Text copyright Fergal Gaynor. First published in Enclave Review, Spring 2011, pp.7-8

Joseph Beuys: Parallel ProcessesKunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen(K20), DusseldorfFergal Gaynor

Parallel Processes, part of the DusseldorfQuadriennale, was a major retrospective of Beuys’work, bringing together around three hundreddrawings, sculptures, vitrines, modified objects,etc. arranged around ten major installations. Inmany ways the exhibition seemed comprehensive,with so many famous pieces gathered in one place.The Pack (1969), Stripes from the House of theShaman (1964-1972, 1980), Tramstop (1976),Show Your Wound (1974-1975), Lightning withStag in its Glare (1958-1985), all duly appeared,before the tour of Beuys’ remains terminated in thetransmutational Palazzo Regale (1985), in which allthe felt, lead, minerals and rough board of theprevious spaces abruptly turned to gold. But whata handful of video-recordings, scrawledpronouncements (for instance, two placardsreferring to ‘Baader + Meinhof’), and knowledgethat, next door in the Schmela Haus annex, thefive-and-a-half hour recording of the action Celtic+~~~ (1971) was running reminded the visitor wasthat, no matter how many pieces were brought

together to represent Beuys’ art, the veryrestriction to material objects meant that a wholedimension of Beuys’ activity, of what he himselfconsidered to be his art – the persona, the‘politics’, the educational initiatives, the actions andless formal performance, the pronouncements –was absent. It is interesting what happens in thisabsence.

What the curators did – there appears to havebeen a fair number involved in the exhibition, ledby Marion Ackermann and Isabelle Malz, andincluding architect Wilfried Kuehn and a ‘team ofyoung researchers’ – was gather as many of the‘museum pieces’, that is, display objects –sculptures and drawings, to put it crudely – intoone space, inwardly organising the exhibition witha certain chronological rationale (from Torso of1949-1951 to Palazzo Regale from the year beforehis death in 1986), and bookending it between twoportraits of the artist, one photographic, with allthe charisma of the earnest, war-scarred face, theother, significantly, a Warhol print. The effect ofthis concentration of familiar and undoubtedlypowerful museum-work with the portraits, I felt,was to publically announce Beuys’ fame, toformally represent a German post-war artisticphenomenon in the city most closely associatedwith him. As such the exhibition probablysucceeded: the public response, if the statisticrecorded on the Kunstsammlung’s website, of 8000visitors queuing for admission on the finalweekend, would seem to suggest so. Beuys is afamous German artist. Ironically, it was of thesame trumpeting goddess that Heinrich Böllwarned Beuys in a poem written for the artist’ssixtieth birthday.

In saying this, I am not necessarily suggesting thatwithout the inclusion (as opposed to ‘appendage’)of the ephemera of Beuys’ extended practice, his‘social sculpture’, no Beuys exhibition can be trulyrepresentative. In truth, the media-stream oftheories and slogans, mythicising narratives andimages of ‘the man in the felt hat’ can easilybecome a distraction when assessing his work.Without that distraction, in fact, something comesinto focus that, by extension, places hisdematerialised work in a different perspective.Walking through the array of material two thingsstruck me. First that, whatever about fame, it washard to doubt that Beuys was a major artist andworthy of such lavish attention – simply as asculptor, with a feeling for form and material, andan eye for an iconic object, and as a practitioner ofthe art of drawing, he was clearly a master.Second, that the same ‘form’ and ‘material’, if onethinks beyond the Beuys ‘signature’ (a wornartisan’s tool wrapped in felt next to a wedge offat, some lead and a piece of pig-iron marked witha halfcross sign – that’s our man!), shows anextraordinary degree of consistency of treatment(which is what makes Palazzo Regale s osurprising). In fact, even without the narratives and

Text copyright Fergal Gaynor. First published in Enclave Review, Spring 2011, pp.7-8

symbolism surrounding the pieces, the formal andmaterial choices make evident a consistentsignificatory concern.

In terms of form, Beuys is clearly uninterested inthe Platonic or technicist aesthetic possibilities offormalism. This, of course, is a trait held incommon with many wartime and post-war artists –hence the elaboration of Georges Bataille’s conceptof the Informe by Yve-Alain Bois and RosalindKrauss. Beuys, however, is not an artist of the‘formless’: what appears in his work is acombination of the half-formed and the post-formed, of objects, often made of clay, still bearingthe artist’s hand-print, and seemingly on their wayto some more distinctive shape, but caught at amoment of their development; and of objects that,by extreme usage or immersion in a space of

violent conditions (a furnace perhaps), have losttheir sense of final shape and readiness for use. Interms of materials, Beuys’ sculptural works can bedivided roughly into two modes: the ‘grey-brown’and the ‘black’. The former is the most familiar; Iregistered the existence of the latter for the firsttime at this exhibition – the shining black ofbakelite and ebony giving an odd sense of‘industrial luxury’, perhaps, in the surroundingpauperdom. My first thought was to the parallelwith Arte Povera, and with a Jannis Kounellis pieceI had seen at a Tate retrospective some years ago– to my mind a resistance to the commodificationof the artwork by the presentation of basic

