One of a Kind, Twice in a Row: Legacy and Legend

“Art never saved the world. It cannot do so.”

--Marcel Duchamp

“Everyone is an artist.”

--Joseph Beuys

The 20th century. Oh how I do miss that century these days. It was a virtual dynasty of dissonance and discontinuity, a breathtakingly radical realm of overturned assumptions and collapsing complacent expectations. Almost all the accepted truths, from science and religion to literature, music and visual art, were being overturned practically on a daily basis. And the two artists profiled in two new tomes from Princeton University Press were at the forefront of the mission to alter our perceptions of what art was and what it can be expected to do to and for us. Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) pretty much invented what we now call conceptual art. But it didn’t really have a name back when they were blazing a trail through the exotic hinterland of aesthetic exploration. And these valuable books, one a collection of snappy quotations from the cheeky and provocative Duchamp, Duchampisms, edited by Larry Warsh, and the other a deeply revealing study, Joseph Beuys and History by Daniel Spaulding, each shed new light on the dazzling outer range of cultural possibility back in the daring century they so personally embodied.

Duchamp playing amplified chess with John Cage in 1968.

Beuys playing political roses with Wilfred Bauer in 1972.

I have long been fascinated by both of these remarkable artists, both of whom are actual emblems of the enigma of what art might be if it wasn’t forced to entertain us with beauty alone but also invited us to consider, or reconsider, what goes on behind our eyes when we look at the visual artifacts we identify as art. They accomplished this unique feat largely by convincing us to look at all things poetically, at objects in themselves, many of which we had formerly never fully appreciated as conveyors of embodied meaning. They were especially adept at constructing situations, and performative scenarios, which allowed us to abandon our addictions to prettiness in favour of a more compelling form of intellectual invention. They also both invited us to participate in the formation of the aesthetic experience directly: Duchamp via his notion of the "readymade," everyday things we were already engaged with, and Beuys via his of "social sculpture," everyday actions ritually applied to progressive political change, to what he called "direct democracy."

In the minds of many art world observers, including my own, Duchamp was basically the Einstein of modern art history: in one fell swoop he altered the entire landscape of art making, interpretation and especially commerce and collecting, in much the same way that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and later his Unified Field Theory, altered the public’s conception of how time and space functioned. If that analogy is viable, then so is my sense that Joseph Beuys went even further down the path newly opened up for us, and he is therefore the Bohr or Heisenberg of the art world, owing to his amplification of what amounts to a quantum physics template, one that illustrated how a profound embrace of ambiguity and uncertainty would, or could, liberate us in our daily lives. Unlike Duchamp, however, Beuys actually did believe that art could save the world, since he saw the very impulse to make art as evidence of a higher calling, one bordering on the spiritual and shamanistic. For Beuys, making art at all was an inherently political act.

Duchamp's "Hat Rack," Fountain," "Bicycle Wheel" (all 1917), and "Bottle Rack" (1914).

These two books are also ample evidence that both artists eschewed the limits of categorical -isms of all sorts, Duchamp being the first to question the inherent value embedded in the fetishization of art and artists. A good point of departure would be the telegram he sent to the editors of Art News Magazine (one of the bibles of the art market) for their December 1962 issue: “Bravo for your 60 ism-packed years.” He was unimpressed by all -isms: classicism (especially) and then impressionism, dadaism, surrealism, expressionism (both figurative and abstract) futurism, and (again especially) pictorial realism. Duchamp never identified himself with any stylistic movement formally, though several welcomed him as an avuncular and inspiring presence (Fluxus being one). He had already stunned both the experts in the art world, and the average gallery-going public, with his masterful "Nude Descending a Staircase" painting in 1912. He was already both a Dadaist and a surrealist long before Hugo Ball in Zürich or André Breton in Paris launched their manifestos. And his 1917 sculpture "Fountain," signed as "R. Mutt," of an inverted men’s urinal is still surreally arresting to this day.

And after a couple of decades of puzzling all viewers with his tongue-in-cheek poetics of often erotic reverie, he claimed to have given up on making art all together in favour of playing chess. He also just happened to be an acknowledged grandmaster in that arcane playing field. But secretly, in a secluded studio, he spent two decades, 1946-1966, working on his most adventurous piece ever, "Étant Donnés," which only came into the light of day subsequent to his demise. Warsh must have had a field day strolling through Duchamp’s frequently witty but simultaneously deep observations about the nature of culture, and for that matter reality. As Warsh, founder of Museums Magazine, and the series editor of The Isms books, clarifies in his introduction:

Duchamp’s singular mind challenged not only art but the very nature of thought. He believed that art is about ideas, not objects, and he expressed that belief in what he called "readymades"— both gestures that included mounting a bicycle wheel on a kitchen stool or placing a urinal on a pedestal in a gallery and calling them both art. Duchamp’s words, like his art, are provocative, sometimes cryptic, and often playful. In this collection of his quotes, the voice of the artist comes through clearly, giving us a more complete understanding of who he was and what he thought. In the spirit of Duchamp I invite you to explore, with a willingness to rethink the familiar. For Duchamp, that rethinking was the very ground of art itself.

