The Utopian Globalists by Jonathan Harris

Author:Jonathan Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

The Beuysian Spectacular Persona

Fifteen years earlier, in July 1964, Beuys made a statement in Aachen, West Germany – location of the unsuccessful 1944 ‘July Plot’, an attempt by Wehrmacht army officers to kill Hitler – in which he called for the raising of the height of the recently erected Berlin Wall by five centimetres.17 This gesture was intended and duly received as an absurd if provocative ­incitement. It formed part of an event organized by the Fluxus network of artists and performers, held at the town’s Technische Hochschule as part of an action marking the failed assassination. The action had ended in chaos when enraged students invaded the stage area and the artist was punched in the face. The black-and-white photographs of Beuys, martyr-like, nose bleeding, holding a cross and his arm raised, in a manner reminiscent of, yet differing from, a Nazi salute, were amongst the first to bring him to the attention of a wide public in Germany and the world beyond (Figure 0.6). The period ­between 1963 and 1968 saw the creation of the Beuysian ­spectacular ­persona, based on enigmatic theatrical actions which often lasted several hours. These were carried out with his repertoire of ‘signature’ materials such as fat and felt, and involved an eclectic appropriation of symbols and objects drawn from religious, cosmological and scientific domains of practice and knowledge. These were combined within rituals consisting of both planned and spontaneous elements which Beuys evolved in performances such as The Chief (first performed in 1964), The Silence of Marcel Duchamp is Overrated (a statement-action made as part of a live German TV broadcast in November 1964), and How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965).

Beuys’s actions inaugurated and constituted a set of ‘liturgies’ – symbolic rituals of offering and sacrifice whose intelligibility and purpose depended upon the articulation of a clear interpretative framework set by the artist himself, or one provided by supportive critics in the artist’s confidence.18 By 1967, Beuys had begun fashioning a clear political component to this system of liturgies, one antagonistic to the mainstream national parties’ contest for seats in the West German Reichstag parliament, when he founded what he called the German Student Party. The following phase in his activities both coincided with, and in various ways contributed to, the development of the New Left in Western Europe and North America – a mass movement united at that time in opposition to US military intervention in Vietnam and involved in countercultural protests, strikes and sit-ins that culminated in the ‘May 1968’ events in Paris, London and many other cities around the world.19

Beuys’s Raising the Berlin Wall was an instance of the ‘radical voluntarist’ gesture that utopian globalists had used throughout the twentieth century and which became, by the later 1960s, a staple of those practices developed by artists such as Ono and Huebler.20 Beuys’s gambit had been to make an ­enigmatic public statement on a matter of German national security and ­traumatic historical and personal significance. This successfully excited

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