Joseph Beuys

Talking on the occasion of his installation Plight at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, October 1985. This was to be the last exhibition made by Beuys in Britain, he died in January 1986.

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 8, Number 1, 1985

Transcript

The 1985 Turner Prize at the Tate Gallery
With Vox Pop comments from:
William Packer, Richard Wentworth, Melvyn Bragg, John Roberts, Jon Bird, Alan Haydon, Paul Johnstone, Alan Bowness, Sir Richard Attenborough, Howard Hodgkin, Peter Townsend, John Hoyland, Michael Moon, Marina Vaizey, John McEwan, John Walters, Mathew Collings and Norman Rosenthal (51)

Beuys speaks on the occasion of his installation ‘Plight’ at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, October 1985. This was to be his last major interview in English. He died in January 1986.

William Furlong: Joseph, perhaps we could start by you talking about the sources of this piece of work, which has involved installing felt around the interior of the gallery and placing a grand piano, a blackboard and a thermometer.

Joseph Beuys: It all started as a joke, being related to the difficulties that the gallery was in when the very noisy reconstruction of the building behind Anthony’s wall was taking place. The reconstruction of buildings close by will remain for the near future. Anthony, who was despairing, asked me if it would not be better to go away from this place. I told him that I did not think that was necessary and I said, you have to stand it for a while. The place is good and the connections from this gallery to the other galleries are okay so there is no reason to move just because there is a noise for, say, two years perhaps. So then I made a joke and said I can easily make a kind of muffling sculpture. I had the idea of a muffling sculpture with felt and also to make it as a big exhibition – that was a joke. Then we forgot about it and didn’t speak of it any more. Then only three weeks before I received a letter from Judy Adam, Anthony’s assistant, and she mentioned earnestly that it would be interesting to make a third installation with this kind of meaning – insulation from outside influences such as danger, noise, or temperature or whatever. Then I decided to make this piece, so I developed this kind of installation. Before I was intending to make it parallel and synchronic with the exhibition of German art in the Royal Academy. I thought it would appear as a stone sculpture here. But I found this much more interesting now, in relation to the pieces that are in the Royal Academy exhibition, since what they are completely missing is one of my main works related to action, performances, environment, and also the materials which belong to those actions. There is fat missing, there is felt missing. So I thought it would be a very good thing to make an impression on the people who will surely appear from all over the world to see the show. The show includes my most beloved and most powerful material, that is felt. And then I felt people could get information from a wider understanding of art. While those pieces are wonderful, they show too little about theory and, let’s say, the whole scope of the meaning of my wider understanding of art. That was the reason.

WF: There is a recurring theme that one sees in your work. There are ideas to do with survival and to do with the human body, and so on. Although that piece is concerned with insulating a space from the outside, it seems to me that on walking in there one becomes very aware of one’s own body or of one’s bodily functions.

JB: Yes, that’s right, and that was also the reason to use such materials. Since I was not interested in staying with the idea of visual art, I was interested in pointing at the necessity to determine the idea of art to us all, to all the senses existing in human beings and even to develop new senses. If they are not there now, they will appear in the future. If people are training and are really interested in art they could develop more senses. So this is now related to the senses of touching and surely also to seeing. This remains. I am not against vision because it’s one of the most important senses. You have a kind of acoustic effect, because everything is muffled down. Then there is the effect of warmness. As soon as there are more than twenty people in the room the temperature will rise immediately. Then there is the sound as an element muffling away the noise and the sound. So this concert hall – I could also call it a concert hall – muffles down the sounds almost to zero. And to express this the grand piano is inside with a score on it. There are lines for notations on this blackboard but there are no notes. There is nothing on it, and instead of this there is a fever thermometer on it to stress that the warm quality is the most important quality for me and is a very important criterion for the quality of sculpture. One person will feel more this kind of accommodation of warmth and other people will find it sucks away the sound. Other people will feel, let’s say, even becoming oppressed, because there is also a negative aspect in the original idea and isolation. The negative side is the padded cell, which is a kind of torture thing.

WF: Because one is deprived of a response by the environment?

