The following is an essay
by David Levi Strauss from his recent
book between dog & wolf, Essays
on Art and Politics, pubished by Autonomedia,
Brooklyn, NY, 1999 .
American Beuys
"I Like America & America Likes Me"
Complicity battling redemption--that's
what the history of America is. Susan Howe
In fact, America
has never known quite how to respond to Joseph Beuys. In Europe, Beuys
is either loved or hated (rarely "liked"), but in America the terms
of reception and critique have been less sharp. This ambivalence is
reflected in the title of an article which appeared just after the Guggenheim
retrospective in 1979: "Joseph Beuys: Shaman, sham, or one of the most
brilliant artists of all time? (1) The Guggenheim
catalog itself is prefaced with a pinched and cautious apology from
Director Thomas Messer which begins: "Joseph Beuys has been the subject
of much controversy in the past and will, no doubt, challenge the responsive
capacities of visitors to the current exhibition of his work at the
Guggenheim Museum." (2)
Aside from German-born
Benjamin Buchloh 's hysterical trashing of Beuys in Artforum (3)
and October (4) in
1980, and
John F. Moffitt's useful but conceptually flawed book, Occultism
in Avant-Garde Art: The Case of Joseph Beuys (5) in
1988, which both end up as rigidly materialist diatribes equating Beuys's
idealism and esoteric sources with crypto fascism (6),
there have been remarkably few attempts, in English, to deal with Beuys's
works and ideas. (7)
By
most accounts, the American audiences for Beuys's public dialogues in
January 1974 (arranged by Ronald Feldman) also didn't quite know how
to take Beuys. His reputation for provocation and controversy had preceded
him, but the substance of his teachings had not, so much of the time
of these meetings was taken up by the most preliminary clarification
of terms. When the dialogues did break through to more substantive exchange,
the audiences often seemed caught on the horns of a particularly (though
not exclusively) American dilemma: How can we embrace Beuys's idealism
(which is akin to our own) without denying its profound opposition to
the materialism which also defines us.
For
his part, Beuys was equally ambivalent about America. As his influence
spread in Europe, he continually declined invitations to come to the
U.S. or show in the U.S., saying he would not come as long as the U.S.
remained in Vietnam. When he finally did come in 1974, he tried to engage
Americans in two very different kinds of dialogue. Four months after
his largely unsuccessful public dialogues and lectures on his Energy
Plan for the Western Man in New York, Minneapolis, and Chicago,
Beuys performed his first and only aktion in America, and this
second contact was fittingly traumatic.
You
could say that a reckoning has to be made with the coyote, and only
then can this trauma be lifted. (8)
For
three days in May of 1974, Joseph Beuys lived and communicated with
a coyote in a small room in the newly-opened Rene Block Gallery at 409
West Broadway in New York. Though actually witnessed by only a handful
of people, this action, I Like America and America Likes Me,
awakened the interest and curiosity of many who heard about it, far
and wide. Along with Beuys's golden-flaked honeyed head in How to
Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), and the glowing white horse
and cymbals of Iphigenie/Titus Andronicus (1969), images of the
Coyote action are among the most resilient and generative images to
come out of Beuys's performance work.
Caroline Tisdall,
author of the book documenting the Coyote action, has elsewhere written,
"The represented environment must effect the modern consciousness originally,
archetypically and beyond the times." (9) Perhaps
more than any other, Beuys's American action was projected "beyond the
times." Fifteen years after the act and three years after Beuys's death
is perhaps a good time to make an inquiry into the further meanings
of the Coyote action, and to reconsider its significance.
Coyote
in America
Coyote, ululating
on the hill,
is it my fire
that distresses you so?
Or the memories
of long ago
when you
were a man roaming the hills.
(10)
Native American
Coyote tales speak of a time long ago "when animals were people" and
everyone communicate with each other. Though there are many different
kinds of Coyote tales, varying from place to place and people to people,
they flow from a common, ancient source and represent "one of man's
earliest attempts to make articulate the movement of the Spirit."
(11)
The Coyote of
the Coyote tales is primarily a transformer, an agent of change
bringing order to chaos and chaos to order. He is "the spirit of disorder,
the enemy of boundaries." (12) In much of Western
North America he fills the role of Culture Hero and Trickster, found
in virtually all traditional societies. He is an American Zeus, Prometheus,
Orpheus, and Hermes all rolled into one: mating to create the human
race, inventing death, stealing fire to give to humans, shapeshifter,
androgyne, messenger and guide to the Underworld. In whatever guise,
Coyote makes things happen.
