Joseph Beuys
I.
I was already dead when I got on the plane. I was already dead when I was in the air, already dead when the shots came and my plane fell into that white expanse, when the horizon tumbled into the ground below. I was dead and I died again and then they found me. They pulled my body away and they knew what to do. They found the wounds on my body and they dressed them with thick smears of fat from their animals and I was still dead. They wrapped my body in wool felt slick with lanolin, and the fat was under the wool again just as it had been when these things were still part of the sheep body, and I was still dead.
fig. 1, Fat Chair (1963)
A wooden chair with four legs, two spindles connecting the front legs to the rear legs which taper at the bottom, a slightly curved wooden top rail with a length of thick wire not unlike a coat-hanger looped around it and knotted. The marks of use cover the chair, and the wood is dark where backs and thighs and the dirt of various floors have rubbed against it. An inch or two below the top rail is the crest of a wedge of fat, which slopes forward to the edge of the seat. The fat is yellow, and as time passes it will darken from pale yolk to ochre. The slant of the wedge is smoother than its rough-hewn sides, but it bears fragmented impressions of the artist's hands. While the fat grows darker, it will also shrink. Even inside a glass case, moisture will escape, and the fat will flatten and wither. The artist witnesses the fat in all its forms: liquid, soft, malleable, and hardened past the point of obeying his hands. The fat has seeped into the grain of the wood, adhered to the dirt of the life the chair left. These simple elements translated through the artist's actions will slowly find their way back to the natural world. The artist anticipates this decay.
II.
I would like to begin with the wound. The wound that occurred with the pain of being born, and again with the pain of being re-born. With each birth I am returned from death and it is the rip that wounds. This wound is not on my body but at times my body can feel it. The sensation brings me to an animal urgency, an emergency, an emergence. A wound is caused by a trauma and it is this trauma that I am inevitable to return to and return from.
fig. 2, The Chief: Fluxus Chant (1964)
The artist is the only one allowed in the gallery room. The artist has installed patches of margarine and fat in the room’s corners. A copper rod is propped against one wall. A speaker leans against the opposite wall next to its puddle of cable. The cable makes a line into the felt blanket the artist has rolled himself in where he holds a microphone. A dead hare lies at each end of the hidden artist. For eight hours there is no movement in the room. The artist is a sculpture. He uses the microphone to project the sounds a stag makes, which come out of his mouth as “öö.” He amplifies his heartbeats. The sounds feel dark brown. The artist thinks about his sounds filling the room and soaking into the corners, about these primary, primal noises being transferred by the microphone and the cable and the speaker and saturating the air again. He thinks he may be suffocating inside the blanket. He thinks this feeling would be worse if he were forming words. He concentrates on the heat he generates and thinks of the heat seeping into the fat corners with the sound and makes the sounds more intensely when he feels a pulse of panic. His sounds are deep and hoarse and the only evidence that something alive is in the room. When the artist feels the ceremony is over, he unfurls himself from the felt blanket, gathers the hares, and leaves the room.
III.
I woke up and the fat and the felt and my body were the only things I knew. It smelled animal, wet, bloody. It was hard to decipher my skin from the felt. It was hard to tell what smells were coming out of me and what smells were pressing against me. These earthy smells rooted themselves in my memory, a humus made of concepts, loamy with intentions.
fig. 3, Evolution (1965)
On the artist’s gray studio floor, a temporary installation. The artist has arranged four skulls, pointing their profiles toward a narrow corner of their iron-mesh enclosure. The skulls once belonged to two birds, one fish, and one ruminant mammal. Two sturdy, graceful horns point out and behind the skull of the ruminant mammal. One of the bird’s skull displays a beak narrower, more delicate than the one behind it. The skull of the fish leads into a small trail of spinous bones. Extending from these four skulls, the artist has drawn approximations of the animals’ bodies in lines of white chalk. The fish is long and sharp-finned; the bird with the narrower beak has shorter legs than the one behind it; the ruminant mammal has small, pointed hooves. Inside the outlines of the bodies, the artist has made marks resembling the animals’ organ structures. The chalk feels bone-like in the artist’s hand, feels at once transitory and ancient as the skulls do. The artist draws the bodies to scale, his studio houses these creatures for the moment. The artist thinks of cave paintings, thinks about holding these animal bodies in his hands. In time, the drawings are brushed away and smeared and spilled on, and the skulls continue to live as objects in other situations.
