Fat is 'Felt' not FAT

a review of Joseph Beuys' show at Tate Modern, London called “Actions, Vitrines, Environments” AT: TATE Modern Gallery, London Between: 4th February -- 2nd May 2005 Introduction: I am an art critic from Bangalore writing about art in Kannada for two decades. I had to wait precisely for 'two decades' to get a scholarship based on my writings in Kannada! So, I was in London for about 7 months. One of the reason for writing the review below, of an European ICON in visual culture is the severe London cold. It always drove me 'into' the galleries. The second reason is that those works are ROLE MODELS for contemporary Indian artist. However, as a Kannadiga, proud of understanding the world through 'Kannada experience', this review is my reaction to an European master, seen live. Earlier, 90 percent of the artworks I had seen and taught about was through 'reproductions' of the original. So the review, the 'Object' of the review and the European masters belong to Kannada as much as Shakespere is! ( I ) The objects in Joseph Beuys' works in the Tate Modern show force us to an 'experience' that we are not used to. And this is an understatement! This particular ‘experience’ is something that any known or given law of any worldly, natural or manmade object is not used to convey. It was a situation created, is a condition applied and hence a philosophy derived by Joseph Beuys. In other words, Beuys’ objects attain the capacity to ‘absent themselves’ even while physically being present and because of their presence! Imagine one of those extra-terrastrial matter which when a spoonful of it is weighed, amounts to a tonne. It is there, but we fail to imagine is sheer physical qualities. ‘Visually’ that object can be compared to certain material types we know. But its ‘weight’ (“a tonne per given inch“) proves too heavy for our brains to acknowledge. Beuys objects possess such a capacity to disconnect the logistics between ‘visibility’ of the known objects and the roles and characters ‘attributed’ to them. A zoo, a garden, a prison, for example, are some of the spaces that have such specific and compulsive human perceptive bindings. The question here--in the light of the experience of Beuys’ objects--is whether there is a natural, non-manmade ‘version’ of a zoo, garden or a prison. The second question is whether we can imagine such and similar alternatives. Beuys’ objects’ answer to both the question is both ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ at the same time. A further justification is in its refusal to acknowledge the paradox thus brought forth by two mutual opposites as solutions! His objects behave as if undefined objects can exist. ( II ) There are no unidentifiable objects in history of art. Metaphorically speaking, museums and galleries, art history and a chain of such institutions basically give us an experience 'through' an object. One example where both the experience and object came closest that one could not be differentiated from the other was in some of Jackson Pollock’s works. Beuy’s heroic objects, (his famous ‘fat and felt‘) do not convey experiences. Instead, his ‘performances’ have conveyed an ‘experience’ in the form of these ‘objects‘! And now, the performance is over, forever. They were as immediate as Derrida’s formulation was about spoken words over the written ones. There is no slippage between his performances (Beuys’) and the objects around which he conveyed them; and between one’s thought and the expression of it (through the spoken words). Very simply, the posthumous exhibition at Tate represent Beuys’ written words, with a lot of ‘gap’ filled by the acts of curation, while putting Beuys’ “acts as objects” together. The ‘footprint’ of a ‘known’ soldier is all that the curators have in hand in order to narrate his/her heroics. ( III ) So, all of us are familiar with Joseph Beuys’ works, have ’heard’ of them in many formats other than the originals. Even when believing that we are facing them directly in the gallery, there is not much we do with our eyes staring at their physical characteristics, like we do with, lets say, while looking at all those visual images from Monalisa to Guernica..... The pre-modern imageries, due to the way they are arranged in a museum, are viewed exactly like this. “I was there, physically next to it” is a feel that is inevitable with those poorly lit imageries at, say, Victoria and Albert museum, because of those works’ deteriorating physical character’ due to exposure to overt, artificial light. It is exactly the same experience ‘given’ to us with those fading fat, felt waste and rusting iron belonging to Beuys. We might begin, some might end up, feeling, “I was there, physically next to it” while facing Beuys’ objects. This was an effort to make his objects (not works) belong to the past! The curators (Sean