an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 5, May-June 2008, ISSN
1552-5112
The phantasm of science… there is an “epistemological break”
that relegates all other thought to a senseless prehistory of knowledge.[1]
Freedom is not knowledge, but what one has become after
knowledge. It is a state of mind that not only admits contradiction but seeks
it out.[2]
I.
Introduction
Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) lived and worked during a
time when our present was only beginning to congeal. It was then still possible
to see art as playing a role in transforming the world by pointing to a future
based on individual creativity. His work was motivated by two driving urges: 1)
A radical conception of politics (toward what he referred to as “social
sculpture”) in which art is to play a healing role; and 2) by a desire to close
the epistemological break which Jean Baudrillard refers to in 1973. This paper
examines some aspects of the continuing place of Beuys’s art in closing this
break despite the evaporation of the politics which motivated its maker. This
takes us to the question: what is the role of the art of Joseph Beuys from the
vantage point of contemporary radical thought?
Since
Beuys’s death, social thought has become radicalized in ways he could not
foresee due to the work of thinkers such as Baudrillard. Radical theory is no
longer understood as imbued with radical politics but exists purely as a form
of challenge – including a challenge to theory, art, and the political. Radical
thought pushes theory toward an escape velocity from a degenerating political
which has mutated into a “transpolitical”[3] wherein we can only await a possible “politics to
come”[4]. In short, theory after postmodernism in general,
and Baudrillard in particular, is not anything like it was in Beuys’s time.[5]
This
has also been a period witnessing an incredible movement of social thought and
art toward each other – but not as Beuys envisioned.[6] Beuys’s art was not meant to be either decorative or
merely reflective but was to function in life as it was lived. Radical thought
today, not unlike like Beuys’s conception of art, aims not merely to be
reflective but to challenge.[7] While I am someone who is motivated by both Beuys’s
art and Baudrillardian radical thought – I understand that it is difficult to imagine
two more dissimilar thinkers. Yet Beuys’s work remains strong in its challenge
to theory to close the epistemological gap precisely at a time when art and
radical thought intersect so radiantly. While it may trouble some Beuyseans
greatly, his art continues to function powerfully in an orbit well beyond his
politics and ethics. This is a contradiction I have come to appreciate and
which informs this writing. It is a contradiction worth pursuing as it provides
a unique opportunity to see Beuys’s work anew.
Beuys’s art now endures into another
time and plays an important role in the bridging of the epistemological break.
This break separating art from social thought has been enforced in the social
studies by empiricists who see art, and all non-empirical accomplishments, as
forms of “non-knowledge”. The most important challenge to empiricism has been
the development of theory that more resembles art than it does science. While
literature and poetry have played more pronounced roles, artists (and their works)
also play an important part in the intersections between social thought and
art. Beuys’s works are especially important because they are a kind of ‘theory’
that makes significant demands on any social thought that seeks to be artistic.
They, and their effect, are also still too imposing to be ignored and will, no
doubt, remain so for some time. Today we can read his art works, like the best
of contemporary radical thought, as efforts not to replicate the real, but
rather, as negations of the “real”. In this Beuys meets a challenge of art that
is also the challenge of radical theory: to help us live in a world in which we
never know the real – merely the appearances behind which it hides. His art
continues to live, as does the best of contemporary radical thought, a
non-empirical existence.
The
art of radical thought today, and its understanding of Beuys’s art, does not
involve a search for universal meaning. Rather it involves the simulation
(writing) of a world which is given to us as enigmatic and unintelligible, in
ways which make it even more enigmatic.[8] Radical
theory, like radical art, is both simulation and challenge. This does not mean
that we have no meaning at all, but that meaning or truth are to be understood
as multiple, restricted, and existing along local horizons. This is a
philosophy attractive to thinkers like Baudrillard and also to Beuys who was
motivated by Goethe’s insistence that the self is the only proper standard of
truth.[9] The universals which traditional thought depends
upon (be it traditional “critical theory” or aesthetics), are no longer
accessible to us.