Joseph Beuys, Blitzschlag mit Lichtschein auf Hirsch(Lightning with stag in its glare), 1958-1985.Installation, 39 Elemente: Bronze, Eisen, Aluminium,Kompass, Leihgabe. Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2010. Foto: Achim Kukulies

Text copyright Fergal Gaynor. First published in Enclave Review, Spring 2011, pp.7-8

materials of commodity culture – iron ore, coke,etc. – so fundamental to industry as to provide alimit point to its commodificatory action. Then itoccurred to me that the materials and, indeed,class of industry evoked, were curiouslyanachronistic for an artist working in the sixties,seventies and eighties. Beuys was not only puttingon show the bare rudiments of an industrialculture, but those of a particular industrial culture,that of the thirties and forties. In the context of thework of a German artist it was very hard not tosense that here was an art concentratedly workingthrough the detritus of the war and the Nazi era.

I don’t think that this would have occurred to mehad the retrospective been filled out by referencesto the non-material work: in restricting themselvesto the ‘serious’ museum pieces the curators hadamplified what the critic Gene Ray has referred toas ‘the work of mourning’.(1) I had a nigglingmisgiving about this recognition and especially itscalling to mind of Ray’s account: was what affectedme among these objects an ‘Auschwitz aesthetic’?Did I automatically sense a solemnity to the workbecause of an innate resemblance to the imagesI’d absorbed of the remains of the exterminationcamps? Ray is clear on this point: there was neverany suggestion of Beuys’ exploitation of theseimages, he was at pains to keep mention of thecamps at a distance in his scattershot of publicpronouncements, only letting his awareness of adeep concern for that era slip out once or twice inhis career. Beuys had no qualms about exploitingother affairs – the media-friendly character of hisappearance, for instance – if it promoted the work;but when a number of others had set up their stallas ‘Auschwitz artists’ he remained rigorously silenton the subject.

But in bringing this essential ‘mourning’ dimensionto our attention Ray is remiss in terms of whatBeuys did articulate: in short, what has often beenseen as his ‘clownish’ side, his relentlessly positiveSteiner-influenced politico-artistic agitation. If theunvoiced ‘work of mourning’ has its formalequivalent in the ‘post-formed’ objects – bearingthe blows and scorching of the preceding violence,

then the ‘half-formed’ links to the constant,garrulous propulsion of the same rudimentarymaterials towards a future. Beuys, in short, is aJanus-faced artist, at once a late-modernist elegistand a post-modern impresario, the same ‘post-modernism’ revealing itself here as a relentlesslypositive openness to whatever new social forms oropportunities appeared in the post-war course ofnorth-western history. I don’t think the two sidescan finally be separated, and in a work like‘Lightning with Stag in its Glare’ a sense of theirconjunction, albeit with the stress on the side ofretrospection because of its materiality, can be felt.

For some reason the piece didn’t come off for mein its position in Parallel Processes, but I’ve felt theenergy and registered the inherent artist’s tracewhen viewing it elsewhere (originally at Frankfurt’sKunstverein). It is, as his Belgian contemporaryMarcel Broodthaers intimated, when he slylyidentified Beuys with Wagner in a famous openletter published in the ‘Dusseldorfer Feuilleton’, aGesamtkunstwerk, an all-embracing maximalartistic effort suggesting the artist’s status as quasi-spiritual genius, but, significantly, it fails as such.The narratives, symbolism and theatrical actionhaving withered away we are left with the remains:an ‘unformed’ artwork, or rather, an energy-boundconfiguration of the half-formed and post-formed.With boundless optimism, using the mostrudimentary, and grave, materials, the ‘genius’ hasmade a huge attempt to bring a work ofregeneration into being, and has been forced toabandon the effort in a state of incompletion,casting doubt on the genius’ status, or thepossibility of renewal, but not on the artist’spositivity, or the gravity of his subject. Without theformer (the spirit that announced that ‘democracyis fun’) the latter would not be articulated; andwithout the latter (the silent absorption in thelegacy of wartime Germany) the former would haveevaporated off as another haze of half-focusedutopianism, typical of its heyday in the sixties.

1 ‘Joseph Beuys and the After-AuschwitzSublime’ (Joseph Beuys: Mapping theLegacy, 2001).

Fergal Gaynor is a writer, independent scholar andco-editor of Enclave Review. His first collection ofpoetry was published by Miami University Press inFebruary.Parallel Processes ran from September 11th 2010 –January 16th 2011.