In contrast to
the virtuous gods and heroes of some other traditions, the Coyote of
Coyote tales is by turns greedy, lecherous, deceitful, vain, jealous,
and gullible. The poet Gary Snyder has pointed out the "Rabelaisian-Dadaist
overtones" of the Coyote tales. (13) It is typical
of Native American thought that comic indirection paradoxically indicates
the way of right action. There is more than a little Coyote in Buster
Keaton.
During
Sacred Time, the time of Creation, Coyote taught humans how to survive,
and the incredible survival of the coyote, both mythologically and biologically,
continues to be one of the great American mysteries.
The
Coyote War
The
coyote is the most adaptable and successful North American mammal besides
Homo sapiens. Favoring prairie, basin, and bajada, the coyote has recently
extended its range from the forests of Maine to the city parks of Los
Angeles, from Alaska to the mountains of Guatemala, and it has done
this in the face of one of the most concerted attempts ever made to
wipe out an entire species.
Weapons in the
war against coyotes have included poisons such as strychnine and thallium
sulfate, leg hold traps, cyanide "coyote-getters" designed to explode
into the coyote's mouth, snares, den-hunting to destroy pups, aerial
hunting from planes and helicopters, "dying rabbit" calls to guns, sterilization
baits, sight-running hounds, toxic collars on sheep, and "Compound 1080"
(sodium monofloroacetate), hailed as "the best, most species specific,
most foolproof predator poison ever developed by man."
(14)
All
over the West, coyotes are hunted with fourwheel-drive jeeps, CB radios
and high-powered rifles with scopes. There has been a bounty on coyote
scalps since 1825, even though no state or province has ever reduced
any predator animal population through the bounty system.
Through
the Predator & Rodent Control Branch of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife
Service (sister agency of the Bureau of Indian Affairs) and other agencies,
the U.S. Government has poured millions of tax dollars into coyote eradication
efforts since
Congress first appropriated money for it in 1914. Charles L. Cadieux
compared the government's war on coyotes to another recent debacle:
Many
people feel that the Vietnamese mistake was the first war that the
United States didn't win. That isn't true. For forty-five years, Uncle
Sam has fought a war against coyotes...and lost! In the years between
1937 and 1981, minions of the Fish & Wildlife Service scalped
3, 612, 220 coyotes. The ears with a connecting strip of skin were
sent to a central tallying point as proof of their 'body count.' [Cadieux
estimates this figure should actually be doubled to include the number
of unverified, unrecorded kills due to Compound 1080 poisoning.
If
my calculations are reasonable, coyotes suffered six million casualties
in this war with Uncle Sam. Yet, we would have to admit that the coyotes
have won the war. (15)
Mythologically
and biologically, Coyote is a survivor and exemplar of evolutionary
change. This is what attracted Beuys to Coyote. Beuys embraced the coyote
as the progeny of the paleo-Siberian, Eurasian steppe-wolf that came
across the Bering Strait 12,000 (or more--some estimates go as high
as 50,000) years ago and adapted to its New World home. Coyote carried
the paleo-Asiatic shamanic knowledge with him, spreading it throughout
the North American West and into Mesoamerica. Our word "shaman" comes
directly from the Tunguso-Manchurian (Turko-Tartar?) saman, possibly
derived from the verb meaning "to know," and remark ably similar to
the Yucatec Maya word for a shaman, h-men, also meaning "one who knows"
(the secrets of the Old Ones). Our word "coyote" is from the Spanish
conquistadors' corruption of the Nahuatl word "coyotl." The Hopi call
him "iisaw." He received his scientific name, Canis latrans,
only in 1823, two years before Missouri made him an outlaw (a "Dillinger"
or a "Geronimo") (16) by putting a bounty on his
scalp. After this, the coyote became a prime scapegoat in the West.
(17) He symbolized the wild and untamed, an unacceptable threat
to husbandry, domesticity, and law & order. In Christian symbology,
he was a satanic figure, the enemy of the Lamb and the Shepherd. Like
the American Indian, (18) he was the Other in
our midst, and we did everything we could to eliminate them both.
The
white man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does
not understand America.
The man from Europe is still a foreigner and an alien. . . . Oglala
Sioux Chief Luther Standing Bear in his autobiography, 1933
The
American intelligence is an indigenous plumage. Is it not evident
that America itself was paralyzed by the same blow that paralyzed
the Indian! And until the Indian is caused to walk, America itself
will not begin to walk...
