Site and Sociality

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Site and Sociality: Joseph Beuys and the Relics of Modernist SculptureAuthor(s): IRENE V. SMALLSource: Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin, , State of the Art: Contemporary Sculpture(2009), pp. 86-88Published by: Yale University, acting through the Yale University Art GalleryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40682631 .Accessed: 01/04/2014 03:19

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Site and Sociality: Joseph Beuys and the Relics of Modernist Sculpture IRENE V. SMALL

In spring 1979, Rosalind Krauss's essay "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" appeared in October, offering a concise argument against the operations of historicism at work in contemporaneous cultural critique.1 Sculpture, Krauss insisted, is not an evolutionary concept but instead a historically bounded category delineated by the logic of the monument on the one hand and, on the other, by this monumentality s inversion in the form of modernist sculpture, the latter as autonomous and siteless as the former is symbolic and place-bound.

In November 1979, Joseph Beuys s retro- spective opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Here, in the opening pages of the catalogue, as if to provide retroactive fodder for Krauss's critique, he wrote,

SOCIAL SCULPTURE -

how we mould and shape the world in which we live: Sculpture as an evolutionary process; everyone is an artist.2

For Beuys, sculpture as evolutionary process was precisely the formulation by which the

category's ontological presence was to be reclaimed from its negative condition as outlined by Krauss. Accordingly, the exhaus- tion of modernist sculpture would not result in the category's displacement from evacuated center into an expanded differential field defined by the objects spatial conditions. Rather, this negative center would be rerouted through the object's social conditions. Sitelessness would be recast as sociality, which is to say that the nomadic condition of the modernist sculpture - its wrenching from site into the conditions of self-referentiality- would be replaced with a series of mobile, proliferating, material- based events of social exchange.

Take, for example, Green Violin and Telephone S-^ (Sender- Receiver) (fig. 1), two multiples Beuys published together in 1974, consisting of a tin-can telephone marked with a cross in the artist's signature fluid Braunkreuz and a green violin played by Beuys's student Henning Christiansen at two Fluxus concerts in 1969. 3 Both proffer materiality as communication in potentia: hollow bodies to be filled with breath. The violin performs its silence as the condition of possible sound. The tin-can telephone, meanwhile, cannot be activated by a single individual but, like the stored energy of bat- teries, requires opposing poles of sender and receiver to draw its coiled string from cold

Fig. 1. Joseph Beuys, Green Violin and Telephone 5- (Sender- Receiver), 1974. Violin with paint, tin cans, string, and paper, violin: 3% SVs 24 in. (9.5 21.9 x 6 cm), can: 9V2 4 in. (24.1 .2 cm). Yale University Art Gallery, Katharine Ordway Fund, 1988.95.2

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(slack) to warm (taut) states through the physical vibration of the voice. In 1973 Beuys wrote that "communication occurs in reci- procity: it must never be a one-way flow from the teacher to the taught."4 Herein lies the mirror image of the R in the object's title: receiver transformed into sender, returning the message across an active line.

Yet despite this emphasis on potentiality, Green Violin and Telephone S- (Sender- Receiver) return sculpture to its premodernist commemorative function, replacing the fixity of the monument with the portable, mt- onymie logic of the relic. Like all of Beuys's multiples, each object is a material witness to the artist's action, even if this action is as sim- ple as the indexical registration of the artist s stamp. The multiples are thus interpretive fragments whose meaning is established by virtue of Beuys's larger iconographie key. For this reason, while Beuys's formulation of social sculpture declares everyone an artist, his multiples enact sociality as a chain of meaning-laden material effects anchored in the person of the artist himself. In this sense, the multiple is the metaform of all of Beuys's sculpture. It presumes to establish the figure of the artist in the empty center evacuated by modernist sculpture. "I am the transmitter: I radiate," Beuys declared in 1964, a formulation as compelling as it is flawed.5

Flawed, I would argue, because Beuys's system claims the pure communicative essence of materials and their symbolic meaning by virtue of personal iconography at one and the same time. Noiseless BUckboard Eraser (1974), consisting of an eraser used to clean a blackboard from one of Beuys's numerous lectures, epitomizes this paradox: it wipes away the artist's construction of meaning through language while offering itself up as a communicative equivalent by virtue of materiality alone. Whereas the condensation of meaning in the premodernist monument was the product of an existing collectivity, Beuys's multiples project a future collectivity by way of a system of private mythology disguised as the self-presence of things themselves.

