BEUYS: GERMAN ARTIST LEAVES VIVID MEMORIES

No one played a greater role in the recent renaissance of German art than the sculptor, performer and political activist Joseph Beuys. His own art was spectral, haunting and heavy with conscience. As a teacher at the Dusseldorf Academy of Arts he nurtured artists who would become renowned as the Neo-Expressionists, including Anselm Keifer. Beuys’ political activities were inseparable from his aesthetic sensibility. In 1972 he staged a demonstration-cum-performance piece urging fair treatment for the notorious Baader-Meinhof Red Army Faction and was dismissed from his teaching post. Along with Hendrick Boll he founded a school without walls called the Free International University.

In Germany it is virtually impossible to enter a modern museum without encountering Beuys in major measure. Enormous lumps of lard that look oddly like icebergs crowd the lobbys of new designer museums. Beuys’ portrait by Andy Warhol stares down from the walls.

Yet when Beuys died Jan. 24 at age 64 his name was still known mainly in art circles outside his homeland. The New York public had some opportunity to know him from a 1979 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum and a notorious 1974 performance in a Manhattan Gallery in which the artist remained caged for a week with a live coyote. Los Angeles had but a single glancing look at Beuys’ art in a small 1973 commercial gallery exhibition.

My most vivid memory of Beuys, however, comes from distant encounters at two editions of “Documenta,” that massive international art survey the Germans put together every five years or so in the town of Kassel. Hundreds of artists participate and show up for the opening days but Beuys managed to personally dominate the proceedings.

Partly this had to do with the tension created by his art, which had a way of being simultaneously profound and absurd. At one Documenta, he simply, solemnly, foolishly conducted “classes” for his Free University. One had the distinct impression his ideology was as impenetrable to his German audience as to an American onlooker. At another Documenta, he arranged to plant trees around the town as a ecological gesture. Somehow it doesn’t take an artist to do that but it was touching that Beuys cared more about being constructive than being distinctive.

His appearance took care of distinction. He created the impression of being physically gigantic. He always wore workmen’s clothes with a sleeveless flak jacket topped off with a formal felt fedora. Some thought the trademark clothes constituted his charisma. It was the face. Beuys had this ageless visage that was so pocked and deeply lined it looked like it had been stitched together out of two or three faces.

Actually, Joseph Beuys had somehow absorbed the persona of Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein monster. He conveyed the same ominous power and the same pathos. He was the monster in the famous tender scene with the little girl. He was also West Germany, artificially created from the corpse of Hitler’s Reich, forever feared as the monster homicidal maniac who had gone berserk and tried to dismember Europe.

Beuys’ physical presence was so much part of his art one wonders if his legacy will stand up without him. His sensibility had such integrity one has the feeling it will endure, odd as it is.

Like any worthwhile art Beuys’ is the distilled spirit of time and place. His circumstances happened to be sensitive to the point of tragedy, insoluble to the point of comedy.

His life was like a troubled Jungian dream. The trauma that determined his aesthetic direction came in World War II when the bomber he piloted was shot down in a Crimean snowstorm. He was rescued by Tartars who wrapped him in layers of fat and felt to keep him from freezing. The materials become the backbone of his art. The work was elemental, brooding compulsively on themes of survival and redemption through hardship. One of the most touching pieces in his retrospective consisted of 20 sleds pulled by a VW bus and included kits of felt and fat. It was called “The Pack.”

The felt seemed to stand for austere consolation, the fat, for flesh. Sometimes the ghastliness of the death camps hovered about. Sometimes there was the lyric poignancy of “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare.”

The art subsisted on nearly unbearable compassion and the hope of consolation after death.