ART008: Week 4 Screening

Joseph Beuys: “Healing of the Western Mind

The artist as shaman and healer. Beuys’ belief in art to affect change and healing for society was total. His “performance” from arriving in an ambulance to living in a cage with a fox for a week and then departing in an ambulance, was overt and blunt even as those bearing witness struggled to comprehend the why of his act. The why’s certainly outnumbered the answers for the audience, even when it shouldn’t have. The weeklong incarceration alludes to the captivity of the flesh for the shaman who seeks to transcend the material plane to communicate with the sacred. That Beuys as the shaman resides in the same cell with a captive animal reads to the viewer as the modern entrapping both the sacred and the ancient manner of accessing it. Newspapers, or dialogue, from the “real” world were brought in each day as parishioners climbing into the confessional to offer up their daily penance for absolution, The shaman took the secular prayers and put them to good use as a repository for his own fecal transmissions. Beuys survives the weeklong event and exits in the same emergent mode illustrating the precipitous and life-threatening state of the spiritual communication of the world towards the sacred – if only if the message is recognized and heeded.

ART008: Week 4 Readings

“Notes on Elimination of the Audience” and “Letters”

I don’t believe it is possible for non-partisan participation in art in the strict, academic sense. In “Notes”, Kaprow elucidates this position and I side with him. To make art with non-participants is a contradiction in terms. It is simply not possible. If you try, you won’t get art, you’ll get reality with no more meaning that any other random acts that occur throughout the world that never amount to anything or have any meaning imparted or available to them. The act may have meaning for one or more participants but it is not possible for all present to engage or establish a context for all. Thus, it is not a matter of getting those outside your sphere to enter in and engage in it, but that the sphere must be expanded to include others as factions in the act.

Killing the audience seems a bit melodramatic and certainly counter-productive. It is the role of the audience that must be deconstructed and redefined and repurposed. To engage in activities that by design are meant to impart some method to the madness yet ignore the mad seems, well, mad. If nothing else, it would have all the significance of masturbating in the shower singing love songs to your soap. Does it have any meaning outside your shower? Do you long for the sensuous curves of your Zest? Would others think you insane for your soapy lover? Not if you build a shower big enough with soap for all that they ay engage in and truly participate in a frothy lovefest. Sudsensational!