The sirens of history: Anselm Kiefer’s ‘Die Frauen der Antike’ at La Ribaute
by Farren Fei Yuan • June 2025 • Journal article
Abstract
Introduction
In 1992, within a year of Germany’s reunification, the artist Anselm Kiefer (b.1945) left his country of origin for a new home in a defunct silk mill in the fourteenth-century city of Barjac in southern France. Over the course of the next fifteen years, the artist transformed the site into La Ribaute, a constellation of interconnected structures that exists somewhere between an artist studio, a museum park and a work of art. It was during this time that Kiefer began making sculptures of female figures that would mark a departure from his decades-long interrogation of Germany’s history and cultural memory, turning instead to constructing possible visions of alternative, matriarchal futures.
On 28th August 1998 Kiefer first recorded his initial ideas for this series: ‘WOMEN OF ANTIQUITY. for some time now, a new project. it has nothing to do with what was written above’.1 Originally conceived as paintings, in which the clothing designed for each woman would be glued onto the canvas, by the spring of 1999 the idea had developed in a direction that was more expansive than directly referential, more poetic than mimetic. The clothes were to be procured first and then assigned to individual sculptures.2 Kiefer compiled notes on the biographies of eighty-six women from Antiquity, listed in alphabetical order in his notebooks, starting with ‘Ada, Adobogiona, Agrippina’.3 In April of the same year Kiefer bought dresses and gowns at a Parisian flea market, which he then covered in plaster and left to dry.4 The result – dozens of headless female figures, their hollow bodies supported by the hardened plaster – would form the material basis for Die Frauen der Antike (Women of Antiquity; 1999–2002) and its continuation in Femmes martyres (Women martyrs; 2018–19).
A number of Die Frauen der Antike debuted in 1999 at Yvon Lambert Gallery, Paris, and today there are others are permanently installed in one of the earliest greenhouses Kiefer built at La Ribaute FIG. 1.5 Some twenty sculptures from Femmes martyres are embedded in an overgrown hillside FIG. 2, while four others stand among the walls of a concrete amphitheatre at the centre of the site. La Ribaute was donated to the Eschaton–Anselm Kiefer Foundation in 2020, which guards the site with a particular vigour. While the studio grounds are open to visitors from late spring to early autumn, exclusively in the form of small, guided tours, the remainder of the remote site is not accessible to the public.6 This article situates both series at the intersection of two thematic axes in Kiefer’s œuvre: his preoccupation with the past as seen through the lens of contemporary history and ancient myths, and the role of the feminine in the artist’s memory politics. It also considers the two series in relation to other works about women’s history at La Ribaute and to the wider context of Kiefer’s practice, assessing their allegiance to feminist politics.
In Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (1995) Andreas Huyssen examined the historical context for contemporary memory discourse in Germany from the post-war period to the early twenty-first century.7 Memory, Huyssen stated, has ceased to have the stable, unifying hold of ‘collective memory’ that gave birth to the German nation in the early nineteenth century, and has become a site of political battles and conflicting representations.8 At the same time, it is precisely this widespread political paralysis, resonating in Germany and beyond, compounded with the amnesic effect of the late-capitalist cultural industry, that makes art a privileged space for memory representation. Huyssen favours Kiefer’s work for these reasons: the artist was the first to confront the taboos and trauma of history and to create collective memory images where they were lacking, all while foregrounding the very impossibility and fallibility of this task.9
Die Frauen der Antike and Femmes martyres represent the most complex work in Kiefer’s engagement with women’s history – a new direction in his longstanding preoccupation with time, memory, myth and history. The first section of this article situates the two interrelated works within the context of La Ribaute. An analysis of the construction and topography of this unique site reveals its self-reflexive operations on memory and remembrance, the significance of which relates less to Germany’s national identity than to the artist’s career and self-identity. The second section examines the role of the feminine in Kiefer’s work and the two series’ materiality and iconography, proposing a new model of memory. It will critically assess their engagement with feminist critiques of history and the way that they allegorise Homeric sirens as critical antagonists of history. The ambivalent nature of the feminine in Kiefer’s œuvre is tracked as it shifts from femmes fatales, daughters or ‘muses’ to sirens, alter-egos and anti-heroines.
