The Noise of Beuys

By ROBERT HUGHES

At New York's Guggenheim, the guru of Duesseldorf

Joseph Beuys--sculptor, maker of happenings, guru and political fantasist--is without doubt the most influential artist in Europe. At 58, he is also one of the few genuine art world stars: the gaunt face, the felt hat that never comes off in public and the fishing jacket make up a uniform as immediately recognizable to his fans as Al Capone's fedora or Picasso's monkey mask. He even has a retinue of attendants, attired in cute red jumpsuits. For some years he has been one of the chief culture heroes in Germany, particularly in Duesseldorf, where he lives, teaches and, by way of extension of his social theories, sponsors an institute called the Free International University, supporting it with the large income from his work. He is seen by the right as a demented blend of gangster and clown, and by some of the less militant student left as a messiah.

Beuys (pronounced boyce) was called up into the Luftwaffe from a small north German town. He did not turn into a professional artist until he was in his 40s. Having survived a series of crippling depressions, he fills the role of the penitent prophet. His wartime experiences, particularly the occasion in 1943 when he crashed in a Ju-87 and was saved by wandering Tartar tribesmen who wrapped his traumatized body in felt and fat (thereby planting the germ of Beuys' later obsessive interest in fat and felt as art materials, emblems of healing and magic), have for his followers almost joined Van Gogh's ear in the hagiography of modern art. After refusing for years to exhibit at an American museum in protest against the Viet Nam War, Beuys is now having a retrospective, organized by the English art curator Caroline Tisdall, at the Guggenheim in New York City.

An extreme case of the reverence accorded to Beuys' work in Germany happened two years ago, when one of his pieces--a bathtub on a stand, dotted with bits of sticking plaster--was mistakenly used to cool beer during a party in the museum where it was stored. No damage was done to it, but the owner sued and was given $94,000 damages by a German court, a verdict happily greeted by Beuys as a victory over the "exploitative self-interest" of the beer drinkers. Plainly, something had happened to the avant-garde in the half-century since Marcel Duchamp suggested using a Rembrandt as an ironing board. Had it died of its own pomposity? If not, where was Beuys' claim to be an avant-gardist left? The problem is simple: there is no avant-garde any more, since its old ambitions of provocation and social attack have been swallowed by the prostrate tolerance of institutions. Its only battle is a shadow play, the game of opposing (or marginally embarrassing) its patrons, the bankers and art dealers who can afford to buy Beuys' work.

Beuys' answer to this is, in effect, a brisk substitution. If art cannot affect politics, we shall designate everything that happens in the world as art, as a form of "social sculpture." Since in the present intellectual climate of Germany nearly every act can be read as political, the artist assumes the stature of a revolutionary prophet. The result is Beuys as political Luftmensch, reeling off harmless Utopian generalizations about social renewal through universal creativity, supporting the Free International University, and engaging in squabbles with the Duesseldorf Academy. This, however, is less social sculpture than social packaging. Beuys is a master of the art of self-representation, the last man to become a real celebrity (as distinct from a mere famous artist) through the medium of the art world. He is the Duchamp of the engages, a position he laid formal claim to in 1964 by exhibiting a placard on West German television which read, "The silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated." As such, he is famous for being famous, for being rather than doing. It is quite unnecessary that his political notions should have any effect on the real world.

The effort to make life and art one and the same does very little to change life, and generally dilutes art; but it is one of the permanent, unrealizable fixtures of the romantic will to cultural impact, and thus the favorite bromide of the avantgarde.

Beuys' sculpture is so wrapped in personal myth that it all looks equally good to his devotees. To those who are less committed, it seems very uneven. His stacks of felt rectangles, topped with copper or iron plates, have the dumb, disengaged look common to most minimal art. It does not help much to learn that the slabs of felt are meant to resemble the plates in a wet-cell battery; no current runs, and inertia is inertia. His most extravagant object--20 tons of mutton fat cast into the form of a corner of a pedestrian underpass leading to Muenster University, and now solemnly displayed in six pale hunks on the floor of the Guggenheim--was meant as a critique of heartless urban landscape, but its own megalomania crushes the small point it makes. On the other hand, Beuys is brilliant at using laconic, coarse, gritty, abandoned things to suggest a tragic sense of history. A case in point is his dreadful reliquary of Auschwitz, from the Stroher collection in Darmstadt: its few objects in a glass case--blocks of fat on a battered electric hot plate, moldering sausages, a mummified rat on a straw bed, a diagram of the camp, a drawing of a child--are perhaps the most poignant, and certainly the least exploitative, image in modern art of that catastrophe.

Many of his larger pieces occupy a middle ground between threat and humor: his swarm of survival sleds, each with its blanket, flashlight and ration of edible fat, pouring out of the back of a Volkswagen bus; or his felt-covered piano, silent and permanently muffled, looking like an ill-stuffed gray elephant with two red crosses sewed on its hide, His obsessive interest in shamanism and the invocation of animal totems -- hare, bee, stag and the like, scribbled out in countless drawings, molded in wax and scratched on slate -- has at least as much to do with the pantheism of earlier German modernists like Franz Marc as it does with real anthropology, Beuys' images are very dense. Only the connections between them look scatty.

In fact, the reason for Beuys' popularity in Germany has more to do with history than one might suppose. For what is his art about? Nothing other than the excavation of memory, layer on layer of it, transformed into metaphor: these mock-shamanistic rituals, this fiddling about with sticks and fat, bones and rust, blood (or at least Blutwurst), coarse felt, mud, gold, magicians' wands and dead animals, are meant to embody a state of premodernist consciousness. Beuys' imagery of survival is intensely romantic and archaizing. It looks back to the days when artists were daubing ocher on cave walls and skinning hares with their teeth. It is full of nostalgia for the lost social centrality of art.

If one were to say that Beuys' art is about earth and race, one would not be far off the mark. But in Germany the very words have been fatally contaminated for the past 40 years by the rhetoric and fantasies of Nazism. Merely to utter them is to summon up the distant specter of flags, hunting lodges, papier-mache Wagnerian swans and holy swords that constituted Guering's idea of folk culture, Karinhall style. One of Nazism's lingering cultural effects on postwar German artists was to render almost all contact with the German romantic tradition impossible; the radioactivity of that catastrophic fallout would take a long time to decay. Hence, perhaps, the peculiar openness of Germany to the tide of American influence that swept it in the '60s and early '70s, when New York modernism became the official culture of Western Europe, at least at the level of museums and big-time collectors. Joseph Beuys was the first post-war German artist to wander freely among the more voelkische fragments of Teutonic romanticism -- some of them still hot enough to make the needle jump -- and assemble them into an art of obstinate personal idiosyncrasy. For this, he has been extravagantly rewarded with fame, money and the love of groupies. He deserves to be. On the political level, the noise of Beuys is not worth the silence of Duchamp; but as an artist, an inventor of memorable images and a fabricator of contexts for them, he has no European rivals. --Robert Hughes

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