Artistic Ontologies of Nature in Los Angeles, Day Two, Part Two: Joseph Beuys as Le Nouvel Novalis
In my previous post I briefly considered, mostly by way of quotation and a shrug, the most prominent criticisms in English of the work of Joseph Beuys, both of his public character as an artist and (seemingly) of his art, in particular the criticisms associated with the journal October given by Benjamin Buchloh, Eric Michaud, and Rosalind Krauss. The combination of the extreme hostility of the criticisms and their lack of specificity (no work or project by Beuys is discussed even briefly in these writings) combine to make it impossible to offer any serious response. As I stated at the end of that post, I hope that a reader will conclude that there’s nothing in those criticisms to discourage the viewer from attending to Beuys’s work. Michaud’s piece did contribute the thought that it makes sense to speak of ‘Beuys’s ecology’, and that it involves giving form to soil and language, and that it makes no distinction between what is ‘given to man’ and what ‘man produces’. Michaud of course gives no relevant quotations from Beuys, nor does he show how the lack of distinction between what is given and what is made effects Beuys’s art. Is there anything in Michaud’s remarks? And what, more generally, can we say about Beuys’s artistic ontology of nature in relation to the exhibition at The Broad in Los Angeles?
I’ll begin with a sketch of Beuys’s core conceptions, and then consider two of his later pieces that are very partially presented The Broad Museum’s ‘In Defense of Nature’ exhibition, his iconic 7,000 Oaks inaugurated at Documenta in 1982, and the project ‘In Defense of Nature’ itself, inaugurated in Italy in 1984, the year before his death. I omit a survey of Beuys’s career, as there are many overviews in English and the main points are quite well-known (from many possibilities, I particularly recommend Ann Temkin’s short account in Temkin (1993)). Beuys produced a vast amount of material—writings, lectures, interviews, and recorded discussion—wherein he presents and elaborates his artistic conceptions. There are two inter-related foci to his explications. First, there is his repeated claim that ‘Everyone is an artist’; and second there is his claim to be creating and practicing an artistic conception of ‘social sculpture’. In order to understand Beuys’s work, it is crucial to keep in mind the status of these claims. Beuys does not present them as so to speak postulates of his work, or conceptions that are determinate in advance of the actual making and reception of any of his works. Rather, whatever determinate meaning they have is only ever partial, and can only rightly be thought to emerge at the end of the reception of his work. As he put it with regard to the first claim, “So when I assert that everyone is an artist, that is the outcome of my work rather than a fact I assume everyone must believe.” (quoted in Mensch, p. 114) Similarly with regard to his conception of social sculpture, he says that it is an extension and radicalization of the traditional conception of sculpture, but he gives no further characterization of it other than that artworks and artistic projects made under that conception include in an open-ended way include the actions and perceptions of artistic co-workers and viewers. He insists that his conceptions, particularly the first, are anthropological conceptions, wherewith he opposes traditional or bourgeois or Western conceptions. In one of his countless formulations, “I extend the concept of art in a radical way, and make it anthropological one” (Beuys (2004), p. 71; my quote here is severely truncated from a longer remark wherein Beuys is characterizing creativity as a way of giving form to things that is not restricted to human action).
It’s quite illuminating, I believe, to consider Beuys’s source for the idea that everyone is an artist. The biographical literature on Beuys notes that after World War II he studied the thought of the German Romantic philosophers, and that he seems to have first encountered there certain ideas that were taken up from his most prominent influence, the mystic and so-called anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner. It seems to me that although Steiner provided Beuys with his frequently employed lecture + blackboard drawings format, his core conceptions of art and artist come to him straight from the German Romantic poet and philosopher Novalis. Beuys’s ‘Everybody is an Artist’ seems to be derived from a passage in Novalis’s ‘Faith and Love or The King and Queen’ (1798): “A true prince is the artist of artists; that is, he is the director of artists. Every person should be an artist. Everything can become a fine art. Artists are the prince’s material; his will is his chisel: he teaches, engages, and instructs the artists, because only he can oversee the picture as a whole from the right standpoint, because only to him the great idea, which is to be represented and executed through combined forces and ideas, is perfectly present.” (Novalis, pp. 95-6) As adopted and transformed by Beuys, Novalis’s idea is that if each person is/can be an artist by virtue of creatively participating in Beuys’s collective projects, then Beuys is himself a sort of second-order artist, equal to the first-order artists qua creative participants, but with a further second-order status by virtue of initiating the projects. Beuys of course drops Novalis’s presumption that the second-order artist can ever get into a position to oversee the project as a whole, if for no other reason than that the projects in principle have no conclusion. Novalis elsewhere in the so-called ‘Logological Fragments’ writes that the artist “stands on the human being as a statue does on a pedestal” (p. 55); first-order and second-order artists are equally statues emergent from the capacities and materialities of human nature, and perhaps this point, which is meant to be applicable trans-historically and trans-culturally, indicates most clearly what Beuys meant in calling his conception ‘anthropological’.