Memory without recollections
Kiefer was born at the end of the Second World War, and the spectre of Germany’s recent past haunts his œuvre: scholars unanimously agree that there is an ‘ostensible lack of direct reference to the present’.10 As the artist himself has said, ‘I believe above all that I have wanted to construct a palace of my memory – because my memory is my only homeland’.11 The weight of an incomprehensible, irreversible period of history is thrust upon the artist and others of his generation, who have only experienced its aftermath. This focus has given rise to frequent comparisons to Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’, based on Paul Klee’s monoprint Angelus Novus (New Angel; 1920; Israel Museum, Jerusalem), whose gaze is eternally fixed towards the past:
Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.12
This is a much-romanticised image of the artist: one whose task is shaped by the inaccessibility and obscurity of the past, as he ventures forth on a solitary and doomed pursuit of redemption. For Kiefer, Benjamin’s angel doubles as Icarus. Consequently, catastrophes, belatedness and melancholy haunt Kiefer’s œuvre, where history is figured only as an allegory, with no true object of referent but its perpetual displacements.
When the artist moved to the abandoned site at Barjac in 1992, he arrived in a quaint, medieval village in the French Cévennes mountains already steeped in history. Working from the partial nineteenth-century ruins surrounded by wilderness, Kiefer constructed a lake, roads and buildings, and dug tunnels connecting them. Most of his work at La Ribaute involved removing and carving out land to create negative spaces, which could be described as a kind of anti-architecture or a form of construction by deconstruction.13 It is as though excavating the ground helps him know, intimately, its identity and histories. Subterranean or above-ground structures – such as greenhouses, a library, an amphitheatre, cavernous passageways and underground chambers – that were initially built to house his paintings have become environmental works of art themselves, while monumental projects, such as the precarious towers of Die Himmelspaläste (The Heavenly Palaces; 2003–18), assume the quality of architectural environments, reframing the natural landscape in turn.
‘I cannot see meaning in the world. To survive, I create meaning, and this is my art’, Kiefer once said of his practice.14 Indeed, the construction project was a process of meaning-making that generated an image of the past to better situate the present. Here, all that one encounters are absences and traces of ‘what-has-been’. For the artist, negative and liminal areas – caves, tunnels, bridges – are spaces for forgetting rather than remembering: ‘I wanted to forget the buildings, to cancel them out, so that all that remained were lines on the surface in the form of footbridges and tunnels’.15 Visitors to La Ribaute are confronted with a heightened sense of duration, while the lack of linear narratives of any kind makes the spatial–temporal position of viewing highly uncertain, which (without the tour guides) creates the experience of being lost. Yet these negative spaces are also fertile ground for new memories: they incarnate the dialectical tension between nostalgia and longing that Huyssen sees as characterising contemporary utopian thought.16 These absences will house and shape the future because they are ‘required to be filled’.17 The paradoxical sense of belatedness and anticipation pushes the present further towards an at once vanishing and ever elapsing slip of time.
