NOTES FOR DRAFT
-SELECTED WORKS-
Artnet.com
http://www.artnet.com/magazine_pre2000/features/schjeldahl/schjeldahl2-12-98.asp
Schjeldahl, Peter. “Lost in the Terrain: Anselm Kiefer.” Artnet.com, Artnet Worldwide Corporation, www.artnet.com/magazine_pre2000/features/schjeldahl/schjeldahl2-12-98.asp.
Over the years Kiefer has made many usual works, but one work stands out among the rest as particularly bizarre—that work being his 20 Years of Solitude piece. Taking over 20 years to create (1971-1991), 20 Years of Solitude is a ceiling-high stack of hundreds of white-painted ledgers and handmade books, strewn with dirt and dried vegetation, whose pages are stained with the artist’s semen. The word solitude in the title references the artists frequent masturbation onto paper during the 20 years it took to create. He asked American art critic Peter Schjeldahl to write a text for a catalog of the masturbation books. Schjeldahl attempted to oblige but ultimately failed in his endeavor. No other critic would take on the task, so the work has largely faded into obscurity.
He would shock the art world yet again at a dinner party in May of 1993. Kiefer and his second wife, Renate Graf, decorated a candlelit commercial loft in New York with white muslin, carpeted the floor with white sand, and staffed it with waiters dressed as mimes with white-face. A handful of art world elite, such as the likes of Sherrie Levine, were served several courses of arcane organ meats, such as pancreas, that were mostly white in color. Not surprisingly, the guests did not find the meal to be particularly appetizing