Jose Marti, "Autores americanos aborigenes," 1884
The
Trauma
Coyote
Old Man is a fine doctor, a great medicine man. (19)
Medical symbolism
is rampant in Beuys's work. (20) His own birth
is referred to in his vitae as "Kleve exhibition of a wound held together
with an adhesive bandage. " Beuys recognized the whole Social Body as
a wounded body, a traumatized body requiring treatment, and this realization
led to a lifetime of research into the healing arts.
The
Coyote action was performed in the shadow of the twin towers of the
World Trade Center, on a postcard of which Beuys inscribed the names
"Cosmos" and "Damian" in one of his multiples (made the same year as
the Coyote action), as a comment on the commercialization of allopathy
and as an homage to the greatest physician in the history of Europe,
Paracelsus, who was born the year after Columbus "discovered America,"
and assassinated 48 years later by men in the employ of irate druggists
and doctors. Legend has it that Paracelsus was captured by the Tartars
while in Russia and was schooled in their shamanic healing arts.
Beuys's
intentions in the Coyote action were primarily therapeutic. Using shamanic
techniques appropriate to the coyote, his own characteristic tools,
and a widely syncretic symbolic language, he engaged the coyote in a
dialogue to get to "the psychological trauma point of the United States'
energy constellation"; namely, the schism between native intelligence
and European mechanistic, materialistic, and positivistic values.
This
is the dialogue he tried and failed to have with people in his Energy
Plan for the Westemrn Man tour earlier that year. In turning to
the coyote, he moved from verbal language to the language of action.
The conceptual simplicity of the Coyote action--"a man in a room with
a coyote"--combines with its semiotic complexity to allow entrances
and readings at many different levels.
Arriving
for his first and only action in America in an ambulance, with "Emergency"
emblazoned across its front and marked with the red crosses so prevalent
in his earlier drawings and paintings, Beuys left no doubt about the
purpose of his trip. Wrapped I n a felt cocoon inside the ambulance,
Beuys recalled his own myth of origin, in which he was shot down over
the Crimea and rescued by nomadic Tartars, who wrapped him in insulating
felt to warm him. Here again, the artist journeys to another world (the
New World) through ritualizing threshold rites. Again he is wounded
and in need of treatment. The trauma is always double. The Coyote action
is an updated version of the masked dance dating from the Upper Paleolithic.
In 1974, a New York art gallery replaced the cave as temenos.
Beuys's
"medicine" in this action consisted of his usual costume (felt hat and
fishing vest), staff, Braunkreuz flashlight, two large pieces of felt,
a musical triangle, a pile of hay, and stacks of the daily Wall Street
Journal.
Upon
arrival in the room with the coyote, Beuys began an orchestrated sequence
of actions to be repeated over and over in the next three days. A triangle
is struck three times to begin the sequence. This triangle that Beuys
wears pendant around his neck is the alchemical sign for fire (dry,
fiery, choleric warmth), which ancient glacial Eurasian shamans sorely
needed. It is also a sign for the feminine element (earthy & mercurial)
and for the creative intellect, and it is the Pythagorean symbol for
wisdom. Striking its three sides three times, Beuys calls himself, Coyote,
and the Audience to order.
After
the triangle is struck, a recording of loud turbine engine noise is
played outside the enclosure, signifying "indetermined energy" and calling
up a chaotic vitality. At this point, Beuys pulls on his gloves, reminiscent
of the traditional bear-claw gloves worn by "master of animals" shamans
such as those depicted on the walls of Trois Freres, and gets into his
fur pelt/felt, wrapping it around himself so that he disappears into
it with the flashlight. He then extends the crook of his staff out from
the opening at the top of the felt wrap, as an energy conductor and
receptor, antenna or lightning rod.
The
conical shape of the felt resembles a tipi, the nomadic shelter which
migrated from Siberia to North America with the hunters. Topped with
the crooked staff, it also recalls both the stag and the shape of the
lightning in Lightning with Stag in Its Glare (1958-85), and
is a reference to the classic shamanic antlered mask, also going back
to the caves of the Upper Paleolithic, as does Beuys's "Eurasian staff,"
the shamanic phallos (Coyote carried his around in a box on his
back) and staff of the psychopomp--messenger and mediator. The felt
enclosure doubles as a sweat lodge for Beuys, accumulating the heat
necessary for transformation.
Beuys
bends at the waist and follows the movements of the coyote around the
room, keeping the receptor/staff pointed in the coyote's direction at
all times.
When
the beam of the flashlight is glimpsed from beneath the felt, we recognize
the figure of the Hermit from the Tarot--an old man with a staff, holding
a lighted lamp half-hidden by t he great mantle which envelopes him.