IV.
It was a miracle that there was felt and fat wrapped around me and it was a miracle that there was air inside me and inside this bundle of me, a miracle that I could breathe even though I thought I was suffocating, even though I thought my death was being prolonged, even though the heat produced between my body and the fat and the felt made the breath heavy, made it feel like the fat and the felt were being pulled into my lungs, the air made its way through my stifling, and this was the third miracle of my death.
fig. 4, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965)
The artist in his uniform khaki vest lined with pockets, in the closed gallery, lights on. The artist has strapped a thick layer of copper to the sole of one shoe. The artist holds a reclining, dead hare. The artist has covered his face and most of his head with gold leaf, some of which dangles from his eyelashes. The artist has coated his face with honey. The head of the artist glows, the new skin uneven and reflecting around dark eyes that seem more animal than human. The clanging of the artist's shoe against the floor as he slowly limps around the gallery space is the only sound audible through the gallery windows. The artist looks down at the hare's face cradled against his elbow, whispers about the drawings hanging in the gallery, transfers thoughts about art, about ancient intuitions. A drip of honey falls onto the hare's fur and, warmed by the artist's face and the closeness of his body, the drip settles down to the hare's skin. The artist speaks a language the hare understands.
V.
The second miracle of my death was being found and tended; the first miracle was the dying itself.
fig. 5, Felt Suit (1970)
The suit is cut to fit the body of the artist. The seams are straight, the hems neat, the trousers pleated. The coat bears two flapped hip pockets, one breast pocket, a crooked, down-turned lapel and no buttons. The felt is a natural brown like the hare in summer. The artist wears the suit and feels comforted in the felt, feels a protective energy in its warmth. The cut of the suit restricts him from moving freely when he wears it but not in the way he is restricted when wrapped in a blanket. The restriction of the suit is enough to negate the comfort of the felt. The artist resists the restriction. The suit remains on its hanger.
VI.
Inside the felt was dark and smudges of less-dark sometimes appeared; I imagined the snow outside, once I remembered outside. My breath made clouds in front of my face which came out warm and then cooled as they fell against me. I felt my body mend. I felt my death slip behind a new feeling that rose up like a green shoot. Time passed. What had been suffocating became comfortable again.
fig. 6, I Like America and America Likes Me (1974)
The artist arrives in an ambulance, wrapped in wool on a stretcher, is carried into the gallery space. At intervals over the next three days, the artist stays in the space with an untamed coyote, a shepherd's staff, a mound of straw, copies of The Wall Street Journal, and the felt he came in with. The artist conceals himself in the felt, stands with his staff jutting above his head. The coyote paces, stares. The artist sheds the wool, sits in the straw, and looks out the window with the coyote. The artist watches the coyote and the coyote circles the artist. The artist tosses his leather gloves toward the coyote. The coyote urinates and the artist covers the puddles with torn pages of The Wall Street Journal. The artist, wrapped in his felt, offers an end of the blanket to the coyote. The coyote tugs. The artist tugs. The coyote breathes a guttural growl, tightens the clench between shoulders and neck. The artist bends, a column of wool folds. The fibers of wool between artist and coyote begin to pull apart and untwist so the material thins and warps. The coyote tugs. The wool between artist and coyote tears until there is no wool between them. The coyote sleeps on his wool. The artist, on his knees, embraces the coyote, and the coyote allows this. The artist leaves the gallery space wrapped in wool, on a stretcher, in an ambulance.
VII.
