Throwing fat in the fire: Joseph Beuys in the heat of revolt, West Germany 1967-69
Creators: name: Dumett, Mari
Publisher: name: University of British Columbia
Year: 2009

description: Between the years 1967-69, the Federal Republic of Germany erupted as a space of political and cultural crisis, like other nations across Western Europe and North America, but as was the case with each, West Germany's own entanglement of historical pressures and contemporary reality rendered the circumstances of its crisis distinct. Within this space the period marked a significant shift in the receptive tide of the work of the artist Joseph Beuys. His art, particularly his performances known as aktionen, began to be considered more seriously and to be appreciated in ways it had not been before. Hardly signalling a remission of the controversy that had surrounded his work during the earlier years of the decade, this "appreciation" generated a phenomena of notoriety that encompassed a spectrum from adorational zeal to vehement disdain. To some the work was even perceived as threatening. Thus, by the end of the decade, Beuys was simultaneously considered the enfant terrible of the West German art world, a clear and present danger to the existing educational order and the most important contemporary artist in the nation. Why was it that the reception of Beuys' work changed at this particular moment? How was it able to take on compelling force - like an epicenter located in the art world, but emitting shock waves that reached beyond this sphere's traditional confines? Seeking to explore theses questions, this thesis takes the approach that answers lie in the work's complex relationship to the specifically German circumstances of crisis in which it was produced. Given the copious documented on this historical moment and Beuys' canonical status, the amount of analysis on Beuys' work from this time is surprisingly modest with regard to English language reception. More importantly, however, is the not so surprising nature of the analysis that does exist. Beuysian scholarship is plagued by a positivist tradition within which: the artist is taken at his word, the aktionen are accepted as perfect visual correlates of his theory of Social Sculpture and ultimately he is valorized as a hero of radical West German youth in the 1960s. Beginning from a general barreness of criticality, analysis in this tradition presents further dilemmas. Firsdy, it elides the reality that the dynamic of crisis was more complex than an "us" (marginalized other) versus "them" (the Establishment) standoff. The left itself was fractured. Often the same general problems were targeted — the archaic, authoritarian and oppressive hegemonic structures of society—but the "best" means to ignite change was debated, allowing for multiple projects of liberation to be set forth. Secondly, it negates the conflict inherent to a rhetorical position, by which, for example, a project "for social change" is potentially recoupable to non-critical, non-parodic (perhaps even reactionary) baseline effects. Beuys took part in a dialogue of social transformation, offering his own work as a particular type of historical explanation and intervention, and its provocation can only be understood in terms of a shifting dynamic of connections and disjunctures with alternate articulations, preceding and contemporaneous, emerging from within and beyond the art world. The aim is to dispel the myth of Beuys, to deconstruct the constructions of the artist and the work of art in the period when they were first penned into West German cultural heritage books. The method chosen, however, is different from past deconstructive efforts. Rather than attempt to stock pile "evidence" on one side of the Beuys' debate - was he a shaman or a sham? - it is the conscious mechanisms embodied in the work itself that are under investigation. In fact his work was more complex than an immediate placement allows. Through close critical analysis of the single aktion Vacuum—Mass of October 1968, it is possible to speak of the work in terms of the social and psychological cracks within which it maneuvered. Thereby revealing the fact that despite an initial appearance of amenability between his endeavors and the antiauthoritarian movement (a perception prompted by his general call to action), despite his rhetoric of "everyone an artist" (with its implied conceptualization of an egalitarian society), despite certain provocative anarchic impulses and despite subsequent texts that function merely as rhetorical reiteration it becomes clear that there were distinctions by which Beuys consciously distanced himself from the radical youth. Setting in place a veneer of radicality, he needed to work in a mode divergent from others in order to protect his constructions. Beyond a benign disparity, the conflicts and contradictions embedded in Beuys' performance, as manifest most significantly in the space of the aktion, the practice of action art itself and the utilization of a symbolic language, signified potentially dangerous reifications of the very problems the youth and their theoretical mentors of the leftist West German intelligentsia saw as reasons for revolution.