Duchamp: The exterior of "Étant Donnés" (1946-1966) and the view through its peephole.

In his astute introduction to the book’s quotation sequence, art historian Francis Naumann raises one of the key pivotal contributions that Duchamp made to art history simply by sharing his unique state of mind with us. This entails his aesthetic self-analysis and the observations that ensue about authenticity and the special status of “originality” within which lurks what Walter Benjamin identified as art’s “aura,” that which is lost in reproduction. As Naumann puts it:

Several of his responses (to questions about the nature of his enigmatic work) are shared here, articulating his distaste for painting as a profession and for its role in society—particularly how it became contaminated by its involvement within the world of finance. As time passed (and he never returned to painting) he even tried to get those who interviewed him to accept the fact that since he was both an artist and a chess player, the games he played should be considered art. In one of these interviews, he told a journalist that his art represents an effort to get away from himself, which he characterized as a little game between “I” and “Me.”

And yet at the same time, ironically, Duchamp conceived of a whole new aesthetic category, multiplicity, which he exemplified so wistfully by permitting a multitude of official reproductions (called multiples) of his works, thus going directly to the very heart of Benjamin’s chief thesis in his famous 1937 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” For me, it was Duchamp’s super-cool attitude, and even his lofty stance, which directly nourished the brilliant innovations of Andy Warhol some half a century later. In fact, I have no hesitation in claiming that Duchamp, along with Picasso, Pollock, Warhol and Beuys, were the most important and influential artists of the 20th century, an assertion that he would likely have responded to with a sly grin as he puffed on his cigar, but also one which would never deny, as some of his choice quotations in this charming little book clearly indicate:

Art doesn’t interest me. Artists interest me.

Art, in essence, is an outlet towards regions beyond time and space.

The art historian and critic have a right and duty to analyze and interpret art and artists. Often the artist is the last one to realize what he has done.

Everybody is welcome to look freely at all works of art and try to hear what I call an aesthetic echo.

And it is in Duchamp’s last quotation containing the subtle insight of the "aesthetic echo" in the reciprocity between maker and viewer that we find the ideal transition to the often obscure world of German Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys, as well as a seamless segue from legacy to legend. This is because, as Daniel Spaulding’s exemplary exploration of his always esoteric art activities reveals through unraveling layer by layer of his personal mythology, Beuys embodied the perfect example of an aesthetic echo which evolved from Duchamp’s creative shadow. By the time Duchamp passed away in 1968, Beuys was just then transforming himself into a legend as a provocateur, the kind which, in some ways similar to Andy Warhol, managed to extend and evolve the Duchampian anti-art ethos into the realm of geo-political theatre. After 1960-61, the year he assumed a professorship at the University of Dusseldorf, Beuys had also, like Duchamp and Warhol, more or less abandoned the art of painting and chose instead to morph his entire life itself into a kind of living painting. And like Duchamp, who considered playing chess at the master’s level to be one way of making art (he thought it was basically drawing) Beuys considered his academic teaching to be a kind of live performative sculpture.

His new medium of expression, performance art and socio-political “gestures,” was perhaps best exemplified by his enigmatic performance works such as 1965’s How to Explain Paintings to a Dead Hare, in which he covered his head in honey and gold leaf and wandered around a gallery carrying a dead hare’s body, to which he whispered largely inaudible explanations of the works on the walls. Even more provocative was his first work in the United States for a Soho Gallery, I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), wherein he was transported from the airport covered in a large felt blanket and spent three days wrapped up, living with a live coyote.

Still from Beuys' I Like America and America Likes Me (1974).