Jean
Baudrillard is the leading thinker among those who have contributed to the idea
of theory as “a challenge to the real” to expose itself as illusion.[10] According to this epistemology (devastating to
empiricism), theory derives more from poetic and literary impulses than a
scientific one.[11] Ironically, and much to the chagrin of empiricists
in the “social sciences”, Baudrillard developed these notions indebted to
scientists such as Heisenberg (author of the uncertainty principle). According
to most scientists, even science is a story – the best one devisable until
another (always provisional), story is formulated. Baudrillard’s radical
thought is more “scientific” in this important sense than is that of the
empiricists who loath him. Rather than the bastion of truth and objectivity,
knowledge is here understood to be in a state of poetic uncertainty. It was,
after all, science which gave us the uncertainty principle – and it is a
principle that does not belong to science alone – it is “at the heart of all
our actions, at the heart of ‘reality’”.[12] Among the more interesting aspects of our current
uncertainty are the intersections of contradictory elements such as Beuys’s art
and Baudrillard’s thought.
II. A
Voyage To The Soul of Art
...the soul of Art…
art with its power of illusion, its capacity for negating reality, for setting
up an ‘other scene’ in opposition to reality, where things obey a higher set of
rules, a transcendent figure in which beings, like line and colour on canvas,
are apt to lose their meaning … in this sense, Art is gone.[13]
Art
which travels to the soul of art is not imitation.[14] It is a voyage of exploration that can lead us into magnificent
adventures. The twentieth century produced no more interesting explorer or
brilliant adventurer than Beuys. He accomplished something few ever do – he
produced works that take us to the indefinable soul of art. Beuys operated like
a virus deeply challenging prevailing definitions of art by uncompromisingly
following a personal vision of what art must do. Wandering through the
devastated wasteland that was art after Duchamp (and Warhol), Beuys assembled
the things he found and in doing so became the first great artist of the
post-art era. Beuys, like (Odd Nerdrum or Francis Bacon and a few others) was
an artist after the end of art (as modernism understood art).
At
precisely the time when everything was gaining speed, driving to a new levels
of programmatic functionality and the banality of the model – in increasingly
high definition – Joseph Beuys made his art by slowing down. As art sped up
(action painting, kinetic art, and the slick fast surfaces of geometric
abstraction, serial Pop, and Op art), Beuys pointed to the necessity of
slowness – of the poetry of finite human existence. It was Beuys’s own version
of a “vertigo of delay in opposition to the vertigo of acceleration” as Octavio
Paz said of Duchamp’s work.[15] Beuys gathered and arranged symbolic materials such
as felt and wax and odd pieces of metal and an assortment of media almost as
diverse as the planet, including his own charismatic persona. He is also
extremely rare in the contemporary period in that he used “waste” to make art
that is not itself actually garbage.
Among
the incredibly diverse media Beuys deployed we find a coyote with whom he
shared a room for four days (I Like
America and America Likes Me, 1974); a swamp (Bog Action, 1971); and a large pump (Honey pump in the workplace, 1974-1977 (1977). Beuys produced an
oeuvre which for me can only be understood as profoundly thoughtful, sincere,
deliberate, and often poignant.
1. Beuys. How to explain paintings to
a dead hare (1965).[16]
He produced
three main kinds of work. First there were the innumerable “actions” such as
his intensely touching How to Explain
Paintings to a Dead Hare – a work which provides a good deal of insight
into his approach to art. With his head
coated in honey and gold-leaf (wearing a felt sole on one shoe and a piece of
iron attached to the other), Beuys undertook the mysterious and poetic action
of carefully carrying the dead hare from one picture to the next at an
exhibition. Beuys spoke to the animal and touched its paw to each work before
sitting down to provide the animal with a longer explanation. Among Beuys’s
gifts was the ability to convince us that such “actions”, which might seem
impenetrably strange coming from someone else, could be taken seriously and
accepted like generous gifts when they came from him. Beuys depended deeply on
his personal charisma which was for him an important medium. Charisma is an
especially warm, magnetic, and seductive medium with which to work and few
artists possess the vast reserve of it Beuys enjoyed.
