Beuys Will Be Beuys

Joseph Beuys, one of the most unique figures in 20th century art, celebrated a birthday last Saturday, May 12th. Born in 1921, Beuys played an instrumental role in the development of performance art as we know it today. For that, he’s both an intriguing and an exasperating artist, depending on your point of view. His dedication to teaching and fostering young artists in his native Germany remains unquestioned. (An image of Beuys teaching in his trademark felt hat appears above.)

Beuys lectures were performance art all by themselves. Above is an image of a blackboard on which Beuys diagrammed the serpentine workings of his mind. This board itself now appears at the MoMA as Untitled (Sun State). Everything Beuys did or touched became art in the self-constructed persona he forged.

Beuys fought in the German Luftwaffe in World War II until his bomber was shot down in the Crimea in 1944. In reality, Beuys received care in a German hospital, but in his self-constructed mythos, this crash and his recovery became the origin of his new artist persona. Beuys claimed that Tartar villagers found his wrecked plane and pulled him out, barely alive. These villagers then covered his body in lard and felt for warmth, nursing him back to health.

(The indie comic Cat and Girl pokes fun at Beuys’ creation myth while describing their own creation in flashback. Cat and Girl’s plane crashes into a frozen wasteland, where they are rescued by Eskimo-looking locals. “Lovely lard,” says an appreciative, recovered Cat. “That’s not what happened at all,” argues the Girl. A Zombie Joseph Beuys enters the final panel to say, “Who are you to question Zombie Joseph Beuys?” Zombie Joseph Beuys appears in many Cat and Girl strips, and even received their endorsement for President.)

Beuys opened many doors for the weird and bizarre in performance art. In his How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (above), Beuys walked around a gallery, his face lathered with honey and gold leaf, while carrying a dead hare, to whom he would whisper explanations of the drawings. Poking fun at both critics and the gallery “experience,” Beuys ruffled feathers but at the same time brought fresh air into the sometimes stuffy world of exhibits.

In a move that Suzi Gablik would praise as “reconstructive postmodern practice,” Beuys initiated the 7,000 Oaks project in Kassel, Germany in 1982, which aimed at ultimately planting 7,000 oak trees worldwide, each with an accompanying stone column.

Some critics attack Beuys with charges of glossing over his and Germany’s Nazi past by creating his personal mythos of lard and felt, but I think that Beuys simply took the normal self-mythologizing of the artist to an extreme. As the art critic Harold Rosenberg said, “Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself. Self-transformation and the transformation of others have constituted the radical interest of our century, whether in painting, psychiatry, or political action.” This “radical interest” of Beuys’ 20th century forced him to create a new self in the name of his new art.

Reenchanting

In one of those serendipitous chains of events, my friend Dave pointed me towards artist Bo Bartlett’s Spring 2007 message, which mentioned a book by Suzi Gablik called The Reenchantment of Art. Gablik’s book is from 1991, but its “sustained meditation” on restoring “to our culture its sense of aliveness, possibility and magic” remains as relevant today as ever.

Gablik sees the postmodern “endgame” position of deconstruction as backing the art world into a corner. A true avant-garde art movement cannot exist because the industrialization of culture blocks any true revolution, permitting only the illusion of change as long as the status quo remains intact. Modernism has “exalted the complete autonomy of art, and the gesture of severing bonds with society,” resulting in an atomized society of isolated individuals. “The art industry has become not only a very effective protector of the status quo,” Gablik believes, “but also an active contributor to the deforming effects of a whole cultural pathology. The mechanism doesn’t require that art do much, just reproduce the economic will-to-power of the dominator system.”

Back when I was pursuing an MA in English Literature, I felt this same frustration with deconstructive philosophies for approaching art, literature, and culture. On one hand, breaking apart old texts and finding the lost traces of other narratives than the main narrative of the “dominator system” was fascinating. Everything old could be new again. Unfortunately, the deconstructing never seemed to stop. Every time I hoped to build something anew, a new meaning, the conventional wisdom of the academy was that meaning was passé, so premodern. Call me old fashioned, but I wondered what the point of all of it was if not to have some meaning, some relevance to life right here and right now? Why ask questions and never want answers?

Gablik calls for “reconstructive postmodern practice” that implements “an aesthetics of interconnectedness, social responsibility, and ecological attunement.” At this point, she may get a little too New Age-y for some, but I think her overcorrection is necessary for the overabundance of wrongs modern society has inflicted on humanity and the ecology. Quoting Jungian psychologist Robert A. Johnson on the human need for reverence, Gablik tries to restore that sense of reverence, if not in God than in nature or perhaps even art. As someone who bows before the altar of art (believing it to be just one of the altars of God), I heartily agree.

One of the interesting artists Gablik posits as an example of “reconstructive postmodern practice” is Andy Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy goes out in nature and creates artwork with found natural objects such as twigs, leaves, icicles, etc., and then photographs them before the wind, rain, sun, etc., reclaim them. (A beautiful arrangement by Goldsworthy of found leaves is above.)

“Although it may seem as if the individual in today’s world has little power,” Gablik finally offers, “the truth is that only we have the power to transform our situation: there is no one else” [emphasis in original]. And with that statement, on art and on so much else, I also heartily agree.

[BTW, there is a great documentary on Andy Goldsworthy titled Rivers and Tides that shows his beautiful, ephemeral art in action.]