Seeing the Future in the Present: the Australian Fires and Anselm Kiefe

And still they burn. For more than a month now. They burn and consume everything in their path: trees, grasslands, homes, buildings, livelihoods. More than a billion animals, birds, fish and other lifeforms have been lost. And still the fires rage and burn. Even the rain cannot dampen their ardour. 


Nobody who has followed the news from Australia these last weeks, as the old decade ended and a new decade begun, can have failed to wonder: ‘Is this the shape of things to come?’ Are we seeing here a message from the future encoded in the present? We know the climate crisis is teetering on the edge of irreversible catastrophe. Whether through fire or flood, the continuity of life as we know it is threatened. In Australia the fires have created toxic air pollution – an immediate threat to human health. The whole scenario feels – here’s a useful word - proleptic: ‘the representation of something in the future as if it already existed’. 


The Nazi book-burnings in 1933 – of ‘subversive’ (often Jewish) literature – was proleptic: “Where they have burned books they will end up burning people” was Heinrich Heine’s (1797-1856) haunting, prophetic intuition. Heine’s German and Jewish sensibility, which allowed him to think into the present moment as if it were a passageway to the future, raises the question which any writer, artist, thinker, any sensate human being, might ask: can we know the future by being fully immersed in the present? 


The Biblical portrait of Moses at the burning bush – a bush that “burned without being consumed” (Exodus 3:2) – is a picture of someone seeing the future in the present: Moses intuits in that vision the indestructible nature of his oppressed tribe, the Hebrew people. But to see deeply he realised he first had to “turn aside and look” (3:3).  The challenge is always not to turn away, not to avoid looking. 


Those Australian fires, still burning, force us to look. And what we can see, and have been seeing over these last weeks, is not just a possible vision of apocalypse, the destination of the decade ahead. But a vision of a split in the human response to such events. At one and the same time, as people were dying in the fires, and hundreds were fleeing to and camping on the beaches, and the country was mobilising their rescue - at the very same time, as New Year’s eve approached, the Sydney authorities, a bare few miles from these events, was refusing to listen to a 300,000-strong petition to cancel the traditional firework festivities, broadcast around the world. The show had to go on. Entertainment, spectacle – commercial interests too no doubt – were judged to be more important than respecting and adjusting to the unfolding tragedy. So people partied while others – just up the road - lives in peril, were facing the loss of everything they had.  


And this choice seems to be equally proleptic: why not keep on as we always have done, as disaster confronts us? Let’s focus on the fireworks as the fire works its way across our land. This kind of cognitive dissonance – a refusal to know, to think into, what we know; a refusal to see, to see into, what we glimpse out of the corner of our eye, or sometimes what is visible in plain sight – this capacity for a kind of internal psychological splitting does not bode well for our future on this planet.

Next week the Australian Open tennis championship will go ahead in spite of players’ concerns about smoke pollution from the nearby bush fires affecting their breathing. “The safety, well-being and health of the players is our top priority” say the organizers (well, they would say that wouldn’t they) – but the show must go on. Over and over again within these recent events in Australia we can see the power of human denial in play. 


History is full of examples of the tragedies that occur when there are those who cannot see – or choose not to see – what is unfolding in front of their eyes, our eyes. Occasionally someone comes along who is able to give representation to this through one medium or another. The German artist Anselm Kiefer – surely the most significant visual artist of our times? - is perhaps one such figure. Born as Hitler was about to be defeated, his whole oeuvre developed in the shadow of the cataclysmic events of 1933-1945. His latest exhibition in London – it can be seen at the White Cube in Bermondsey until January 26^th – is no exception to this fate, no exception to his choice to confront us with what it means to live in a world where humane values can disappear. 


His paintings and installations in this current exhibition are monumental in size and ambition. Many have a savage and epic beauty, particularly the scenes of burnt vegetation that recede to the horizon, barren landscapes filled with real branches, twigs and straw, in which no human being ever appears. The only sign of so-called humanity are axes strategically and compellingly positioned amidst many of the desolate, post-apocalyptic landscapes, their rusted blades attached to branch-handles, relics of what human beings have left behind. Relics and symbols. The axe cuts down and creates, destroys and renews, attacks and defends. Every culture and civilisation, back to mythological times, has read something into the axe.  


The devastation in Kiefer’s art is thrilling, overpowering. His work is, in the true sense, awesome: it induces the fear and wonder that reside within awe. His work shows us: something awful has happened. But what has happened is also proleptic: his work is a vision of what is to come. Or what we fear is to come. As the fires burnt still in Australia and the landscape there comes to resemble Kiefer’s bleak, provocative compositions – you can’t take your eyes off them, they linger in the mind and fertilise the imagination – we begin our new decade with trembling spirits, in the knowledge that, despite the forebodings and proleptic signs, the future is not yet settled. It’s all still to play for. 


Postscript: I came across the following luminous piece by Mark O'Connell after I'd posted my blog. It speaks for itself: 
"The most disturbing thing about the images of the fires is not that they might signal the end of the world, but that they might signal how the world will continue. That we might just get used to large parts of the planet being on fire, and even larger parts of it under water. And more disturbing still, that we might harden our hearts against the people who live and die in the floods and the fires. In this sense, above all, we are in danger, and we need to act immediately to survive". (The Guardian, 13th January 2020).