Here’s the Joseph Beuys myth: the hugely influential German artist was a pilot in World War II. He crashed his Stuka over the Crimea and was found by a tribe of nomadic Tartars who wrapped him in fat and felt to keep him warm. They saved his life.
Out of that fable came a whole career based on felt, fat, electricity and medicine – the building blocks of survival, used to help deal with his country’s tormented recent past. His work took in sculpture, drawing, performance, political activism and lectures. It’s art as spiritual first aid for a damaged national psyche, sculpture as healing object, performance as shamanic ritual – and it’s some of the most important art of the twentieth century.
The first room here is full of felt clipped to the walls, copper boxes and piles of relay equipment. In one piece, rolls of felt nestle in smeared globs of fat. A hammer on the wall promises to rebuild something, a sled on the floor promises to whisk your broken body to safety.
Upstairs, the floor is littered with little coiled clay turds with tools stuck in them – like the charred faecal remains of some group of workers – cracked machinery and powerless electricity rods. It leaves you certain that once this was alive, but is now anything but. You’ve probably seen a bronze version of this landmark installation in the Tate. They are sad, forlorn, abandoned things.
In a side room, you find a bunch of early works – fragile little female figures and crucifixes, all on the edge of crumbling like disintegrating prayers.
These are all political statements too – works that scream for healing and social cohesion, not the destructive, nihilistic drive of capital. That they’re on show, and many for sale, in a huge international commercial gallery is pretty at odds with Beuys’s whole vibe.
But look past that and in this art of upheaval and pain, you might just find some balm for the soul, and we could all use a bit of that.
@eddyfrankel
