Anselm Kiefer’s Bicycle

I thought the short video of Anselm Kiefer bicycling through his vast studio could be an interesting jumping-off point for an idea, actually, several ideas about space, scale, gigantism, getting lost and our place in it, because it brings up the idea of the sublime, which when I think of it I associate it with the Rocky Mountains, driving eastward towards the west coast of course, one feels increasingly small, which got me thinking about what could be fantastically large spaces that make me feel lost, lost not in a bad way, just lost as having to trudge all the way, a very long way to get out of that space to another space, like if you’ve ever been to those olden times places like the Vatican (which I have been to) or the Hagia Sophia (which I haven’t been to), maybe a better example is it’s kind of like when you shop at a Wegman’s or a Walmart Supercenter, just getting from one side of the store to the next takes the conditioning of a reasonable good athlete, which brings me back to Anselm Kiefer and his bicycle, this may be the coolest studio of all time, the studio is made even cooler because it belongs to Anselm Kiefer, who is definitely one of my top five artists I’m liking these days and I think I will like in the future, I feel pretty confident about that, plus I like lead too, so there's that, the video helped me see something a little bit different, which is what if normal spaces could be blown up, “super-sized” into something so large that you’d get lost, like a bed where you sleep some place different every night for a year, or go sailing when you’re in the bathtub taking a bath, or have a car that seats you’re own personal marching band, now that would be something, the car I mean, not so much the marching band, though when I think about it your own personal marching band would be pretty cool, which would mean having a car that large would be what is called a necessity, which I bet there’s not a lot of people who have any of these things, making it even more important to think about large spaces, about “bigger is better”, which I get it may not be a very popular idea right now, but just maybe, just maybe is a real counterintuitive, counterfactual sort of thing, bigger might be better if it allows you to do something that can be done much better than if that space is “smaller is smarter”, at the very least it’s something worth kicking around for a moment or two, because at the end of it, we like to think big, even if thinking big sometimes backfires on us, the truth is this stuff is hard to tell and even harder to figure out, because not everything is exactly as it seems, which is something I’m sure you’re already figured out.