"Schriften zur Kunstkritik" (Publications on art criticism)
In the Schriften zur Kunstkritik collection, published by the German section of AICA and under the editorship of our colleague Walter Vitt, volume 4 is not, as was previously the case, a reprint of an existing text, or part of a text. but is an original essay commissioned from an author, Sabine Schütz, entitled Der Lackmus-Test ("Art criticism as chemical test"). This initiative lends weight to the collection. In this new issue the author treats her subject serioulsy. intelligentlv and humorously in the short space allocated her (44 pages, including notes). At first, the title is intriguing. Using as her subject Anselm Kiefer's work over the past fifteen years, Sabine Schütz has tried to draw parallels between, on the one hand, critical analyses, many of them contradictory, by mainly British and German authors, and on the other hand, results obtained by a chemical analysis called in German "Lackmus-Test" (after a natural pigment called "Rocella fuciformis") utilized in "pH-metry" to measure the hydrogen potential: pH paper, dipped into a solution - in this instance. Kiefer's material-, becomes red or blue according to whether the analyzed matter is acid or alcaline.
So: for or against Kiefer?... If the comparison seems somewhat far-fetched, it is a fact that the opinions of the art critics mentioned by S. Schütz are amazingly extreme. But surely Anselm Kiefer's work is loaded with political/historical content which is bound to engender virulent reactions and indeed Kiefer himself is the first to point out the symbolic implications of his work, which naturally opens a particularly wide field of interpretation.
Ruth Henry AICA-France (in: AICA Newsletter, November 1996, S. 12)