Nourishing Energy, Protective Warmth:
The Metaphors
Felt an Fat in Joseph Beuys' Work
Artists love legends, especially when they make their biography seem a
little more interesting.
Joseph Beuys was no exception, on the contrary. The draftsman, performance
artist, party founder, and professor, who was revered by his students like
no other, had a pronounced weakness for all manner of stylization. The hat
and photographer’s vest he always wore, the myth of felt and fat as an
original experience bestowing life and warmth, these were things that
Beuys cultivated with idealistic zeal – without losing sight of his own
personal gain. A portrait by Ulrich Clewing.
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Wie man einem toten Hasen die Bilder
erklärt, Fluxus Performance, Düsseldorf, November, 26, 1965
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If the story isn’t true, and there is a lot of evidence
attesting to this, then at least it was a good invention. When Joseph
Beuys, crewmember of a
Stuka JU 87 during the
Second World War, was shot down and severely wounded in the Crimea, legend
has it that nomadic Tartars found and nursed him back to health in the
weeks that followed. According to Beuys’ later testimony, they achieved
this by rubbing their patient in fat and wrapping him up in warm felt
fabric.
Today we know from reliable sources that no more than 24
hours could have passed between his machine having been shot down and his
admittance to the military hospital, and thus his sojourn with the
Tartars, if at all, had to have been much shorter in duration than Beuys
has claimed. On the other hand, the legend fits so well into the image of
the world and work of the artist, who died in 1986, for this biographical
"inaccuracy" to be simply filed away as such. For one, Beuys had a clear
weakness for a symbolic way of expressing himself; "warmth" in particular
played a central and crucial role for him, not only in a physical sense.
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Stuhl mit Fett, 1963, Hessisches
Landesmuseum Darmstadt
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On the occasion of the 1964 Festival of New Art in Aachen,
Joseph Beuys composed a so-called
"Lebenslauf/Werklauf" or biography of life and work, which
he then expanded five years later for an exhibition at the
Kunstmuseum Basel. In it, the first "warm exhibition" is recorded for the
year 1964; the first "Exhibition of Coldness", by the way, already took
place in 1945.
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The fact that he was referring to his reassignment as a
soldier to Northern Holland shortly before the end of the war as well as
his return to his parents in Kleve following his release from war
imprisonment a year later is secondary. What’s more important is that the
artist seems to have found his specific nomenclature at this time, in 1964.
Iphigenie/Titus,
glas objekt in a
steel frame, 1985
For Beuys, "warmth" was
first of all a metaphor, in keeping with the fact that he generally
accorded his objects, collages, and graphic notations a highly symbolic
meaning. This propensity for symbolism also extended to his public
activities, his actions and performances, but also to his political
involvement, which intensified following the student protests of the late
sixties. From that point on, the cognitive and emotional category of
"warmth" also began taking on social dimensions. The metaphor of warmth is
most present in the fat and felt works that Joseph Beuys made throughout
his life from the early fifties to his death in 1986 and which count among
his most well-known works.
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Filzplastik -Bronzeplastik, 1964
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Infiltration Homogen für
Konzertflügel, 1966, Musée national d'art moderne, Centre George
Pompidou, Paris
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The nutritive energy of fat and the protective,
warmth-retaining property of felt were two symbols with which he was able
to express his ideas in a particularly direct way. Filzplastik -
Bronzeplastik (Felt Sculpture – Bronze Sculpture) is the title
of a drawing Joseph Beuys made in 1964, today part of the
Deutsche Bank Collection. The stylized contours of a grand piano can be
clearly recognized – similar to the one that Beuys actually wrapped
completely in felt two years later, whereby he not only "protected" it,
but also robbed it of its function in that it could no longer make a sound
from within its covering.
For Beuys, as he once stated, drawing was
the "extension of thinking". At the beginning of his artistic development,
as a student of the Art
Academy in Düsseldorf, he concentrated almost exclusively on this
medium. His works on paper are valued highly to this day. The intuitive,
the search for harmony with the subconscious, the fundamentally human at
the core of a soul alienated from itself by civilization and convention,
the recovery of a lost naturalness, in short: the warmth of human
existence – according to Beuys, who held the anthroposophic teachings of
Rudolf Steiner in high esteem, all of this became revealed in his idea of
an "extended concept of art". Beuys felt a great proximity to Steiner and
his philosophy, and seems to quote him word for word in some of his own
statements: "I wanted to introduce the light of the world of ideas into
the warmth of inner experience", Steiner wrote in 1890. "To me, the mystic
seemed to be a person who couldn’t see the spiritual in the idea, and for
this reason, the idea made him grow cold within. The coldness that he
experienced from the idea forced him to search for the warmth that his
soul needed through a liberation from ideas."
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