I am just finishing my text about the 2018 Joseph Beuys in Connemara Residency.
“Looking for Joseph Beuys turns into work, into a paper-chase which eventually will yellow, curl up and fade into a temporary blot on the Irish landscape, which this summer having turned yellow in parts (fields said to be the consistency of toast) are also red.”
Over the summer, I searched for traces of Beuys in Ireland as well as on Fogo Island. I met several artists who had met Beuys, as well as producing several butter-sculptures in tribute to him. For me, the Residency (based in a cottage in Connemara in which he may have stayed) is an exercise in the possible. By speculating on various details of Beuys’ time in Ireland (and elsewhere) I am creating a new layer of context for the artist, albeit one based on my own subjective experiences.
This year’s research has also provided a number of other leads, including the Block Beuys, a series of his works which are in the Landesmuseum in Darmstadt. This museum is not an art gallery but a more wide-ranging institution with natural history and geology collections. I also discovered a variety of links between John Latham and Beuys, which together have created some confusion around the concepts of ‘flat-time’ and ‘fat-time’, which need further investigation.
