Picturing Time in the Anthropocene: Anselm Kiefer’s Ages of the World (2014)

This essay analyzes a massive installation by the contemporary artist Anselm Kiefer, Ages of the World (2014), as an answer to a conundrum central to thinking about the Anthropocene: how to represent the convergence of deep time and historical time? Humans are geological agents whose influence will be recorded in deep time, yet they are faced with the necessity of acting in historical time to counter the existential threat of climate change. Composed of a pile of discarded canvases interspersed with rocks, debris, and dried sunflowers, and flanked by two reproductions on photographic paper and canvas annotated with geological terms, Ages of the World fuses together different temporalities that are not customarily and immediately available to our perception. The installation enacts a temporal convergence by interweaving historical and geological events through image and metaphor, awakening our sensory and intellectual perception of time. Ages of the World does not work on the viewer through narrative argument, yet its aesthetics of juxtaposition and superimposition, and its oscillation between the global and the particular, may offer food for thought to the historian as storyteller of a still unfolding epoch.