Second,
there was his self described work as a Shaman – he saw himself more as an
educator than an artist and it is quite possible to make the case that his
works of art are not “art” at all, but pedagogic instruments.[17] This is an important aspect of why we still take
Beuys seemingly “odd” gestures seriously – because first and foremost he
presented a shaman-like presence in which we are enjoined to believe him
because he so obviously and so strongly believes in his performance. Finally
there was his “social sculpture” and his work as a catalyst for social change.
This led him to found the German Students Party and a series of political
actions and organizations, the net result of which, is today’s not
insignificant German Green Party. As in How
to explain paintings to a dead hare, all three aspects could inform a given
work.
2. and 3. Beuys. Coyote Action: I Like
Beuys’s
belief that “everyone is an artist” was as generous as it was utopian and it
was, ironically, undermined at every turn by the rare quality of his work which
only served to demonstrate his own exceptionality. Even if we are each of us
artists – some excel in their particular craft more than others do in theirs.
Beuys himself acknowledged this in 1985 a year before his death.[19]
Whatever
art is – and it is something we have been fortunate to have never adequately
defined – the work of Joseph Beuys is as much at the heart and soul of it as is
that of Michelangelo, Raphael, Bernini, Caravaggio, Duchamp, Picasso, or
Rauchenberg. We cannot reach agreement concerning what art is by studying its
diverse forms. We can however acknowledge that what is “artistic” about a work
we can acclaim to be “art” is that it works on another plane than the “reality”
we experience in the world. Art then, involves the “power of illusion” as
Baudrillard puts it, setting up another prospect from the world of appearances
we take to be the real. In Beuys’s case this involves work that gathers up
ancient threads from our prehistory and ties them to a strong sense of the
future. This is one more element in his work that sits well beside a
Baudrillardian understanding of theory as challenge. Beuys even managed to turn
his expulsion from the
4. Beuys. Democracy Is Merry (1973).[20]
university into an artistic provocation which is
remembered as Democracy is Merry.
This was an artist we can view today as knowing how, very early on in the
transpolitical, to take a world that is given to us as enigmatic and unintelligible
and to make it even more so.
III.
Fragments
5. Beuys. Sheep in Snow (1952).[21]
As
theory has itself become an illusory art, art (traditionally consisting of an
object) has grown closer to theory (the medium of which has traditionally been words).
Words were rare in the art of modernism. One of the important ways Beuys’s art
diverges from modernism involves how much words matter to it. His work often
relies heavily on the moment of the mutual volitization of the status of the
thing and of discourse. Words (in the form of titles) simulate thought as gauze
and wood simulate the illusion of a sheep and snow. In this particular doubling
of simulation Beuys elevates the
enigmaticalness of the work into a form of gestural poetry. Beuys, like Francis
Bacon, produced work that relies on sensations and feelings rather than meaning
and representation. This work includes a (very) short story, but one that we
must continue to write after its maker has given us the first three words.
Beuys, as did conceptual art generally, stressed the discursive side of art and
this was an important step out of pure abstraction to a place where art and
theory come closer together and may eventually enfold each other.
From
the vantage point of radical thought Beuys’s art works challenge theory to
communicate the illusion of the world with poetic elegance. In order to enter
into a dialogue with such art one thing theory itself must do is be willing to
leave words behind. It is interesting in this regard to find a leading radical
theorist, Baudrillard, producing “photographs as theory” beyond his many
written texts.[22]
6. Baudrillard. Saint Clément (1987).[23]
Baudrillard’s
enigmatic car in the water simulates not only the catastrophe of the individual
car but of all of technological civilization. We are reminded of Heidegger’s
claim that technology is nihilistic in its pure expression of a will to power.