What of nature? Animals—stags, bees, swans, coyotes—are recurrent motifs in Beuys’s work across his entire career, and he also exhibits a strong interest in natural phenomena and objects such as trees, stones, and geological processes. Beuys has said that “THERE CAN BE NO ARTISTIC ACTIVITY WITHOUT AN AWARENESS OF NATURE” (Tomassoni, p. 82, quoting Beuys (capitals in the original)). Why not? Presumably because of the open-ended or non-restrictive use of materials and invocations of agents in Beuys’s work. As Beuys put it (here I give the full quote that I truncated above): “So if I extend the concept of art in a radical way, and make it anthropological one—taking the starting point for creativity as inherent in thinking, which it turn is capable of creating forms in the world, then I also have to say that there are forms parallel to the ones I produce, that are not made by the human being.” (Beuys (2004), p. 71).
Beuys’s conceptualizations tie the awareness of nature to the artistic process more tightly and intimately than is generally recognized. ‘Social sculpture’ is after all an extension and radicalization of sculpture as traditionally conceived, and a basic contrast in sculpture transculturally is between sculpting conceived as building up relatively neutral materials into something formed and meaningful, and sculpting conceived as removing extraneous material to reveal a form within the object (the block of marble, the branch) that the artist started from. This distinction is usually given as between modelling and carving. Beuys mobilizes this distinction throughout his work, usually preferring modelling as more appropriately to organic forms, but notes that even natural processes can be understood as and recruited into artworks as modelled or carved: at one point he distinguishes pebbles from crystals in that pebbles are the result of ‘taking away’ (i.e. ‘carved’) by natural forces, and crystals the result of ‘building up’ (i.e. ‘modelled). (Beuys (2004), pp. 60-1).
With Beuys’s basic artistic claims so explicated, the conception of nature as an aspect of art (and so not something set over against art as in the schematic dichotomy nature vs. culture) involved in his work is apparent (p. 63). 7,000 Oaks consists not just of the planted trees, but also for each tree there is an accompanying large stone (so organic and inorganic, modelling and carving). Beuys has said that he chose the number 7,000 because of the traditional association of the number 7 with a rule for planting trees, and the number 1000 suggesting myriads and a forest (Beuys (1990), p. 111). The later work ‘In Defense of Nature’ extends this conception to include the planting of 7,000 trees in northern Italy and in the Seychelles, planting seeds in remote areas by dropping seed-embedded clay balls from a helicopter, and exhibiting various related materials such as old agricultural equipment (Tomassini, pp. 132-140).
In different ways, then, Beuys along with his fellow denizens of the greater Los Angeles region Cai Guo-Qiang and Paul Cézanne offer artistic conceptions of nature that break with the rigid nature vs. culture dichotomy that might be thought to afflict so much of European and North American arts. Whereas Cai may offer the most spectacular recruitment of natural processes into artistic meaning, and Cézanne may offer the greatest results for close artistic attention, Beuys’s conception is perhaps the most forward-looking, at least if there is any future for humanity, either to ward off, or to reconstruct after, the coming ecological collapse.
References and Works Consulted:
Joseph Beuys, Joseph Beuys in America: Energy Plan for the Western Man (1990)
---What is Art? Conversation with Joseph Beuys (2004)
Lucrezia de Domizio Durini, Joseph Beuys: Difesa della Natura (1996)
Claudia Mesch, Joseph Beuys (2017)
Novalis, ‘Logological Fragments I’ and ‘Faith and Love or The King and Queen’, in Novalis: Philosophical Writings (1997)
Ann Temkin, Thinking is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys (1993)
Italo Tomassoni, Beuys in Perugia (2003)