Anselm Kiefer's project is it to evoke, and to distance, the mythifications of the national ‐past in order to make certain German artistic traditions fruitful once more. It is argued that he has succeeded in doing so with work creating a tension between the fascination for a taboo vision, denying identification through artistic means. Expressionist materiality, the figurative mode, woodcut, lyrical inscriptions, sculpture, bookmaking, original materials have been used in specific ways so as to create open‐ended works, confronting the viewer (...) with his/her conflicting feelings and allowing them to finalize the work. However, where an overbearing scepticism of modernity causes Kiefer to turn to myth for answers, he is prone to collapsing history with timeless truths, confounding artistic production and organicist creation, thus abolishing the boundaries of the work together with the possibility of dialogic exchange. (shrink)

Last Spring two important German books on aesthetics finally appeared in English: Adorno's unfinished Aesthetic Theory, intended to summarize his philosophy and sociology of modern culture, and Büger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, in many ways a dialogue with Adorno and critical theory. Peter Bürger, a professor of French and comparative literature at the university of Bremen, has published extensively on a broad spectrum of classical to avant-garde literature, generally trying to combine an outline of a sociology of culture with detailed (...) socio-historical anaylses of specific works. Bürger sees himself as a mediator between hermeneutics and critical theory. He is an avowed disciple of the Frankfurt School in that the recognizes the cognitive and potentially moral function of art, bound up with art's necessary aloofness from practice in bourgeois society. (shrink)