Beuys's works succeed, paradoxically, when they perform the limits of this presump- tion, and Green Violin and Telephone S- 51 (Sender- Receiver) are exemplary in this regard. In Green Violin, paint dulls the violin's sound while it mimics the oxidation of bronze. Like Beuys's felt-covered piano, Infiltration- Homogen for Grand Piano (1966), it is a muted monument, an instrument silenced by iconography applied as a literal layer of physical matter around a body intended to issue forth expressive sound. In the very primitiveness of its transmission technology, meanwhile, Telephone S -ft. stages the fragility of communication; it provides for the recovery of information, but it also dramatizes communication as failure and loss. Henning Christiansen accompanied Beuys with his green violin in two concerts. The second was titled . . . or shall we change it? But Beuys's earlier title is indica- tive. He called it I attempt to set (make) you free. Here is Beuys in sculpture's empty center, pro- jecting social relations in the form of material relics radiating back to the transmitter himself.

1. Rosalind Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," October 8 (spring 1979): 30-44.

2. Joseph Beuys, "Introduction," in Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggen- heim Museum, 1979), 7; emphasis in the original.

3. The two works appeared together in a crate marked "Two Fluxus Objects" and were released in an edition of 24 + VI examples, signed and numbered Verlag Schell- mann & Klser, Munich. Sec Joseph Beuys: Multiples, Catalogue Raisonn of Multiples and Prints, 196$- 198$, ed. Jrg Schellmann (New York: Editions Schellmann, Inc., 1985), no. 123. The first Fluxus concert took place at the Akademie der Kunst, Berlin; the second at the Stadt Museum, Mnchengladbach. Braunkreuz literally translates from the German as "brown-cross" and was an iron-colored medium Beuys often made with house paint and hare's blood).

4. Joseph Beuys, "I Am Searching for a Field Character" (1973), m Joseph Beuys in America: Energy Plan for the Western Man, ed. Carin Kuoni (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1990), 22.

5. Joseph Beuys, cited in Donald Kuspit, "Joseph Beuys' Mission," in Warhol, Beuys, Polke, exh. cat. (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1987), 55.

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Article Contentsp. [86]p. 87p. 88

Issue Table of ContentsYale University Art Gallery Bulletin, , State of the Art: Contemporary Sculpture (2009), pp. 1-224Front MatterDirector's Report: July 1, 2008-June 30, 2009 [pp. 4-25]STATE OF THE ART: CONTEMPORARY SCULPTUREIntroduction: The Field of Sculpture [pp. 26-33]Swiss Gheese Field And Sculpture Mingled [pp. 34-43]Approaching Architecture: The Cases of Richard Serra and Michael Asher [pp. 44-55]Now On Display: Sculpture [pp. 56-69]Not a Single Point of View: Contemporary Sculpture and the Spatial Imaginary [pp. 70-83]

NOTESBridle [pp. 84-85]Site and Sociality: Joseph Beuys and the Relics of Modernist Sculpture [pp. 86-88]Christian Boltanski's Fte de Pourim [pp. 89-92]William Kentridge's What Will Corne [pp. 93-95]Lee Mingwei's Money for Art [pp. 96-100]Niki de Saint-Phalle's Standing Nana with Serpent [pp. 101-105]23 Thoughts about Dirt [pp. 106-110]WANDERERS In the Expanded Field [pp. 111-111]FROM THE ARCHIVES: John Hill Morgan: Scholar and Curator of American Paintings [pp. 112-117]

Annual Report: July 1, 2008 June 30, 2009Acquisitions [pp. 120-203]Exhibitions, Publications and Programs [pp. 206-212]

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