Haiku Review 6 – Joseph Beuys

"Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments", Tate Modern, London

February 4 - May 2, 2005

March 13, 2005

It is difficult to consider Joseph Beuys without first mentioning the legend behind the artist, one which he himself actively cultivated during his lifetime, a legend which has by now become inseparable from his work. In its essence it is this: during World War II Beuys was drafted into the German air force and in 1942 his plane was shot down over Crimea where he was rescued by Tatars who wrapped him in animal fat and felt to warm him and heal his wounds thereby saving his life. Robert Hughes has remarked: “Beuys’ wartime experiences have for his followers almost joined Van Gogh’s ear in the hagiography of modern art.” Yet this single, sketchy biographical detail remains important because it serves as an entry point into Beuys’ world, simultaneously providing an introduction to his particular aesthetic and to his most commonly used materials, fat and felt. It also illuminates the significant ideas of healing and transformation that are at the heart of his life’s work. Together - these materials, this story - created a regenerative balm for a traumatised post-war Europe.

Beuys the artist-healer-teacher, eternally dressed in his felt hat and pilot’s vest, worked extensively both within and beyond the art world. The Tate Modern show divides his oeuvre into three main areas: vitrines (small scale assemblages in glass cases); actions (Beuys’ preferred word for performances) and; environments (what Beuys called his large scale installations). His art also encompassed teaching, politics and social and environmental activism. He had ambitions for a sweeping programme of human transformation which was to be catalysed by individual creative energy, what Beuys called his “expanded concept of art”, a world in which “everyone is an artist”. His didacticism did not appeal to everyone, nor his “claims for universal solutions and global validity”, but his aesthetic of the damaged seems to have struck an enduring chord. His work can be found in major museums across the globe and sells for millions of dollars, ranking Beuys among the world’s most expensive modern artists.

Beuys’ objects, often in part readymades, consist almost entirely of society’s detritus: discarded things with an awkward, scarred presence, unpolished, rough, fragments of life turned into art. His objects are also predominantly organic, incorporating elements from the human, animal, plant and mineral worlds, the kind found in rural, not urban, settings. Plucked from everyday life, these objects consist mainly of plain, undisguised matter that are recontextualised in Beuys’ visual vocabulary to convey disruption and damage. “Burned door, beak and ears of a hare, 1953” incorporates all the materials of the piece’s title; similarly “Cross with kneecap and hare’s skull, 1961”. Bandages, dirt, mould, broken objects, imperfections and dead animals are symbolic reminders of the decay and destruction all around us that must be attended to. And their colour is the colour of the earth, a shade of brown that looks as if it were made of rust and blood. “Virgin 1952” is a female torso of wax, wrapped in gauze binding and resting on a soiled pillow. “No title (bathtub)” from 1960 is a chipped enamel bathtub on a stand covered in adhesive bandages and gauze. But the Beuysian cure is never far, his iconic “Felt suit” from 1970 is specially designed to generate, store and transmit energy which is integral to the creative process; and in the case of “The pack, 1969”, rescue is at hand. This large-scale installation consists of a Volkswagen van where 20 sledges, each equipped with a felt roll, fat and torches spills out into the room, ready to come to the viewer’s aid.

Central to Beuys’ programme of healing was transformation, and in the realm of the environment, Beuys’ timing was superb. In 1979, he was one of the founding members of the Green Party in Germany, which catapulted environmental issues into mainstream politics. Although he failed to be elected by his party to stand for state elections, Beuys used his work as a conduit for raising ecological awareness. For example his part animal-part medical “Horns, 1961” made using two rhinoceros horns, painted iron, plastic tubing and red paint, a regenerative infusion for the animal kingdom; and “Snowfall, 1965” where branches of fir trees are tucked under layers of felt like blanketed patients in a sick ward.

In 1982, at Documenta VII, four years before his death, Beuys inaugurated “7,000 oaks”, his most ambitious large-scale work. The project involved planting 7,000 oak trees, each one aligned with a basalt stone. The tree planting on this monumental scale was meant to provoke an “ecological awakening” by initiating social and environmental transformation in nerve centres of the art world, starting in Kassel and later in New York. Beuys has said about “7,000 oaks”: “I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time. The oak is especially so because it is a slowly growing tree with a kind of really solid heartwood. It has always been a form of sculpture, a symbol for this planet.”

Joseph Beuys, perhaps more than any other artist of his generation, was responsible for bringing Germany out of cultural isolation in the aftermath of the war. Messages of healing and transformation were encoded into his entire life’s work, over half a century later the world is no less in need of them. ◊

Haiku Review was started by renowned Sydney-based visual artist and writer Ruark Lewis back in the dawn of electronic journals.