The Drawings of Joseph Beuys - Essay Example

appears here] appears here] appears here] appears here] Introduction By 1967 the major sixties isms, namely pop art; stained-color-field abstraction, or formalism; and minimalism, had become established in the art world. Their rationales had become familiar, too familiar for them to be thought of as avant-garde. Pop art had been the most notorious of sixties movements up to the end of 1963. After that it no longer generated much art-world discourse. Pop art's innovators -- Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Tom Wesselmann -- continued to command attention. But they had not spawned a second generation; as a result pop art seemed to be on the wane. In actuality it went underground, emerging again, in entirely new guises, only toward the end of the 1970s. In 1967 Joseph Beuys, a professor of sculpture at the prestigious Dsseldorf Academy of Art, founded the politically dissident German Student Party and in the following year aligned himself with the rioting students, who strongly influenced his attitudes to art and politics. Beuys was born in 1921 at Kleve in the Lower Rhineland, served with the Luftwaffe in the War, enrolled as a student at the Dsseldorf Academy in 1947, and was Professor of Monumental Sculpture there from 1961 until he was dismissed in 1972. Beuys, who remained committed to social change to the end of his life, founded (among other organizations) the Organization of Non-Voters/Free Referendum Information Point in 1970 and the Organization for Direct Democracy through Referendum in 1971. He also waged war against hidebound art education. Beuys summed up his countercultural stance in 1979: "Young people -- the hippies in the '60s, the punks today -- are struggling to find new ways of defining the culture they live in. They, not money, are the capital of society" (Adriani, Konnertz, & Thomas, 1979). More than any of his contemporaries, Beuys sought to confront the social situation of a physically and psychologically devastated Germany and, by extension, Europe. Facing up to German history and culture -the Nazi period and its antecedents -- he said that he would assume the shamanistic role of exorcising past horrors, indicating the traumas of a time and initiating a healing process." He also believed that the imaginative powers of art could change life and bring about a personal and national rebirth. His ideas appealed to the European art world, because they seemed peculiarly European and -- equally important -- because they were expressed in an advanced visual language. Beuys achieved widespread recognition in 1968 and, in the 1970s, became the most important and influential artist in Europe. Beuys proposed his art as an alternative to contemporary American art -- which to him meant pop art, exemplified by Warhol, and minimalism. He overlooked the fact that many American post minimalists were also reacting against pop art and minimalism and were, like him, moving into performance and installation art. And they were as affected by the Vietnam War and America's social evils as he had been by the Nazi horror, the Holocaust, the student uprisings of 1968 -- and Vietnam. (But he convinced a significant number of European artists and art professionals that his misreading of American and European art was the correct interpretation, in large measure because they wanted to believe it.) Beuys's artistic roots were in Dada-inspired fluxus, which had been at the center of the German avant-garde in the early 1960s. Attracted by its use of performance to break down barriers between art and life, he joined the group. In February 1963 he hosted an international fluxus festival, Festum Fluxorum Fluxus at the Dsseldorf Academy. On that occasion he performed the first of his "actions," as he called his theatrical pieces, titled Siberian Symphony. Fluxus artists, who generally favored simple, short, often outrageous and funny sound-producing events, found Beuys's performance too complex and metaphorical for their taste. But much as he diverged aesthetically from the fluxus group, he always maintained his identification with it -- and its iconoclastic, antiestablishment image. Beuys based his mature work on what he claimed was the most consequential event of his life: the alleged shooting down of his fighter plane in the snows of the Crimea during World War II and his miraculous rescue by nomadic Tatars. Claiming that they had resuscitated his frozen body by wrapping him in fat and felt, he later made fat and felt his trademark materials. He also introduced related images and objects: red crosses, medical tubing, ambulance sleds, and the like. The theme of the artist-hero, fallen out of the sky to his painful near death and subsequent resurrection, would be reenacted obsessively in Beuys's work. He then layered this personal myth of wartime survival with references to nature; national consciousness; German history, culture, and mythology; the interaction between East and West; and messianic social prophecy. Finally he formulated a political program and became an activist (Stachelhaus, 1996). To be effective Beuys had to attract the attention of the media. To this end he fashioned a memorable -- a trademark -- persona that featured a felt hat (atop his sallow, hollow-cheeked face), an apple green fisherman's vest, jeans, heavy shoes, fur-lined overcoat, and knapsack. In appearance, he was a kind of Teutonic counterpart of the pale faced and silvery-gray-bewigged Warhol. Performance was central to Beuys's art. For his best-known "action," How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), he covered his head with honey and gold leaf and lectured a dead hare cradled in his arms. He said that he took it "to the pictures. . . . I let him touch the pictures with his paws and meanwhile talked to him about them" (Borer, 1996). Animals also appear in Beuys's later performances. In Iphigenie/Titus Andronicus (1969) a glowing white stallion