Therefore, if La Ribaute is a ‘site of memory’, as the art historian and curator Camille Morineau has claimed, it certainly does not offer any concrete objects of recollection.18 The site cannot be further from the collective, unifying public memorial parks often dedicated to a historical figure or event. Instead, installations around the property meditate on the precarious nature of memory and thematise remembrance – for example, the realistically cast lead books of various sizes, found either stacked on the floor or arranged on shelves, such as Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory; 2019–20). The central amphitheatre FIG. 3 – an accumulation of cast shipping containers – takes the shape of an inverted ziggurat, coming to serve as an apocalyptic metaphor for the modern narrative of progress. The internal chambers are accessible on all five levels and connected by tunnels, resembling a maze or the Châtelet métro in Paris.19 In one internal chamber, photographs from the artist’s archive are printed on long lead strips, which hang from the ceiling and pile up on the floor like rolls of film FIG. 4. These structures of inversion are hollow shells for irretrievable, potentially infinite memories. Their fundamentally shifting and plural forms evade the capture of chronicles, history books or public monuments – the ‘lieux de mémoires’ with foundations that, as Pierre Nora has pointed out, lie precisely in the loss and discontinuity in memory.20
Kiefer has compared La Ribaute to ‘laboratories’, ‘refineries’ and ‘mines’: sites that evoke processes of memory sedimentation, excavation and transmutation.21 Over the years he has accumulated a vast archive of photographs, texts, ephemera and past or unfinished works, which has continuously outgrown each studio space. Indeed, in Wim Wenders’s documentary Anselm (2023) Kiefer is seen riding a bicycle between the vast aisles of this archive, now relocated to his studio space at Croissy.22 La Ribaute was where the artist lived and worked, but also where he sourced and developed his materials – such as the sunflowers, wheat and willows that he planted and harvested – where the boundary between art and life dissolves.
Having evolved as part of the process of creating the ‘studio world’ of La Ribaute, Die Frauen der Antike and Femmes martyres defy the formal categories of sculpture or installation. Following Kiefer’s routine procedure, the busts were left outside, where they were exposed to the weathering of nature, or sometimes dipped in salt, producing surface discoloration and greenish hues.23 On top of the busts, Kiefer placed symbolic objects such as a Kabbalistic Tree of Life fashioned from slender steel wire and glass discs, casts of open books, broken ladders and unwound film rolls. The resulting figures lack the self-contained formality of sculptures: one’s experience of the works remains incomplete without being immersed in the surrounding nature and the other architectural structures on the site. In contrast to the controlled condition of museums, the works continue to develop as they interact with the mercurial forces of the seasons, remaining, as he regards most of his works, open-ended and ‘never finished’.24
Die Frauen der Antike and Femmes martyres offer an especially generative lens through which to explore the question of memory and forgetting, not least because of their privileged position in the topographical map of La Ribaute. Not only located at the centre of the site, they are also the only figurative sculptural works, positioned like guardian angels or sentinels. Moreover, if La Ribaute can be considered as a museum of the artist – a complex, total entity that houses his past works in a dense mise-en-abyme – then the two series assume symbolic meanings for his career and self-identity more broadly.
Significantly, in addition to the two sculptural series, several other works at La Ribaute also invoke the female figure and address women’s history. One of the first installations on the site was Les Femmes de la Révolution (Women of the Revolution) FIG. 5. Consisting of two rows of lead beds in a cavernous chamber, it was inspired by the historian Jules Michelet’s book of the same title, which Kiefer read avidly in the late 1970s.25 On each bed, a puddle of water in the ‘sagging’ mattress indexes a past presence, while handwriting on the wall names individual women fighters. Michelet’s book was the first to document women’s contributions to the French Revolution, although not without reinscribing women to their traditional roles as wives, mothers or daughters. Michelet viewed the feminine in terms of a singular, abstract ideal of ‘woman’, whose ‘enthusiastic love of ideas and the wish of being mothers’ would usher in a new faith in humanity.26 Kiefer’s reinterpretation distances itself from Michelet’s triumphant and celebratory tone; instead, the cast beds, in which even the textures of the sheets are visible, produce an overwhelming sense of absence and mourning. The replacement of figurative representation with the material traces of the fighters’ lives – in this case, water – further highlights the obscurity of women’s identities in history. Yet despite the expansive atmosphere produced by the work, the artist’s words fail to wholly escape an essentialising, exceptionalist rhetoric. Speaking of the installation at the Collège de France, Paris, he described the puddles of water as ‘a metaphor for the tremendous power that women draw from deep within themselves in contrast to the superficial bluster and bragging of men’.27