Rainbird and Juliet Bingham, both are Tate curators) were smart enough to provide the audience with a booklet, describing ‘each-work-in-one-room’ with one page description on each work. The audience read them and then saw--a rare picture of groups reading tiny booklets, relaxing, gazing, contemplating (anything other than ‘looking‘) in front of objects belonging to a Shaman! What was left for the readers was to imagine, re-imagine, those circumstances when Beuys put forth his dialogue about “Social Sculptures” and everyone being a part of it. Yet the curators seemed to have believed in the ‘one’, ‘mutually independent’ possibility of his works (not objects though). The two black boards of Beuys’ “tutorial artwork” in Tate Modern’s possession was a ‘class’ that was over, and that which could never take place again! This is an effort to make his objects (not works) belong to the future! ( IV ) Inspite of being mammoth sized, (real van, huge pillars, life sized shelves and the branded fat, felt and copper) Beuys’ objects theoretically climb up a pedestal, immediately climb down, to take us into a nostalgic journey of no personal type, physically deteriorate along with the audience, and compel us to imagine what happened ‘to them’ at one given historic moment. That moment was when Beuys ‘performed’ using them as a ‘means‘. Ironically, he would have been in a paradoxical situation if he had refused the relevance of the ‘past’ and ‘future’ of his objects ‘beyond’ that specific historic moment when he performed with them. And the Tate exhibition, for the sake of argument, is an endorsement of that historic moment when he dealt with these objects. It means the exhibition is a refusal of what Beuys actually stood for. This paradoxic/ironic/metaphoric/allegoric characters of those real Beuys’ objects is what makes us live in the search for a possibility of an ‘imagination of the performance’ that slipped of any documentative apparatus, in its true spirit. He would have had approved this refusal as well. Since I am concerned with the seemingly all inclusive Beuys’ objects, what happens to them as artistic documents of past performance depends on “what is being ‘described’ about experiencing those objects” (as this writeup would be doing). As a past set of objects they document a memory of performance. As a present displayed set of objects they try to create another performance through the viewers’ psyche. And to do so, they have to act as the ‘marks’ of past performances. It is like a person blessed with an ability to see 360 degrees around him at once. A given sense of ‘frame’ is taken away from him! ( V ) A group of ’fallen’ volcanic, basalt stone slabs represent “The End of the Twentieth Century” (again from Tate’s own collection). “Beuys bored conical hole to each one of them, creating a ’wound’ and then ’treating’ them by smoothing and lining the hollow with insulating clay and felt, before re-inserting the plug of stone.” (catalogue description) The curators have placed this in a Tate room through the window of which we can see that Millennium Bridge that connects a 21st century gallery with an older one: St. Paul’s cathedral (with an understanding that religious places were exhibition halls at one point). The bridge, designed by Norman Foster, a gift to the new Millennium, wobbled when it initially opened. It was ‘recreated’ later. So are the objects of Beuys in this gallery and the next one--they can always be recreated later. People getting out of the bridge seem to go underneath this very room and after a while you could be sure where they were heading--into Beuys’ show, out of other prominent ones (of Bruce Nauman, August Strindberg), that too while being charged with entry fees only for this show. The curators understanding of the passage of art as institution from religious settings to a religion of its own via the millenium; and art objects themselves having to wait till it is connected to build up a relation to become what they would (outside of which they just dont exist) is deliberately connected by relating Beuys (specifically) pillars with the bridge, the cathedral and the historic Thames (Monet, Whistler and Turner’s visions of the river is shown in another Tate gallery) in this specifically arranged work. Verbs and relations also become objects herein. Beuys himself might have been excited with such a ‘relational aesthetics’ and created an ‘act-as-object’ at the cost of St.Pauls, Thames, Tate and the Millennium Bridge. Because he was the one who literally placed copper wires and plates between a pile of felts and elsewhere and called them as “energy batteries”. He removed the physicality from rock solid materials. The birth of a Joseph Beuys’ object’s characteristics marked the demise of its very physicality despite being present there, rock solid, in the gallery! H.A. ANIL KUMAR