KEIFER (1945-)

Born into a blitzed Fatherland,

He grows with a restless intellect full

Of Goethe, Wagner and Nietzsche,

Agitating at the edges of national amnesia,

Sieg heiling Hitler and the Holocaust

Out of the bunker and back into the landscape;

Reclaiming and reminding Germany to remember.

‘We don’t why we are here and we don’t know

Where we go’ becomes his mantra;

The cosmic cycle of construction and destruction

His method and obsession, his mania.

His colours are black, brown and grey,

With a flash of silver and gold, a splash of red;

His materials ash, concrete, paint, straw and lead.

His process is damp, rust and decay

With the petrified flowers sprouting

Through the wreckage of his work

Echoing Nature’s ongoing reclamation.

In France, he raises up ruins

Over some two hundred acres

Like some twisted Portmeirion;

A concentration of towers and tunnels

Barracks and ovens and batteries;

Strip-lit interiors with only occasional

Daylight leaking through cracks

Into corners and on to rubble.

Elsewhere, in another French studio

Housed in a massive warehouse,

The artist directs his artisans

With their power-tools and hydraulics

In the setting out of his installations

And their disassembling and reassembling;

Lifting the vast paintings on rollers

Aboard trucks and planes and ships

And into the galleries of the world.

And Keifer hacks away at the pictures,

Sometimes stacking them like the strata

Of his own personal geology,

Saving and cataloguing every last scrap

In his great library of debris and leftovers,

With his hoards of multifarious crap

In yards of industrial containers,

Waiting for him to work his alchemy.

Nothing ever finished –

Until it is sold and turned into gold.

(2015)

I'd never heard of Keifer until I saw a TV documentary which fascinated me sufficiently to jot down some notes at the time. It was, however, the best part of a year before the notes became the basis for this poem - another of the group about artists which all arrived within a few days in what had been an otherwise rather fallow year for poetry. 

The photo is of one of his stacks of  past canvases - alluded to in Verse 4 - which were installed as a work in themselves for an exhibition. Also evident are the 'petrified flowers' mentioned  at the end of Verse 2.