Floor 6: 6th Floor Landing (Exhibition Landing): Exhibition entrance at Elevator Landing

Wall Text

1988
Photograph and copper wire on treated lead in glazed steel frame
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1989

A bookcase and its ghostly double—one full, the other empty—occupy the center of this image. Kiefer named the two bookcases seen here after the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, which frame the historic Near Eastern region of Mesopotamia. This area developed one of the world’s earliest writing systems and was a site of flourishing libraries in antiquity. Kiefer has mounted the photograph on the same material that he used for his giant artist’s books—lead—which he has called “the only material heavy enough to carry the weight of human history.”