Joseph Beuys was both a creator and follower of myths – including the well-known story relating to his WW2 experience in the Luftwaffe in which he claimed to have been shot down in the Crimea, and rescued by Tartars. This biographical founding legend is one of the keys to understanding Beuys’s physical use of materials such as fat and felt (which he said the Tartars wrapped him in) as well as wider themes of healing and transformation. Beuys’ grotty installations have something of the air of Renaissance alchemy to them, that lost pre-Enlightenment world.
With this in mind, I wonder if biographies should be treated as fiction, given that most people’s lives are pretty unknowable. That a stranger should attempt to construct a narrative of one’s life seems an impossible task, for while documents can be perused, writings analysed, they are not the same as understanding feelings, beliefs and foibles.
The reverse also is problematic – that if one has the chance to meet a well-known figure, be they writer, artist or other, there may often be a sense of disappointment. This could be because of the difference between the person, the personality, and the work they produce. Books are neat, well-formed objects, with the invisible hand of the editor upon them. Artworks, while sometimes less neat, are still discrete objects, a totality. The person is none of these – the famous artist may have slept badly the night before, and they may have worries completely unknown to us.
So perhaps it is all the best that I never met Joseph Beuys, and have instead chosen him to form part of an ongoing artwork, based around a small cottage in Ireland. The Beuys in Connemara Residency suggests a new facet of Beuys, a rural palate-cleanser to his frantic antics at Documenta in Kassel, and his ever-enthusiastic teaching. Building on existing accounts of his time in Ireland, the residency encourages a speculative approach to his work, and the opportunity to engage with local flora and fauna.
