Notes on the conference: Joseph Beuys and Europe: Crossing Borders, Bridging Histories

Yesterday I was at a conference on Joseph Beuys at the Leeds City Art Gallery. The gallery has an artist's room exhibition of Beuys' work on at the moment and his drawings form an important aspect of his practice, so I was interested to see what Beuys scholars were saying about him. 

I wont pick out the presentations by individual presenters who were all professors, or PhDs or people working towards PhDs, because I was selfishly only really there to listen to Richard de Marco give his presentation. I had met him years ago and together with Patrick Oliver and Penny Cooper (who was an old friend of de Marco's), when he visited Leeds back in the 1980s we went up onto the art college roof in Vernon Street and after looking at all the architectural domes we could see, decided that Leeds was essentially a female city. He was an engaging speaker and full of energy and enthusiasm for life, so I was expecting something special from him. I sat through everyone else’s presentations and took notes and had ideas in relation to their papers, but, and this is something I’m becoming worried about, every speaker, except Richard de Marco, read from a pre-written paper. Over the years this has become more and more the accepted conference standard and perhaps it’s my age, but I can’t see the point of it. If I want to read a paper, I can just read it, so why not give out copies. Because most of the speakers are not trained actors, their voices trail off, they don’t use microphones properly or they just mutter. This means that large chunks of what they are reading out are lost, one presenter in particular was totally inaudible. Richard de Marco in contrast performed. He has a strong voice, didn’t need to refer to notes and spoke to us about what was on his mind, asserting that Beuys was for him still alive. He spoke powerfully about his belief in art and memories and experiences of Beuys. It was a fascinating and memorable talk, one that was constructed live for a live audience and it was so different from all the academic speakers who I felt operated as if they were more like vultures picking the last flesh from the dry bones of a long dead artist, and I wanted them to be translators channeling his ideas to a new audience.

However before I turn to what Richard de Marco had to say, there were some issues I picked out from all that dry academic talk, so perhaps it wasn’t quite as bad as I’ve painted. Someone mentioned the principle of resurrection as a driver behind certain art forms. Someone else, it was an audience member if I remember rightly also highlighted the importance of Christianity to Beuys’ ideas and there was mention of the wound and how Beuys set out to heal the world. The Judeo/Christian heritage was referred to several times and I was reminded that concepts like democracy, socialism and a caring society are rooted in this heritage, one that Beuys would have been keenly aware of.  This background was linked to Beuys’ interest in other cultures, such as the cultures on the far edges of Europe, from the Celtic fringes, to the frozen edges of Nordic Scandinavia, Lapland and Inuit territories via the Russian steppes. The European fringe cultures were in Beuys’ mind also in conversation with Eastern cultures, the wisdom of the other, either from the past, such as the Wyrd or from religions such as Zen Buddhism or Tao, all entangled in Beuys’ mind. I began thinking again of the journeys taken by many migrants, often beginning on the borders of Europe, then working their way through the European heartland and finally to the edges of that old kingdom that once was Angleland and which is now a Brexit fixated island of little Englanders. Beuys would have hated the idea of Brexit, he thought in long historical lines, worked across national boundaries and was aware of geology being more important than history. When you think of his work with dead hares, you also think of Durer and his famous painted image of a hare and the fact that Durer’s self portrait included a hare fur collar; when you think of Beuys' use of reindeer images, you know he is also thinking of the pre-historic drinking reindeer of Les Combarelles in the Dordogne

Beuys: Reindeer

Drinking reindeer: Les Combarelles Dordogne

Beuys set out to heal the wounds of the world, he wanted to bring people together, he wanted to teach people about the interconnectedness of things, he also wanted an art that would highlight the connections and similarities between cultures. His was not an art of aesthetic formal invention; it was an art of shamanic transformation. Material languages were central to his ideas, fat, felt and rich brown paint, each applied as a mark or register of a Beuysien sensibility.  I was reminded as Demarco spoke of how wonderful the idea of Beuys was at the time. Of how exciting the possibilities seemed. Art could change things, art could have some sort of relevance and it was a way of educating people about alternative truths.

