Narrow are the Vessels
I didn’t even know that Anselm Kiefer made sculpture. According to Look Into My Owl, this one was sited in a garden in Fairfield, Connecticut until the local Historic District Commission gave it the boot. Even in a gallery, though (maybe especially in a gallery) it’s got a lot of landscape in it. Of the landscape architects in the public eye these days, only Julie Bargmann and Martha Schwartz seem to be straying anywhere near Kiefer’s imagery of violence and ruin. (And even they tidy it up before they roll it out. How much of that has to do with their taste and style is hard to know, because as landscape architects working in the public realm they are constrained by code and liability risk.)
I would have liked to see what this looked like in a garden setting.
Deborah Howe
Toby Wolf
Before reading this post I had a flash that someone had torn down a Honda dealership and put the rippled awning on its front into a gallery. Like you, Toby, I wonder what this thing looked like in its real place.