 JOSEPH BEUYSJOSEPH BEUYS
JOSEPH BEUYS
JOSEPH BEUYS
JOSEPH BEUYS
Lucrezia De Domizio Durini, one of the world’s foremost scholars of the artist’s thought and work, offers a close study of the poetic and the achievement of an undisputed master of the twentieth century: Joseph Beuys.
The images come from the De Domizio Durini historical archives Joseph Beuys Sculptor of forms Sculptor of souls Lucrezia De Domizio Durini. |
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By Lucrezia De Domizio Durini
In recent times, there has been a spate of information that newspapers and magazines spread in the international cultural circles almost exclusively as a function of the market.
They speak of the high prices fetched by his works (everyday objects like Sled, Felt Suit, Wine, Spade, Oil, Hoe) which auctions in London or New York present to the world business scene.
We often read articles by uninformed people who surround Beuys’ thought and work with confusion and prejudice.
Perhaps it is just as well at this point to ask: “Who is Joseph Beuys?”
Joseph Beuys is the figure whose life and works most fully represent the centrifugal and anti-traditional energy that contemporary art has produced in recent decades.
He is a figure atypical of artistic currents.
In vain efforts have been made to lodge him among the minimalists or Arte Povera, first with the Performance artists, and then with the conceptual artists. Beuys was able to invest himself with art and art with himself.
This means much more than the never dormant idea of the unity between art and life.
By putting himself into the work of art, Beuys intended to stress the anthropological power of all art.
The crisis of contemporary man, the loss of identity, are the principal themes that engaged the whole life of the man and the artist Joseph Beuys.
In this sense, the German teacher was involved in politics, economics, agriculture, ecology and all those issues that empower the individual.
I have always considered Beuys as a “diamond.”
A diamond has many facets.
Each facet of transparency makes it visible to others, even in its compactness and unity.
So to understand Beuys’s work and be able to judge it, it is absolutely necessary not to limit it in formal terms but consider it in depth and its entirety, analyzing the complexity of its articulations, the concern for society and all its implications, so as to understand the true reasons for his actions and the purpose of his art.
Beuys saw creativity as closely associated with the nature of all humanity, inseparable from the profound connotations of freedom.
Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld, West Germany, on May 12, 1921, and died prematurely in Düsseldorf on January 23, 1986.
He spent his childhood at Kleve, a small town on the left bank of the Lower Rhine, a plain rich in wetlands.
This environment exerted a notable influence on the artist, as did his experiences of study and education, above all the natural sciences.
But the young Beuys did not neglect other areas of culture: art, to which he devoted himself by frequenting the studio of the sculptor Achilles Moortgat in Kleve; literature and philosophy, from Romanticism to Knut Hamsun and from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche.
He developed an interest in Nordic folklore and mythology, as a reaction to his one-sidedly humanistic education.
He gained stimulus from music, especially Wagner and Satie.
The dispute between classical and Romantic literature was particularly important in Beuys’ studies.
He read and studied authors such as Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Schelling and Novalis, and also took an interest in the work of Edward Munch and Scandinavian literature in its entirety.
His greatest personal motivation was to work in social welfare.
In 1940 he completed his studies at the high school in Kleve and decided to enroll in medical school, specializing in pediatrics.
The war changed his plans.
He enlisted in the Luftwaffe as a dive bomber pilot.
He was serving on the eastern front in 1943 when his Stuka crash-landed in a snowstorm on a desolate plain in Crimea.
A tribe of Tartars found him buried, half-frozen and with serious head injuries.
They smeared him in fat and wrapped him in felt.
This idea of generating warmth with the materials of nature is a recurrent element in his work.
After the war, Beuys found himself profoundly altered in body and spirit.
In 1947 he enrolled at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, graduating in 1951.
As always, he did not restrict his work to the narrow horizons of the art world.
In this period he was deeply interested in the thought of Rudolph Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, which he was always to draw on in the future.
In 1961 he was appointed professor of monumental sculpture at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie.
In the early seventies he developed a close relationship with the founder of Fluxus, the American George Maciunas, and took part in a number of the group’s public exhibitions.
Notable among other members of the Fluxus project were Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, John Cage, Daniel Spoerri, Charlotte Moorman, Robert Filliou and Bazon Brock.
With Fluxus, Beuys shared the idea of art as an instrument of awareness.
He believed art was everywhere and for everyone.
At the same time he began to exhibit on his own, presenting actions, sculptures and drawings.
Some noteworthy titles, now famous, were How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), Eurasia and Homogeneous Infiltration for Piano (1966), Vakuum Masse (1968), I Want to See My Mountains (1971).
All this serves to suggest his artistic identity, which can never be fully assimilated to clearly defined and established movements.
In the second half of the sixties, he moved closer to the most distinctive social and political aspects produced by the culture of the period.
In 1967 he founded the Student Party; in 1971 the Organization for Direct Democracy through Referendums and in 1974, together with Heinrich Böll, he founded the Free International University.
Within the FIU, in the late seventies and early eighties, Beuys was interested in the nascent Green movement, which presented itself as a non-ideological cross-party force.
Naturally the movement was mainly concerned with environmental and ecological problems, hence the defense of nature which characterized Beuys’ last years.
When the movement turned into a party it lost the qualities of a spontaneous and independent social force and Beuys soon resigned his membership.
Symbolic materials In all Beuys’ work there is a strong symbolic connotation which is partly combined with a scientific interest in the experimental sense and partly flows into the intuitive and creative area of mankind.
