Anselm Kiefer , Scuba diving in the river versuses the Red Sea and Mike canning

Mike Canning said Art is unlike a good joke in that good art improves with each viewing where as a joke looses it impact after the first telling . It set me thinking , I dive in the river every few days winter and summer no matter how cold ,how fast the current is or how poor the visability is . sometimes the place is so dark you cant see half a meter in front of you and you have to hold your buddies hand to stay in touch. Yet i find it endlessly facinating.I've also dived the Red Sea , its wonderfull, millions of brightly coloured fish ,you follow reefs which drop off 2 miles beneath you, you explore wrecks that look like a Holly wood set, Ships sunk during the second world war ,still full of tanks, aeroplanes all the crap of war stacked up but never got there because the ship was sunk, old sailing ships, intact and full of their cargo of wine. at night you can open bottles of wine 150 years old then dive at night amonst the sharks and all the scary things that come out in tropical waters at night but for all that , it 's like Mike Cannings joke , if youv'e seen it once the next day and the next is the same . The visabilty is so good you see it all at one go , no mystery.. Dara Waldren gave a lecture about the romantics and talked about the Subline. He said there is a thing in extreame tourism to be droped by helicopter in a compleatly unexplored part of the world , the idea being to be , literally the first person on earth to be at this spot' All this must take so much time and cost so much but I explore bits of the river ,underwater, that i know no one ever in the whole world has ever seen before. Ive come across skulls of ancient animals, 4000 thousand year old dug out canoes , mysterious deep dark pits full of meter long blood sucking eels with concentric rows of tiny sharp teeth, I know no one has ever seen these things before .This to me is much more fascinating than the bright colours of the red sea and can be done on a weekend morning for free. This brings me to Anselm Kiefer I love his mucky,obscure and sloppy looking pictures. I've tried to express the underwater river artistically but its fasination to me is the lack of any senserory stimulus , you cant hear anything , can see practilly nothing , have no sense of up or down , your almost compleatly sensually deprived and its weird that for an artist i find that so compulively interesting.BUT..Anselm Kiefer seems to be able to capture how the river feels to me