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Visual Arts: The Beuys are back in town

The visionary artist is often dismissed as a fraud. But that misses the value of his life and work, says Tom Lubbock

Tom Lubbock
Monday 07 February 2005 01:02 GMT
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" After I am dead, I would like people to say, `Beuys understood the historical situation. He altered the course of events.' I hope in the right direction." Now he's been dead for almost 20 years, what do they say? That he altered the content of art somewhat, but altered the course of nothing. History has turned from the directions he was pointing in. "Joseph Beuys (1921-86): great German artist; nut": this seems to be the standard view.

Beuys did many things, of which only his artworks remain. From the 1960s, he was a figure on the international art stage and, to an extent, in German public life. He had his constant, signature costume - the felt hat, the angler's jacket and hunter's fur overcoat. He had a semi-mythical war past, in which his life was saved by nomadic Tartars who wrapped him in felt and fat, which became two of his favourite materials. He said every person was an artist.

He proposed the raising of the Berlin Wall by 5cm, to improve its proportions. He created a political party for animals. He was a founder member of the German Green Party. He had continuous run-ins with the Dusseldorf Art Academy and agitated for the founding of a Free International University. He conducted day-long teach-ins, covering blackboards with abstract nouns, arrows and lines of energy. He spent three days interacting with a coyote in a large cage. He initiated the planting of 7,000 oak trees in south Germany and around the world. He was into old pagan and shamanic cultures. He thought art could save us, and was the only thing that could.

Of course a good deal of this comes through in Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments, at Tate Modern. But mostly it's a collection of Beuys's gallery installations, theatrical found-object sculptures that occupy whole rooms.

It's a powerfully symbolic art. Its leading themes are wounds and healing, memory and survival, energy and ritual. Some of the works are well worth the experience. Beuys is a very accomplished stager of resonant stuffs and objects. There's The Pack, which is an old VW van with its back hatch wide open, and pouring out of it a team of 25 wooden sleds, each equipped with an emergency survival kit. There's Hearth, which suggests the relics of some rite. There's The End of the Twentieth Century, a graveyard of logs of basalt, each with a hole cut from it plugged with felt and fat.

And, in a series of glass cases - somewhere between reliquaries and rabbit hutches - you find smaller shows of allegorical things, the objects dense and dirty, the layout always careful and reverent. There's the spade with two handles, for example. The whole of Beuys's work wants to be followed and used cooperatively.

I suppose it would be possible to experience, understand and admire this work without realising that there was any more to it. You could take it as a body of art with its themes and symbols and feelings. You needn't notice any aspirations beyond the gallery, beyond the usual dialogue of viewer and object. You needn't see this art - as Beuys saw it - as the tip of an iceberg.

"Art is the only possibility to change the situation in the world," he said. "But then you have to enlarge the idea of art to include the whole of creativity. And... it follows that every living being is an artist. Man is only truly alive when he realises he is a creative, artistic being. I demand an artistic involvement in all realms of life... Politics has to become art, and art has to become politics... All human activities have to become art, and to be organised by artists."

The doctrine was called Social Sculpture, a work in which we are all creative, participatory makers. The cause was radically democratic, ecological, with a tendency to primitivism and magic. "Those men that are called the Green Party now [1982] will have another name in 20 to 30 years. These sensible men will be able to make these laws as the druid... made his laws." Beuys's actions had an air of shamanic ritual. His materials seemed to be credited with alchemical powers. There was all the talk of energy, and the interest in Celtic myth and the Giant's Causeway, with Ireland designated The Brain of the World. Eh?

It's easy enough to see Beuys's ideology as hare-brained, a bit fascist in its attraction to the mythic, or at any rate just delusional, a blend of impossible high-mindedness, New-Age hocus-pocus, and a messianic personality cult.

We arty people are good at evading the creeds and commitments that artworks bring with them. We say that Beuys was a great visionary and sidestep the issue of whether we share those beliefs. Or we say that the work is the crucial thing. Or we say that Beuys himself didn't really believe any of it either. But I think there is a more realistic response. We tend to feel that just calling an artefact from another culture art isn't good enough: it can't be separated from some religious ritual or social practice. So what practice was Beuys's work part of?

Evidently it wasn't part of a functioning shamanic culture. It was part of the western art-world - which is a market and an entertainment industry and a public institution. It likes to dally with political activism. It's willing to play along with an artist who has weird or extreme beliefs, so long as a) those beliefs don't become explicitly evil, and b) nobody is seriously required to believe them. But the art world isn't wholly a neutralising bubble. It leaks into the world here and there, like those 7,000 oaks. It isn't mad for someone to use this arena as a way to try to change the course of events.

So I'm reluctant to see the Beuys project as just a sweet and stirring bit of silliness. I'm well aware how self-deluding art can be. I don't like the doctrine of creativity as salvation, and I think anyone who admires Beuys should say where they dissent from him. But, on the other hand, anyone who gets involved in art must occasionally imagine possibilities beyond Saatchi's entrepreneurship or the Tate's "admin uber alles". It's in the nature of modern art generally that it awakens aspirations it cannot by itself satisfy. And faced with this work now, one should be filled, at the least, with a longing for something more.

Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments, Tate Modern (020-7887 8000; www.tate.org.uk) to 2 May

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