The Art History and Ideas lecture series that Villa Arson – a national higher school of art – is launching this year is designed to support the teaching provided there.
This evening at 7 PM the second lecture: the reenactment of German history by Eric Michaud.
“Kiefer likes to repeat, ‘My biography is Germany’s biography.’ By deliberately identifying his own story with that of his ‘country,’ the artist seems to have acquired all the rights to a national collective memory that remains sensitive, seventy-five years after the end of the National Socialist crimes.
However, since the provocative reenactments of the Nazi salute in his early 1969 photos, criticisms of Kiefer’s works that hint, directly or indirectly, at the history of Nazi Germany unfold in three very distinct ways. These criticisms either purely and simply praise these works, claim their strongest condemnation, or laud their ‘ambiguity’ or ‘ambivalence.’
By questioning the relationship to history that every reenactment establishes, the lecture will examine the significance of each of these critical positions.