pawed while Beuys clashed cymbals and an amplified voice intoned the words "death" and "die." His intention, as he said, was to tie man "from below with the animals, the plants, with nature, and in the same way tie him with the heights with the angels or spirits" (Borer, 1996). Art-as-action was more important to Beuys than art-as-object. Though his works of art were generally not conceived as autonomous (most were the relics of performances or lectures), they nonetheless manifested a masterful sculptural sensibility. A number of the best-known were conceived as discrete objects. For example, in Fat Chair a wedge of fat sits on a chair like a person. Writers have likened the fat to the remains of the millions of people who were melted down in Nazi death camps. References to the Holocaust are also inescapable in Auschwitz, which consists of a two-burner hotplate with a chunk of fat on each. But fat was also interpreted as a symbol of life-giving warmth, doubly so because it was insulated by felt. Beuys commented that fat was meant to heat and dissolves the frozen and rigid forms of the past [so that] future form becomes possible. Its malleability, its ready change from liquid to solid, was a metaphor for change, for the remolding of society. The transitional nature of Beuys's materials, not only fat but the energy that flows through the recurring batteries, transmitters, receivers, insulators, and conductors in his work, also suggested alchemical processes. Reacting against formalist criticism, which they identified as American, European critics and curators often read specific and elaborate symbolic meanings into Beuys's materials and images. But his work seemed to elicit such readings. Beuys thought of his art, even at its most autobiographical, as political. In his performances he assumed the role of shaman -- that is, one who makes a private experience public for the purpose of healing society. In a sense he extended his thinking from his own body in action to the body politic; that is, he moved to sculpting society as his art. With this in mind, Beuys performed an "action" titled The Silence of Marcel Duchamp Is Overrated (1964), calling into question Duchamp's detachment from social affairs and his anti-art stance. In 1971 Beuys rented a store in Dtisseldorf, in which he invited his fellow citizens to participate in political discussions. From this time on his major activity, which he designated as his "art," became lecturing and talking to people. He often used a blackboard to demonstrate his theories, objects that were preserved as "drawings" and, when assembled, as "sculptures." When art critic Achille Bonito Oliva said to Beuys: "It seems to me that your work is the extending of a kind of 'Socratic space' in which the works are no more than a pretext for dialogue with the individual," Beuys responded: "This is the most important side of my work. The rest -- objects, drawings, actions -- all take second place. . . . Art interests me only in so far as it gives me the possibility of a dialogue with individuals." (Kuoni, 1990) Beuys's message -- or his "theory of social sculpture," as he termed it, was that society could be transformed only by art, but first the concept of art would have to be enlarged to include every kind of creativity. From this point of view, everybody was a potential artist. When the people became aware of their creative power, they would join together to reform society, according to their desires. The political process that Beuys advocated was direct democracy through plebiscite on the economy, education, ecology. Free and self-determining people would create communal organizations and rule by "direct action." Beuys's libertarian antistatic and ant bureaucratic politics were much the same as those of the protesting students in 1968. Just as Beuys believed that humanity had to be regenerated, so he believed that the environment had to be renewed. Consequently he was a cofounder of the ecopolitical Green Party. In 1979 Beuys ran for a seat in the European Community Parliament; he received just 3.5 percent of the vote, but that did not seem to faze him. Beuys was a controversial figure to the end of his life in 1986. His opponents claimed that his politics were simple-minded and self-serving. Why else did he confer on the artist the leading political role Furthermore, no matter how fervently he proselytized for individual self-determination and public dialogue, he assumed the egotistical role of the "good" leader, the Christ like savior who transformed his suffering into his art and through it would bind a war-torn society's wounds. In the wake of the Hitler period, his Ftihrer-like stance was worrisome. A charismatic figure, he attracted a considerable number of disciples and acolytes, some of whom dressed in a kind of Beuysian uniform. Critics also viewed Beuys's self-mythification as his primary enterprise. They claimed that, like Warhol, his greatest work was his own dramatization. His pedagogical and political activities were all components of that self-aggrandizing performance. Indeed, so was his life; anything that Beuys did was considered to be part of his art. The props of his "actions," life, and lectures were offered as relics, to be venerated by the faithful. But Beuys was also esteemed by many artists and others who believed in a social art, and he influenced both performance and installation artists, and painters, such as his students Anselm Kiefer and Jrg Immendorff, as well as Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, who studied at the school in which he taught. His influence was strongest in Europe, but it was also felt in the United States, trying to awake from the nightmare of Vietnam. Though Minimalism had equivalents in Europe, most Europeans were reluctant to sacrifice the world of the senses to the same degree. A few, most evidently Beuys in Germany wanted to retain a sense of history and memory. It was only around 1967-8 that Beuys's