Shelley Sacks >Symposium to discuss the future of the Block Beuys.<
Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, Germany
18./19. April 2008
Which direction should the fresh air come from?
- 3 perspectives for overcoming confusions regarding the Block Beuys-
Dear Friends
In the past year we have heard a great deal about the Block Beuys needing "fresh air' as one reason for interventions that sound suspiciously like a 'buttocks lift'. This is particularly problematic because this is not a buttocks and the professor of "cosmetic surgery' whose speciality is "buttocks lifting' is no longer even here!
Today I am going to present 3 perspectives for overcoming confusions regarding the Block Beuys - one of them dealing with the fresh air question!
This symposium to further explore perspectives and arrive at decisions about the future of the Block Beuys is clearly challenging territory for curators and restorers of complex contemporary artwork. It also gives shivers and rings alarm bells for practitioners of context related work, like myself, that do not necessarily produce discrete objects.
The meetings and dialogues of the past year have highlighted these challenges and a raft of related questions. Some of these questions are technical - about the life span of the jute and the carpet fibres - whilst others have primarily to do with our assumptions and perspectives.
In the case of the Block Beuys, the perception and definition of the work as an installation, a Gesamtkunstwerk, or a collection of objects has enormous consequences.
Our perspectives inform and determine where we think the work begins and ends. They determine what we think is integral to the work; if we think certain things can be changed; what we think is superfluous and what can be removed.
It is therefore imperative to look not only at the technical questions, but also at the assumptions, ideas and perspectives from which the questions are addressed and decisions will be taken.
The lack of clarity that has surfaced, regarding the nature and character of the Block Beuys is, I suspect, how the confusion about what is appropriate regarding its "restoration'and maintenance began.
So we need to ask ourselves: what is the perspective on which we basing our proposals and our decisions? Is Block Beuys an installation -like Feuerstaette -that can, to some extent, be installed in different ways; a set of (semi) discrete objects; or a particular kind of Gesamtkunstwerk in which all elements are interconnected and predetermined?
In February, Frau Dr. Busch communicated certain new decisions to the meeting - for example, her commitment to maintain the Room 1 grey carpet and yellow line in its original form. Although such decisions imply recognition of its Gesamtkunstwerk character, and that core questions about the nature of the work might have been resolved, the ongoing debates suggest otherwise. And so, I would like to begin my talk today with this point.
I am arguing for maintaining the Block Beuys as it is, on the grounds that it is a particular kind of'Gesamtkunstwerk' -in which all elements are interconnected and determined- and not'a collection of objects', as it was described at the meeting of 8 September 2007 in Darmstadt, by Dr. Pohl, the Landesmuseum's Beuys curator.
So, what makes it a Gesamtkunstwerk of this kind and not a collection of objects?
There is significant evidence that Beuys saw this Darmstadt instance of his work as an integrated body. Not only did he position parts of this work in relation to existing the contextual elements -for example, the felt suit just below the horizon defined by the jute walls; or the copper plate and cut-out felt section between rooms 2 and 3, on the grey carpet- as time went by he also made clear that some of the changes in the total environment (such as the shadow marks on the jute walls) were an integral part of the work. He described these particular changes as the 'Hiroshima shadows'.
An integrated body (like a person) is not simply the sum of its parts. If you put all the parts of a human being together, in a different order, you will not reconstitute a person. And the same could be said of this Gesamtkunstwerk.
If we want to understand an integrated body, to grasp the whole, we need to recognise that the meaning exists in the interrelationships, and not as a collection of parts. And that these interrelationships are informed by an impulse... a set of characteristics... an underlying gesture... a set of relations... an idea. In this case it is Joseph Beuys' conception of how all these elements fitted together - In each particular vitrine, in this particular space, under these particular conditions: conditions which included jute walls and grey carpets, conditions that led to a particular set of qualities, qualities of light and contrast (between bigger and smaller spaces, between more and less light), qualities of temperature (enhanced by the browning jute and the grey carpets), qualities of sound (from the silencing of footsteps to the imagined breaking of glass bottles)
- qualities that all became inextricable parts of the work. Beuys' response to the situation as he found it, embracing both carpet, jute and narrowing rooms with angled ceilings, makes these elements of the work indivisible from the whole, and is one of the important hallmarks of this Darmstadt Block!
Relating to Block Beuys in this way is akin to how Goethe encountered the being of the plant. Goethe's study of the metamorphosis of plants showed that the parts do not constitute the whole. Through an approach to metamorphosis that perceives the informing idea, Goethe offers a relational, participatory mode of installed it himself and stay close to its ethos and formation. Block Beuys, unlike Feuerstaette is not a "do-it-yourself pack.
With Block Beuys the parameters are different. And to honour its decisions we are in quite different territory. In recognising this as a context-integrated work that has predetermined proportions and relationships, we cannot extract the jute, the grey carpet or flatten the ceilings, without creating a new and different set of decisions.
Related to this point about the decisions that constitute a work, is the importance of there being at least one place in the world where people studying Beuys can see exactly how he responded to a particular context; in other words, where people can experience a significant aspect of how he worked and thought.