Elsewhere, Kiefer has left the diggers’ marks from the excavation process exposed on the earthen walls of the underground chambers. For the artist, this recalls Heinrich von Kleist’s play Die Hermannsschlacht (The Battle of Hermann; 1808), in which the Germanic princess Thusnelda lures the deceitful Roman legate Ventidius into a cave of bears that kill him.28 This theme of femmes fatales – powerful and mysterious women capable of seduction and violence – recurs in Kiefer’s artist’s books from the 1970s to 1980s housed in another building at La Ribaute. For example, Erotik im Osten oder: Transition from cool to warm (Eroticism in the Far East or: Transition from Cool to Warm) FIG. 6, two books of watercolour drawings made after his visit to the island of Magerøya in Norway, each feature expressive wintery landscapes followed by a section of abstracted nude female figures kneeling, lying or engaged in sexual positions.29
This idea was reprised in his watercolours and artist’s books from the 2010s, exhibited in 2017 at Gagosian, New York.30 A series of drawings from 2014, titled Les extases féminines (Feminine Ecstasies) FIG. 7, for example, reference the book on female religious ecstasies by the historian and philosopher Jean-Nöel Vuarnet. Individual drawings of nude female bodies, flowers and landscapes are joined together into a larger tableau on which the artist wrote names of female saints. The flower imagery was probably inspired by Vuarnet’s comparison of ecstatic female bodies to blooming flowers and his description of gardens as the frequent setting of ecstasies.31 The relatively undefined features and outlines of Kiefer’s figures is intentional. In an interview published in the Gagosian exhibition catalogue, he discussed his predilection for watercolours because the medium affords him greater spontaneity. For him, drawing with watercolours is akin to collaborating with nature, as he is unable to fully control the watery pigment.32 Kiefer, who is left-handed, executed these drawings with his right hand, further favouring expression over representation, and perhaps also evoking the torrential depths of ecstatic experiences described by Vuarnet, or even menstrual blood. As Kiefer noted, ‘Michelet was fascinated by the menstrual cycle, and he described the queens of France in all colors: this queen had some stonelike blood, the other one is fresh blood, the other one is red blood, violet blood’.33 At the same time, however, the technique also heightens the eroticism of these drawings, which represent women as irrational and sexually available: ‘Women as receptacles for God […] They are yielding, giving in’.34 For Kiefer, women’s susceptibility to ecstatic experiences gives them spiritual superiority over men: ‘If you have intercourse with God, then you are twice in another world: you are out of yourself, but you are with God’.35
When Morineau claims in her article on La Ribaute that the site ‘celebrates the triumph of the feminine’, it therefore becomes necessary to ask: what kind of femininity is being celebrated?36 Or, is ‘celebration’ an accurate description of the complex role that the feminine figure plays on the site and in Kiefer’s œuvre? With the exception of the watercolour series – which have been described as an ‘affirmative’ turn in the artist’s late career – the feminine figure is invoked by her absence, a silent but foreboding cry from a post-apocalyptic future contending with the patriarchal past and present.37 Related most closely to Les Femmes de la Révolution and the painting Les Reines de France (The Queens of France) FIG. 8 – two works that marked the beginning of Kiefer’s exploration of women’s history as well as the history of his newly adopted home in France – Die Frauen der Antike and Femmes martyres similarly draw on historical accounts.38 However, the range of references here is more universal. After all, Antiquity predates the concept of nation states. The poet Sappho stands on a par with Thusnelda, while ancient legends, such as the Roman empress Agrippina and the wealthy Greek courtesan Phyrne, are represented alongside the Virgin Mary. The artist situates Mary within the ancient world, viewing her as a syncretic figure shaped by earlier pre-Christian deities, such as Iris, the Greek goddess of the rainbow who symbolises divine guidance in ancient Greek religion, and Astarte, a goddess of fertility and love worshipped in the ancient Levant.
