Archive for Friday, August 24, 2001

Art Reviews
By Leah Ollman
August 24, 2001 in print edition F-22

Those who worship at the altar of Joseph Beuys will find a rich reliquary in Griffin Contemporary
these days. Those who aren’t disciples or aren’t aware of Beuys’ significance in allying the
forces of art and social reform will have a tough time being won over by the understated Beuys
ephemera on view.

“Whenever anyone sees my things, then I myself appear to him,” Beuys once said, playing into
his status as charismatic guru, prophet and shaman. For all of the star power he commanded,
however, the German-born Beuys (1921-1986) advocated an art–and a life–based on collabora-
tion and fraternity, modeled after socialism and its symbol, the beehive. He preached a gospel
of healing, both personal and societal, that was rooted in his revelatory World War II sur-
vival experience.

Piloting a dive bomber, Beuys crashed when his plane was hit by enemy fire and downed in a
blizzard. Nomadic Tartars brought him, unconscious, into their tents, where they salved his
wounds in animal fat, wrapped him in felt and nursed him back to health. Warmth and healing
returned as core ideas in his art, and felt, fat and honey all came to represent for him the
“warmth principle.” At Griffin, there’s a man’s suit sewn of thick gray felt and a postcard reading
(in German), “Give me honey.”

After the war, Beuys attended the State Academy of Art in Dusseldorf, where he taught from
1961 until 1972, when he was dismissed by an administration that regarded him as a false pro-
phet–far too revolutionary and democratic for the institution’s sake. He wanted to make a free
university of the school and ban the practice of admitting students based on the quality of
their portfolios.
Art, he felt, should be within everyone’s means. Creativity is a capacity latent in all but in need
of cultivation, and that cultivation promises the betterment of the species. At stake for Beuys
was no less than the survival of spiritual values in a material age.

Thought, action and art were synonymous in Beuys’ view, and through the various manifesta-
tions of his ideas–performance, political action and the creation of objects–he did as much as
Duchamp to redefine what constitutes a work of art. His work embodies a basic, circular logic:
Life generates art, art transforms life. The postcards, imprinted shopping bags and silk-screened
chalkboards here are all multiples that Beuys editioned in large numbers to help spread
the word.

This show, guest-curated by Hamburg-based art historian Beatrice Foessel for the L.A. Interna-
tional Biennial, preaches to the converted, but with a bit of effort, even new initiates can access
Beuys’ message. It’s a message that he didn’t originate, but that traces back to centuries-old
uses of art as a means of evolutionary and revolutionary change. Or, as Beuys might put it, as
the means toward social salvation.

Griffin Contemporary, 55 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 578-2280, through Sept. 1. Closed Sun-
days and Mondays.
Arts Publications

Very mixed media: Tate Modern has

presented Joseph Beuys with clarity,
but, asks Samson Spanier, how can
any museum exhibit an artist whose
work includes a 7000-tree forest?
Apollo , April, 2005 by Samson Spanier
Joseph Beuys was the first artist to confont the silence, anger and denial that pervaded
Germany after World War II, and the materials he required were fittingly unprecedented.
Show Your Wound (1974/75) is an arrangement of hospital beds, blackboards, pitchforks
and other items, originally staged in a disused underground passage in Munich. The hospi-
tal beds have boxes underneath them, and one can only assume that whatever life was once
here has dripped into the boxes. There are two of each object in the room, all arranged side
by side. This redundancy adds to the unease. The title of this work is an appeal to Germans
to speak of the past. Germany is doubled--into East and West--a wounding that fits the
country's bereavement for its lost innocence and lost citizens. Such confrontations with the
past directly inspired Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke and Jorg Immendorff. Beuys is generally
agreed to be the most influential German artist since the generation of Dix, so this exhibi-
tion at Tate is very welcome.

Beuys's favourite materials are fat, felt and himself. They are united in his claim that when,
as a Nazi pilot, he was shot down over the Crimea, nomadic Tartars rescued him by covering
him in the two substances. This self-created myth (eventually disproved) allowed Beuys to
create metaphors of sickness but also of healing and redemption, in a language alien to the
art gallery.

The fluidity of fat (is it solid or liquid?) and the warmth of felt are symbols for Beuys of a
quasireligious energetic movement that might be spread to all people in an attempt to enli-
ven them politically and creatively. The most important locus of energy was himself, and
Beuys performed much performance art or Atkionnen to pass on this energy. I Like America
and America Likes Me is a film recording of Beuys living with a coyote in New York for
three days, intended to suggest that he prefered to cohabit with animals rather than Ameri-
can citizens during the Vietnam War.

The performances exist now as films, photographs, blackboards on which he wrote notes,
and as The performances exist now as films, photographs, blackboards on which he wrote
notes, and as installations. Beuys' oeuvre is comprised also of fresh installations or 'envi-
ronments', and 'vitrines', museum-style display cases that contain smaller versions.
All these types of art--which Beuys considered to be sculpture--are on view at Tate. Beuys's
sense of moving energy is cleverly imparted by a central room full of vitrines, with three
doorways that lead to other rooms; the visitor circulates around with hearty randomness.

Tate is experienced at making an exhibition flow well, but Beuys is an especially difficult art-
ist to display. The site-specific quality of Show Your Wound is rightly pointed out in the ex-
hibition pamphlet, for it requires an imaginative leap on the visitor's part. The ravishing
view of St Paul's Cathedral from the window a few paces away, after all, confounds the sense
of a dingy truth lurking in the vitals of Germany.

A display of Beuys's work is trickier still because the artists's installations were fluid, accre-
tive and subject to change. Tram Stop (1976), for instance, was a totemic structure of tram
tracks and a cannon out of which poked a cherub's head, that was erected in the Nazi-era
German pavilion at the Venice Biennale; but once it was acquired by a museum, Beuys re-
placed the cherub with a screaming head and dismembered the parts, which currently lie
scattered at Tate. Beuys introduced fragmentation in the absence of a Nazi framework. It is
in the context of fluidity that Sean Rainbird describes in a conscientious and thought-
provoking catalogue essay The End of the Twentieth Century (1983-85), a collection of ba-
salt stones with moderate sculpting, which had to be arranged by Tate without any instruc-
tions from Beuys.

This conscience is admirable, but it does not solve all a curator's problems. Beuys's sense of
fluidity was part of an expanded concept of sculpture in which he attempted to permeate all
of life with his art. At the German art festival 'Documenta' in 1982, he instigated the plant-
ing of 7000 oak trees in an attempt to heal the landscape. He advocated, moreover, 'social
sculpture', his own term for the art form of improving society itself. While a teacher of
sculpture at the Dusseldorf Academy of Art, for instance, he invited rejected applicants to
occupy the building in the name of open education. How can a museum accurately evoke
this? Tate is rightly showing footage of Beuys lecturing, but it is not enough. A photograph
of 7000 Oaks would be welcome, but I also missed interviews with students, followers and
artists--remnants of 'social sculpture' that Beuys would have taken seriously.

'Joseph Beuys' was at the Menil Collection, Houston, from 8 October 2004 to 2 January
2005. It opened at Tare Modern on 4 February and continues until 2 May. The catalogue, by
Mark Rosenthal and Sean Rainbird, is published by the museums, ISBN 1 854 37585 7,
24.99 [pounds sterling].

COPYRIGHT 2005 Apollo Magazine Ltd.

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