The (sanitised) way that many Beuys works have been (re)presented since his death gives little access to what Beuys was so good at: his feeling for time and temperature, his spontaneity, his responsiveness to how things are - all reflected here in his decisions to keep the warm grey carpet and the darkening jute walls, and the related decisions that the jute walls and grey carpet made possible.
We must however not confuse the task of maintaining such spontaneous choices and decisions for others to see and enter, with a false re-creation of the work. This is surely one of the reasons why Johannes Stuttgen has said that to try and restore things to how they were is 'kitsch'? I agree.
I witnessed a situation at documenta 6 when someone inadvertently rubbed out a blackboard that Beuys had done earlier. A colleague in the Fill implored him to re-do it. "One can't redo something like this', he replied. AIt contains the energy and spontaneous responses of the moment/ This kind of response from Beuys was not unique. I am sure others who worked closely with Beuys heard him respond in similar ways.
Maintaining the decisions for others to see -that Beuys made in Block Beuysr and to a large extent, fixed- is quite a different matter. This is not the same as trying to recreate and redraw spontaneous acts and responses -whether blackboards, yellow lines on carpets, or recreating the Hiroshima shadows on artificially aging cloth!
Recognising the integral character of the work so that it can be maintained with minimal intervention is the responsibility of all people who know that this work is not the same as the others; that although many elements of the work are in the stream of aging and decay, what is not decaying is a whole set of decisions.
From this perspective, taking responsibility has meant ensuring that the work is not unnecessarily destroyed by: carelessness, lack of clarity, unknowing, hasty decisions, lack of will, lack of restoration expertise, lack of money, or a false invocation of the social sculpture ideas and of freedom. Luckily many of these obstacles have already been overcome.
perception that can see beyond an endless multiplicity. His'anschauende Urteilskraft' is based on a paradigm of interconnectedness. In this way, Goethe, emphasised, as Beuys later did as well, the importance of developing "new organs of perception' to access what Kant had deemed impossible.
If such relational modes of consciousness were more pervasive it would be easier to see that removing key elements of the Block Beuys would destroy it.
So the first case I want to make for maintaining the Block Beuys as it is, rests on it being an integrated body; a body now fused with the contextual forms that Beuys found here; a body that is undoubtedly more than the sum of its parts; a body that would be distorted and undermined if any of its significant elements were altered and removed. However, like a body, small repairs could help it to survive with dignity and in character; more significant changes like new jute and flat ceilings will distort it beyond recognition, whist major changes, like white walls and wooden floors, will destroy it altogether.
The second point I want to make has to do with the decisions that every artist makes; the decisions that constitute the substance and meaning of a work; and our responsibility for preserving these decisions.
Leaving aside the question of the 'aura' of a work, and whether this should be disturbed or not, all artwork, modern or contemporary, painting or installation, is made up of an enormous number of 'decisions'. Every stroke is a decision. Every response to the existing context is a decision. And it is our contact with these decisions made by the artist that enables us to enter the territory of their thinking, of their consciousness.
This is the intimacy and the astonishing journey into the world of another being that is possible through art, or, one could say, through consciously shaped form. If decisions -whether arrived at spontaneously, intuitively or rationally-constitute the work, how can we then ignore, disturb or discard primary decisions made by the artist?
In the case of Beuys' multiples, drawings or discrete objects, honouring his decisions is easy: like paintings that sit in their frames, we are free to decide how and where we exhibit them, unless otherwise stated. In the case of his installations -like Feuerstaette - Beuys leaves us relatively free to install the elements to suit the context, but only within a certain set of quite precise parameters.
Just how successful any presentation is -whether discrete objects or context-flexible installations, like Feuerstaette- depends of course on the sensibility of the curator or owner. Beuys often talked about needing to allow for freedom, but appropriate to different kinds of work, and stressed that freedom also carried a particular responsibility. I was with him in New York in 1975, when he installed Feuerstaette and Richtkraefte. He regarded Feuerstatte like a kit with a certain flexibility, although he expected curators to take the lead from the times he had The question remains: how to maintain and preserve the Block Beuys, without reconstituting it falsely, or destroying it altogether?
Shall we not as Caroline Tisdall said last September in Darmstadt, let all the elements grow old together with dignity?
Beuys himself twice refused to remove the jute walls. Knowing how precisely and carefully he made decisions, I respect this.
It also reminds us that the Block Beuys in Darmstadt is one of the few places in the world where one can study Beuys' response to a situation. And this is why the Block Beuys is the first place where I bring students from Oxford.
I am hopeful that the advanced skills that must surely be available in Germany will allow us to preserve the decisions that constitute this work, and enable us to enter the consciousness of its maker.
The third and last point I want to make has to do with the call for'fresh air'?
I have been in two Block Beuys meetings where this was point was strongly made. When I enquired what this meant it was explained - that one should not hang onto things as they are; that this is a distortion of Beuys' work; that we have to move forward; that the Block Beuys, in the spirit of Beuys' emphasis on freedom and shaping the future, could do with some 'fresh air'.
