I remember the day Joseph Beuys died the way my mother remembers Elvis's passing. It was a winter's day in 1986, and I was an amateur performance artist. I felt art would never be the same again. Shortly thereafter I performed a work in tribute, entitled No Replacement for Beuys, in which I donned a grey polyester suit, splashed it liberally with fake blood and then wrapped myself in bandages. The performance ended when I deliberately threw myself off the edge of the stage and hurt my knees. Little did I know then that my terrible aktion was simply one of countless works which would debase the artistic language of Beuys, the saint, if ever there was one, in the canon of modernism.
Beuys (1921-86) was Europe's Warhol, a giant, one-man art factory, whose career extended from the 1950s to the 1980s. But Joseph was the opposite of Andy: instead of embracing consumer culture and industrial production, Beuys tried to rescue us from it. Instead of posing as an amoral businessman, he posed as a new messiah—and from the 1960s to the 1990s, most curators and critics of note were blind disciples.
Beuys was initially loosely allied to a late 1950s/early 1960s art movement known as Fluxus, whose members thought art should be left-wing and made from inexpensive materials, but Beuys's wayward blend of new age spiritualism and grand artistic ambition soon set him apart. Cobbling together anthroposophy and Marxism, he gave lectures about his beliefs, wearing a hunting jacket and a dented cowboy hat. To explain himself, he scribbled pseudo-scientific diagrams and equations on blackboards (most famously, "Art=Capital"). Afterwards, the boards were sprayed with fixative and sold for large sums to collectors. Beuys saw his teaching as works of art, and saw his works of art as political actions—he coined a phrase for it, "social sculpture," founded a movement called the Organisation for Direct Democracy, planted oaks and campaigned for the German Green party. We all know his most famous aphorism—"Everyone is an artist"—but not all of us know where it comes from. Nowadays most artists scale down this utopian hyperbole. Now that modernism is over, and as Tate Modern's Beuys exhibition draws to a close, it is worth asking how his reputation has fared.
The Tate's show ends with Economic Values (1980), an installation in which Beuys exhibited old packets and jars of food from communist East Germany on cheap shelving, while gold-framed 19th-century oils of bourgeois life hang on the surrounding gallery walls. It's didactic, pompous, literalist, corny—a cliché of politically engaged art. Similarly in The End of the Twentieth Century (1983-85), a grandstanding triumph of space over content, Beuys filled a museum room with repetitive lumps of stone, in each a small circular felt plug.
Then there is the problem of imitation (not only mine). What were once Joseph Beuys's innovations have become the lowest common denominator of contemporary art. Damien Hirst's medical paraphernalia in glass cabinets and Tracey Emin's transformation of biographical objects into sculpture both find their precedents in Beuys's work. Beuys was the first to exploit the aesthetic kick that could be delivered by exhibiting strange bits and pieces in faux-museum cases, as if they were ethnographic artefacts.
It was his desire to teach that was his greatest asset, as well as his Achilles heel. Most artists today show little interest in how well their works convey their ideas; for them a work of art is an opaque sign which alludes to a set of ideas which their curator-friends can be relied on to write about in the catalogue.
Beuys took materials from his life which could be used as an easy set of symbols in his work, accessible to any thoughtful gallery visitor—red crosses to indicate healing, batteries for energy, fat for warmth, the hare for uncorrupted European nature. These were Beuys's primitive essentials, drawn from a possibly apocryphal story he told, that in the second world war he had been shot down over Russia, and peasants had saved his life by wrapping him in fur and felt.
Beuys popularised performance art—or Aktionskunst, as he called it—as a medium, and was among the first to produce permanent art works through the photographic and video recording of those performances. His performances, arcane as they might appear today, could be brilliantly thought through. I noticed one new detail as I went round the show at the Tate. In 1974, Beuys performed I like America and America likes me. He flew to New York, was wrapped in felt and ferried by ambulance to a gallery where he spent three days confined with a coyote, armed only with his "Eurasian staff" (like an oversize shepherd's crook), before leaving by the same procedure. It was a work about Europe's relationship with America. The new detail? I read that Beuys's feet never once touched American soil. What a great and simple symbol of his and our ambiguous relationship with that continent. Sure, Beuys's self-mythologisation doesn't look so hot today, but neither does that of Kandinsky or Malevich. Personal vanity and daft ideas have rarely diminished an artist's legacy.