The felt peeled back and dozens of moon-paled hands passed over my body. I felt cold, wet air. The hands pulled me, swabbed me clean, and the faces they belonged to emerged from the darkness, round and knowing. The hands put honey in my mouth and the honey mixed with my blood. I was no longer confined to the merely human.
fig. 7, Honey Pump in the Workplace (1977)
In a large, semicircular chamber, the artist creates a kind of heart. Over one hundred days, two tons of honey are pumped through a circulation system of plastic tubes. Two hundred pounds of margarine lubricate the motors. Energy and warmth generate more energy and warmth, and outside-energy is absorbed and redistributed and the rhythm, the pattern of noise, is soothing to the artist. It feels like his own pulse. The tubes coil on the floor and stretch over his head and as the honey warms it flows more easily. The honey stays the same, circulating back into itself, but the margarine gradually disappears as it’s fed to the motors. The artist considers multiple ways of transforming potential energies. The burning smell of running machines combines with the sweetness of the honey and the thick, salty smell of the margarine and this odor forms a cloud around the artist, lingering on his skin which is warmed by the pumping of his own heart, even when he is away from the honey pump.
VIII.
I became revived and purified by the honey, an animal language made liquid. The honey, like the fat and the felt, created through a metamorphosis. A transference from vegetable to animal to man. Here I accomplished my own regeneration, arising from the flux of creation meeting destruction. I felt pulled to the root of time, before the loss of nature. I felt made of the muscle of the earth. The ones who healed and fed my body recognized me. We spoke a pure, irrational language.
fig. 8, 7,000 Oaks (1982)
The artist plants an oak tree. The artist delivers several hundred basalt stones to the installation site, arranged in an arrow pointing at the oak tree. The artist creates a rule: in order for one basalt stone to be moved, a tree must be planted in its location. As he plants one tree after another, installing a new forest, he plants the column-shaped basalt stone next to each sapling. The artist creates hollow spaces in the ground and his hands feel like dirt digging into dirt. The artist allows others to plant with him. He feels like a yoke between earth and man. As the future comes to pass, the tree will grow and the stone will diminish, but the stone is not a dead thing. The stone has its own silent life. The tree and the stone experience time and transformation in the ways they are supposed to. The artist thinks of regeneration as a concept of time, thinks of the slow oak growth as a sculpture. Within each tree is the potential for countless tree births. The installation will never be finished. The artist anticipates this growth.
IX.
I became an artist of resurrection. I have spent my whole life dying.
I was already dead when I got on the plane. I was already dead when I was in the air, already dead when the shots came and my plane fell into that white expanse, when the horizon tumbled into the ground below. I was dead and I died again and then they found me. They pulled my body away and they knew what to do. They found the wounds on my body and they dressed them with thick smears of fat from their animals and I was still dead. They wrapped my body in wool felt slick with lanolin, and the fat was under the wool again just as it had been when these things were still part of the sheep body, and I was still dead.
fig. 1, Fat Chair (1963)
A wooden chair with four legs, two spindles connecting the front legs to the rear legs which taper at the bottom, a slightly curved wooden top rail with a length of thick wire not unlike a coat-hanger looped around it and knotted. The marks of use cover the chair, and the wood is dark where backs and thighs and the dirt of various floors have rubbed against it. An inch or two below the top rail is the crest of a wedge of fat, which slopes forward to the edge of the seat. The fat is yellow, and as time passes it will darken from pale yolk to ochre. The slant of the wedge is smoother than its rough-hewn sides, but it bears fragmented impressions of the artist's hands. While the fat grows darker, it will also shrink. Even inside a glass case, moisture will escape, and the fat will flatten and wither. The artist witnesses the fat in all its forms: liquid, soft, malleable, and hardened past the point of obeying his hands. The fat has seeped into the grain of the wood, adhered to the dirt of the life the chair left. These simple elements translated through the artist's actions will slowly find their way back to the natural world. The artist anticipates this decay.
II.
