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    26 views14 pages

    Buchloh Beuys PDF

    Uploaded by

    Diego Parra

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 14
    bition one wonders why that most bea clarity, warmth and light i dimly lit in a gray and moody twilight. I this athe- atrical trick to create a setting of “Northern Romantic" ight, meant to obscure? ‘What mental semitrance are we supposed to enter before we are allowed to «mmbark on wandering down the spiral of 24 Staions (whose martyrium, whose _mysterium)? Pethaps we ae prevented from seeing belated automatist drawings ‘on the walls, pompously framed in chthonic ron, and weathered, withering relics Benjamin H.D, Buchloh Appendix BEUYS: THE TWILIGHT OF THE [DOL Preliminary Notes for a Critique ‘Theft that peopl in Germany deceive themselves concerning Wigner does ot su rise me. Te revere would surprise m. The Germans have modeled a Wager or ‘themselves, whom they ca nor never yet hae they been pychlagis hey re ‘han thar they misunderstand Bu thas pple shoud aso dave serves oncerning Wager Paris? Where people rear anything else than psyco ts... How intimately related must Wagner bt the entie decadence of Europe {for her not to have eat he was dent, He ong tthe isis proagons its goetest name. Al hate wold needs mst toscana inthe most seductive manner in is arte trv great sila of evansed peopl: atl ‘ns artifiiality and innocence (dae)... Wagner est une nvrve _—Fiedtich Nietsche, The Caseof Wagner! RING THESE DAYS OF THE [Guggenheim Museums Beuys exhi 1 building, normally beaming with 199 Dron Nore ein HD. Bache "Bans The “wig he, Pray Nes foreCrie ie ayadin ‘va 9 are rapn Boe "oop a Soin Chge a Win ar to ‘oa Bay! Ame np ota donning etal feng ein, Bs sic domme Sundin of te Carman apc ‘om i to enh tras pron We ach ‘towing perhaps ead ce ‘eto mrt ati th ‘hh her eed ome ees simpaonthss se ‘rt wert sing, ‘ewes Cpe Pips ‘ogee rer oul rs theo lgering an ct eva eas and hes ‘nate offen wos in ‘orn nes he opin po Ssh dye tata rer ons aoe "vl ere a nats owe see tind heen uhih eer ‘ahr trance stoping ‘onpemens CR, 1 rec Siete, The Cie of Wage in The Compe Wr of re es Ox tener moe Thelderf cing ph Bes Inthe tad of Reurd igs prope ye te Marl roster pb ‘tert oh es, Disedert Ober. 97 Pineda ra geet Pius by Nace rode Pass sce erp of Yes Hisnbworkon te coun of Benjamin HD. Bachloh 200 nd vestiges of past activities, which might be “souvenirs of aif of spectacle poor dead things. Breft ofthe confectioner, the life of his art has vanished”? ‘The presentation of the souvenirs, however, is most elaborate. Enshrine. specifically designed glass and wood cases that look like across between vtrnes in Victorian muscums of ethnography and display cases in turn-of-the-century boarding schools, the objects, or rather their containers, signal to the viewer: yyouare entering interior spaces, the realm of archetypal memories, an historic communion. Ahistoricity, that unconscious or deliberate obliviousness toward the specifi conditions that determine the reality of an individual's being and ‘work in historical time, isthe functional basis on which public and private mythologies can be erected, presuming that a public exists that craves myths in proportion to its lack of comprehension of historic actuality. The ahistorie mythology of fascism, to give an example from political history, could only develop and gain credibility asa response to the chilistic and debauched hopes of the starving and uneducated masses of the German Weimar Republic and postmonarchic Italy. Veneration for leaders grows out of the experiences of severe deficiency. ‘The private and public mythology of Joseph Beuys, to give an example from ‘art history, could only be developed and maintained on the ahistoricity of esthetic production and consumption in postwar Europe. The substantially retarded comprehension of European Dada and Russian Constructivism, and their political as well as their epistemological implications, determined both European and! American art up until the late 1950s and served for both produc- cersand recipients asa basis for mythifying subsequent esthetic work, Once put into their proper historie context, these works would lose their mystery and seemingly metaphysical origin and could be judged more appropriately for their actual formal and material, thats historical, achievements within the situation and the specific point of development of the discourse into which they insert ‘themselves. The public myth of Beuys life and work, by now having achieved proportions that make any attempt to question it orto put it into historic per- spective an almost impossible critical task, isa result ofthese conditions just as it tries to perpetuate them by obscuring historical factcity. This very atitude, however, of making the artist a cult figure, historicizes Beuys and aligns him with representatives of his own generation in Europe during the 1950s who were quay grand masters ofthe public spectacle: figures lke Yves Klein and Georges Mathieu. No other artist (with the possible exception of Andy Warhol, who cer- tainly generated a totally different kind of myth) managed—and probably never intended—to puzzle and scandalize his primarity bourgeois art audience tothe 201 beuys: THE TwiL: Ar OF THE IDOL extent that he would become a figure of worship. No other artist also tried and succeeded so systematically in aligning himself at a given time with esthetic and political eurrents, absorbing them into his myth and work and thereby neutral- iting and estheticizing them. Everybody who was seriously involved in radical student polities during 1960s in Germany, for example, and who worked on the development of a new and adequate political theory and practice laughed at or derided Beuys’ public-relations move to found the Grand Student Party, which \was supposed to return an air of radicality to the master who was coming of ‘esthetic age. Nobody who understands any contemporary science, polities or esthetics for that matter, could want to seein Beuys' proposal for an integration. of art, scence and polities —as his program for the Free International University ddemands—anything more than simple-minded utopian drivel lacking elemen- tary political and educational practicality. Beuys’ existential and ideological fol- lowers and admirers, as opposed to his bourgeois collectors and speculators, are blindfolded like cultists by their eader’s charisma, As usual with charisma, this seems to be nothing buta psychic interaction between hyperactive unconscious Processes at the edge of sanity and the zombielike existence of supposed nor- ‘ality in which individuation has been totally extinguished, so it scems per= fectly necessary to become a “follower” of whomever seems to be alive. Ernst Bloch, the German philosopher, when talking about Beuys’ philosophical mas- ter Rudolf Steiner, gives an exact description of those processes that constitute the mythical figure and the cult, and this portrayal seems to describe Beuys word-for-word Wis nt suprising to meet peculiar dreamers. They ae sufficiently disrupted t be ‘open for unconditioned experiences. |The dreamer] tends to remove lrontces of everyday life so that it can cover the unussl with the ordinary and vice versa. The slvided self accumulates a feeling of sin whose power seems almost forgotten and “unfathomable. The internalized super-ego the pride aid certainty of mimic messiah ‘that those characters develop, would never be attained by any notmal being, even in states of highest mental exaltation, No flse Demetrius woul maintain himself for Jong, but a fase fesus among madmen will da well... The occult journalist Rudolf ‘Steiner established himelf atthe top ofthe "Cognition of Higher Words" particu: lurlyodd cas. A mediere,but unsupportable ody yt effcient..as though some ‘ten druids were chatting on newsprint paper. As to Beuys, the cul and the myth seem to have become inseparable from the ‘work, and as his confusion of art and life sa deliberate programmatic position, an “integration” to be achieved by everybody it seems appropriate t0 take ay tang Bch ou erieip

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