The Sigla Blog

One of things we discussed on The View last Tuesday was an important figure in the Art world who I knew very little about. All I had heard about Joseph Beuys was that he scribbled his work frantically on blackboards and spent a lot of time in Ireland. The Goethe Institute is currently showing photographs of Beuys’ life taken by filmmaker Caroline Tisdall. Born in Germany in 1921, he started his career in medicine out of an interest in things scientific. Later, he would use aspects of science in his work, but not before joining the military. Trained as a combat pilot, he was seriously wounded many times during the Second World War. One experience, often considered part of his fabled life story, was a plane crash in the Crimea where he claimed nomadic Tartars healed his wounds by binding him in felt and fat. Whether this actually happened or not has some bearing on the fact that Beuys would use these materials extensively in his work, and would himself adopt the role of nomadic philanthropist.

Beuys’ catalogue, if it can be called that, is unconventional. His work is a mixture of the physical and metaphysical. For all of his palpable pieces . drawings, photographs, sculpture, installations - Beuys was a man of ideas, who toured extensively lecturing and promoting his way of thinking. His vision of art was delivered through teaching and discussion and the Goethe Institute exhibition is so revealing because it focuses on the man rather than the work. Shot in black and white, Caroline Tisdall’s 30+ images capture a sense of an enigmatic man. Beuy’s was a huge admirer of James Joyce and the opening image is of him standing in the urinal at the Forty Foot at Sandycove, “contemplating the scrotum-tightening seaâ€?. In a long-range shot of him standing on The Giant’s Causeway, he resembles a pensive, Churchillian figure. The exhibition juxtaposes Beuys in small lecture rooms surrounded by riveted students and out in the expanse of the Irish landscape as a solitary figure (a metaphor for the artist in society?). One of the most revealing images is of Beuys chatting with some tramps in Belfast. The caption under the photo reads: “Outsiders and battered places . Beuys’ affinityâ€?, which reaffirms his position on the margins.

Tisdall’s collection of photographs focus on Beuys’ time in Ireland and Scotland. In one image, he stands outside the tomb at Newgrange, Co. Meath in front of stones bearing spiral symbols. For him, they represented the Celtic symbol for energy. He believed the Celts had an advanced concept of what energy was and spirals recur as a motif in much of his work. Contemporary Ireland of the 1970s also appealed to Beuys, because of the unsettled political situation, the energy to be found in chaos. As Sean Rainbaird says in his book that accompanies the exhibition, Beuys saw Ireland as “a place with conflicts in need of resolutionâ€? which he gravitated towards. In the 1970s and ’80s Beuys spent a lot of time in Ireland, North and South and this was reflected in his work. His installation Hearth featured numerous ideas on the political situation in the North. The Brain of Europe is a blackboard drawing of a map of Ireland with prongs sprouting from it representing various shades of opinion from ‘Saor Eire’ and ‘IRA Provisionals’ to ‘Stormont Unionists’ and ‘Paisley’. Another piece, Northern Irish Tongue, is a photographic negative of Beuys’ head and it looks like he’s been shot. Also featured in the image is a part of a brick, a piece of bomb detritus in Belfast. It is a comment on identity and the unity of language and art.

As well as the photographs, the exhibition houses two glass cases containing coloured acetate sheets detailing accounts of Beuys’ day-to-day life. His home, where he experimented with plants, was covered with animal skins. He kept a wild mouse in a cage at the end of his bed and his books and cigarettes in the fridge. A keen cook, he would often serve up 50 kilos of mussels and 10 fried swans on “special occasionsâ€?. In his lifetime, Beuys lost his job as a professor at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art after he suggested that admission to study art there should be open to anyone. His visionary thinking on teaching led to him being offered the Dublin’s Royal Hospital Kilmainham (now IMMA) in 1972 to house the Free University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research. In 1970, he was involved in the Organisation for Direct Democracy by Referendum, which advocated more political power for the individual and in 1979 he was one of the founding members of the Green Party.

Beuys is certainly more admirable for his ideas and is remembered as a forward thinking conceptualist. More philosopher than an artist, he funnelled various beliefs into the idea that art should be a cross-pollination of expression through art, performance, music and literature.

Joseph Beuys and the Celtic World runs at the Goethe Institute, 37 Merrion Square, Dublin until March 18th. Admission free.