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Joseph Beuys’ widow not amused by ‘Fat Corner’ schnapps stunt
08.08.2014
10:52 am
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Noted German Fluxus and “happening” artist Joseph Beuys focused on two substances above all in his art: felt and fat. His use of the two materials purportedly stem from an incident Beuys experienced during World War II. In 1944, as a pilot of a Nazi “Stuka” dive-bomber, Beuys was shot down on the Crimean Front. According to Beuys, he was saved when a group of nomadic Tatar tribesmen wrapped his body in animal fat and felt and nursed him back to health: “....the tail flipped over and I was completely buried in the snow. That’s how the Tartars found me days later. I remember voices saying ‘Voda’ (Water), then the felt of their tents, and the dense pungent smell of cheese, fat and milk. They covered my body in fat to help it regenerate warmth, and wrapped it in felt as an insulator to keep warmth in.” This account has never been corroborated; contemporaneous reports insist that Beuys was found by a German search commando and that there were no Tatars in the village at that time.

Still, for Beuys this tale served as an originating myth, and in his many “Aktionen” (actions, happenings) he would use the two materials again and again. One of his most famous works is his Filzanzug (Felt Suit, 1970); he often wore a felt suit and a felt hat in everyday life. According to the Tate Gallery in London, “Beuys used triangles of fat in both his sculptures and ‘actions’. From around 1963, he would use wedges of fat or felt to mark the boundaries of a space when performing an ‘action.’”

His best-known fat-based artwork is called Fettecke (Fat Corner, various years). According to Antidiets of the Avant-garde by Cecilia Novero,
 

Beuys “melted” or cooked butter (or margarine) and worked with it in its multiple states, from hard to soft to liquid. When warm, fat expands and moves; when cold or frozen, it becomes hard, heavy, and non-malleable. Energy is not only necessary to transform fat but also is the force that the artist uses to sculpt it. As Beuys reported of two of his most famous fat objects of the sixties, Fat Corner (Fettecke, 1960) and Fat Chair (Fettstuhl, 1964), fat in the former has hardened in the form of a quadrilateral, where fat on the chair “is not as geometrical as the fat corner, rather is preserves some chaotic character.” For its malleability fat becomes the material that best expressed the ideas of transformation from chaos to form, and vice versa, ideas that for Beuys exemplify processes of life, especially human social activity. Human action can be organized according to the state of matter, that is, of fat.

 
As part of the Düsseldorf Quadriennale and the Museum Kunstpalast’s current show “Art and Alchemy,”  Markus Löffler, professor of art in Bremen, and two artists named Andree Korpys and Dieter Schmal took up the challenge of creating booze out of the Fettecke: they “used a four pound chunk of the over 30-year-old sculpture and a dusting of blue pigment from an Yves Klein edition to distill a 160 proof alcohol, which was then cut down to around four liters of 100 proof schnapps.” According to Löffler, “The taste is reminiscent of Parmesan. ... It stays with you for a long time afterwards.”
 

Remnants of Beuys’ Fettecke
 
According to artnet, visitors to the museum were also offered a drop or two of the liquor. After so many years, the fat had certainly turned rancid, a fact that did not bother the artists responsible for the Fettecke schnapps. “You can make liquor out of anything,” Loeffler said. Apparently, the three artists have already distilled (and presumably consumed) liquor made from books and a bust by Dieter Roth.

The creation of the schnapps, which seems perfectly in keeping with Beuys’ own sensibility, did not delight Beuys’ widow and daughter, Eva and Jessica Beuys:
 

[Eva Beuys] called the performance “crap and stupid,” speaking to Germany’s Bild on Wednesday. She claimed that her late husband’s rights have been violated by the destructive act, and said that after hearing the news, she had gotten “red cheeks out of anger.” Eva Beuys said that the museum failed to inform her or her daughter Jessica about the performance, which she went on to call an act of slander against her husband.

Though she refused to comment on the performance itself and said she won’t sue the institution or the “stupid and crudely unfeeling” artists who initiated the performance, the widow had some choice words for Stüttgen. She claims that after rescuing the now-destroyed portion of Fettecke, Stüttgen made her sign a document confirming the work’s authenticity and subsequently showed it in exhibitions. “Now,” she tells Bild, “He has made a farce of the work and a farce of my husband who can no longer defend himself.”

 

Eva Beuys

Posted by Martin Schneider
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08.08.2014
10:52 am
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Joseph Beuys Sings

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The German artist Joseph Beuys always seemed to be in Edinburgh, when I was young. Exhibiting at the Richard Demarco Gallery, or discussing art, democracy and socialism with whoever was around.

Born in Germany in 1921, his influence as an artist and an activist during his 64-years of life was so effective that we are, in many respects, all Beuys’s children. Take this as his defintion:

‘...one of the most influential and extraordinary artists of the twentieth century.

Artist, educator, political and social activist, Beuys’s philosophy proposed the healing power and social function of art, in which everyone can participate and benefit…’

Beuys’s best known works are the performance pieces How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), Filz TV (1970) in which Beuys responds to a TV covered with felt, I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), where he shared a room with a coyote for 3 days, and the social sculpture 7,000 Oaks, which he explained to Demarco in 1982 as:

“I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time. The oak is especially so because it is a slowly growing tree with a kind of really solid heart wood. It has always been a form of sculpture, a symbol for this planet ever since the Druids, who are called after the oak. Druid means oak. They used their oaks to define their holy places. I can see such a use for the future…. The tree planting enterprise provides a very simple but radical possibility for this when we start with the seven thousand oaks.”

Beuys always dressed the same in his artist’s uniform of Trilby hat and multi-pocketed fishing vest, to keep the focus on his art, as he believed art must work towards a better social order:

Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build ‘A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART’… EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who – from his state of freedom – the position of freedom that he experiences at first-hand – learns to determine the other positions of the TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER. work included.

Political activism was important to Beuys. I recall in 1980, when he presented Jimmy Boyle Days, where he went on hunger strike in protest over convicted killer Jimmy Boyle’s move from Barlinnie’s Special Unit, where Boyle had rehabilitated himself as an artist and sculptor, to Saughton Prison, where he was no longer able to practice his art. Beuys saw little difference between art and activism, and his support for Boyle led to a huge outcry over the place of art in society, that led to the Scottish Arts Council removing its key financial support form the Demarco Gallery.

In 1982, he surprised critics and fans alike with his one and only single, “Sonne statt Reagan”, a disco attack against President Reagan’s stance on nuclear arms. The song’s title, “Sun Not Rain/Reagan”, was a pun on the German word “regen” for rain and Reagan. Some critics thought Beuys had sold out, but they failed to see his humor, and the serious intention behind the disc. Beuys may have been unpredictable, but his work is always life-affirming.
 

 
Joseph Beuys’ ground-breaking Filz TV, after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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10.16.2011
07:50 pm
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