Peter Teal
In Conversation With Anselm Kiefer
I’m on the tarmac at Schiphol and I turn my phone on to check my emails. There’s one with a high-resolution attachment which is an aerial photograph of what looks like a village that has been bombed or maybe a storm has torn through it. I find this concerning but also compelling. I text it to my friend Hasan who replies straight away with Jesus then a few seconds later says That is really upsetting. Yeah, I write back, for real. I block the email address. This is one of several images I have received in the past few weeks depicting large-scale catastrophes. I assume they are from my ex or maybe Kiefer’s people are doing a kind of conceptual long-play with me. Why are you awake so late, I say to Hasan and he replies Anxious. Cool, I say, then wait for an Uber.
I’m sitting at a table at a spot called Glouglou that I used to come to. The tone is animal pelts, lots of ink, guys who order everybody’s drink. It actually isn’t that cool anymore, I’m thinking to myself, but Anselm Kiefer’s assistant’s assistant agreed we would meet here and it’s too late now to change location. I’m kind of nervous so I light a cigarette and then a woman next to me asks if she can borrow one. It isn’t a problem so I say, “Of course,” then realise it is Austrian Sarah. Austrian Sarah sometimes sells my friend Tom Valium when Taiwanese Sarah isn’t around, so she and I know each other, though not that well. Austrian Sarah and I get to chatting. She asks me why I haven’t been around lately and I tell her I’ve been living in Oslo, which is a lie. She tells me she has family there then shows me a photo on her phone of what looks like a government building completely reduced to rubble. “Damn,” I say. “Yeah,” she says, “fucked.” I get a call from Anselm Kiefer’s assistant’s assistant who sounds different this time. She says Anselm Kiefer is about ten late, and then apologises to an extent that makes me uncomfortable. I tell her it’s no problem, which it isn’t. “It’s no problem,” I say, and I think she genuinely believes me.
I remember Austrian Sarah is in grad school and I ask her what she’s working on. She tells me that the poetry of Montale and other writers associated with the group called the Ermetici was a reaction to the style of the Italian regime at that time, and that these poets were allowed to develop their literary protest from within what was seen as an ivory tower. The mood of the Ermetici poets was exactly the reverse of the fascist cult of optimism and heroism. The regime tolerated their blatant though socially imperceptible dissent because the Fascists simply did not pay attention to such arcane language. All this does not mean that Italian fascism was tolerant, she says, and she’s really concerned about this point. Gramsci was put in prison until his death; the opposition leaders Giacomo Matteotti and the brothers Rosselli were assassinated; the free press was abolished; the labor unions were dismantled; and political dissenters were confined on remote islands. Legislative power became a fiction and executive power (which controlled the judiciary as well as the mass media) issued new laws, among them laws calling for the preservation of the race. I remember it was maybe Taiwanese Sarah who was in grad school and ask Sarah about the photos I’ve been getting. She starts talking about the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project in Guyana, but I only vaguely know what she’s talking about. I nod along and I think she understands.
Anselm Kiefer arrives on a little bicycle but I can immediately tell it’s not him. At least I really get the feeling it isn’t him, even though he introduces himself as Anselm Kiefer. He starts saying the place is cool and talking about how he used to live in Haarlem, but I’m not listening because the whole time I’m realising that I don’t know exactly what Anselm Kiefer looks like. I have a vague image, but I’m not that certain. I think about trying to search it up on my phone but figure that it’s kind of rude and anyway he is already talking about how he doesn’t have much time for the interview. I tell him I’m not going to record our conversation which I thought he would like but he seems not to hear me or not to care and then lights one of my cigarettes and motions with his hand as if to say, “Let’s get going.”
I ask him about whether he was able to oversee the installation of the piece in the museum and he tells me he doesn’t remember, which is weird because I’m pretty sure it went up like last week. I ask him whether he feels his work has an established continuity with Flemish painting and he says, “It doesn’t matter,” then says, “Ask me something that matters.” I ask him why he so frequently includes quotations from the poet Ingeborg Bachmann in his work and he half sighs and coughs at the same time, then scans the other tables as if he might find someone he knows. Fuck it, I think, and get my phone out to find an image of him. I look at my lock screen and there’s like three messages from different unknown numbers, all with sites of absolute destruction: a temple after a flash flood, a burned-down housing estate, and what I’m pretty sure is a mass grave. There’s also a text from my new friend Nick asking how the interview is going. I delete them all and search Anselm Kiefer. Yep, definitely not him. I tell Anselm Kiefer he is not Anselm Kiefer and he seems engaged for the first time in the whole interview, takes a long drag of my cigarette and says, “Now that is interesting.” He asks me if I’ve ever even considered how unnatural it is to observe one’s own face. I’m stuck on the thing about him not being him and ask him when his birthday is. He tells me some date in 1945 and I realise I don’t know when Anselm Kiefer’s birthday is. I ask him if he has been texting me photos of bomb-sites and dead people and he says he doesn’t think so but he would have to check. A long line of ash from his cigarette drops onto his coaster and starts to smoulder a little bit and he quickly pours some of his wine on it. I ask him why he did that and he says, “Because I am afraid of dying in a fire,” then laughs a lot like that is a hilarious thing to say. Then he says, “Like Ingeborg Bachmann.” “Ingeborg Bachmann didn’t die in a fire,” I tell him, and he looks very serious at this. “No,” he says, “she didn’t.”Julieta Caldas
Angel Noise
If Not
Jane Dabate
Seasonal Dresses
Ulyses Razo
Spring
Personal Life
Zans Brady Kohn
We Ran Away
T.C. Hell
Houses have creaked a long time
Colton Karpman (Founding Editor)
Editor’s Note
Dilara Koz (Art Director)
Em Bauer (Illustrator)
Harry Lowther (Prose Editor)
Isaac Zamet (Poetry Editor)
William McGuire (Prose Editor)