It is a tribute to James Joyce's masterpiece, Finnegans Wake. Anselm Kiefer borrows the word "arsenal" from the dictionary, that is, a facility intended for the construction and maintenance of warships. No boats appear in the installation set up by the German master at the Red Brick Art Museum, but industrial materials of all sorts such as steel, lead, glass, wood, silicone, terracotta, rocks, ash, paper, fabric, straw, earth debris, oil and acrylic paints: rusted elements overflowing from industrial shelving stacked to the ceiling on either side of a tunnel-like corridor that divides into several rooms, in a way that evokes the environments of an arsenal. Rolls of photographs hang from the ceiling and curl in piles on the floor like unraveling memories. The photographic negatives, on which Kiefer affixed black and white photographs, are made of lead. In his words, negatives "are like films, but it's a paradox because the raison d'être of a film is to be transparent, to let light pass through it to be projected." Glued onto lead, these images are no longer viewable: memories that the mind has erased.
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