Joseph Beuys, Contemporary Artist, 1921 - 1986, Germany

Joseph Beuys has been considered one of the most influential and representative artists of modern art. His distinct approach to artistic expression and the extension of art frontiers has arguably been the most critical difference between Beuys and his predecessors. By claiming that "everyone is an artist", Beuys challenged the definition and limits of conventional art, and proposed that not only is everyone an artist, but that anything can be art. His rejection of boundaries between art and ordinary reality opened up the potential for ordinary life to be shaped as a form of art expression. This is best exemplified in his own identity and experiences, as evidenced by his fantastical and imaginary retellings of his military service.

“It was in 1943, my Junkers 87 was hit by Russian anti-aircraft fire, and I crashed in a snowstorm in the Crimea in the no-mans-land between German and Russian fronts. I was found in the wreckage by a clan of nomadic Tartars. They covered my body in fat to help it regenerate heat and wrapped it in felt as an insulator to keep the warmth in.” This story was frequently used by Beuys to explain why he employed common materials, such as fat and felt, in his work; these materials, used by the Tartars to save him, refer to storage and containment, two necessary forms of material existence and circulation which have become symbolic in many of his works. Nonetheless, Beuys' narrative of his legendary experience clashes with real historical information -the Tartars on the Crimean plain had disappeared 400 years ago, and military documents attest to Beuys being brought to a military hospital after the air crash. Despite Beuys never clarifying or confirming the contradictions of his experience, as he did not care about the authority of objective facts, people tended to barely define whether this experience was a traumatized hallucination of Beuys, an exquisite lie, or another way he used to shape his own unique artistic identity. Beuys' utilization of his own life and identity was driven by his definitive and clear intention to pursue artistic expression. Unlike Dadaism, which deconstructs everything in pursuit of pure chaos, Beuys believed that art would have no meaning if it did not have an outcome.

I Like America and America Likes Me, 1974. New York

Beuys's work has always concisely articulated the complex relationship between individual identity and historical politics, exemplified by his renowned performance art project, I Like America & America Likes Me. In 1974, he arrived at a New York City airport, where his assistants swathed him in felt and transported him to the René Block Gallery in Soho via ambulance. There, he spent three days, eight hours a day, cohabiting with a live coyote. Beuys attempted to communicate with the animal through various symbolic gestures, such as throwing leather gloves, waving his cane, and holding it out like a wrangler. The coyotes were both docile and hostile, tugging at the felt covering the artist. He also played recordings of triangles and turbines. At the conclusion of the performance, Boyce left the same way he had arrived, still wrapped in felt. At the most fundamental level, this work has presented viewers with a tangible state of harmony between humans and nature. All the interactive behaviors represented by Beuys's human identity in this work were carefully considered, implying certain specific ways of how human groups interact and communicate with the world. The involvement of the coyote is also an iconic symbol. This species is a typical North American one and holds symbolic spiritual meaning in Native American culture, but to white people it is a vicious predator. Susan Howe mentions in her book American Beuys that, "Mythologically and biologically, the coyote is a survivor and exemplar of evolutionary change. This is what attracted Beuys to Coyote. The word 'coyote' is from the Spanish conquistadors' corruption of the Nahuatl word 'coyote'." This made the coyote a prime scapegoat in the West, symbolizing the wild and untamed, an unacceptable threat to husbandry, domesticity, and law & order. In Christian symbology, they were a satanic figure, the enemy of the Lamb and the Shepherd.

Based on historical evidence indicating that a large proportion of the earliest white immigrants in the United States were from Germany, Joseph Beuys utilized his own identity to juxtapose his presence with that of a coyote in his artwork. This might suggest the plundering and cultural purification of the American continent by white immigrants. The seemingly lighthearted and intimate interaction between Beuys and the coyote symbolized the phenomenon of invasion. After having robbed the existing cultural wealth, the invaders were then able to assert their vested interests and coexist with the disadvantaged under the facade of democracy and freedom. The seemingly placid and humorous relationship between Beuys and the coyote is rooted in the superiority of Beuys' use of felt and cane as defensive and offensive devices, as well as the power dynamic that allows humans to shoot coyotes at the first sign of a perceived threat.

