"Sonnenschlitten"

JOSEPH BEUYS

Joseph Beuys was born in 1923 in Krefeld, a small town on the Dutch border of Germany, where he grew up in the oppressive climate of the Nazi period. As a child, he showed an interest and vocation for the natural sciences, but as he grew up, he felt a strong fascination for the arts, especially sculpture. However, when war broke out, he decided to enrol in the Faculty of Medicine, abandoning his own inclinations. In 1941, he enlisted in the Luftwaffe and was trained as an airborne radio operator. In 1943, the event that most marked his personal life occurred: during a military mission flying over the Crimea, the plane he was in crashes. The crash causes the death of the pilot and leaves Beuys with a serious head injury. For twelve days Beuys remained in a state of semi-consciousness until he woke up in a German military hospital. Over the years he would recount being rescued, after the crash, by some Tatar nomads, being taken into one of their tents and treated for eight days with compresses of animal fat and felt, poor but useful materials for soothing the serious head injuries. The episode penetrated Beuys' subconscious and became an unstoppable generative force that was to be reflected in all his subsequent work. Today many question the veracity of the incident, but the so-called ‘Tartar Myth’ remains fundamental in the narrative of the construction of Beuys' artistic personality. At the end of the war, after spending a few weeks in an Allied prison camp, Beuys decided to enrol at the Dusseldorf Academy of Fine Arts and began studying sculpture under Ewald Matarè. During these years he broadened his intellectual education, preferring to read romantic authors such as Schiller and Novalis, but also Joyce; he was also deeply influenced by Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophical theories. He also continued to cultivate his love of nature by assisting Heinz Sielmann, who had been his instructor in the army, in making nature documentaries. In 1961, he was awarded a professorship in sculpture at the Dusseldorf Academy. In the following year, he began a fruitful collaboration with Fluxus, a group of neo-Dada artists from various backgrounds, who proposed extremely innovative forms of art, focusing not so much on the work itself, but on the creative process. From this important encounter, Beuys began to engage in his first Aktionen, his first performances. The most famous of these years is undoubtedly Come spiegare la pittura a una lepre morta (How to explain painting to a dead hare), which took place in Dusseldorf in 1965, emblematic for its symbolic density and the ceremonial rituality of the gestures. Of the following year is Homogeneous Infiltration for grand piano (now in the collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris); in both performances Beuys makes use of felt, which becomes the absolute protagonist in works such as Felt Dress (1970, in the collection of the Tate in London) and The Sled (1969), in which fat is also used, the central element of Chair with Fat, of 1964. The collaboration with Fluxus lasted only a few years, but Beuys did not abandon the medium of the Aktion, which became a highly effective instrument in the affirmation of political and social demands: a large part of Beuys' artistic production, in fact, was to be inextricably linked to a certain political militancy, which reached its peak in 1980, when he became one of the founders of the Green Party. The theme of ecology is certainly crucial for the artist (exemplary, in this sense, is the work 7000 Oaks, realised in Kassel on the occasion of Documenta 7 and finished after Beuys' death), but also the problem of the right to education. In 1967, he founded the German Student Party, responding to the demand of some of his students to be heard and represented. In 1972, he appealed directly to the director of the Dusseldorf Academy and succeeded in getting 142 young people who had failed the selections admitted to studies. In the same year, however, due to his radical views, Beuys was dismissed from his teaching post. He then founded the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research, with makeshift locations all over Europe. In general, it is crucial for Beuys that art is made accessible and can be enjoyed by everyone: ‘Every human being is an artist’ is one of his most famous statements. It should be understood as a celebration of the intrinsic and innate creativity of the human being, in this sense to be understood as ‘artist’. Everyone can become part of a creative process that, according to Beuys, has the power to subvert and revolutionise the established order, with all its limitations and shortcomings, especially evident in the devastated and torn post-war Germany. Each individual has the possibility of changing the structure of relationships within society by using all the creative and expressive means at his disposal: in this sense Beuys speaks of Soziale Plastik, ‘social sculpture’. His choice to produce works in multiples is therefore very understandable. They serve as amplifiers for his activist endeavours, as vectors facilitating the propagation of political messages, but they also embody the ideology of a ‘democratic’ art, available and usable to as many people as possible. The work 2 Shafskopfe (‘2 Sheep's Heads’) was produced in 90 copies between 1961 and 1975 and one of these is part of the collection of the Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m. The oil on paper is perforated in the centre; against the light, two shapes are visible whose outlines suggest the heads of two sheep, outlined on the black paint with animal fat. The choice of sheep is not surprising, given the large number of works by Beuys in which animals appear. For example, the aforementioned How to Explain Painting to a Dead Hare, but also the Aktion I like America and America likes me (1974, Renè Block Gallery, New York), in which Beuys has himself locked in a cage together with a coyote: the man wraps a large piece of felt around himself for protection; with few tools at his disposal, he spends three days in contact with the animal, trying to win its trust. The choice to represent the sheep is linked to the imagery that accompanies it: it refers to a partnership between man and animal, a mutually beneficial coexistence, but also to biblical and evangelical symbolism, in which the faithful are often metaphorically called by the name of the animal. The hole in the paper is located right at one of the sheep's heads - a wound surrounded by the same grease that had healed the artist's injuries in his disastrous plane crash - and is healed in the duplicate next to it. Joseph Beuys was also distinguished by this detail: on his head he always wore a felt hat, an active reminder of a material that is most therapeutic, along with fat, in contact with the skin. Joseph Beuys participated in the Venice Biennale in 1976 and 1980 and took part in Documenta in Kassel in 1982. In 1979, a retrospective of his work was organised at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Over the years, exhibitions have been dedicated to him all over the world, including those at the Seibu Museum of Art in Tokyo, Tate Liverpool, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Modern in London, among others. Today, his works are held in the collections of important international museum institutions, including the Tate (which owns a copy of 2 Shafskopfe, among others), the MoMA in New York (which owns an artist's proof of ‘Painting Version’ in the collection of the Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m.), the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He died prematurely on 23 January 1986.