Word: arte
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...penitent prophet. His wartime experiences, particularly the occasion in 1943 when he crashed in a Ju-87 and was saved by wandering Tartar tribesmen who wrapped his traumatized body in felt and fat (thereby planting the germ of Beuys' later obsessive interest in fat and felt as art materials, emblems of healing and magic), have for his followers almost joined Van Gogh's ear in the hagiography of modern art. After refusing for years to exhibit at an American museum in protest against the Viet Nam War, Beuys is now having a retrospective, organized by the English art...
...left? The problem is simple: there is no avant-garde any more, since its old ambitions of provocation and social attack have been swallowed by the prostrate tolerance of institutions. Its only battle is a shadow play, the game of opposing (or marginally embarrassing) its patrons, the bankers and art dealers who can afford to buy Beuys' work...
Beuys' answer to this is, in effect, a brisk substitution. If art cannot affect politics, we shall designate everything that happens in the world as art, as a form of "social sculpture." Since in the present intellectual climate of Germany nearly every act can be read as political, the artist assumes the stature of a revolutionary prophet. The result is Beuys as political Luftmensch, reeling off harmless Utopian generalizations about social renewal through universal creativity, supporting the Free International University, and engaging in squabbles with the Düsseldorf Academy. This, however, is less social sculpture than social packaging...
...effort to make life and art one and the same does very little to change life, and generally dilutes art; but it is one of the permanent, unrealizable fixtures of the romantic will to cultural impact, and thus the favorite bromide of the avantgarde...
Beuys' sculpture is so wrapped in personal myth that it all looks equally good to his devotees. To those who are less committed, it seems very uneven. His stacks of felt rectangles, topped with copper or iron plates, have the dumb, disengaged look common to most minimal art. It does not help much to learn that the slabs of felt are meant to resemble the plates in a wet-cell battery; no current runs, and inertia is inertia. His most extravagant object-20 tons of mutton fat cast into the form of a corner of a pedestrian underpass leading...