I would like to begin with the wound. The wound that occurred with the pain of being born, and again with the pain of being re-born. With each birth I am returned from death and it is the rip that wounds. This wound is not on my body but at times my body can feel it. The sensation brings me to an animal urgency, an emergency, an emergence. A wound is caused by a trauma and it is this trauma that I am inevitable to return to and return from.
fig. 2, The Chief: Fluxus Chant (1964)
The artist is the only one allowed in the gallery room. The artist has installed patches of margarine and fat in the room’s corners. A copper rod is propped against one wall. A speaker leans against the opposite wall next to its puddle of cable. The cable makes a line into the felt blanket the artist has rolled himself in where he holds a microphone. A dead hare lies at each end of the hidden artist. For eight hours there is no movement in the room. The artist is a sculpture. He uses the microphone to project the sounds a stag makes, which come out of his mouth as “öö.” He amplifies his heartbeats. The sounds feel dark brown. The artist thinks about his sounds filling the room and soaking into the corners, about these primary, primal noises being transferred by the microphone and the cable and the speaker and saturating the air again. He thinks he may be suffocating inside the blanket. He thinks this feeling would be worse if he were forming words. He concentrates on the heat he generates and thinks of the heat seeping into the fat corners with the sound and makes the sounds more intensely when he feels a pulse of panic. His sounds are deep and hoarse and the only evidence that something alive is in the room. When the artist feels the ceremony is over, he unfurls himself from the felt blanket, gathers the hares, and leaves the room.
III.
I woke up and the fat and the felt and my body were the only things I knew. It smelled animal, wet, bloody. It was hard to decipher my skin from the felt. It was hard to tell what smells were coming out of me and what smells were pressing against me. These earthy smells rooted themselves in my memory, a humus made of concepts, loamy with intentions.
fig. 3, Evolution (1965)
On the artist’s gray studio floor, a temporary installation. The artist has arranged four skulls, pointing their profiles toward a narrow corner of their iron-mesh enclosure. The skulls once belonged to two birds, one fish, and one ruminant mammal. Two sturdy, graceful horns point out and behind the skull of the ruminant mammal. One of the bird’s skull displays a beak narrower, more delicate than the one behind it. The skull of the fish leads into a small trail of spinous bones. Extending from these four skulls, the artist has drawn approximations of the animals’ bodies in lines of white chalk. The fish is long and sharp-finned; the bird with the narrower beak has shorter legs than the one behind it; the ruminant mammal has small, pointed hooves. Inside the outlines of the bodies, the artist has made marks resembling the animals’ organ structures. The chalk feels bone-like in the artist’s hand, feels at once transitory and ancient as the skulls do. The artist draws the bodies to scale, his studio houses these creatures for the moment. The artist thinks of cave paintings, thinks about holding these animal bodies in his hands. In time, the drawings are brushed away and smeared and spilled on, and the skulls continue to live as objects in other situations.
IV.
It was a miracle that there was felt and fat wrapped around me and it was a miracle that there was air inside me and inside this bundle of me, a miracle that I could breathe even though I thought I was suffocating, even though I thought my death was being prolonged, even though the heat produced between my body and the fat and the felt made the breath heavy, made it feel like the fat and the felt were being pulled into my lungs, the air made its way through my stifling, and this was the third miracle of my death.
fig. 4, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965)
The artist in his uniform khaki vest lined with pockets, in the closed gallery, lights on. The artist has strapped a thick layer of copper to the sole of one shoe. The artist holds a reclining, dead hare. The artist has covered his face and most of his head with gold leaf, some of which dangles from his eyelashes. The artist has coated his face with honey. The head of the artist glows, the new skin uneven and reflecting around dark eyes that seem more animal than human. The clanging of the artist's shoe against the floor as he slowly limps around the gallery space is the only sound audible through the gallery windows. The artist looks down at the hare's face cradled against his elbow, whispers about the drawings hanging in the gallery, transfers thoughts about art, about ancient intuitions. A drip of honey falls onto the hare's fur and, warmed by the artist's face and the closeness of his body, the drip settles down to the hare's skin. The artist speaks a language the hare understands.
V.
The second miracle of my death was being found and tended; the first miracle was the dying itself.
fig. 5, Felt Suit (1970)
The suit is cut to fit the body of the artist. The seams are straight, the hems neat, the trousers pleated. The coat bears two flapped hip pockets, one breast pocket, a crooked, down-turned lapel and no buttons. The felt is a natural brown like the hare in summer. The artist wears the suit and feels comforted in the felt, feels a protective energy in its warmth. The cut of the suit restricts him from moving freely when he wears it but not in the way he is restricted when wrapped in a blanket. The restriction of the suit is enough to negate the comfort of the felt. The artist resists the restriction. The suit remains on its hanger.
