Engel der Geschichte by Anselm Kiefer

　Walter Benjamin thought of the angel of history as the witness of history’s catastrophe. 

His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward 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. This storm is what we call progress.

(Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1969: 249.)

What gave Benjamin the image of the angel was Paul Klee’s painting titled Angelus Novus. Benjamin was attached to the painting, never abandoned even while living in exile, until his unfortunate death. 

How can we image the angel of history in the contemporary context? In the spring 2018, Engel der Geschichte (angel of history) by Anselm Kiefer was exhibited at Thaddeus Ropac Gallery in Paris. The huge painting covers you because of its scale (267 x 650). It seems lead is dropped on the oil painting and peeled off from both sides. It says the work was produced from 2005 to 2017, which could mean that the artist dropped lead in 2017 on the work painted in 2005. Thick oil colors are attached to lead and glittering. Hollowed black surface on the canvas is also glittering due to the gold powders and gold leaves. It looks like wings spread. 

Like Kiefer’s recent works, it is something euphoric. The euphoria filled Kiefer’s work may be due to the potentiality. Every art work is filled with potentiality, that is, it could always have been something different. For Kiefer’s Engel der Geschichte, dropping lead on the painted picture and peeling it off with leap of time made us discover the extraordinary image. 

If you look at the debris of what is called history piled by the wind called progress, you would find not only the actual events but also the past potentialities. For Benjamin, nothing but the potentiality implies the way to the redemption. Kiefer’s Engel der Geschichte presents the potential power and euphoria caused by it, in a very fortunate way.