they are one substance: matter as vessel, every element a container either holding or broken. The lead books hold a word no one can read; the shelf holds the books; the panes held light and broke. The law is visible in a single material from top to bottom, whole above and shattered below, and the range runs from the infinite to debris without a break. Held below the top because the wired labels are another kind of thing, a diagram’s register set among objects, and because the territory, though tall, is one theme.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The orders held: the sacred, in the infinite and the sefirot; the cosmic, creation as a breaking; knowledge and the book, a culture’s memory; history, through the maker’s birth in 1945 and the glass a viewer may set beside November 1938; matter, in alchemical lead. They are integrated by one vertical, from the name above to the floor below, and the viewer’s body is placed in it. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: history is held by inference, not by anything in the object; and the human orders are absent, with no person, no family, no labour, no state but by implication, and no nature beyond the mineral. The figure describes the form, a single object.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Inner Law at 8.6, then The Archetypal Deep, The Living Form, The Imperishable and The Made at 8.5. One substance, whole above and broken below, running from the infinite to debris without a break; the Lurianic cosmogony built as the structure of the object from top to bottom; a form in which lead that cannot be read and glass really broken are the knowledge; a work whole after thirty-six years; and lead commanded at architectural scale, books at a distance and metal close.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: the sacred, the cosmic, the book and matter are integrated by one vertical, but history is held by inference and the human orders are absent, with no person, no family, no labour and no state but by implication. Below the rest, Pressure on Tradition at 7.6 and The Swerve at 7.8: much of the force and of the turn belong to the lead library and to an idiom Kiefer had already made and been rewarded for, and little that followed can be traced to this object alone.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Archetypal Deep and The Imperishable meet the bar of 8.5 exactly, but The Unconcealment at 8.0 falls short by five tenths, The Swerve at 7.8 by seven and Pressure on Tradition at 7.6 by nine. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 97.9, an average of 8.16 that displays 8.2, in the band of Tier IV and short of the 9.0 the summit also requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the object, Breaking of the Vessels, made by Anselm Kiefer in 1990: of its configuration, its materials, its subject and the main lines of the criticism of Kiefer around it; not from standing before it, and no image or written source was consulted. The configuration and the subject are known securely; the materials moderately; the dimensions, the inscriptions in detail and the collection record thinly, and where a judgment turns on them it is held more loosely. The work scored is one free-standing object as it can be shown now: the iron bookcase, the lead books, the broken glass on the shelves and on the floor, the arched pane above and the wired labels. The shards on the floor are part of the work. Nothing is known to have been lost or replaced, and no later hand is known to have added to it; the floor glass is laid again by hand at each installation, so the scatter at any date is an installer’s inside the artist’s design, and that bears on survival alone. Kiefer’s earlier lead library, which supplies the type, his other works on Kabbalistic subjects, and the doctrine of Isaac Luria as made known through Gershom Scholem are context, and are not scored. No words are quoted but the title, which is given in English. Facts that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the German title, the dimensions and the weight, the number of lead books, the exact wording, spelling and placing of the lettering on the arched pane, whether all ten sefirot are labelled, the full medium line (whether the lettering is in charcoal and the wire copper, and whether an acrylic binder is also named), the title and dates of the earlier lead library, the collection record (the holding museum, taken here to be the Saint Louis Art Museum, and the year and terms of acquisition), how the work has been shown there, the critical writing on it by name, and the condition of the lead and the glass.