Art Myth and Revolt: Cy Term Paper

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Such works bring to mind Freud's theory of genital anxiety, which is present in both men and women. At the same time - and this is where Bourgeois's revolt against myth occurs - what would otherwise be seen as a fetish object for men is deployed here as a weapon instead. Thus, by subverting the feminine into a weapon, Bourgeois is simultaneously responding to the psychic myths of Western civilization and transgressing them in an effort to posit a new model of the real.

Throughout the course of his career, Anselm Kiefer has attempted to unite myth and history through an immense terrain of entangled cultural references and pictorial techniques. In doing so, Kiefer has effectively attempted to bear the weight of our collective historical tragedies and redemptive hopes that many artists in the last forty years have attempted to convey. Few of them, however, do it so effectively as Kiefer.

This exhibition will feature an overview of Kiefer's primary thematic concerns, which include Egyptian myths, alchemy, the Cabala, the Holocaust, Exodus, the Napoleonic occupation of Germany, the National Socialist architecture of Albert Speer, as well as fascist uses of German Romantic images.

Like both Bourgeois and Twombly, Kiefer has worked extensively in sculpture. Jericho is typical of the artist's monumental approach to the medium. It comprises two large concrete towers, both of which seem to be on the verge of collapsing. The piece has been interpreted as a Modernist re-working of the Tower of Pisa. Viewers are able to step into the tower and look up through the holes that have been cut on top.

Kiefer continues his Biblical excavation in such works as the installation Palmsonntag (Palm Sunday), a work that consists of a giant palm tree surrounded by a series of eighteen paintings, each of which have been layered with leaves from the tree. In Kiefer's painting practice, the artist has continuously sought to integrate natural materials with traditional artistic mediums in an effort to shatter the artificial division between nature and culture, and thus unite his works with a mythical conception of the universe.

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Kiefer's work harmonizes with the concerns of Bourgeois, in its exploration of the psychic detritus of Germany's Nazi past and its post-war evolution to its present day status as the center of a "New Europe." In a similar way, the mythic concerns of Twombly make him the most European of American painters. For each of these artists, it is important to note that the displacement one feels in their work connects to a literal feeling of displacement in their biographies. Twombly is an American who has spent most of his life in Rome; Kiefer has lived in relative isolation, away from his native Germany, in the French countryside for a number of years; while Bourgeois left her native France at a young age and has lived in New York ever since. It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that this stunning triad of outsiders would concern themselves with myths that are seen to be universal, rather than local. In the process, each has developed a singular vision that is completely unique in the history of art. In Myth and Revolt, the works of Twombly, Bourgeois, and Kiefer are permitted to stand side by side, hence giving the viewer a new insight into these mythic concerns through three singular….....

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