Mick Hartley

German artist Anselm Kiefer has just built a wonky tower in the courtyard of the Royal Academy. Or rather, he’s had one built: an artist of Kiefer’s stature obviously doesn’t do any actual building himself.

Jericho is constructed from reinforced concrete components arranged in a series of tiers or floors. There are doorways in some of the walls, and the floor pieces have a rough open centre allowing the viewer to look up from the base unit to the sky through a series of levels. Reinforcing bars visibly protrude from each piece accentuating the towers rough-hew texture.

The Royal Academy are properly grateful for the opportunity to celebrate the work of such a significant figure:

Over the past four decades, Anselm Kiefer has produced a diverse body of work in painting, sculpture and installation that has made him among the most important artists of his generation. Few contemporary artists match Kiefer’s epic reach, and his work consistently balances powerful imagery with acute critical analysis.

Under the heading “Attention: towering intellect at work”, the Times’ Tim Teeman interviews the great man:

Kiefer is German, 61 and stern, with a hint of playfulness. And he is a deep, deep thinker, whose intellectual preoccupations — religion, belief, philosophy, the essence of life and how society is organised — are channelled into his multilayered paintings and sculptures.This overtly serious work comes with scrawled quotes from Paul Celan, Isaiah and Aeschylus. Kiefer references classical literature including the fall of Troy, Norse myths, Goethe, Wagnerian opera and German history. His works are made from a range of materials: glass, straw, wood, oil, soil, paint, a typical canvas containing a combination of the above.

The fall of Troy! Norse myths! Goethe! Wagnerian opera and German history! A deep, deep thinker indeed.

For Kiefer a tower is “something which looks stable but is not. All is changing all the time, always transforming — change, time, resurrection.” The Royal Academy towers look as if they are about to fall over; the levels — stuck together with special rods — are uneven, set at an angle, their façades alternately closed off and sometimes broken by slits of windows and doorways. Kiefer says their meaning is rooted in the notion of “the renewal of landscape. The Royal Academy seems like a stable building but it is not. It is unstable and it doesn’t know it.

Shouldn’t someone be told? Structural engineers perhaps?

Kiefer is softly spoken. But, boy, he’s esoteric. He’s studied pretty much every religion and belief system going, so when I ask if the towers also stand for some kind of link between heaven and earth, he assents but then adds gently that “we now know that heaven is not ‘upstairs’ as the monolithic belief has it”. So where is Heaven? I ask gingerly. “Heaven is in each of the little sparks of the body.” Really? “Intelligence is in each of these elements,” he says pin-pricking his arm as if to locate the most infinitesimal of cells, “Heaven is in the interconnection of these elements.”

We now know that heaven is not ‘upstairs’ as the monolithic belief has it. It takes a genius to come up with a remark like that. An esoteric genius.

Kiefer was raised a strict Roman Catholic in a small town in southern Germany. He was a very serious boy, buried in books, and from an early age a keen painter and storyteller; Ali Baba was a favourite. “I still know how to say Mass in Latin,” he says, laughing. “I have a very precise memory of my first communion. You are told that Jesus will come to you. I was very disappointed that nothing happened.”

He left the Church “ten, 20, 30 years ago”, not so much in rejection of its beliefs but rather the dogmas — “this is good, this is not good” — which he felt made the quality of belief that much poorer. He turned to kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, “which I found richer, wider, more open”. And now? “I have no beliefs. It’s a black, black hole. You can never know why you are here. These are questions which are completely unresolved. It makes you have vertigo, thinking about this,” he says.

Ten, 20, 30 years ago? He’s 61 now, so he was 50, or 40, or maybe 30, when he decided Catholicism was too dogmatic. Another sure sign of a keen mind. Most of us don’t work that out until we’re at least – oooh, 14 or 15. And wondering why we’re here, in a German accent and, to judge from the picture in the Times, wearing open sandals over socks in the middle of winter, is a sure-fire sign of a towering intellect.

It could drive you mad, I say. “Yes, but if it did I wouldn’t have my art,” he says. “I think of the manager, having to fly around the world every day for his work, thinking about these questions. What a horrible life.”

It’s so much more spiritually meaningful to make wonky towers: then you can sneer at those shallow materialistic fools who make stuff that’s actually useful.

But he’s doing the same thing, just making art instead of negotiating deals, surely. “No, I don’t produce work to get away from the black hole. I produce work in the black hole. In way it makes me more connected to a possible answer. You feel something but you cannot grasp it.”

But, given the recurrence of the themes of apocalypse and renewal, you sense that Kiefer feels some kind of hope. He says Hinduism is his favoured religion now, because it recognises the value of other religions. “Mythology is the only way you can try and understand the connections in the world. Science can’t do that.”

No indeed: science doesn’t provide a religious explanation of the world. Very perceptive. And he’s aware of his own worth, of course:

Kiefer studied law, not art, at the beginning “because I had a genius complex. I thought I was a genius. I never wanted to practise law but I was interested in its construction and philosophy.”

Interestingly, Kiefer studied with Joseph Beuys during the 70s – the great self-mythologiser of modern art. What he’s learnt from the master, clearly, is that in the modern art world the most important step is, first of all, to set yourself up as a genius. With so many credulous art critics around, that’s not difficult. Then, by definition, everything you do, even a wonky tower, is a masterpiece.