I have been thinking about material languages again and Beuys had a very personal set of these, his invented stories of being saved by Siberian Tartar tribesmen, helping him to construct an authentic language of fat and felt. He was concerned to communicate in mythic terms, how the damage done by politics might be transfigured. The Nazi party had engineered its own myths and appropriated older ones, poisoning what should have been a nourishing set of beliefs and threatening to make all mankind lose touch with proper nourishing myths of life and its entanglements.  

I do worry about things though, and something was niggling away at me, something about the idea of the art star. Beuys’ screen-print by Warhol perhaps being the image that was unsettling me, it suggested that like Warhol himself, Beuys was now something to be commoditised, his piles of fat no longer working as psychic energy batteries but as securities and hedge funds for the super rich. Beuys’ association with de Marco was already compromised when I met Beuys, who came along to the college with Anthony D’Offay, a man who collected up everything that Beuys did when he was with us, who wouldn’t let any of Beuys’s scribbled diagrams of possibilities get out into the public domain because they were too precious, too full of cultural capital to be allowed out.

Warhol: Joseph Beuys

But back to Richard de Marco, he was still at the age of 87 positive and excited by the legacy of Beuys and his enthusiasm was a necessary cure for my cynicism.

De Marco still sees the work of Joseph Beuys as a legacy that creates hope for the future of art and its role in society. The language of politicians and politics is too poor and impoverished to be of any real use, and only the language of great artists like Shakespeare, T S Elliot and of course Beuys can open out for us the true possibilities of what it is to be human. These languages of art go beyond logic, their creators live on in our languages; artists in reshaping the material of words and physical forms leave us a continuing legacy of possibilities.

Two weeks before Beuys died he gave a lecture, he began, “I would like to thank my teacher Wilhelm Lehmbruck…” A timely reminder that Beuys was a sculptor and that artists are also concerned with the art of their predecessors, but perhaps even more importantly that Beuys regarded teaching as being the most important thing. De Marco stated that all of Beuys’ work could be regarded as teaching tools; his lectures in particular and writings and drawings on blackboards produced as illustrations to his thinking, clearly point to these pedagogic issues in his practice. “Every single manifestation of his work was as a teacher”.

Wilhelm Lehmbruck

De Marco went on to remind us of the dangers of ‘tourism’ making a joke about George Bush’s pronunciation of “terrorism” which he first misheard as “tourism”. He reminded us of the importance of small magazines like ‘Pages’ that existed simply to promote and deepen an awareness of art’s possibilities. He railed against of the rise of art as ‘entertainment’, of art as an adjunct of the tourist industry, pointing to Damien Hirst’s latest Venice exhibition 'Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable’ as a sad reminder that Hirst was once seen as a possible inheritor of Beuys’ mantle.

De Marco sees universities as now being simply machines for making money and reminded us that there should be no separation between art and science as ways of understanding the world.  He wanted us to think about what is the proper use of art colleges and asserted that if we could get that right they would be central to the future of civilization. Art colleges should be looking at how to face the reality of global warming, Beuys’ ‘The Pack’ produced in the 1960s being a reminder that he was already thinking about these issues even then.

The Pack

Beuys saw other artists of the past as belonging to a ‘communion of souls’ that you as an artist should aspire to belong to, this communion being essential to the way that artists think and that this world is far too important to be sucked into the world of entertainment.

The Museum Sztuki in Łódź (pronounced like ‘watch’ with an ‘o’) has one of the most important collections of Beuys’ work. Beuys was drawn to Poland because he wanted to heal the wounds left over from the 2^nd World War. I was reminded as de Marco spoke of a wonderful performance by the Slovenian Sister Scipion Theatre that he put on in Edinburgh, in 1986; holes had been cut into the floor so that heads could pop up randomly and begin speaking as you walked through the space. The whole ‘feel’ of performances like this or the Kantor productions that de Marco also put on was gripping, they had a gritty reality and somehow otherworldliness that moved you into totally new spaces for thinking.

Kantor theatre production

For de Marco both Kantor and Beuys are still alive. 

At the end of his exhilarating presentation he suggested that a good book to read that would be a useful salve if feeling crushed under the weight of Capitalism and the fact that the art world appears to simply exist as a playground for the super rich would be ‘Reclaiming art in the age of artifice’ by J F Martel and finally that he has an archive that is accessible to everyone. 

Joseph Beuys: Felt action:1963

See also:

Beuys and Cotman in Leeds