international reputation was assured. In 1968 Beuys declined Morris's offer to show in '9 at Leo Castelli', and in an interview with Willoughby Sharp the following April stressed the metaphorical content of his art, which he felt distinguished him from American artists. He refused to show in America during the Vietnam War, his transatlantic career was launched only in 1974 and, though it was crowned with a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in 1979, Beuys has had a less secure reputation in America than he has enjoyed in Europe. In Beuys's case a biographical outline seems necessary because a mythified version of his life story is appropriated into his art in a way it is not with any American artist. Biography becomes myth as past events, together with Beuys's glosses on them, become the subject of sculpture. Strikingly independent, Beuys evolved a range of artistic ideas through the 1950s, long before there was a substantial audience for his work even in Germany. Beuys shared with the Zero group, and particularly Klein, the idea of art as a field of energy, and the objects of art as symbols of that energy. The existence and release of energy hidden in individuals was a basic principle for him, and helps to account for the significance of teaching and polemics in his life; releasing energy for social change was an ideal, and led to him adopting the--at first hearing--rather strange designation 'social sculpture' for his deeply subjective work. Beuys invented a personal myth of rebirth by embellishing a story, which had a basis in truth, of his rescue in 1944 by Crimean Tartars from the wreckage of his Junkers aircraft which had crashed on war service. Beuys's work is about transformation, it is heavily symbolic, and it is central to its character that its symbolism stems directly from him as an individual. Beuys saw himself as teacher and mentor as well as an artist in the narrower sense, and as the agent of change: his position at the Dsseldorf Academy and his astonishing capacity to engage a student audience was as crucial as his other creative successes. In a materialist and socially divided world, in a world which--as he saw it--had lost touch with nature, history, and the wellsprings of its culture, and in a country that was scarred by the evil of National Socialism, Beuys chose to stand for restitution and healing. While for Beuys the results of this might be collective (a culture might ultimately find its lost unity), the method of achievement must be individual. Beuys was a Nietzschean, believing in a quasi-priestly role for the artist who could use his unique position to help others harness their inherent creativity (Temkin and Rose, 1993). Beuys engaged in performances, for which he preferred the word 'action' to describe what were often long periods of physical endurance within an installation or scenario in which he was the only person involved. His chosen materials--fat, felt, and honey--were warming or life-giving, and he also used appliances like telephones and transmitters, video recorders, and electrical parts, which evoke the passage of energy. Except in his use of gold, which he used in the form of gold paint as the alchemical opposite of base metals, Beuys kept mainly to low-grade materials associated with the first industrial age. At a time when other German sculptors associated being modern, and being, after the War, part of a new and modern country, with high-quality, rust-free materials, Beuys used neither new materials nor mechanized processes. Beuys was interested in history and the origins of man and had a sense of a lost unity, the need for reconciliation between north and south, man and his past, and man and nature. He explored the layers and sedimentations of history. One of his earliest works, made in 1952, was based on Grauballe man, a prehistoric figure discovered intact in a Danish peat bog. As a native of Kleve on the low-lying Dutch border of Germany, Beuys identified with the waterlogged lowlands of northern Europe, and their capacity to conserve history intact. His contribution to the 1976 Biennale in Venice, which he saw as like a north European city in being built on water, was to make a deep borehole and to expose as part of the display the substance removed, which included human remains and other historical sediment. He used as the 'above- ground' part of the work an existing sculpture, Tramstop, a cast of military and sculptural remains erected by the seventeenth-century Prince of Nassau in Kleve at the point that happened to be Beuys's local stop as a child. Beuys changed only the figurehead, from a cupid to an open-mouthed suffering man. Beuys, like many German writers and artists since Goethe, saw the need for a northern culture to look south without losing its own identity. The Venice piece made mental and emotional connections between far-apart places marked by Beuys at different times. Beuys's appeal to history was to the pre-modern. He paid tribute to the sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1881-1919), who was one of the last German sculptors for whom direct realization of emotion by means of facial and bodily expression was possible. Beuys believed that 'sculpture begins in thought, and if the thought is not true, the ideas are bad and so is the sculpture. The sculpture's idea and form are identical.' There is an equivalence here of thought--or he might have said feeling--with image, that one of Beuys's strongest critics has called a 'nave transparency between form and matter and the "idea"'. The events of 1969 fore grounded issues of power and authority in ways relevant to art, from education to the museum as institution. Beuys himself was at the centre of a political storm surrounding his activities at the Dsseldorf Academy, which lasted for four years (1968-72) and ended with his dismissal. In d a crisis of a different nature, also involving Beuys, blew up in the context of an exhibition of European art