Compared to the earlier two works, Die Frauen der Antike is the most structurally complex project that Kiefer has dedicated to historical women and demonstrates a more critical engagement with feminist ideas. Due to the scarcity and divergence of the records, the ancient women Kiefer meticulously catalogued in his notebooks are known today more as mythical, abstract representations of concepts rather than concrete historical figures. Speaking in 2005 on the occasion of an exhibition of Die Frauen der Antike at the Villa Medici, Rome, Kiefer explained:
The women do not have a head because the history of women from the last three millennia – since there was a matriarchy – was only made known through men [...] the real rulers of the world throughout the ages were women [...] but poetesses such as Sappho or lesser-known ones like Telesilla, for example, we are aware of only through the citations of male poets who are better known.39
Emphasising anonymity and collectivity, the decapitated and hollow bodies represent the lack of female agency, as though mourning for potentially erased and unknowable lives. To hint at the ambiguity of history, Kiefer opted for a more allusive relationship between the sculptures and their referents: not all of the figures in the two series have been assigned an identity. In the greenhouse installation, too, clusters of names on the glass panes FIG. 9 housing the loose arrangement of figures deny a direct, one-to-one correspondence. Like his casts of open books or the unwound film rolls, these figures are vessels for lost and speculative memories, belonging neither to the past nor the future but exemplifying their dialectical enactment. They are memories without recollections.
The sirens of history
The role of women in Kiefer’s practice has been the subject of several scholarly studies, although most focus on Lilith FIG. 10, Brünhild, Shulamite and Margarete, through which the artist has contended with the unrepresentable weight of Germany’s recent history.40 Lilith was the first wife of Adam, who was expelled from Eden for her refusal to be subservient to her husband; Brünhild, the loyal lover and righteous daughter from Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung; 1857), later mythologised as an Aryan ideal; Shulamite, the muse and bride of King Solomon; and Margarete (Gretchen) from Goethe’s Faust (1808), emblematic figures of Jewish and Germanic cultures, respectively, whom Paul Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’ (‘Deathfugue’) summons to confront the reality of Nazi genocide. These charged figures recur in the artist’s heavily worked canvases of the 1970s and 1980s as disembodied presences entwined in a dense network of intertextual references. Such works often feature strands of straw or black hair and sunflowers or dresses superimposed upon a ravaged apocalyptic landscape. Whether through text or material overlay, these women dominate Kiefer’s canvases, as though they existed above, before and despite history.
As Huyssen has argued, Kiefer’s works exploring how these mythical female figures speak to Germany’s recent history reflect upon ‘the ultimate inseparability of myth and history’. In Kiefer’s art, the mythical female figure takes centre stage; she is powerful because she is capable of mobilising collective imagination, sentiments and beliefs. As Dominique Baqué has noted, with the exception of Paul Celan and Jean Genet, almost all other references in Kiefer’s art are to women. When asked about his fascination with the mythical female figure in an interview, Kiefer responded: ‘I am not [a woman], so you are interested in what you are not, not what you are’.41 He cites Henri Matisse as a predecessor who rarely painted male figures: ‘We men are jealous of women […] because they are much more connected with nature, with real things’.42 Therefore, in this binary framework of gender, women are not only spiritually superior but also have a closer relationship to truth. The association between women and truth – especially historical truth – is not without precedent in European literary and philosophical tradition. The archetype of the female figure of history can be found in Homer’s Odyssey. The Sirens, who are distinctively gendered female, know the truth of Odysseus and his comrades’ past:
The Sirens failed not to note the swift ship as it drew near, and they raised their clear-toned song: ‘Come hither, as thou farest, renowned Odysseus, great glory of the Achaeans; stay thy ship that thou mayest listen to the voice of us two. For never yet has any man rowed past this isle in his black ship until he has heard the sweet voice from our lips. Nay, he has joy of it, and goes his way a wiser man. For we know all the toils that in wide Troy the Argives and Trojans endured through the will of the gods, and we know all things that come to pass upon the fruitful earth.43
In Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s interpretation of this passage, Homer further positions the Sirens as antagonists to instrumental reason: their allure is ‘that of losing oneself in the past […] the temptation of the irrecoverable’.44 Their songs threaten the legitimacy of established bourgeois ideas of history, which, for Adorno, only instrumentalises the past for the present’s regime of linear progress. In both the original text and Adorno’s reading, that the Sirens are gendered female is crucial because it separates them from the existing patriarchal order and gives them the ability to sabotage it. In this myth, as in Kiefer’s art, women are assumed to have a more organic relationship to time and memory, and thereby to truth. Their half-human, half-bird form signals a temporal rhythm that is closer to natural cycles and counters the patriarchal time of project. This positioning of women in a static and past timeframe is reinforced in the character of Penelope, who engages in the repetitive chore of weaving as she waits for Odysseus’s return.
