At the same time, many artists focus solely on exploring the possibilities of the very form of stairs. Going beyond the given static structure, they treat stairs as malleable plastic material for their experiments, often creating absurd staircases.
The Biblical story of Jacob’s Dream has long fascinated artists both religious and secular, from icon painters to Marc Chagall. The St. Petersburg artist Vladimir Tsivin has treated the subject extensively.
“From the sketches I made it emerged that Jacob, asleep under a ladder to the sky, represents an ideal universal tombstone for Man. For all humanity. After all, someday, after many millions of years, in order to be saved, Man will have to wake up, climb the ladder to the sky and leave the horizon behind forever.”[1]
In Tsivin’s work the ladder Jacob sleeps under is of triangular form, suggesting a stepladder or a tent (V1: 80, 81); perhaps the shelter it provides indicates God’s protectiveness towards man. Or perhaps the tent, omnipresent in nomadic cultures like that of the Prophets, suggests the inevitability of the spiritual path that each of us must travel to reach our heights.
Anselm Kiefer often includes ladders in his works and in the German Romantic tradition seeks the perfect symbol to imbue his works with deep philosophical meaning. The titles of his paintings “Seraphim” (V2: 342) and “First” (V2: 343) refer to Biblical texts, one of the central motifs of his oeuvre. In Kiefer’s works, stairs and ladders are often reborn from the wreckage of the old world in accordance with established divine law. The ladder in “Seraphim” is the highest point, the culminating chord sounding in the void. This note does not oppose chaos; on the contrary, it is constructed from the elements of chaos. By mixing paints with dirt, sand, dust, straw, rusty metal and clay, the artist creates an archetypal image: a ladder, ideally capable of structuring chaos thanks to its structure, which arranges space horizontally and vertically. And just as God created man in his own image and gave him the right to create and destroy, so the artist combines these two poles in his paintings. Kiefer is acutely aware of each individual’s responsibility of for the fate of all mankind and his works often address the theme of war, destruction and subsequent rebirth. In many of those works ladders serve as harbingers of a new, mysterious life.