Wim Wenders on the 3D Artistry of Anselhm Kiefer -His new documentary

Anselm 3D

Anselm Kiefer was born in a bomb
shelter two weeks before the end
of WWII. Immediately, his mother

pressed plugs of softened wax
into her son’s newborn ears
to shield him from the enemy.

Above ground the broken
voices of another
unwinnable war.

At 78, an arc-welding wizard
unmasked against the fierce
toxicity of memory, Anselm

treads a tightrope between
burning straw and molten
lead. Paint pot, brush

or flaming torch in hand,
he cycles the twin hallways
of density and weightlessness.

His studio’s vast, a contained
yet infinite space, itself
a portrait of this man

in whom life’s disjunctions
(even when he does not speak)
are in perpetual conversation.

Trapped in the copper
lining of his eye, the reflection
of a winged palette, feathers

a-tremble, emblem of service
held up to the sky. A smear
of colour threatens, disappears

down the jagged path
into a forest of birches
where stiffened white

ballgowns stand stock-still
and silent among the trees.
Glass shards arrested

in fabric folds prevent
them/prevent us/prevent
Anselm from taking off

across the unscarred landscape
back to the bomb shelter
in Donaueschingen,

his mother’s lullaby above
the falling bombs a constant
that never leaves him.

Claire Beynon | Ōtepoti Dunedin

Anselm Kiefer | Das einzige Licht (2006) 

Claire Beynon is an artist and writer living in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Her poetry, flash fiction and short stories have been widely pub-lished and anthologised in Aotearoa and abroad. She has been a runner-up in the Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition and in 2002 was the winner of the NZ Poetry Society’s International Poetry award. In 2021 her poem ‘Today’s Sky’ was awarded the Takahē Monica Taylor Poetry Prize.  Claire combines the contemplative rhythms of writing and art-making with a range of interdisciplinary collaborations. Two summer research seasons in Antarctica continue to inform her work. Her most recent collection is For when words fail us: a small book of changes, The Cuba Press, 2024. Website