Joseph Beuys and The Body

I chose to write this essay on the work of Joseph Beuys in order to comprehend his extremely diverse output, to know why he used such odd drawing materials (a list which famously includes such things as honey and hare’s blood), to investigate the interpretations of his ‘actions’ or performance pieces, and to understand his simple but oddly eerie sculptural objects. I recognise what Lothar Schirmer is referring to (in the Editor’s introduction to ‘The Essential Joseph Beuys’ by Alain Borer) when he speaks of trying to “grapple with this strangely disquieting aesthetic phenomenon”[1].

Beuys’ work deals with notions of his own body (he was seriously injured several times in the Second World War) and grander concepts of a united ‘body’ of people through his Theory of Social Sculpture. Through his Actions he also used his own body directly as an artistic tool, as well as the bodies of dead and live animals, including bees (in the Queen Bee series), a live coyote (in Coyote, 1974) and a dead hare (in How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965). The latter two were actions in which Beuys himself also appeared.

According to Caroline Tisdall, who was a great personal friend of Beuys and followed him closely throughout his life, “Beuys cared very much about the damage he sustained to his face and head during the Second World War, particularly the injuries suffered when the Stucka plane in which he was the radio operator was shot down over the Crimea”[2]. According to the legend, Beuys was rescued by the Tartars, a nomadic tribe, who had a profound effect on him and the work he was to make for the rest of his life. “Their intervention with fat and felt, to save him from his burns”, says Tisdall, “led to his recognition of the healing properties of such materials and their potential as revolutionary materials in sculpture”[3]. The Tartars became good friends of Beuys as he recovered, and even asked him to join their tribe. Though he declined, during his short stay with them before he was rescued they taught him about their use of fat and felt, and left with him some of their “ritualistic respect for the healing potential of materials”[4]. The War continued for Beuys and, at the end of it, he spent 9 months in a British prisoner-of-war camp. “The effect of these years was shattering and complex, and was ultimately the reason for his decision that there were things to be said and done which could be said and done only through art”[5].

The war was important for Beuys, not just because it facilitated his experiencing of new materials. The plane crash incident serves to shed light on Beuys’ perceptions about his own body, the fine line between life and death, the physicality of bodily experience and the ethereality of spiritual perception and thought.

In ‘How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare’, Beuys cradled a dead hare lovingly in his arms for three hours, walking it around and showing his drawings to it whilst explaining them to it in an inaudible whisper. The hare symbolises birth for Beuys because it is born and burrows underground, later to emerge from the earth[6]. The effect of Beuys’ body in the action is terribly important, the presence of a human being is difficult to ignore, especially as his head was covered in honey and gold leaf. The reaction would be far more different if Beuys had had his hare for example, reading about art from a book. The pictures on the walls, surrounding Beuys and the hare, are impossible to see all at once, and we realise that this is not so much about Beuys and a hare as it is about our own bodies, how we physically find ourselves in the world and how we relate to it. The problem of understanding and thus also of explaining is relevant to everyone.

In black and white, the harsh contrast of photographs of Beuys with his head covered in honey and gold leaf during the action are evocative of severe facial disfigurement reminiscent of Henry Tonks’ ‘Studies of Facial Wounds’ from the First World War. “By putting honey on my head I am clearly doing something involved with thinking”[7], Beuys said. The image of the man made mute by his thinking, his over-rationalisation, is deeply unsettling. Perhaps this serves to emphasise Beuys’ opinion that western society is too rational. Beuys claimed he preferred to explain pictures to a dead hare than to other people. He said, “A Hare comprehends more than many human beings with their stubborn rationalism ...I told him that he needed only to scan the picture to understand what is really important about it”[8].

In this respect, Beuys’ work is similar to his contemporary Nam June Paik’s ‘Zen for Head’ of 1962, in which Paik dips his head into a large bowl of ink and tomato juice and uses it to paint a line down a long sheet of paper. “Paik parodies the notion of meditative art-making by physically enacting a painting gesture using the body as a tool rather than the repository of mental and spiritual processes.”[9] The head is relieved of its duty as seat of rational analysis and becomes a tool no more or less worthy than say, a hand. The overly-intellectual mind is allowed to become integrated once more with the body, feeling and doing as worthy as thinking.

