Exhibitions
Joseph Beuys Drawings: The secret block for a secret person in Ireland (Royal Academy, till 16 September)
Joseph Beuys: Editions (Scottish National Gallery of Modem Art, till 19 September)
Noble muddle
Martin Gayford
The late Joseph Beuys told the maga- zine Der Spiegel that at the age of four he was visited by an angelic figure who instructed him, 'Extend the concept of art.' It is hard to know whether Beuys himself believed that story. He had a strong sense of humour, and was quite capable of telling fairy stories about himself. One such is the oft-told tale — currently repeated on the walls of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art — that when his plane crashed during the war he was cared for by nomads who wrapped him in fat and felt.
But, angelically instructed or not, Beuys certainly extended the boundaries of art. He extended them into installation, strange, ritualistic performances, public seminars — all of which have made him a hugely influential figure in contemporary art. So wide-ranging was his use of novel materials that the head of education for the state of North Rhine Westphalia once refused to meet Beuys, on the grounds that he could not take the risk to his dignity of being incorporated in a work of art. Conse- quently, the bizarre and often scrappy drawings from The secret block for a secret Person in Ireland currently on view at the Royal Academy are actually about the most conventional works from Beuys's output.
Even so, it is difficult to know what to make of them. Some, though doubtless laden with cabalistic signs, resemble the scraps of paper on which one jots down facts and figures while talking on the tele- phone. Others, verging on the pornograph- ic, look more like the kind of graffiti to be found in telephone boxes and public lava- tories. Initially, looking at Beuys's wispy, scratchy line, one is tempted to adapt his famous slogan 'Everybody is an artist'. Everybody, one mutters to oneself, is at least as good an artist as this. But one is wrong there. Look a little fur- ther, and one sees that Beuys was more interesting and more old-fashioned than he at first appears. There is a — no doubt cal- culated — rawness about these drawings. The wash, when he uses wash, often looks as if it might be made of rust, or dilute blutwurst (a favourite Beuys material); in fact he did use iron chloride, and on occa- sion blood, instead of more usual pigments.
But there is also, quite often, a raw beauty about his images of nudes, skulls, stags and so on. They look like updated cave paint- ings, the secret signs of a romantic primi- tive surviving underground in the modern world. And that is more or less what they were. The startling innovations in Beuys's artistic vocabulary conceal the fact that he was absolutely in the German Romantic tradition.
He believed — an incessant theme in the thought and art of the last two centuries in a return to an organic society, free from the rational rigidity of industrialism and science. In that utopian world, man would be in direct, intuitive connection with the world of nature, and creativity would be unchained in one and all (which is what he meant by everybody is an artist).
To this millenarian brew — roughly, William Morris plus William Blake with a German idealistic spin on it — he added a layer of esoteric thought, involving the symbolism of alchemy, the practices of Shamanism, and so on. As a result, even for the initiated, his works can be extremely hard to understand.
Well, it looks highly unlikely that Beuys's peaceable kingdom is going to come to pass (in 1984 he was still bravely predicting it would come by the end of the century). Looking at his Weltanschauung as a whole, it is tempting to borrow the judgment of Kenneth Clarke on the world view of William Blake: it is a pretty good muddle. But, of course, that does not invalidate his art, any more than Blake's muddle invali- dates Blake's (though it can render it simi- larly arcane). And in some ways it is a noble, attractive and imaginatively fertile muddle.
?, 1952, by Joseph Beuys, on show at the Royal Academy, London The difference with Beuys is that, though his production was vast, with his own charismatic presence removed (he died in 1986), there is often little left. The large exhibition in Scotland — Joseph Beuys: Editions — often seems like an accumula- tion of the relics of a mediaeval saint, or a Hollywood star. There one finds Beuys's celebrated felt suit, vestiges of various installations and performances, and also innumerable photographs of him wearing his actual, invariable uniform of felt hat, fisherman's jacket and jeans. There he is with Andy Warhol, being ejected from his professorship at the State Art Academy in Dusseldorf having sided with dissident stu- dents, and so on. Often, the photographs are signed, and stamped with his occult seal. Thus, they become part of the gesamtkunstwerk of Beuys's life.
I am more or less convinced that Beuys was a major figure, and not, as was fre- quently alleged by the German press dur- ing his lifetime, a charlatan. On the other hand, more even than is the case with Mar- cel Duchamp — another elusive extender of the boundaries of art — it is difficult to point to any specific works and say, 'Here is his achievement, the masterpiece.' But I dare say Beuys intended it to be that way.
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