VI.
Inside the felt was dark and smudges of less-dark sometimes appeared; I imagined the snow outside, once I remembered outside. My breath made clouds in front of my face which came out warm and then cooled as they fell against me. I felt my body mend. I felt my death slip behind a new feeling that rose up like a green shoot. Time passed. What had been suffocating became comfortable again.
fig. 6, I Like America and America Likes Me (1974)
The artist arrives in an ambulance, wrapped in wool on a stretcher, is carried into the gallery space. At intervals over the next three days, the artist stays in the space with an untamed coyote, a shepherd's staff, a mound of straw, copies of The Wall Street Journal, and the felt he came in with. The artist conceals himself in the felt, stands with his staff jutting above his head. The coyote paces, stares. The artist sheds the wool, sits in the straw, and looks out the window with the coyote. The artist watches the coyote and the coyote circles the artist. The artist tosses his leather gloves toward the coyote. The coyote urinates and the artist covers the puddles with torn pages of The Wall Street Journal. The artist, wrapped in his felt, offers an end of the blanket to the coyote. The coyote tugs. The artist tugs. The coyote breathes a guttural growl, tightens the clench between shoulders and neck. The artist bends, a column of wool folds. The fibers of wool between artist and coyote begin to pull apart and untwist so the material thins and warps. The coyote tugs. The wool between artist and coyote tears until there is no wool between them. The coyote sleeps on his wool. The artist, on his knees, embraces the coyote, and the coyote allows this. The artist leaves the gallery space wrapped in wool, on a stretcher, in an ambulance.
VII.
The felt peeled back and dozens of moon-paled hands passed over my body. I felt cold, wet air. The hands pulled me, swabbed me clean, and the faces they belonged to emerged from the darkness, round and knowing. The hands put honey in my mouth and the honey mixed with my blood. I was no longer confined to the merely human.
fig. 7, Honey Pump in the Workplace (1977)
In a large, semicircular chamber, the artist creates a kind of heart. Over one hundred days, two tons of honey are pumped through a circulation system of plastic tubes. Two hundred pounds of margarine lubricate the motors. Energy and warmth generate more energy and warmth, and outside-energy is absorbed and redistributed and the rhythm, the pattern of noise, is soothing to the artist. It feels like his own pulse. The tubes coil on the floor and stretch over his head and as the honey warms it flows more easily. The honey stays the same, circulating back into itself, but the margarine gradually disappears as it’s fed to the motors. The artist considers multiple ways of transforming potential energies. The burning smell of running machines combines with the sweetness of the honey and the thick, salty smell of the margarine and this odor forms a cloud around the artist, lingering on his skin which is warmed by the pumping of his own heart, even when he is away from the honey pump.
VIII.
I became revived and purified by the honey, an animal language made liquid. The honey, like the fat and the felt, created through a metamorphosis. A transference from vegetable to animal to man. Here I accomplished my own regeneration, arising from the flux of creation meeting destruction. I felt pulled to the root of time, before the loss of nature. I felt made of the muscle of the earth. The ones who healed and fed my body recognized me. We spoke a pure, irrational language.
fig. 8, 7,000 Oaks (1982)
The artist plants an oak tree. The artist delivers several hundred basalt stones to the installation site, arranged in an arrow pointing at the oak tree. The artist creates a rule: in order for one basalt stone to be moved, a tree must be planted in its location. As he plants one tree after another, installing a new forest, he plants the column-shaped basalt stone next to each sapling. The artist creates hollow spaces in the ground and his hands feel like dirt digging into dirt. The artist allows others to plant with him. He feels like a yoke between earth and man. As the future comes to pass, the tree will grow and the stone will diminish, but the stone is not a dead thing. The stone has its own silent life. The tree and the stone experience time and transformation in the ways they are supposed to. The artist thinks of regeneration as a concept of time, thinks of the slow oak growth as a sculpture. Within each tree is the potential for countless tree births. The installation will never be finished. The artist anticipates this growth.
IX.
I became an artist of resurrection. I have spent my whole life dying.
