Almost 50 years ago, when ecology was not a topic of conversation at all, German Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) mounted a most revolutionary action: an ambulance picked him up on a stretcher from his home in Düsseldorf wrapped in a felt blanket, he was airlifted to New York and deposited as a bundle in a gallery room René Block, where they had released a captured coyote in the desert. Among strands of straw and leaves from the ‘Wall Street Journal’ – a symbol of capitalism – they lived together for a month without interruption. The series of photos captured during the challenge were sent to a life-sentenced man in Glasgow, who made a sculpture inspired by the material and was later collected by Beuys himself. The action, entitled ‘I like America and America likes me’, spoke of the brotherhood of man and nature, but also – let’s not forget the Scottish murderer – of the social and the asocial. Beuys, interested since he was a child in all forms of life, would champion the German environmental cause and would be in the kitchen of the current Die Grünen (The Greens) party.
Defense without buts
The discussion in life – and posthumously too – was whether he was a genius or a phony. But there is his last living collaborator, the sculptor Björn Nörgaard -Creator of the sarcophagus prepared for the queen Margaret of Denmark– to talk about its ultracontemporaneity. “Beuys believed that communism, which repressed freedom of thought, and capitalism, which destroyed nature to make money, were useless ideas – explains the Danish -. He was convinced that the capital of society was the human being, and that it should cooperate with nature and not use it. ” How? “That was the role of art and creativity!”
The grace is that it was not a business of the enlightened artist. “He believed that everyone should take advantage of their creative qualities, whatever they do and wherever they are.” And that “social plastic” could change education, the State, the entire democracy. In the future, he thought, nature, human beings, and spirituality would converge (the German was very Christian, in his own way).
This opposition to individual salvation –very typical of existentialists– and the commitment to plastic actions –and not to bequeathing a lot of work with which to market– turned him into the most influential artist of the second half of the 20th century.
False biography?
Still, a handful of biographers insist that Beuys had “mental problems.” In the winter of 1943, the Luftwaffe plane in which he was operating as a radio operator crashed in the Crimea and Tatar nomads saved his life by protecting his body with fat and felt (his favorite sculptural materials). Recovered from fractures to his skull and several bones, he was wounded four more times in combat and was taken prisoner by the British. So far his story. There’s no way to prove which part was true, a post-traumatic delusion or a sparkling invention.
His political side was also questioned. That if he was a leftist, environmentalist and defender of direct democracy – he came to stand for the Bundestag in 1976 -, that if he was a defender of a Germanic soul – with an occult side included – that gave off a Nazi whiff. He was kind and could get sullen. His wife, Eva, assured that “he was dead all his life, but he was always very alive.” Perhaps he was an infinite performance himself, period. “If someone takes the word of Beuys as the word of God, he has not understood Beuys at all. It is only the affirmation of a human being. And an affirmation is not the truth, it is the possibility of moving forward,” says Nörgaard.
That is why it was so important to see him, in a space and a time, ready to take your spirit by the shoulders and shake you. “I attended four of Beuys’ actions – recalls Nörgaard -. They were not staged. He had an extraordinary concentration and the objects in relation to his body generated a moving image. He was not present as a person.”
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Creativity at your expense
In any case, on the centenary of his birth, he would have liked each one to make his interpretation. Nörgaard, who participated in the performance ‘Manresa’ at the Schmela gallery in Düsseldorf – yes, Beuys visited the capital of Bages in 1966 motivated by his passion for Ignacio de Loyola-, will travel to the Catalan city next March to carry out an action that will culminate a trilogy that began with the work of Beuys and that continued with the exhibition that was held at Santa Mònica in Barcelona in 1994. And he will once again act as an apostle of his word.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com