One needs only think of his clothing: the hat, a sapiential and initiatory symbol; the “fisher of souls” jacket, alluding to the figure of the shaman and Christ, the fragment of hare skin on his chest, a simile that established the principle of movement and of metempsychosis; the jeans as the sign of a revolution in dress; boots as an emblem of the dynamism of the traveler.
In this respect, Beuys’ symbolic materials covered a very broad range.
I have described Beuys as the most emblematic twentieth-century sculptor: sculptor of forms, sculptor of souls.
For formal sculptures Beuys uses all those materials that I call visible and which metaphorically indicate power, heat (copper, felt, grease, oil, stone, wine…), while to create his social sculpture – his Living Sculpture – he used invisible materials (words, gestures, intuition, smells, noises, sounds, behavior and even the mythology of his own person) so as to implement a process of close collaboration between different people, always out of respect for human freedom and creativity.
We can therefore understand that the materials used for his works, actions and discussions will have no connection with those used in Arte Povera or American Minimalist art.
They go beyond the purely representative process and interpret the flow of human energy in a natural and primitive way; the flow of life and death, of humanity and the social dimension of art.
Joseph Beuys Olivestone Stone and oil.
The triumph of life over death Beuys’ sculptural work Olivestone, made of stone and oil, belongs to the Defense of Nature project.
Stone is an important material in Beuys’ work, especially in his late period, when he worked on three important projects: 7000 Eichen in Kassel (7000 Oak Trees in Kassel) of 1982 (with a basalt pillar), Das Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts of 1983 (The End of the Twentieth Century) and Olivestone, 1984.
Stone, inorganic and crystalline, is the material that he sees above all as representing the poles of form, reason, order and death, a sedimentation opposed to the aspect of chaos, warmth and life.
The distinctive quality of Beuys’ work in stone lies in the way he supersedes the dualities of cold-heat, reason-intuition and death-life.
By animating the stones, in themselves dead, Beuys endows them with life. Note the difference between the stone in Olivestone and the basalt pillar in the 7000 Oak Trees in Kassel.
While the pillar remains unchanged compared to the organic growth of the trees, in Olivestone the continuous addition of oil corrodes the ancient stone.
So in this work the principle of heat and energy triumph over coldness and lifelessness.
The triumph of life over death.
Olivestone is a work fully consistent with the artistic approach and the research he performed in his last creative period in a small village in Abruzzo called Bolognano, with only three hundred inhabitants.
Here the German master worked in the last fifteen years of his life on the Defense of Nature project.
At Bolognano Beuys created his famous Piantagione Paradise.
On May 13, 1984 he received the honorary citizenship of the town and, in front of his studio, he planted the First Oak in Italy in memory of the 7000 Eichen in Kassel.
Olivestone is an archetypal sculpture originally made of stone and oil.
However, on closer inspection it reveals a singular feature that can easily be ascribed to the geography of its conception.
Its constituent elements, stone and oil, are the perfect interpreters of this.
The ancient stone comes from the quarries of Lettomanoppello, a village in the province of Pescara.
It is a sandstone, and Beuys found it in Palazzo Durini carved in the form of tanks, three centuries old, which were used for decanting the oil from the estate of the Baron Durini of Bolognano.
Beuys chose five of these tanks, like the five fingers of the hand, to represent the continents of the planet and carved five new rectangular slabs out of the same sandstone which, like lids, can be set in the four sides of the containers, leaving a gap of one centimeter.
Finally he filled the tanks with olive oil, which, by the system of communicating vessels, united the old troughs and the new stone of the rectangular panels, creating a mirror surface.
The stone is nurtured with oil, just as the earth, watered by the rain, enables the olive tree to grow.
The elements in Olivestone create an atypical and chronologically paradoxical communication: the five ancient stone basins symbolically refer to the past, while the rectangular stone of the new represent the present.
The oil passing between past and present acts like the future.
The reunification of past and present can only be achieved through the action of the oil, a repeated action that belongs to the future.
The liquid is continuously added to the new stone just as happens when the soil is irrigated to grow the trees.
This is obvious to the attentive viewer.
On approaching the tanks and gazing down at them the viewer will be struck by a picture that emerges in the indefinitely oily and translucent surface.
The viewer sees himself/herself.
But not as in a mirror, which is always an artificial medium devised for this very purpose, but as a natural reservoir, a pool of water hidden in the bushes, as in the womb of nature.
The reflective surface of the oil that fills the stone tank assumes the function of a lens by its pearly transparency.
The vision pierces beyond the oozy threshold and is reached by the message from beyond the basin, almost at the limit of the sacred.
For our part we cannot separate the idea of the sarcophagus from the image of the basin.
Olivestone – the five stone basins – as we have said, also acts on the formal plane.
The parallelepiped of the ancient baths has an aesthetic of great value and beauty.
On the tactile level the stone itself is a choice material, being the most immediate feature of the work that makes the form visible.
It is the arché for the artist, through which he sees not one of the many products of the earth but the earth itself.
Is the stone made of earth or is the earth made of stone?
On May 13, 2011, at the Zurich Kunsthaus, starting from Olivestone, a royal retrospective will retrace the whole historical procedure of Defense of Nature, and once again it is Beuys’ alchemical stone that leads us to state that Olivestone is a work that foreshadows a possible better future: the future of Humanity and Nature.
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