This, I imagine, was the sort of mind Beuys was attempting to communicate with when talking to a dead hare; the pure mind, unaffected by concerns about ‘correct interpretation’. This mind is somewhere within everyone. “Everyone is an artist”[10] according to Beuys, but this becomes muddied by conformity, social norms and conventions. Beuys was uninterested in doing things in ‘the proper way’, something he demonstrated by his proposal to admit any student that he felt would benefit from his tuition to the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf at which he was Professor of Sculpture. He was dismissed and forcibly ejected from the building in October 1972.

Beuys and Paik had a mutual connection through ‘Fluxus’, an international movement, “based on an absolute connection between art and life”[11]. “Ideally a balance should be achieved though the overriding tendency today is towards the intellectual pole. Balance, reintegration and flexible flow between the areas of thinking, feeling and will, all of which are essential, are the objective of the Theory [of Social Sculpture]”[12]. The Theory of Social Sculpture was Beuys’ attempt to formalise his feeling that everyone was an artist, and society as a whole was the ‘work’. Benjamin Buchlot, who wrote a savagely critical essay entitled ‘Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol’ described Beuys’ attempts to fuse the disciplines of art, sciences and politics as “simple-minded utopian drivel”[13]. This seems a little harsh, though Beuys in his turn did say that a hare running from one corner of a room to another “can achieve more for the political development of the world than a human being”[14].

If Beuys’ political theories did not become universally accepted, at least the photos of How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare became, according to Caroline Tisdall, some of “the most resonant images of the 1960s. This is in part a testimony to the skill of Beuys’ most constant photographer, Ute Klophaus”[15]. The fact that much of Beuys' work is documented through photography is important to preserve his actions for future audiences, many of whom, including myself, could not have seen the work first hand. In the case of ’How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare’, the audience was not allowed into the gallery. A small window was the only way of seeing directly. A screen reproduced the work to the outside making the reproduction of Beuys' work quite necessary. The photographs that come out of the actions do more than just document the event.

“What is striking though is that merely looking at the photos conveys something of the delight in malleability of this born sculptor who ... transformed himself into a sculpture whose forms change continually”[16]. The photographs are powerful, and we are drawn into them. The photographs are not secondary to the action, they exist in themselves and serve to emphasise the action. In their perpetuation of Beuys' life they inevitably draw attention to death and continue the theme of the piece. In them, Beuys' hare is born and dies again and again.

‘Fat Chair’ (1964) is much more about the physicality of the human body. To Beuys, fat as a material could be considered before form was considered, very much like the upside down-ness of Georg Baselitz’s paintings and drawings is apparent before their subject matter is. Fat, like felt, was a material that appealed to Beuys because it was a composite with no internal structure. In ‘Fat Chair’, Beuys placed fat with its “chaotic organic energy”[17], symbolising warmth, in the cold, rigid, man-made form of a right-angle. This form, which represented the coexistence of instinct and intellect was placed in the right-angle of a chair between seat and back. The fat also occupies space on the chair that would be filled with our digestive and excretive organs if we were sitting on it. There is a further pun in German, the word for chair being like both senses of the English word ‘stool’. Beuys has reduced the body to a symbolic presence within the work.

But the symbolism which meant so much for Beuys was not universal. Although he did not want us to rationalise his work, he also did not intend his pieces to be appraised aesthetically, “An object of this kind [his Felt Piano] is to be understood as a stimulus for discussion and should in no way be taken as a product of aesthetics”[18], he demanded. Buchloch wrote “the more an aesthetic decision, a formal or material procedure, is removed from its functional historical context – which, in the system of art, is first of all the aesthetic discourse itself – the more the work will attract other meanings that may be assigned to it”[19]. The myth of Beuys’ crash landing and meeting with the Tartars, whether it was true or not, surrounded his work and imbued in it meaning attached to the fat and the felt. Buchloch argues that Beuys encouraged such interpretations, knowing his work seemed more successful as a result. Taken without the attached narrative such objects lose their symbolism.