JB: Yes, right, there is no response, there is nothing, the outside cannot break through. That’s more the oppressive element, I would say; then the positive thing is the warmness and the possibility to protect you from all sides. Nobody asked me what does it mean until now, this is the first time. I give only the answer that I found it very necessary during all my attempts to widen the understanding of sculpture, being related to humankind’s creative structures and senses and in thought, feeling and winning power. So it is necessary to describe the reasons why I work with this material, but it needs an exploration towards the special meaning of this special piece. It is visible immediately, so therefore I have spoken about the theory only, until now. What could I say? Yes, surely, I have already tried to give a lot of reasons why it came to such a result. The history started with this joke, with the special condition of Anthony’s gallery and so on; then the reason why I principally use the material is that I try to use a material that is transformable into psychological powers within the being who is not aware nowadays about his or her creativity potentials.

Because our time tends to work with a kind of ideology, they call those things sculpture and paintings visual art. But I think that vision plays only one role and there are twelve other senses at least implied in looking at an artwork. So I try to change the understanding of art, which leads to a wider understanding of art, and that’s what I call anthropological art. So this is for me also a series in which anthropological art has to appear after modern art. I find the period of modern art ended in Germany with the beginning of Hitler’s time. In England I am not so clear, but I am almost sure this is almost the same. I think everything which came after the war was a kind of reminder of possibilities from the modern impulse, which dates from the turn of the century. Now especially, people are speaking without any idea about the necessity and logic of art. They speak once again of modern art but they call it postmodern, and this for me is a falsification. This is not an organic transformation of the idea of art. It is only a kind of cancer, because they don’t know how its next step should take place with the transformation of the power of art. They don’t know that it should be related to everybody’s creativity, and that the participation of everybody in the idea of art in any field and character of work should take place, and that every future discussion on the changing of the social order will fall if it does not start to base itself on the creative being, with the possibility to make self-determination, self-administration and self-government. So this transformed idea of art means a lot and maybe it appears to be bold, but I think this boldness is necessary to overcome bad positions in the social order.

WF: Why do you cite the Second World War as a point of significance and change?

JB: You could also take this time of the necessity to change the understanding of art from the modern art – the ideology of moderna. You could shift it ten years later or ten years earlier, but in Germany that was the time when this modern art disappeared and a kind of revival took place, and some very interesting painters appeared even after the Second World War. What I was missing with them was the theory of the thing. So in looking for the importance of modern art, which for me is very, very important, completely independent of whether it is German modernism or Dutch modernism or French or Italian modernism or Russian modernism – Mondrian, for instance, or Malevich, Tatlin, [etc.], had Futuristic ideas, Cubistic ideas, Surrealistic ideas. They are of significance because they are the signalisation for a future time where everything is done by a person. Because all those names like Surrealism, Cubism, they were developed from single persons, and every person as an individual is able to create his own culture completely. Like in the older cultures. The Egyptian culture was under a kind of rule and it was a great and gigantic culture, but it was not developed by the free individual being. It was commanded by the Pharaoh, who was pretending to be a representative of all the future gods. So all future arts, therefore, were determined from the top as a collective art. It ended with the Baroque time, and after the Baroque time there slowly and with some difficulty started the tendency to give it to the free person as a cultural way to develop and determine his or her own idea of the world. So every artist now in German art – be it Expressionistic, or be it Surrealistic, or be it naturalistic, shows that he is able to create a world of his own. But with all the signaling towards this potency existing in humankind, they signaled this possibility but they didn’t develop the theory.

It is especially interesting that Marcel Duchamp, who tried to destroy the whole kind of tradition, was hinting towards the common worker with his pissoir piece (Fountain, 1917), because he said this is an artwork only if it’s shown in a special other context. But he missed the point completely to find out the logic in saying that if this is a work of art which is done by some Mr Mutt or an anonymous worker in the factory, then the creator is really the worker. So he didn’t enlarge all the work and all the labour to the new understanding of art as a necessity to study everything in humankind’s labour from this point of view. That would have been of very big importance because it could then have two kinds of discussion with existing ideology on society, the capitalistic systems and the communistic systems. There is a germ in the right direction set down and practised by Marcel Duchamp, but then he stays away from any other reflections, so he didn’t understand his own work completely. So to be very modest, I could say that my interest was to make another interpretation of Marcel Duchamp, and I try at least to feel its most important depth which was missing in this work. So with such statements the silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated. You know after he stopped working and playing chess and such things and he didn’t speak any more about art so much, was completely silent, he cultivated this kind of silence in a very old-fashioned form. He wanted to become a hero in silence or in saying nothing or resigning his whole idea of art. Art also is Marcel Duchamp. I will say that during this time when he was silent he could have reflected on his work and come to a real other result about the meaning, impact and, let’s say, effectiveness, because he was really interested in the transformation of art, but he didn’t transform it. He showed some pieces that shocked the middle classes, the bourgeoisie, the people of piccolo borghese. So from this point of view he belongs to some of the tendencies of the Dada stream. So I try principally to do this thing further on over the threshold where modern art ends into an area where anthropological art has to start – in all fields of discussion, not only in the art world, be it in medicine, be it in miners’ problems, be it in the information of state and constitution, be it in the money system.