at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in which it was proposed to include Beuys and, among others, the Belgian Marcel Broodthaers (1924-76). Broodthaers was angry with Beuys because he had not protested the previous year against the cancellation by the Guggenheim--on what Broodthaers regarded as unjustified political grounds--of a one-man exhibition of the German-born American Hans Haacke (b. 1936). Broodthaers wrote an open letter to Beuys asking him to consider the conditions of production of his work and these conditions' inseparability from the nature of the institutions where the works were both made and shown. Beuys ignored the letter and Broodthaers withdrew from the exhibition. Accusations made against Beuys in America have been of excessive projection of self and of a-historicism: that he overvalued independent creative talent outside historical context, and that he used myth-which repels dialogue and, in its traditional sense, at least, is not grounded in the contemporary--as an excuse for not looking critically at the present. More than that, the dominant core of American criticism since Alfred Barr and Meyer Schapiro in the 1930s had been strongly resistant to nationalism, and Greenberg's Modernism had drawn its earliest and strongest impulse from revulsion against the effects of the nationalism of the 1930s dictators. In these terms Beuys's preoccupation with Germany was seen as atavistic. German history since unification in 1871 has been beset by crises involving national identity, reflected in attitudes to art that have shifted radically between focus on nationhood and on the international community. He was a pioneer of conceptual art, in which ideas and actions take the place of traditional objects. He advanced the notion of using materials not usually considered components of the usual artistic baggage, felt and fat being only two examples. He believed that art - as much as religion or economics - should be political. He also believed that art, unlike economics, was beneficent. It could heal the wounds of the world rather than infect them further. Or so he hoped and taught. Perhaps because of all this - because so many artists today work in Beuysian ways, even if they have never heard of Beuys himself - much of what is exhibited at the Forum seems not so strange after all. By the time he died, Beuys had acquired the reputation of being an art shaman or even a messiah. Some of the sculptures look like relics of a strange holy man, or objects used in his rituals. In this show there is a cross - "Wurfkreuz," a cross to throw - that looks rather like a religious weapon rather than simply a symbol. Crosses appear regularly in Beuys' work; a cross is a prominent element in the rubber stamp with which he marked many prints and drawings. Although there is certainly a Christian connection, the cross also refers to Beuys' fascination with Jean Henri Dunant, the Nobel Prize-winning humanitarian who founded the Red Cross, and to the plus sign, which often appears in energy-related pieces with its opposite. A lot of Beuys' influence was directly related to his "actions," which were similar to the Happenings of the '60s and to contemporary performance art. One was "I Like America and America Likes Me." This action was realized at the Rene Block Gallery in New York in 1974. The action got a lot of attention. It began with Beuys, cocooned in felt, traveling from the airport to the gallery in an ambulance. Once at the gallery - after some refitting that he demanded - he shared the space for a week with a coyote, an animal Beuys regarded as distinctly American and one that had been scapegoat - blamed for the sins of others and for things that go wrong (Tisdall, 1979). Conclusion Like the schoolboy scientist he once was, Beuys remained fascinated by the alchemic and the shape-changing: fat that could be both liquid and hard, bread and fish laden with religious significance. He mixed hare's blood with ordinary house paint, calling the result 'brown cross' and conjuring up a kaleidoscope of natural, political and religious connotations, from rust to the occult to Nazism. Beuys abandoned his vocation as a doctor, but he never lost the desire to heal - a tall order in post-war Germany. His work often speaks of a 'social wound', depicting the injury and prescribed cures. 'His art is rooted in the material world,' agrees Sean Rainbird, curator of the Tate's survey. 'It's very earthy, often slightly rubbishy and scrappy looking, but at the same time it reaches up to the heavens. Like all great art, it's about how humankind relates to transcendent ideas of spirituality, and how creativity and belief can take us forward.' When it comes to reading his work, the liberating truth is that fretting over its meaning doesn't much help. As Beuys himself put it: 'Art is not there to provide knowledge in direct ways. It produces deepened perceptions of experience. Art is not there to be simply understood, or we would have no need of art.' It may prove a frustrating concept for a generation of art lovers trained to first read the wall-mounted essay or hit 'play' on their gallery discman, but it's this word-defying magic that makes Beuys so endlessly compelling (Anderson, 2005). Works Cited HEPHZIBAH ANDERSON, 2005. Man of actions; Joseph Beuys. The Evening Standard (London, England). Heiner Stachelhaus, 1996. Joseph Beuys, Dsseldorf. Cairn Kuoni, 1990. Joseph Beyus- Energy Plan for the Western man: writings by and interviews with Joseph Beyus. Goetz Adriani, Winfried Konnertz, and Karin Thomas, 1979. Joseph Beuys: Life and Works. Trans. Patricia Lech. Barron's Educational Series Alain Borer, 1996. The Essential Joseph Beuys. London: Thames and Hudson Ann Temkin and Bernice Rose, 1993. Thinking is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys (exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art). Thames and Hudson Caroline Tisdall, 1979. Joseph Beuys. London: Thames and Hudson : Read More