Jenga!

If the pomp and circumstance of Citizens and Kings isn't your thing, then you may find alternative inspiration in the Royal Academy’s latest courtyard installation. Following in the wake of Damien Hirst’s Virgin Mother and Rodin’s Gates of Hell comes Anselm Kiefer’s Jericho. The installation consists of two towers of corrugated concrete reinforced with iron bars standing slap bang in the middle of the academy quad. They are magnificently ugly. Purists have thrown up their hands in despair and the courtyard echoes with that familiar refrain ‘But it isn’t ART!’ The traditionalists moan that the towers are a cancer on the refined Neo-Classical lines of the Academy buildings.

Far from besmirching the academy’s quadrangle, I think that Jericho only enhances the elegance and grace of its surroundings. Jericho squats like a fat toad in the centre of a beautiful architectiral lily pad. On second thoughts, squatting is hardly the word for it, since these towers, well tower. The tallest of the two is 16.5metres (55ft) high, the smaller 14 metres, and both teeter like demented towers of Pisa as if about to fall and demolish a large chunk of the academy’s East wing. Critics and visitors alike have raised the inevitable comparison with New York’s Twin Towers. But Kiefer has emphatically (and repeatedly) denied that Jericho is in anyway related to the events of September 11th. The idea, Kiefer tells us in his publicity notes, had begun to take shape long before the twin towers fell. There is nevertheless something post-apocalyptic about the towers, they recall the bombed out buildings of Darfur or Basra seen on the news every night, or a set from Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men. But perhaps Kiefer is exploring less aggressively industrial themes?

The roofs of his towers are each perforated by a rough hewn oculus so that a visitor standing inside at the base can look up through the gutted storeys to a distant patch of sky. I have been to the towers three times now on three very different days. On the first, the sun shone with the blinding milky white of a January frost, the second was overcast, grey, and mild. On the third visit, the heavens opened and rain collected in great puddles around the towers’ foundations. Standing at the base of the towers, looking up through the skylight is like looking through a telescope, with the oculus forming the lens. The sky seemed somehow clearer, more vivid, far closer than it ever had before. These towers, masquerading as hulking, industrial monstrosities conceal a covert beauty. They are not temples to the industrial age but rather viewfinders to the ever-changing facets of the sky.

If you get the chance, go and see for yourself. Walk around them, stand in their shade, step inside and look at the sky. Laugh at them, ponder them, and having done all that by all means throw your hands up in despair and join the rousing chorus of ‘But it isn’t ART!’ Come up with your own interpretation. Maybe the unsound structures represent the fragility of modern society? Maybe they are nothing more than the sum of their parts: just some concrete, iron bars, and plastic sheeting? Maybe Jericho is Jenga played by the Gods? I like that one.

Just don't call it the twin towers.