Essential to Beuys' work is the shamanic nature, a cultural trait that repeatedly appears in many of his works. Shamanism focuses on the connection and roots between human beings and nature. As Shamanism, Art and Ritual discussed, "Anthroposophy is a philosophy founded by Rudolf Steiner that postulates the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world that is accessible by direct experience through inner development. More specifically, it aims to develop faculties of perceptive imagination, inspiration, and intuition by cultivating a form of thinking independent of sensory experience." Thus, Beuys drew on both the practices and spiritual nucleus of shamanism to present his practice of art in the public vision. In 1965, he created another work, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, which presented the process of explaining pictures and whispering to a dead hare with his head entirely coated with honey and gold leaf. This work is then imbued with mysterious ritualism, as Beuys dissected artistic expression by starting with the symbols that constitute expression, using expression to express the self.

How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965, Galerie Schmela, Düsseldorf

The Hare is a key element in this Beuys's work. As indicated in the 2018 essay How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare: Analysis, the Hare has a strong connection to women, childbirth and menstruation, as well as to the transformation of blood. The Hare's action of hollowing out his form demonstrates the process of incarnation - something that only humans can achieve through their thinking. By rubbing, pushing and digging himself into Materia (earth), the Hare sharpens and transforms his thinking, making it revolutionary. Additionally, Beuys attributed the meaning of "production" to the Bee and used the structure of a bee community to refer to the composition of an ideal socialist society.

Beuys pushed spiritual expression to its maximum in this grotesque work, communicating the confusion and difficulty of artistic and creative expression through an ineffable expression. Moreover, by explaining things to a dead animal, he conveyed a sense of the secrecy of the world, which echoed the shamanic nature of his work. The composition of this performance art was not only limited to Beuys' individual actions and ideas, but also included the audience's reactions; it threw them into a situation of grotesque suddenness, giving them a renewal of vivid self-awareness and perception. This performing art even contains an existentialist absurdity, which implies that humans can act without being determined by our past.

Beuys's expression of art was full of shamanic forms that could shape the environment, but he also believed that art itself had great power to shape, as reflected in his concept of social sculpture. Sculpture is the process of transforming materials from disorder to order, while social sculpture investigates how to model and define the world within which people live and exist. Beuys believed that art had the capacity to be involved in social revolution. Applying the medium of art could encourage humanity peacefully, which indicated that art and artists were accountable for providing all people with the mission of sculpting this existing social form from within society to the outside.

In 1982, Beuys proposed his most ambitious artistic experiment: a program to plant 7,000 oak trees, each paired with a basalt stone, throughout the city of Kassel, with the stones piled on the front lawn of the Fridericianum Museum. This project, seen as a symbol of green urban reconstruction, took five years to complete and has since been scaled up to other cities. Beuys took the vitality of the oak trees and the solidity of the basalt stones as symbols, hoping to trigger the improvement and transformation of human living space after the extreme expansion of industry in modern society. He viewed social sculpture as having artistic value and expanding the scope of art into anthropological and sociological dimensions. Whereas readymade works had previously surpassed the boundaries of art, 7000 Oaks went further, transforming the site of art into the entire human community and defining all participants as artists.

Beuys continued to contribute to the social advancement movement, advocating for a passionate concern for society and the world, and preserving the integration of personal perception and sociality. When people fight for every tree and piece of land, art ceases to be romanticized, and instead becomes a practical social responsibility for all humans. Through extending his works and unique artistic symbols, Beuys demonstrated the worth of the artist's active engagement in social action and the power of art as a means to promote social justice.

Works Cited

Susan, Howe. American Beuys. 1990. web.archive.org/web/20140316063227/http://johanhedback.com/beuys.html

"Who is Joseph Beuys". National Galleries. 12 August 2016

Andrews, Natalie. Shamanism, Art and Ritual. March 27 2018. www.trebuchet-magazine.com/shamanism-art-and-ritual/

"How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare: Analysis." UKEssays. ukessays.com, November 2018. Web. 12 April 2022.