Author Spaulding, who is a professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the founding editor of the art historical journal Selva, is perfectly situated conceptually to approach, appreciate and fully elucidate the elusive nature of the Beuys persona, which often mystifies observers due to its hermetic and oneiric nature. Spaulding locates Beuys in a tradition of art activism which he terms “economimesis” and undertakes the essential if daunting task of clarifying and contrasting the true and the real in his mysterious oeuvre. As clearly indicated by Spaulding’s map of the Beuys mythology, which explains the artist’s optimistic hope for saving democratic socialism through a shared healing process that acknowledges human wounds inflicted by das capital, his vision was not without a persistent dark side:

His premature death by a heart attack was a fluke, but it is not by chance that I have introduced Beuys in a way that makes mortality unavoidable. There are few artists of the twentieth century whose work is so saturated with the negative as his was. Death is everywhere, as is historical trauma; his drawings and sculptures are littered with decomposing organic matter and fecal looking stains, and his "actions" frequently thematize wounding. This is true most notoriously in his many, though mostly indirect, evocations of the National Socialist period, through which he passes as a member of the Hitler Youth and soldier in the Luftwaffe.

It was as a German pilot, shot down over Siberia and, according to his own heroic narrative, nursed back to health by Tartar natives who wrapped him in fat and felt to restore his vitality, that the awesome mythology of his nearly shamanistic persona comes most into focus (as does his incorporation of fat and felt into many of his art installations).

Beuys' "Fat Chair" (1964).

Spaulding is eminently skilled at rendering the complex accessible and the complicated straightforward, even though it might take a few re-readings of his lines of reasoning to fully appreciate how deeply he has explored an often mystifying Beuys psychogeography hidden behind the mesmerizing weirdness of his aesthetic style. It’s well worth the effort; I had to re-read some puzzling sentences. His superb and informative book is about Beuys’ location in art history, true enough, but its larger theme is the location of human history as a whole, as it embeds itself in this profoundly moving artist’s psyche. As for instance, when he sheds light on the shadows that Beuys himself is most prone to casting

Beuys’s anti-capitalism is persistently mediated through an aesthetic figuring of capitalism, a mimetic relation to the value form of the commodity. The object of mimetic approximation in Beuys’s work is not a thing but rather a relation, meaning that the mimesis at stake here is an emergent property of nonrepresentational alignment between an aesthetic logic and a social form. That is, Beuys’s art starts to behave like capital instead of looking like it.

That line perfectly encapsulates how and why Beuys is an aesthetic echo of Duchamp, in the same manner that Warhol is. They all eschewed the reification of art into collector or museum money, yet their work is also about that very reification. Spaulding expands helpfully on this contextual reading

I will argue that an analogous universal fungibility is the horizon of Beuys‘s erweiterter Kuntsbegriff, or ‘expanded concept of art’. What could be more familiar than the convergence of commodity and artwork in Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, or in Andy Warhol, or any number of other canonical practices. These are abstract words that will make more sense after I have gotten under the skin of the art.

Context is everything. And Spaulding excels at getting under Beuys’s aesthetic skin while interpreting his most poetic and monumental objects, up to and including what sometimes feels like a necessary nearly vivisectional cutting into what some have felt was Beuys’s own seemingly self-mediated cult of personality.

Duchamp, Beuys and Warhol. The three groundbreaking artists referenced in this appreciative essay all, at one time or another, were accused of fostering such a cult of personality. Whether that is true or not is a matter of little consequence to what they were trying tell us through their emblematic works, or in their shared ethos, that "everyone is an artist." Each of these visionary artists was prescient in the way he depicted the ongoing perceptual and conceptual changes occurring in the contemporary art-making process, especially with regard to the impact of evolving technologies. They themselves were in fact harbingers of a new technology of intuition still now taking shape in postmodern culture. Much of Duchamp’s charmingly insightful take on what it means to be an artist, and how deeply he respected the viewer and an informed viewer’s role in a unique kind of creative partnership, is evoked by his heirs.

Both Warhol and Beuys shared Duchamp’s majestic tolerance for different ism-perspectives, a stance best expressed by Marcel himself:

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work into contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. Art can never be adequately defined, because the translation of an aesthetic emotion into a verbal description is as inaccurate as your description of fear when you have actually been scared.

Such an interactive perspective is even echoed by pop/conceptual artist Yoko Ono, another chief inheritor of the Dadaist and Fluxus ethos exemplified by both Duchamp and Beuys.

In Joseph Beuys and History, the first rigorous art historical study of the artist in English, Daniel Spaulding does the deft deciphering for us and presents a striking new interpretation of both Beuys’s work and career. By putting Beuys in the context of Germany’s postwar recovery, Spaulding shows that the artist’s superimposed metaphors offered a powerfully hopeful way to think about the trajectory of human freedom, the place of art in capitalist modernity, and the possibility of a new ecological aesthetics. And precisely because Beuys went to the very extremes of art, as this book demonstrates, he therefore belongs at the center of its core history.

– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, published in January 2024.