piece of art exploration

I'll examine Anselm Kiefer's artwork for this assignment. His paintings and sculptures combine art and history, and he is a German painter and sculptor who was born in March 1945. The poem "death fugue" by Paul Celan, a German poet who survived being imprisoned in a Nazi camp but subsequently committed suicide, served as inspiration for his work "Your, Golden Hair, Margarete." The poet uses two female characters—a Jewish-German Shulamite and a German-Aryan named Margarete—to tell a story about the Holocaust in which their fates appear to be interwoven. Just like in Celan’s poem, Kiefer developed a series of visualized tropes that would characterize Margarete and Shulamite whose destinies and cultures were linked. Shulamite’shair, is normally painted in black and Margarete’s is shown in a straw that is embedded in the paint. They are mirror images of each other to represent their link and relationship. The straw added to a Shulamite’s painting represents the golden curls of Margarete, and the black lines of paint in Margarete shows the insignificant presence of Shulamite. For the artist, he implies that after the Holocaust, which was genocide during the Second World War, his home country Germany, had wounded itself.

After he had exploited the metaphoric resonance of lead and sand, the artist resorted to the use of straw. The ability of the straw to burn and turn into ash, according to the artist represented a wounded landscape caused by war and fire and represented a significant transformation. The indication of Margarete by straw was a symbol of the German love for the land, the noble German soul, and racial purity. The image of Margarete displays the German womanhood and shows that they are preserved moral values, which can be redeemed and saved at the same time. The straw also is a symbol that represents emotions that were caused by the idea of land in the German history.

In the painting, the name Margarete has been scribbled in black, partly a prayer and partly a memorial. The tendrils of the straw are curling upwards resembling the smoke from death camp chimneys. The dark paint amidst straws represents a defect or deformity in German’s soul that will not be erased in ages.

In most cases, we view artwork physically without getting to understand the deeper meaning intended or misinterpreting it. Displaying the images through Google Art Project has improved significantly the view of the work I have chosen and many others. This is because of the descriptions that come with each piece of art including the artist's inspiration, and the factors that led to its creation.

The understanding of art requires some education and experience in a specific context. Various audiences react differently to a variety of pieces of work thus, changing the meaning of my artwork say to an audience used to works related to a different a fashion context will affect their understanding. The audience will want to relate my artwork to what they are already used to rather than getting to comprehend the meaning of the one in sight. They may fail to interpret the meaning of such a piece of work unless it is explained to them. For, example, the image that I chose is based on the history of German people during the Holocaust, presenting it to an audience who relate in the fashion/textile art, might think that it represents a sense of dressing and by the fashion the German women at the time. Therefore, I think it changing the context of an artwork requires several explanations or else it wrong interpretations and understanding might occur.