I am very sympathetic to this emphasis on taking forward Beuys' work, but we have to ask ourselves which work; what aspect of Beuys' work should be developed?
Beuys' legacy, as we know, is far from one-dimensional! Each type of work has its own needs and parameters. It would be absurd, for example, for the sake of moving on, to redraw Beuys' drawings instead of making sure we preserve them. On the other hand, if we cease to develop the social sculpture ideas and processes, we actually destroy this major work, because social sculpture is the work that is never completely done; this is the work that depends on new insights and new developments; that depends on working with and moving on from what Beuys had just begun. This is where the stream of fresh air is continually needed!
We need therefore to make distinctions about where the fresh air is needed, so that our commitment to transformation and our energy for moving forward is appropriately channelled.
The Block Beuys is not the place for this kind of moving forward. The Block Beuys is a completely different issue.
To reiterate my first 2 points:
1. The Block Beuys is an integrated body that should not be dismembered.
2. It is the most extensive instance of Beuys' spontaneous 'decision making' in response to a situation, where scholars can analyse and visitors can experience not only the things he made but how he responded to physical sets of givens.
In Darmstadt we therefore have one task: to protect Beuys' decisions for others to see; to protect this Gesamtkunstwerk! This means: keeping the existing jute wall covering; keeping the grey carpets; and not flattening the ceilings in Rooms 3 -7. Luckily other aspects of the work that were under threat have already been protected -like the yellow line and its grey carpet, whilst the proposal involving video in Room 7 has been reconsidered and withdrawn.
In our social sculpture work, the task we have is completely different. This is the field where we can work with Beuys' insights and intuitions, with the invisible materials of speech, thought and discussion. Here we must evolve new forms ourselves, whilst making the strategies, insights, ideas and principles of his expanded concept/on of art available to others. This is what Johannes does so well in his social sculpture projects. This is what I like to think we are doing through the Social Sculpture Research Unit based in Oxford.
Let us tread carefully in Beuys' world - discerning differences and doing what is appropriate! Protecting what has to be cared for, whilst taking forward with passion, freedom and hard work, the revolutionary insights that Beuys lived and died for.
No one would restore a Rembrandt with bright colours and acrylic paint because they felt it needed fresh air or modernisation. Would anyone rip out the quiet greyness and jute walls that Beuys was not so pleased with at first, but then accepted, embraced and grew to love?
Let us not confuse the question of conservation that includes very small essential repairs, with restoration, renovation and destructive intervention. And let us recognise that fresh air with regard to Beuys means developing the social sculpture!
Shelley Sacks, Social Sculpture Research Unit, Oxford. April 2008. This text draws on a series of discussions with Dr. Wolfgang Zumdick, International Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, and is supported by Ronald Feldman. The translation into German is by Dr. Zumdick.
Shelley Sacks ( South Africa 1950). I am an artist active in the field of transformation, facilitating interventions that lead to new understandings of responsibility and ways of engaging in the world. I am Reader in Social Sculpture at Oxford Brookes University and Director of the Social Sculpture Research Unit.
I was a student and colleague of Joseph Beuys for over a decade in the Free International University. This relationship began in 1970, when Beuys invited me to study with him. After graduating from the University of Cape Town in 1972, in Sculpture and Aesthetics, and working in the emergent democratic struggle, I decided to give up art making altogether. When I took up Beuys' invitation in 1973, he was no longer at the academy. Thus began a nomadic studentship, on trains, across countries, in his studio; assisting in Hamburg at the Kunstakademie; in 1975 in New York; for 100 days at documenta 6; in 1980, visiting FIU groups and travelling with him between Green Party meetings and exhibitions. Back in South Africa, our dialogue continued through telephone conversations about my work to develop new social enterprises, and my dialogues with the ANC exploring Third Road ideas as a blueprint for development.
In addition to the lecturing, writing and projects like the Social Sculpture Reader, being developed with Wolfgang Zumdick and Hildegard Kurt, my work between South Africa, Germany and England, since 1970, includes more than 40 arenas, installations, actions and collaborative frameworks. Current projects include: Exchange Values on the Table, University of the Trees and Agents of Change, an SSRU collaborative project on climate change.
What these works share is that they are vehicles for crossing borders: from the visible to the invisible, from our habitual thinking into new territory. And so they are about freedom. This is also why there is no distinction between my social sculpture practice and my teaching! In both, I am offering ways of becoming internally active, crossing thresholds and connecting with the world; both are therefore to do with a 'connective aesthetics'. And both also have to do with responsibility, not as a moral imperative, but as an ability to respond.
The emphasis on active imagination and rethinking processes in my Thought Bank projects is no different from thelmaginal thought-work I do in Exchange Values with farmers and consumers, that centres round the power that we have to shape a different kind of world. This expanded approach to art is what Beuys described as 'social sculpture'. In my daily interactions, in my projects, in my teaching, I am researching ways to take forward this holistic approach.
My contribution to this 'hearing' argues from 3 perspectives for maintaining the Block Beuys as it is, with the possibility of minor repairs. My position is supported by Dr. Wolfgang Zumdick (Aachen) and Ronald Feldman (New York).