Barney/Beuys

In a previous post about a visit to the Peggy Guggenheim museum , I forgot to mention the Mathew Barney/Joseph Beuys exhibit there called all in the present must be transformed.
(was flustered about my orange and green hair!)

The Guggenheim's press release explains a bit more.

Barney and Beuys are not easy artists. The more I see their work, though, the more I understand it and even like it. It's very conceptual so you have to look beyond what's before your eyes. You have to tap into your own creativity and experience the art and not simply identify or categorize it. Beuys is growing on me. I'm still working on Barney.


This still is from a video of a 1974 performance piece entitled I Like America and America Likes Me, in which Beuys spends three days in a locked room with a coyote. More about this piece here and here.

Some quotations below from Beuys that explain his views about art. I copied these down from an exhibit of his work at the Hamburg Bahnhof Museum of Contemporary Art in Berlin.

"The whole process of living is my creative act."

"The idea behind Tram Stop is not very interesting. Yes, I am consciously radical. I want to make this point very clearly: art is not just there to be understood; art is also not just there as knowledge. ... Art has to come over people like a cloud and, in the final analysis, a picture should keep alive a profound question in people. Art is, as such, a puzzle . . . a puzzle that wants to be solved. but not straight away. At some point, but not by saying: that is the Tram Stop by Joseph Beuys, it means this and that, it was there and there, it refers to Moritz Von Nassau etc. Then people are stuffed full with meanings and they are no longer able to see things."

"Art is the image of a human being. This means that when a person is confronted with art, then they are in fact confronted with their own self, and so open their own eyes. And so it is the creative person who is addressed, their creativity, their freedom, their autonomy. And this is only possible using the concept of art; however, this concept must be made more comprehensive. You cannot and should not deal with this concept traditionally and say: that is what artists do and that is what engineers do. . . . But you can get beyond the concept. And the only escape route is a more comprehensive concept of art that is anthropological and that is taken seriously: that everyone is an artist and that every person has a creative core."