The drowned car is in ecstasy, its entire presence denoting an absence, a
catastrophe in slow motion as it dissolves into the water. This photograph of
the car evokes slowness, inertia, the absurdity and ultimate illusion and
unintelligibility of progress, and of the nothing which underlies everything –
the nothing which haunts modernity represented here by one of its greatest
objects of fascination and desire, the motorcar. It is a photograph that
manages to gather up the indifference of the car and add to it what Baudrillard
refers to as the “subjective disillusion of the world”.[24] Photographs, like theory seeking to make the world
more enigmatic, bring us closer to pure appearance than they do the real. Like
the world, this car will never be understood other than as an image of doubt,
at most a fragment of an enigmatic appearance – the illusory appearances behind
which hides the “real”.
Beuys’s
Sheep in snow creates a similar
effect as one fragment of an artist’s thought processes – a simulation of a
fragment of the world. Like Baudrillard’s drowned car, Beuys’s Sheep in Snow possesses the power to
seize our attention but not the power to clarify or simplify the world –
indeed, the impact is the opposite. This is where art and the most radical of
contemporary theory intersect. For me, Beuys objects and actions, despite what
he might have wished, today serve to only increase the world’s inscrutableness.
I
move no closer to an understanding of universal truth in my experience of
Beuys’s work any more than I do by looking at Baudrillard’s photograph of the
car or reading one of his texts. These two artists oblige me to become an
artist or perhaps even a poet in the work of reading the texts they provide. By
experiencing their texts in this manner, the burden of interpretation forces me
to feel the enigmaticalness of the world and its fragmentary nature. I am
provided with the opportunity to see the world anew – not as something at the
service of any universally “true” meaning or narrative – but as something ever
so much more mysterious and dependent on my (local) “reading” of it. Sheep in Snow, like Baudrillard’s
photograph, leaps the gap between image (or object) making and text and we may
look upon it today as an important moment, among many, in the closing of the
gap between theory and art. Sheep in Snow
does not function on the level of representation but neither is it an abstract
work. Not unlike Francis Bacon’s art it seeks to evoke a feeling in the reader
which is stimulated by the feelings of it maker. It trades, in object and
words, at the level of illusion and appearances and our reading of it will never
precisely coincide with Beuys’s
intention. Beuys’s object like Baudrillard’s photograph signal an
important movement of theory and art toward each other as they play upon the
mutual volatilization of object and discourse. They stand as new kinds of texts
which take us toward a kind of non-empirical thought in which the illusory
nature of the world remains intact. Social theory and art proceed most
elegantly without the empiricism which has for so long sought to separate them.
IV. Silence
7. Beuys. Silent Gramophone (1962)[25] 8. Beuys. (Fond IV) Silent Loudspeaker[26]
Beuys
Silent Gramophone and Silent Loudspeaker are works of a poetic
quietude in a world increasingly inundated with noise. What today is more
precious than a quiet place in which to carry out silent thoughts and the
transcription of these simulations of the world in our preferred media? How
often we wish that a loud speaker could be transformed into a silent block of
felt. Against the pace and noise of late modernity, Beuys turned down the
volume of the world in a bid to make it listen to the sound of silence – to
feel the illusion of noise by its very absence.
Silent Gramophone and Silent Loudspeaker are each a visual
rendering of hearing but in a manner in which silence is prioritized. Both of
these works render observable our ability to hear. Hearing thus becomes a more
delicate matter for thought as Beuys interrupts the normal flow of “ear to
mind” alerting us to a new way of thinking the act of hearing from “eye to mind”.
