And onto my third artwork where I’m asking AI to try and give meaning to modern art, as well as just checking whether it thinks it was created by a professional artist or a child. This continues to be a slightly dangerous experiment, not least because AI appears to be gaining confidence while I remain largely in the ‘that looks like some roots’ stage of interpretation.
AI is adamant here that this is definitely a professional work, although added that “a child would not have been able to convince a gallery to put what appears to be half a hillside and some determined roots on the wall” which is another way of looking at it I suppose. Children may produce strange and powerful things with mud, glue and enthusiasm, but they rarely get the framing budget or the wall space to make it feel like a meditation on civilisation. The artist is Anselm Kiefer (1946-) and the artwork was created between 1985 and 1991.
AI mentioned that “it has a strong feeling of decay, buried memory, erosion and nature reclaiming something human-made” and when pushed it gave the meaning to the artwork that it was suggesting that nature gradually took back control. It then wanted to go further, it said that this artwork was likely about “time overwhelming human ambition” which I thought was quite philosophical and powerful. I must admit that this did make me look at the artwork again in a different way.
This website gives more background to the artwork:
“In this work, Anselm Kiefer revisits another iconic episode in German history. The painting references the castle commissioned in 1838 by the Russian tsars from Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the great German neoclassical architect and one of the key figures behind the city of Berlin’s architectural landscape. For Schinkel, Orianda was a dream project, one with which he sought to leave an indelible mark on history. However, the castle was never built, and according to some interpretations, this disappointment delivered the final blow to the already weakened health of the renowned architect.”
This pleased me, I had an artwork that had meaning, was interesting to look at and which also had some historical perspective. It is all rather powerful, although admittedly still not something I would hang in a breakfast room unless I wanted to start every day contemplating human failure before the crispy bacon was served up.