This card
in the Tarot indicates wisdom, circumspection, and protection. It refers
to the developed mind of man, the prudence and foresight of learning,
and is thought by some to picture Hermes, the Messenger, signifying
active divine inspiration and "unexpected current." (21)
Arthur Edward Waite gives the sense of the Hermit's lantern as "where
I am, you also may be." (22)
After
awhile, Beuys emerges from the felt and walks to the edge of the room,
marking the end of the sequence of gestures. There is a pile of straw,
another piece of felt, and stacks of each day's Wall Street Journal
in the room. Beuys sleeps on the coyote's straw; the coyote sleeps on
Beuys's felt. The copies of the Wall Street Journal arrive each
day from outside (like the engine noise) and enter the dialogue as evidence
of the limits of materialist thinking.
Beuys's
ongoing argument with materialism is what most clearly identifies him
as an Anthroposophical artist. Following Rudolf Steiner, Beuys was not
against materialism, per se. He valued it as a positive result of Christianity
and recognized its historical necessity, but believed that humankind's
survival depends on its letting go of materialism in order to move on
to the next evolutionary stage.
In
a previous sculpture, Batteries (1963), Beuys employed bound
stacks of newspapers as "batteries of ideas." In the Coyote action,
the batteries are disassembled (by the coyote), their stored energy
dissipated. The coyote sleeps on the felt and pisses on "the Daily Diary
of the American Dream."
Indeed,
it is difficult to escape the conclusion that coyotes do have a sense
of humor. How else to explain, for instance, the well-known propensity
of experienced coyotes to dig up traps, turn them over, and urinate
or defecate on them? (23)
Coyote also pisses
on the Wall Street Journal to mark it, as if to say, "Everything
that claims to be a part of America is part of my territory."
In previous actions
and drawings, Beuys repeatedly identified himself with the Hare, "which
as an animal of the steppes elucidates the principle of movement and
later becomes the image for the whole 'Eurasian' story." (24)
In Beuys's iconography, the Hare symbolizes birth and especially incarnation.
Though fertile, the Hare represents the vulnerability and finiteness
of humankind. Like the Hare, Beuys is careful. He always uses felt and
fat to insulate and protect. He moves slowly and deliberately, approaching
Coyote carefully. In the Coyote action, Beuys/Hare is burrowing in,
wanting to be born into Coyote's world. Coyote Old Man is the long survivor,
found painted on paleolithic cave walls as already having been around
a long time. "I know what happened after the before and before the after,"
he says. (25) Hare comes to Coyote to learn how
to survive.
In
fact, Beuys in his Hare nature was less a shaman than an ordinary Anthroposophical
man; that is, his inquiries were seldom in extremity as the shaman's
are, but rather in the direction of more common and communal work: producing
warmth, planting trees, talking with animals, sweeping up, farming,
teaching. Because of this, it took a good deal of courage for Beuys
to put himself in vulnerable contact with the more dynamic and chaotic
f orce of Coyote.
Among
the Ohlone peoples who once lived in what is now the San Francisco Bay
Area, vision-seekers going out (in dream)
to contact animal-helpers had to be very careful. These animal-gods
were "amoral, unpredictable, greedy, irritable,
tricky and very magical. Cultivating such helpers was a complicated,
exasperating and often dangerous undertaking." (26)
In
social terms, the Coyote action calls attention to the crisis brought
about by mechanistic, materialistic, and positivistic thinking in the
West, and to the emergent need for Western Man ("Old Western Man is
most clearly represented by what has become of the United States") to
move into the next evolutionary stage, from progress (domination of
nature, "triumph over the past," positivist reductions) to survival
(holistic, ecological, evolutionary).
One
of the most prevalent and persistent misunderstandings of Beuys has
been that, by invoking the shaman and invoking other ancient esoteric
lore and practice, he suggested an atavistic return to a pre-technological
past. Beuys addressed this in a conversation with Heiner Bastian and
Jeannot Simmen in 1979:
Beuys: ..
.When I do something shamanistic, I make use of the shamanistic element--admittedly
an element of the past--in order to express something about a future
possibility.
Simmen:
All right, but how much of it is the presence of the shamanistic now,
how much of it is the actuality of a model taken from the past, and
how much of it is really alive and viable at the present time?
