No More Beuys
I finally finished reading the Joseph Beuys biography that I mentioned in one of my earlier emails. I can’t say that I enjoyed it all that much. But I felt I needed to have read the whole book before being able to justify my much changed view of this artist. Otherwise, there would have always been the nagging thought that somehow, I had missed a redemption in the unread parts. If there’s one thing I’ve learned is that I don’t necessarily need to engage with Beuys’ work any longer.
In some ways, it’s unfair to judge an artist’s work by their personal behaviour or by what they believe in. That said, you typically hear this idea expressed when yet another white male artist is revealed as having been an unsavioury character. For a while, I thought that one needed to be able to separate the work from its artist. I also thought that that separation could cut both ways: Good art could be made by terrible people, and terrible art could be made by good people.
But for a number of reasons, I’ve come to realise that insisting on such a separation is problematic for all kinds of reasons. If I stick with Beuys, his work was clearly informed by his belief system, which in today’s world would place him more or less into the center of Germany’s neo-fascist AfD party. As the biography outlines, Beuys was very open about what he believed in. None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who looks into it. Beuys did openly question democracy, and he said some things that are so incredibly infuriating that I don’t want to repeat them here.
The work clearly reflects larger parts of his beliefs. Even if the parts included in the work – all based on the “theories” of Rudolf Steiner – weren’t outright neo-fascist, that belief is always just a step away. And that bothers me for reasons that are probably pretty obvious to anyone who has either been following these emails or looked at my book Vaterland.
Even as I might still enjoy some of Beuys’ art – it clearly doesn’t only center on far-right Steiner ideas, the reality is that there are many other artists whose work I enjoy just as much (or maybe even more). This means that my solution to the problem of how to deal with good art made by bad people is to walk away from these artists.
I don’t know if this is the best solution. Maybe in ten years, I will deal with it differently. But for now, walking away sounds like a good solution. After all, my own engaging with art is based on my own personal choices. And those I’m responsible for.
From the biography I also learned an interesting minor tidbit, namely that Beuys agreed to do a commercial for a Japanese whisky maker to raise money for his 7,000 oaks project. Of course, I had to look that up. You can watch it above. It’s only 14 seconds.
You might disagree with my decision to walk away from Beuys, using the trees as an example: isn’t that a great piece of art, especially in light of all we know about trees? Well, yes, I’d say, but do you know the völkisch uses of oak trees by Steiner et al.?
In some ways, these two facts point at a reality of life that increasngly is getting swept aside as we’re moving more and more into a world of binary choices: most things aren’t black or white, they’re black and white at the same time, or they’re some tone of gray in the middle. I do appreciate the grayness of the world (just look at my pictures). But in the end, I feel that one still needs to make a decision about how to engage with it. For me, there is a shade of gray where I need to walk away. The insistence on either making stark choices – black or white, Coke or Pepsi, etc. – is just as faulty as the insistence on accepting all shades of gray. After all, there has to be some form of personal morality.
In one of my previous emails, I wrote about how I don’t have 13 minutes for a video that explains how you can shoot a movie with mirrors, in which the cameras don’t show up in the mirrors. However, I do have 12 minutes to see how you can make riceballs that look like cats! And so do you.
Meanwhile, I started reading Louis Menand’s The Free World. I’m about 15% into the book (not sure how many pages that would be – I’m using an e-reader), and it’s absolutely engrossing. I think if I didn’t know the basic outline and if I were familiar with most of the characters (at least to some extent), I’d have a hard time with the book. And I was a little bit intimidated by the length. But now that I’m reading it, I’m often surprised how “quickly” Menand moves from one person to the next. This is all relative, because he dives into a lot of details for every person mentioned – and it’s a lot of people.
So far, the book isn’t quite as overwhelming as I thought it would be. Or rather I should note that it is overwhelming in all kinds of ways. But it’s the kind of being overwhelmed that can be good – such as when you’re at the beach on a really hot day, and there’s a wave of water breaking over you, providing much needed relief from the heat.
So, yeah, the heat… if this email reaches you somewhere on the southern hemisphere, you’re experiencing winter. Anyone else I’ve spoken with these past few days tells about of the heat. Where I live, it’s something like 36 (96) degrees Celcius (Fahrenheit), with very high humidity (my office isn’t air conditioned). If I can offer two tips for all those who also need to cool down:
First, I’ve been making cold-brew green tea (I use Japanese sencha). You can use any kind of green tea, but I prefer a higher-grade sencha simply because it tastes better. I use something like 5g of tea for around 700ml of water (you need to fine tune this based on your tea) and let it sit in the fridge for around half a day. I also make sure to “agitate” the bottle a few times while it’s in the fridge (I’ve found this produces a slightly more well rounded tea). Strain at the end, and you got your refreshing summer drink.
Second, Gatsby Facial Paper is your friend. I learned about this in Japan: a friend of mine used it. It’s a one-use wipe that you clean your face with. It’s super refreshing. Google it if you’re curious.
And with that: As always, thank you for reading!
– Jörg