A silence is invoked – a silence that draws attention to the poetic beauty, not
only of silence as auditory absence, but of a visual art that can make us “see”
silence. By encouraging us to see silence, these works are useful for us today
in our effort to formulate a strategy of indifference. This strategy of
indifference responds to the system’s bid of neutralization and indifference by
returning an equal (or even greater indifference) to the system. What has
changed is that we no longer have the luxury (as Beuys did) of seeing the
system as manageable. Today things are understood to be beyond anyone’s control
– including collective control.[27]
“Why
avail oneself of meaning when silence is sure to win” asks Baudrillard.[28] During Beuys’s time our world was rapidly becoming
one in which we are today obligated at every turn to speak. The guarantee of
freedom of speech is ever more a guarantee only of surveillance. [Today many
loudspeakers are used primarily to hide listening devices for public
surveillance]. In such a world art which celebrates silence carries a
significant conceptual force. Silence becomes an important visual aspect of the
world for Beuys just as words play a role, however uncertain, in the
communication of objects and images. Beuys’s works which prioritize silence
today intersect with a radical theory that values the enigmatic and
unintelligible aspects of existence. This is a more difficult kind of knowing,
one more in keeping with the unintelligibility of the universe. It is a kind of
knowing in which works such as those made by Beuys are much closer to radical
theory today than is the noisy clamor of statistics in empiricism’s quest for a
real we can never know in any “objective” sense. Beuys’s work participates
today in a different kind of “knowability” wherein uncertainty, flux, and
temporality are prioritized.
V.
Enshrouding
9. Beuys. The abandoned sleep of me and my 10.
Beuys. The needles of a
loves (1965)[29] Christmas tree (1962).[30]
Death
also appears as an important theme in Beuys’s work. The Needles of a Christmas Tree is a photograph of a tree Beuys
left standing for four years in his studio. This tree is often understood as a
constant reminder of death ever present in his creative space while he
contemplated and executed works such as The
Abandoned Sleep of Me and My Loves. It is however, also a work that, with
each needle of the tree, makes palpable the physical accumulation (snowing
down) of time. The illusion of “death as an ending” is the subject of this
work. The deterioration of the tree is not its ending but its continuation into
another endurance – not merely its life after death but its continued life in
death. I know of no other work in the history of human art that makes so apparent
the non-identical nature of time and death. We have in this work only the
appearance of death. Beuys understands that time is master of all – including
death.
The abandoned sleep of me and my loves
is a reenactment in miniature of the sleeping facilities of the prisoners of
the NAZI camps. For me it is also a silent contemplative work about time. Words
and silence are once again called upon by the artist but now with an even
greater enigma given the difficulty of speaking to the original event. Time slowly
becomes conspicuous through the word “abandoned” which refers to the seemingly
countless days and nights of life extinguished by the factories of death.
Beuys’s
Abandoned Sleep also highlights the
uncomfortable fact that all we have left of the years of the camps are
simulations. We know that period and that war now – a war in which Beuys flew
with the Luftwaffe – only through visual simulations such as this work of art
or films such as Holocaust.[31] Today “abandoned” may also be read as the loss of the
lived sense of the German camps which have already begun to fade into history
and mass mediated simulations. This work perpetrates an act of elegance in
memory for those we (always) abandon. Abandoned Sleep is a work concerning the
illusory nature of remembrance. It leaves us to wonder if it is worse to forget
or to remember and to ponder the notion that, in the end, time is the cruel
master of memory which it fatigues into forgetting.
Snowfall is one of the most simple art
works ever made consisting of sixteen pieces of felt cut into squares layered
over three small tree branches. Like Needles
of a Christmas Tree this work captures the slow, soft, inevitability of
11. Beuys. Snowfall (1965).[32]
the drifting down of time. I know of few other works
which point so well to the fact that it is appearances which actually stand in
for what we have long called “reality”. This work trades on the notion of the
importance of being attentive to our slow accumulation of experience which,
like a gentle snowfall, cloaks our existence. Each of us peer out from under
the cover of this accumulation of fragments of existence. The more we think,
the more uncertain we become, and this is the secret of the noise and haste of
a consumer society predicated on thoughtless accumulation. Beuys works against
such an ethos in this work which is akin to watching not only time, but thought
itself, drift down over existence. As our experiences gather we do not become
more certain, but rather, as a product of this enshrouding, less certain.