WF: If we could finish by perhaps returning to ‘Plight’. The meaning of ‘plight’ is also the lot of the individual, the actual position of the individual. One talks certainly in the English language of somebody’s plight – what they are actually left with, what their position is, what their role is – and there is an implication that perhaps their position isn’t all that satisfactory in the world if one describes somebody’s plight, which presumably is part of the meaning of the space that you have made.

JB: I was interested to stress and to tackle all that runs through the meaning of the insulator idea. To show both sides of the installation, the positiveness of this and the negativeness. This English word plight is not only this special bad situation that you are speaking of, it means also the betrothal of the plight, it means that is love implied, there is a positiveness or trust. Also in English this word has two completely different meanings. One goes in this direction and one goes in that direction, so it was useful to take it as the title for this insulating environment.

WF: Could we just finish by talking about the exhibition that you are in at the Royal Academy. I’m interested to know how much you feel part of what one would call a German identity in terms of recent contemporary art, particularly recent painting. Do you think you share very much with those artists? Is there something one can pin down in your work?

JB: No, as soon as you are trying to restrict this question or to reduce this question to works of art which are only recently done in Germany, I feel completely dubious about the connection with this. But I am completely secure that I belong to German art. To give you a real and radical example, I would not be here as an artist if there had not been a personality like Wilhelm Lehmbruk, a sculptor who I admire very much. His existence led me to the decision to become a sculptor and to get interested in sculpture. I didn’t even know what sculpture was when I saw it for the first time, during Hitler’s time, when I was relatively young and shortly before I became a soldier. I saw a kind of catalogue, which had not been burned during the book-burning activities of the Nazis. I saw a catalogue of pieces by Wilhelm Lehmbruk and immediately I saw this is my ability – to try to show that there is a lot of possibility with the idea of sculpture, whereas I was otherwise only confronted with the social realism of the Nazi time, and you know this just didn’t touch me even – didn’t give me a feeling of what it was a necessity for. But as soon as I saw some examples of Wilhelm Lehmbruk’s work, I saw that with sculpture you can change the world. Such a feeling I had then, and he was for me the important person. Surely, I belong to this tradition.

WF: But can you actually identify anything particularly about your work in terms of its concerns, its underlying theories, its attitudes, that one could say was very much derived from a German consciousness.

JB: Well, you know people tend to have no idea about the nature of what a German being is, what it means to be a German. The judgement is done only on the basis of very banal, foreground things which result from the bad history of the period from the beginning of this century with the First and Second World Wars. The people are immediately connected with the kind of description of the German nature which has principally nothing to do with German nature. It can appear within the German nature because this nature might have some potential to take on such things under special conditions. The nation idea is easier to realise with a country that is geographically isolated. The splendid isolation of England, Albion, you see. But Germany on all sides is surrounded with different cultures, and it was the idea of the idealistic poets and philosophers such as Goethe, for instance, and Novalis, and almost everyone you can think of was speaking about the necessity to see Germany as being in the middle position in the difficulties which will stay on and on in the world, and this bridging between extremities is not realised by German people. So the German spirit has principally to do with bridging and helping others and not helping themselves and bringing themselves to power or to a kind of state, even. The idea of a state is a complete misunderstanding of the German soul and the German ability. So the function of the German is that it lies in the middle of Europe. He belongs to the middle European countries.

This in Germany is a specially hard position. This is now exactly the opposite to a bridge. There is the Berlin Wall, so this possibility to mediate between extremities which are always coming from the East and from the West is exactly the spiritual position of the German ability. In music, in philosophy, in poetry, in sculpture, in painting and also in their work. So also their social organisms should be constructed after this idea. This is deeply existing, I insist; and this is not only a formative activity – I insist that everybody will find in the German soul this longing for bridging the difficulties in the world to find solutions for any problem, be a helper, be a mediator and find the bridge position in the centre of Europe.