MARKETING ITS 2014 RETROSPECTIVE of the forty-year career of Anselm Kiefer, the Royal Academy in London declared its exhibition “a testament to the career of a man driven to confront himself and the audience with the big and complex issues of our world's past, present and future.” Kiefer, the academy said, is “a colossus of contemporary art” who “takes over our main galleries,” filling them with his “quite simply monumental” artworks. The references to size here are apt in several ways: the physical immensity of Kiefer's exhibits stretches the capacity of the Royal Academy to accommodate them; related to that is the magnitude of the questions driving Kiefer's artistic production; and in addition, there is a twofold temporal dimension, encompassing both the totality of Kiefer's career and the totality of time—past, present, and future—that his art seeks to represent. All of these aspects of size in Kiefer's work—physical, philosophical, and temporal—are simultaneously at work in what I present here: an attempt to think through the totality of his artistic production as a manifestation of an archival impulse. For this purpose, I include as part of that totality the words and actions by which Kiefer contributes to the production of his public artistic persona, and I invoke a broader understanding of the archival impulse than that defined influentially by Hal Foster as the recovery of historical information. In Kiefer's work the archival impulse extends itself into the future as well as the past, and exhibits itself in the present moment as a dialectic: it is both a will to produce and reproduce ever more of the world, and the will to contain that expanding world.

Retrospectives, by definition, may be understood as memory work. In seeking to describe, classify, and contain the past their memorial task is organizational and archival. In Kiefer's case, the will to order, which might be considered a preliminary step in the process of bequeathing the past to the future, is greatly heightened, because it resonates with the thematic and formal substance of the work itself. In other words, what drives the retrospective as genre also drives Kiefer's work internally.