Beuys: It's
this aliveness that I'm after, also in the sense of will power based
on the necessity of bringing back something into our time-conscious
culture that's been lost, namely a willingness to take these lost
forces seriously, forces that are there in shamanism, and to put them
back in the context of our thinking in a completely new way. That's
why these things are realities not only in an aesthetic context, they're
also real intentions. (27)
In
that same interview, Beuys explains why he would not want us to "return
to the age of shamanism," even if we could:
In
the age of shamans, rnen may have created closed images of the meaning
of life, but they actually lived in subjugation, in a state of spiritual
subjugation. It's different now--human beings are in a position to
shape their own future, to determine how the future is going to look....
Self-determination
is something very concrete, something very spiritual.... In philosophical
terms, human liberty is the basic question of art.
(28)
This is the key
to Beuys's "expanded concept of art," elsewhere addressed by Max Reithmann:
"For poiesis, which has a more comprehensive meaning than techne
[art], means creation in the broadest sense of the word, the freeing
of all natural beings." (29)
Beuys
clearly comes out of the tradition of German idealism that can be traced
from Goethe and Novalis to Rudolf Steiner. Beuys apotheosizes art with
a totalizing insistence that would have made the English Romantics blush.
For Beuys, everything begins with art, and art is finally synonymous
with life, with survival: "Art alone makes life possible," and "without
art man is inconceivable in physiological terms."
The
evolutionary narrative which can be traced through Beuys's entire oeuvre
is Anthroposophical at its base, but it is also molded by the artist's
own investigations experiences, including his empathic dialogues with
animals and his intuitive understanding of traditional shamanic practices.
From his earliest drawings on, Beuys depicted animals (elk, stag, goat,
swan, queen of goats, fox, hare) as bearers of psychic and spiritual
forces, and the shaman--ln the House of the Shaman (1954), and
The Shaman 's Bundle (1962), among others--as a vital and initiatory
technician of the sacred.
Beuys
was not a philosopher. He was a sculptor, and his life's work was to
uncover and demonstrate certain principles sculpturally. That this led
him into pedagogy and social communication on a scale unheard of for
avant-garde artists is a measure of the necessity and timeliness of
those principles.
Every
art action Beuys made looked to a future in which our continued survival
will depend upon our ability to adapt, and to marshall senses and powers
of intelligence now lying dormant. He recognized scientific materialism
as a reductive and backward-looking idee fixe that must be transcended
if human evolution is to continue.
It
should perhaps not be so surprising to find that the holistic views
espoused by Beuys have more and more come to the cutting edge of quantum
physics and the life sciences. Modern science has recently discovered
(in the "Gaia hypothesis") that the Earth is alive! Popular science
writers like Fritjof Capra, Lewis Thomas, Stephen Jay Gould, James Gleick,
and others report that the dominant world view of the past 300 years,
based on a scientific method that reduces everything to its parts for
separate analysis without considering each part's relation to the whole,
has reached the end of its tether. Recent developments in scientific
thought as well as recognitions of global crises are moving many scientists
toward new holistic, systemic, and ecological paradigms that see things
in relation.
The modern Western
world is extremely distrustful of the vatic role of artists, and is
more likely to characterize their actions as autistic rather
than vatic. In his role as Trickster/Transformer, the shaman in traditional
societies acted as a safety valve, letting the air out of society's
repressed fears. Beuys often played a similar role. When German newspapers
and magazines carried story after story about the escapades of "Prof.
Beuys," they most often characterized him as both ridiculous and dangerous.
In his attacks on Beuys in America, Benjamin Buchloh refers to Beuys
at several points as a "trickster," always disparagingly: "Sometimes
I'm not sure whether he's simply a fool or a very shrewd trickster,
or perhaps a mixture of both." (30) Contrast this
with the Navajo, who still attend the double function of the culture
hero as ethical lawmaker and frivolous prankster, benefactor and bufoon.
The
spirit of the coyote is so mighty that the human being cannot understand
what it is, or what it can do for mankind in the future.
(31)
Beuys
's diaiogue with the Coyote stands out against the more prevalent modern
relation to animals as inferior ("pre-technological") pests, pets, monsters,
or medical spare parts. As Beuys the ecologist led to the Green movement,
did Beuys the animal communicator and founder of the "Political Party
for Animals" (with its billions of members) lead to the Animal Rights
movement?
The
Coyote tales say that we learned a great deal from Coyote at one time.
Recent developments indicate that we have a great deal to learn from
him again. The Coyote action was Beuys's attempt to renew that synergistic
dialogue, and to make contact with an America that is both ancient and
nascent.
David Levi Strauss, 1990
between dog & wolf, Essays on Art
and Politics, pubished by Autonomedia,
Brooklyn, NY, 1999 .