In this binary construct, the Sirens represent a counterpart to Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’. Homer never described their appearance, as their power lies not in visual stimulation but rather the unrepresentable, mesmerising force of their songs. Kiefer echoed Homer’s lack of visualisation in favour of invocation, citation and the index approximating this mode of memory representation. Whether it is in his paintings titled after mythical women or Die Frauen der Antike and Les Femmes de la Révolution, he adopted what Craig Owens has termed an ‘allegorical’ approach, whereby images and texts supplement one another within and across a sequence of works.45 Allegories, Owens suggested, deny the indissoluble unity between form and substance, signifier and signified that characterises the symbol; they imply a self-conscious reflexivity and distance from their historical object.
Working with ideas widely regarded as problematic, Kiefer routinely treads a fine line between complicity, affirmation and critical appropriation. On the one hand, he consciously reflects on the tension between history and fiction, which shaped his selection of the eighty-six women:
now all the ones who seem interesting are written down. who is interesting? probably those for whom you have a painting in mind. not only. which others as well? Those who stand out for their cruelty, for being particularly monstrous, not because of monstrosity per se, but because a particular quantity or a particular brand of cruelty creates legends, sticks them in the memory like a flood or an earthquake.46
something egregious must happen, something people will recount for a long time, and by force of repetition it solidifies into a myth that is carried through time without losing anything.47
Indeed, the artist is limited by what sources are available to him. In search of the names of notable ancient women, he referred to a book on the history of sex work and another on medieval anatomical discourse concerning the female body and sexuality.48 His list of eighty-six entries summarises each woman’s biography in brief sentences. They record murder (Arsinoë, Horatia), torture (Epicharis, Leaena), rape (Chiomara), suicide (Arria, Julia Domna, Pompeia Paulina), uprising (Boudica) and achievement (Hypatia, Phryne, Praxilla, Zenobia) – all stories of cruelty, suffering and bravery.49 These notes are the artist’s means to condense – or, to use Kiefer’s words, ‘solidify’ – historical accounts into memorable images for the artist. However, rather than translating these into naturalistic visual forms, the final works of art constitute a powerful anti-monument that provokes questions about the nature and role of memory, and the import of the past on the future.
On the other hand, while conscious of the pitfalls of mythologisation, Kiefer is also drawn to the affective and mnemonic power of mythical images, capable of shaking one’s perception or recollection of the past. In an interview related to his major solo exhibition at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Kiefer stated that ‘there is no such thing as “escaping into myth”. Because the myth is present. Myths represent another way of understanding history’.50 Like stories and images, myths anchor memory, and myth-making is a tactic Kiefer repeatedly employed to drill history into the public consciousness. An example of this is Heroische Sinnbilde (Heroic Symbols; 1969), the photographic documentation of Besetzungen (Occupations; 1969), a series of actions that included Kiefer performing a Nazi salute.
