My second day in the land beyond the San Gabriel Mountains found me at The Broad Museum’s large exhibition of the works of Joseph Beuys, entitled ‘In Defense of Nature’. It was that title that first gave me the idea of writing specifically about the exhibited artistic ontologies of nature on this trip. I’ve had a soft spot for Beuys ever since I saw a retrospective of his work in (I think it was) Munich in late 1981. And in the English language context, I’ve also felt defensive about Beuys’s work and its importance in response to the astoundingly ferocious hostility to Beuys from what is usually taken to be the leading academic journal of contemporary art, October. Despite the title of the exhibition, Beuys’s works that seem to address most directly the concept of nature, above all his 7000 Oaks, do not receive any emphasis in the exhibition, which rather appears as a balanced survey of the full range and trajectory of his work, with perhaps a particular aesthetic interest in his drawings.
Before considering Beuys’s work directly, I feel compelled to say something about October journal’s hostility, which in my experience marks every discussion of Beuys. I have addressed aspects of October’s ideologies in previous blog posts, namely Rosalind Krauss’s acclaimed essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ in relation to the philosopher Paul Crowther’s account of sculpture, and a review of the quasi-philosopher Thierry de Duve’s recent book (de Duve is only distantly connected to October, but they did publish a piece by him on Beuys). There are three prominent pieces relevant to their attack on Beuys: first and most influentially, Benjamin Buchloh’s assault from 1980 on the alleged mythic and cultic aspects of Beuys; Eric Michaud’s essay from 1988 that accuses Beuys of talking too much; and Rosalind Krauss’s short piece in her book Formless of 1993, which denounces Beuys as a kind of totalitarian meaning-maker whose conceptualizations are vastly inferior to those of her preferred Georges Bataille. None of these attacks give a careful reconstruction of Beuys’s view, none offers an overview of his work, none analyzes even one work in depth; each consists of unargued and largely evidence-free assertions, each contains controversial claims about modern art and art generally, and each contains undefended claims about what Beuys should have done if he weren’t such a stinker and bad artist.
Here are the October gang’s central assertions about Beuys:
1. Buchloh says that Beuys’s work involves a malign self-mythologization whose historical background and pre-condition of Beuys’s work and its popularity generally is “the ahistoricity of aesthetic production and consumption of postwar Europe”. He thinks that the missing ‘historicity’ would have been some general awareness of “European Dada and Russian and Soviet Constructivism, and their political as well as their epistemological implications”; this “retarded comprehension” (!) “determined both European and American art until the late 1950s” (Buchloh, p. 42) He seems to think that Beuys’s self-mythologization is in the service of forming his own ‘cult’, and, together with Beuys’s repeated assertion that ‘Everyone is an Artist’, this is especially malign (?) because “[i]n Beuys, the cult and the myth seem to have become inseparable from the work; as his confusion of art and life is a deliberate programmatic position, an “integration” to be achieved by everybody . . .” (p. 45) Buchloh twice characterizes Beuys’s position as ‘infantile’, because it ignores psychoanalysis (?!) and involves no acknowledgement of the allegedly insuperable achievement of Marcel Duchamp and his readymades, and with it “the consequences of Duchamp’s work” (p. 46; what are these consequences?)
2. Michaud: At the beginning of his short essay Michaud states that Beuys talks too much, and at the end he insists that art should be reserved (I cannot discern how much talk is okay for Michaud; Duchamp, for example, gave a whole book worth of interviews, as well as a lecture on his work, so maybe that much is okay). Michaud’s central point seems to go as follows: the central concept for Beuys is ‘Gestaltung’ (“the putting into form”). Michaud asserts that ““this idea of Gestaltung [Michaud’s bold print], central to Beuys’s thought is the resurrection of meaning”. Michaud addresses Beuys’s interest in nature under the term ‘Beuys’s ecology’, and asserts that it “is one of Gestaltung as soil and as language”; further, this ecology “doesn't differentiate between what is given to man and what man produces: the fish, the potato, the car, and the image are all thought of as the product of human labor, the product of a culture put into good form from which the Gestaltung will be able to regenerate and expand”. For Michaud this is disastrous because “makes of every object in the world the simple instrument or means of its activity”, and that as embodied in Beuys’s central artistic conception of producing what he called ‘social sculpture’ this productive and transformative power “can, I believe, mean only the subjugation of the real world and real men, which it reduces to the mere instruments of its free exercise”. Oddly, Michaud immediately adds that Beuys’s conception “makes of activity both means and ends”.
3. Krauss: In a short section entitled ‘No to . . . Joseph Beuys’ in her book Formless Rosalind Krauss denounces Beuys for his alleged aim of making everything meaningful, or perhaps more exactly turning everything that is meaningless or non-meaningful into something that has meaning, and that this meaning is a ‘recuperation’ wherein some meaning is given to each thing by having it play some role in “the same great work” (Krauss, p. 145) which is a “totalized system” (p. 146). In Krauss’s inimitable phrasing, “Beuys’s notion of total recuperation [is] connected to a system from which nothing escapes being impressed into the service of meaning” (ibid). Krauss seems to think this is quite a bad thing, and much prefers what she takes to be Georges Bataille’s conception of the ‘formless’, which she takes to be a dimension of artistic practice that somehow resists being turned into something ‘meaningful’.
Response: I fear that a reader (if there are any) will suspect that I am being unfair to the October theorists by presenting an under-described or distorted version of their views. I invite such a reader to invest an hour or two of her time and read the relevant pieces for herself; I am reasonably confident that a reader so informed will largely agree with my characterizations. It seems to me that the criticisms presented above are self-refuting, if for no other reason that each one demands massive further explications of all the claims, substantial defenses of controversial claims about mythology, historicization, means and ends, and meaning, and some more detailed consideration of actual works by Beuys that would show the pointedness of the criticisms. Lacking all this, one struggles to respond. One might, for example, note how close Beuys’s conceptions of agency, nature, and freedom are to those influentially propagated by Beuys’s contemporary, the dissident Rudolph Bahro, in the mid-late 1970s, and that Bahro’s subsequent abandonment of Marxist thought for a more explicitly ecological conception of human life brought him even closer to something like Beuys’s conceptions. Aside from attempting to show through nothing more than summary and quotation that the hostility to Beuys is not justified by anything resembling rational argument or artistic taste, the summaries provide one useful point for beginning an account of Beuys’s artistic ontology of nature, namely, Michaud’s hostile remark that Beuys has a conception of ecology that “doesn't differentiate between what is given to man and what man produces”. Perhaps this is right, though one might think that, following Philippe Descola’s conception briefly introduced in the first post, this is a positive feature of Beuys’s overall project. So I’ll turn to the exhibit ‘In Defense of Nature’ in the next post.
References:
Rudolph Bahro, The Alternative in Eastern Europe (1978)
--From Red to Green (1984)
Joseph Beuys, Joseph Beuys in America: Energy Plan for the Western Man (1990)
---What is Art? Conversation with Joseph Beuys (2004)
Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol’, in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (2003)
Phillipe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (2005)
Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985)
---‘No to . . . Joseph Beuys’, in Formless (1993)
Eric Michaud, ‘The Ends of Art According to Beuys’, in October 45 (1988)