Whether or not this is the case, one feels not only that maybe Beuys was embarrassed by his war injuries, but also that he held a rather conservative uncomfortable attitude towards his own body and bodily function. Buchloch refers to “Beuys’ obsession with fat, wax, felt and a particularly obvious kind of brown paint”[20], and also adds that he regards Fat Chair as “an outspoken affirmation of [his] compulsive inclinations”[21]. In fact, Buchloch goes further and argues that “Beuys’ sculptures could just as easily be read in psychoanalytic terms, and perhaps more convincingly so”[22].

In the case of Beuys the boundary between art and life was very fine. One young sculptor remarked how, as Beuys became ill with exhaustion towards the end of his life, a deathly skull emerged out of his face “like a sculpture”[23]. We cannot say whether the life which informed so much of his art was a reality or a concoction. “It’s a question again of Which Reality?”[24], Beuys himself said, when lamenting a deficit of imagination in society as a whole. One thing seems quite apparent though: Beuys’ pieces are not just about the body, but informed also by his own compulsive reaction to his own body, the physicality of existence, and the many injuries he suffered during his life.

Bibliography

The Felt Hat, Joseph Beuys, A Life Told, Lucrezia De Domizio Durini, Charta, 1997

Joseph Beuys, Caroline Tisdall, Thames and Hudson, 1996

The Essential Joseph Beuys, Alain Borer, Thames and Hudson, 1996

Art and Illusion, Ernst Gombrich, Phaidon, 2002

Flesh and Stone: The Body and City in Western Civilisation, Richard Sennett, Faber, 1994

In Memoriam, Joseph Beuys: Obituaries, Essays, Speeches, Joseph Beuys ... [et al; translation, Timothy Nevill], Inter Nationes, 1986

Joseph Beuys, Caroline Tisdall, Anthony D’Offay, 1980

An Interview with Joseph Beuys, Willoughby Sharp, Art Forum, December 1969

Joseph Beuys: We Go This Way, Caroline Tisdall, Violette Editions, 1998

Languages of Art, Nelson Goodman, Hackett Publishing Company Inc, 1976

The Artist’s Body, Tracey Warr, Amelia Jones, Phaidon, 2000

Spectacular Bodies, Martin Kemp & Marina Wallace, Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2000

Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry, Benjamin Buchloh, The MIT Press, 2000

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[1] Lothar Schirmer, The Essential Joseph Beuys, Alain Borer, p.9

[2] Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys: We Go This Way, p.31

[3] Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys: We Go This Way, p.31

[4] Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, (Anthony d’Offay) p.2

[5] Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, (Anthony d’Offay) p.2

[6] Lucrezia Durini, Joseph Beuys: A Life Told, p.33

[7] Lucrezia Durini, Joseph Beuys: A Life Told, p.33

[8] Amelia Jones, The Artist’s Body, p.77

[9] Amelia Jones, The Artist’s Body, p.60

[10] Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys (Thames & Hudson), p.7

[11] Lucrezia Durini, Joseph Beuys: A Life Told, p.26

[12] Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys (Thames & Hudson), p.72

[13] Benjamin Buchloch, Neo-Avantguarde and Culture Industry, p.43

[14] Joseph Beuys, An Interview with Joseph Beuys, p.43

[15] Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys (Thames & Hudson), p.101

[16] Timothy Nevill, In Memoriam Joseph Beuys, p.7

[17] Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys: We Go This Way, p.360

[18] Lucrezia Durini, Joseph Beuys: A Life Told, p.35

[19] Benjamin Buchloch, Neo-Avantguarde and Culture Industry, p.53

[20] Benjamin Buchloch, Neo-Avantguarde and Culture Industry, p.48

[21] Benjamin Buchloch, Neo-Avantguarde and Culture Industry, p.49

[22] Benjamin Buchloch, Neo-Avantguarde and Culture Industry, p.48

[23] Timothy Nevill, In Memoriam Joseph Beuys, p.5

[24] Amelia Jones, The Artist’s Body, p.203