Jericho, Anselm Kiefer, Royal Academy, London (From The Oxford Times)

Jericho, Anselm Kiefer, Royal Academy, London

10:57am Thursday 19th April 2007 in Leisure By Claire Nichols

Anselm Kiefer's two towers stand at the same height and bear the same industrial concrete colouring as the Victorian premises around them. They seem at home in the RA's courtyard, as courteous to, as they are questioning of, the public sensibility built into the institutionalism of the RA.

These twin towers' stand precariously, somewhere between grand monuments to a moment of public terror and quietly contemplated Greek statues. Their roughly hewn texture complements the one-legged pose of both towers, with the steel sheets shoved in' under the concrete base completing their pictorial struggle to stand. A series of self-reflexive gestures, these all play against the structural ingenuity that holds Kiefer's sculptures permanently still.

Co-exisiting themes of destruction and re-creation have always permeated Kiefer's work, and the twin towers are no different in raising the political pertinence of this theme. Their political structure is defined by the context in which they are displayed. The RA is a public arena where social habits were cultivated during a period of heavy industrialisation in Britain, a period when a return to social and moral worth was appealed for based on a class system. The dissimulation and relics of these values are ingrained in the way we approach the architectural façade of the RA, and built into architectural liberties taken by Kiefer at the point where he acknowledges and plays with the politics of this spectacularised scene. The RA becomes a theatrical backdrop for the social climate that has mediated current political struggles.

As a double life and almost necessary juxtaposition to the political issues inherent to Kiefer's towers, they bear a weightless pictorial idealism. The merged histories of his off-set concrete and steel conjunctions that conjure a static environment inside the courtyard of the RA are framed kaleidoscopically by the chemical and sculptural properties of the materials he uses and the specific biblical legacy he remembers. They are open to being read at once in the light of their titled, biblical nod to the destruction of Jericho, a bridge between the earth and heavens, as well raising a socially flared question around the bombast of great empires, past and present. But to exist in imagination simultaneously or potentially as all of these, the towers are an architectural feat that understands the relationship of construction to society.