As the previous section has discussed, particular images of femininity recur in Kiefer’s œuvre at La Ribaute and elsewhere. Lilith, Shulamite, Brünhild and Margarete are all known for their beauty and sexual allure, which is regarded as the only source of their agency, yet it is so powerful that they alter the course of patriarchal history. In his heavily worked canvases, Kiefer reiterated these mythical archetypes through allegory, thereby exposing their allusive nature and liberating them from their historical associations. It is precisely Kiefer’s capacity to hold up contradictions and ambiguity that lends his art a powerful, if not also mythic, status.
In Die Frauen der Antike, Kiefer simultaneously exposed the dialectic of myth and history and constructed memory images himself. Much like his acts of cross-dressing in Besetzungen and Für Jean Genet (1969), he attempted to identify with feminine temporality – the object of his desire and fascination – as figured by the Sirens, who summon the past in its primal intensity and radical non-linearity. The women’s hollow bodies, cast in plaster from nineteenth-century bridal gowns, served as a blank canvas, a receptacle for these memory images:
why are these wedding dresses so suitable for carrying all these stories, objects, points of view, perspectives? they’re white, they’re all alike, they have nothing behind them (as is appropriate for a bride). they’re vessels for almost everything.51
At once sacred and mundane, bridal gowns are an effective material support because they symbolise a time of transition, connecting past and future. While the white, corseted bodies carry the male artist’s projection of female purity, virginity and fecundity, their surface-weathering and appendages transgress these patriarchal ideas.
In the glasshouse installation, the stack of bricks atop a figure’s décolletage alludes to Phryne, ‘a kind of rubble woman’ who paid to rebuild the walls of Thebes after they were destroyed by Alexander the Great.52 Shards of broken glass, an overt reference to Kristallnacht, are inserted into the body of the figure whose torso holds up the Tree of Life, symbolising the prevalence of divine (feminine) presence in devastation. Kiefer also wrapped figures in razor wires to evoke Mary walking through a wood of thorns or Madonna of the Rose Bower.53 However, apart from these moments of specificity, most of the sculptural attachments lack a singular, fixed referent. Several figures are wrapped in cable wires and empty film rolls; another has two packs of chopped wood attached to her sides; two others are dwarfed by a tall pile of tree branches or giant cast poppies reaching towards the sky. Indeed, these objects relate as much to the stories associated with the women of Antiquity as to Kiefer’s past work. For example, polyhedrons, which here allude to the Greek philosophers Hypatia and Arete, also feature in the paintings and sculptures titled after Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514), where it symbolises artistic creation.54 The cast poppies and sunflowers are also common elements in Kiefer’s work, sourced from the fields of La Ribaute. The cyclical network of intertextual motifs suggests a process of memory sedimentation and transformation, and thereby the role of these works in the artist’s own recollection and myth-making.
The multiplicity of references and the melding of industrial and natural materials collapse disparate temporalities. The seemingly fragmentary and incomplete images that the work conjures challenge linear, causal ideas of history. Different moments in time are immanent in the installation and kept in dynamic relation with each other, morphing and emerging under the sun. Kiefer consciously reflected on the repetition and mutation of mythical content, noting, for example, that Hypatia is also the name of a 1983 feminist journal, and drawing attention to a period when cultural feminists turned to historical women in their imagination of a matriarchal past and a post-patriarchal future.55 The stacks of bricks, while referring to the rebuilding financed by Phryne, also bring to mind the Trümmerfrau – German women who cleared away ruins in the aftermath of the Second World War, to whom he alluded in his 2009 performance at the Place de la Bastille, Paris, which featured several of these sculptures.56
The ashen surface of the sculptures is at once the material and cumulative index of time passed and a herald of a new beginning. In 1999 Kiefer created a series of painted photographs of the sculptures.57 The photographs consist of behind-the-scenes shots from Kiefer’s studio during the extended making process of Die Frauen der Antike. The studio ground is covered with sand, plaster stains and dust; plaster-soaked dresses are hung on clothes racks FIG. 11 or laid flat on the floor to dry, leaving imprints that barely trace their outlines FIG. 12. The close-up photographs of his floor create painterly tableaux, replete with flattened clothing, empty hangers, worn shoes, razor wire and plaster drips on the floor FIG. 13. In one image, the shadow of the artist is superimposed on a dress FIG. 14. Kiefer assigned some plaster dresses a name by writing it at the top of the photographs, much like the names written on the glass panes of the greenhouse installation or in his paintings. Matthew Rampley has written about Kiefer’s appeal to the immediate, authentic fullness to the single word in the Romantic tradition.58 These names, ‘Theoris’, ‘Cornelia’ and ‘Olympia’, hovering above the disembodied, distorted fabrics, evoke voices from the past, a form of unmediated presence.