Against modernity’s cherished notion of progress, we live in a world where as
time passes, we do not “know” with more
certainty, but less. There is a passage in one of the theory diaries of
Baudrillard which captures this feeling. The theorist as poet wrote:
Everyday experience falls like snow. Immaterial,
crystalline and microscopic, it enshrouds all the features of the landscape. It
absorbs sounds, the resonance of thoughts and events… Watching time snow down,
ideas snow down, giving in to the vertigo of enshrouding and whiteness.[33]
Beuys possessed the ability to create work wherein we
could witness the illusory power of death, remembrance, and certainty. It is
especially by calling attention to these illusions that Beuys’s works continue
to participate in the coming together of the concerns of radical thought and
art. The shroud from under which Beuys’s work peers out is the veil of
temporality. In a time after their maker’s time Beuys’s work intersects with
radical thought along planes where Beuys would no doubt be uncomfortable.
Interpretation too is one of the ravages of time.
V.
Conclusion
Beuys,
like Baudrillard, produced objects with which art and theory may continue to
bridge the epistemological gap separating them. From the vantage point of the
earliest steps along that bridge we begin to see all the better that
empiricism, as its grand edifice begins to fade in the distance, was no more or
no less a simulation than any of Beuys’s art objects and actions (or texts by
Baudrillard).[34] Beuys’s art today can be read as sharing many of the
concerns of radical thought given its truly “artistic” nature – works which
take us more to appearances than they do to any firm understanding of the
“real”. As such, Beuys’s work goes to the soul of art where radical thought may
appreciate it’s approach to simulation, silence, time and experience. For
radical theorists seeking to surpass the strictures of empiricism Beuys’s art
works continue on with a certain power.
12. Beuys. Infiltration
Homogeneous for Grand Piano
By
removing the mythic mask of empiricism thought may relish the experience of an
enigmatic and unintelligible world which it is the task of theory and art to
explore. The empirical is a tenacious product of instrumental reason. This kind
of reason is the enemy of illusion and the enigmatic as it constantly seeks
meaning and to break through appearances into the real.[35] It is ironic that objectivity became so important to
empiricism because – as Beuys and Baudrillard show us – in the most “objective”
sense, the world is an illusion which can only appear to us as light breaks
across the surface of it.[36] Beuys is in no way an irrationalist (neither is
Baudrillard for that matter), but an artist who can be read as forcing reason
to face the enigmatic.
Empiricism’s
problem turned out to be its lack of artistry – its avoidance of the illusory
and enigmatic quality of the world. It often tried to write a beautiful story
only to end up with a not a very interesting one. In recent decades artists
like Beuys have shown us that beauty is a meaningless concept better replaced
by the criterion of interest. Knowledge rules only over truth and causality –
it has no power over appearance and illusion.[37] Contemporary radical thought makes us aware that
knowledge is part of the world but our world is profoundly illusory and bears
no necessary relation to knowledge.[38] As we move toward a new, more artistic, horizon in
the social studies – empiricism may be traded for a more poetic, artful, and
uncertain epistemology – one more in keeping with the uncertainty and enigmatic
nature of the world. This challenge to
the real and to reason works with the knowledge of only indifference. In the
place where art demonstrates its artistry by its perception of illusion and
appearance Joseph Beuys’s work remains important.
Beuys’s
work sets up “another scene” from the real. His simulated fragments point to
aspects of the enigmaticalness of the world with works that hinge on fragments,
silence, and enshrouding. Beuys’s art can be read today, from the vantage point
of radical thought, as contributing to the enigmatic and unintelligible
character of the world. Like the best of
contemporary thought, these works heighten our awareness that it is appearances
we know, never the real which hides behind them. And it is here where Beuys’s
works continue their assault on the epistemological break although not at all
in ways he foresaw. Theory, like any art form, can never settle for being made
into a means for counting. As Beuys and Baudrillard understood, each in his own
way, theory like art, is “a way of proceeding”.[39] In our time this is perhaps the best freedom we will
know.
As
for empiricism, it may only survive by slipping into the hyperreal worlds of
cloning and artifical intelligence. We should remain suspicious for it is from
these terrorist bases that empiricism and instrumental reason may well exact a
catastrophic revenge.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 5, May-June 2008, ISSN
1552-5112
Notes