The photographs derived from Die Frauen der Antike paint a scene of destruction and aftermath, but also one of a possible awakening. In the European sculptural tradition, plaster is an intermediary material and necessarily incomplete, considering its anticipatory relationship to a ‘final’ work in bronze or marble. Kiefer might have had in mind the collection in Paris of plaster casts by Auguste Rodin, an artist he admired and for whom plaster was key. These headless female plaster figures are therefore inherently liminal, without a fixed position in space and time. The sand covering the floor and the plaster dresses in these photographs were intended to accentuate the folds and heighten the sense of constant change.59
The primacy of the written word and Kiefer’s rare turn to figurative representation in the gowns afford the figures a voice: ‘when you get close enough to them, you’re surprised that they’re not breathing’, Kiefer has noted.60 Although the women are emphatically headless and silent, sonic and temporal materialities predominate: they contain the desire to speak, the realistic cast of the folds in their gowns almost evoke movement and life.61 These sculptures are activated in the opening sequence of Anselm, in which a tracking shot of the female figures at La Ribaute is accompanied by overlapping female whispers chanting – in manifold languages – a hypnotising refrain: ‘We may be the nameless, but we don’t forget a thing’.
Indeed, in Die Frauen der Antike the past comes back not as discrete images but a concatenation of voices. Their aural presence allegorise Homer’s Sirens, a critical riposte to the image of the femme fatale elsewhere in Kiefer’s work. Importantly, Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’ is gendered male; he is given a task that is greater than himself. In Benjamin, Klee’s angel gazes on from a distance while the ruins grow ‘skywards’. Standing as the guardians of La Ribaute, the army of female sculptures propose an identification with an alternative figure of history, the Sirens. Driven by a fear of self-dissolution, Odysseus and his crew struggled to neutralise their power. Tied to the mast but listening to their song, Odysseus cannot act on his desire; whereas his crew, with their ears blocked, simply do not hear them. The Siren song is therefore turned into a ‘mere object’, its power contained, much in the same way that the ideology of progress instrumentalises the past to serve its own present, inserting it into its own linear timeframe.62 Here, Kiefer’s refusal to fully resolve the women’s identity, opting instead for indexical materials and names, prioritises a non-linear temporality, where the past is instantiated and becomes entwined in a potentiating present of viewing.
Conclusion
Engaging with the larger environment and topography of La Ribaute, Die Frauen der Antike and Femmes martyres challenge the drive towards permanence and fixity that characterises the monumental tradition of idealised, often sexualised, female figures. Kiefer achieved this by first invoking this tradition, then brutalising its image and foregrounding its inevitable decay. Through allegorical and alchemical procedures, past and future are entwined in the figures to form potent memory images that provoke questions as to how and why we remember. The works’ fragmentary and unstable materiality and open-ended references embody the dialectics of memory and forgetting, preservation and destruction, past and present, myth and reality, history and fiction. Standing like guardian angels of the site and of lost and unknowable memories, these Siren-like figures signal a potential post-patriarchal future.
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