Famous paintings in postmodernism by Joseph Beuys. Josef Beuys An Artist's Guide to the World from America to Shamanism

Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld (North Rhine-Westphalia) on May 12, 1921 in the family of a merchant. He spent his childhood in Kleve near the Dutch border. During World War II, he served in the Luftwaffe as a gunner-radio operator, with the rank of non-commissioned officer. The beginning of his “personal mythology”, where fact is inseparable from fiction, was the date of March 16, 1944, when his Ju-87 plane was shot down over the Crimea near the village of Freifeld, Telmanovsky district (now the village of Znamenka, Krasnogvardeisky district). The frosty "Tatar steppe", as well as melted fat and felt, with which locals saved him, preserving bodily warmth, predetermined the figurative structure of his future works. Joseph Beuys was hospitalized on March 17, 1944 and was treated until April 7 (fracture of the bones of the face). Returning to service, he also fought in Holland. In 1945 he was taken prisoner by the British. In 1947-1951 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, where the sculptor E. Matare was his main mentor. The artist, who received the title of professor at the Düsseldorf Academy in 1961, was fired in 1972 after he “occupied” its secretariat together with the unaccepted applicants in protest. In 1978, a federal court found the dismissal illegal, but Beuys no longer accepted a professorship, striving to be as independent from the state as possible. On the wave of leftist opposition, he published a manifesto on "social sculpture" (1978), expressing in it the anarcho-utopian principle of "direct democracy", designed to replace the existing bureaucratic mechanisms with the sum of free creative wills of individual citizens and collectives. In 1983, he put forward his candidacy for the Bundestag elections (on the list of "greens"), but was defeated. Beuys died in Düsseldorf on January 23, 1986. After the death of the master, every museum contemporary art sought to install one of his art objects in the most prominent place in the form of an honorary memorial. The largest and at the same time the most characteristic of these memorials is the Working Block in the Museum of Hesse in Darmstadt - a suite of rooms that reproduce the atmosphere of the Beuys workshop, full of symbolic blanks - from rolls of pressed felt to petrified sausages.

In his work of the late 1940s-1950s, “primitive” in style, close to rock paintings, drawings in watercolor and lead pin depicting hares, elks, sheep and other animals dominate. He was engaged in sculpture in the spirit of expressionism by V. Lembruk and Matare, performed private orders for tombstones. Experienced the deep influence of R. Steiner's anthroposophy. In the first half of the 1960s, he became one of the founders of "fluxus", a specific type of performance art, the most common in Germany. A bright speaker and teacher, in his artistic actions he always addressed the audience with imperative propaganda energy, fixing his iconic image during this period (felt hat, raincoat, fishing vest). Used for art objects shockingly unusual materials such as lard, felt, felt and honey; The “fat corner” remained an archetypal, through motif, both in monumental and more intimate (Fat Chair, 1964, Hesse Museum, Darmstadt) variations. In these works, a sense of dead-end alienation sharply emerged. modern man from nature and attempts to enter it at the magical-“shamanic” level.

Joseph Beuys is, first of all, a very special idea of ​​the very figure of the artist, his role in art and in society. "Master of Thoughts", teacher, political activist, he took part in the creation of at least two political parties - the German Student Party, which he initiates in 1966, and the Green Party, which appeared in 1980. Along with Picasso, Dali and Warhol, he is one of the most recognizable characters in modern art, a "pop star" and the creator of a kind of personality cult. And, of course, the “shaman” is a title firmly stuck to Beuys, for which few could argue with him.

“My actions and methods have nothing to do with the transient and ephemeral. Yes, it is true that they use materials that can be called ugly and poor, but they have nothing to do with emptiness. I often talk about how childhood impressions and experiences can determine the formation of images and the choice of materials, but this is the opposite of emptiness. These are simple, minimal materials, and here we can talk about the connection with minimalism. It is clear that Bob Morris also works with felt, and it is clear that Morris took it from me: in 1964 he was here and worked in my workshop. The concept of minimalism means absolutely nothing to me. The arte povera also has a void that the Italians have only added.”

"How to explain pictures of the dead hare." 1965 project. A three-hour performance by Joseph Beuys was made at the opening of his first solo exhibition. The audience looked out the windows as Boyce whispered something to the carcass of a hare. The artist's face was covered with honey and gold foil. For Beuys, the hare was a symbol of rebirth, a conversation with the non-human world, honey was a metaphor for human thinking, and gold meant wisdom and enlightenment.

"Coyote: I love America and America loves me." 1974 project. Beuys shared a room with a living coyote for three days, pitting himself against the America of consumption, speaking directly to the archaic and natural America personified by the coyote.

"Honey extractor in the workplace." 1977 project. The device drove honey through plastic hoses.

"7000 oak trees". The most large-scale action, during the international art exhibition "Document" in Kassel (1982): a huge pile of basalt blocks here was gradually dismantled as the trees were planted. “He wanted to plant seven thousand oak trees from Kassel, where the Documenta exhibition is taking place, to Russia. Boyce was going to go and call in all the cities along the way and plant oak trees there, but he did not want to plant them himself, but to convince the local residents that this was necessary. There is a lot of documentary evidence left - Beuys started the project, but did not have time to finish it. For example, some two neighbors who did not even talk to each other, after talking with Joseph Beuys, decided to plant this oak tree. This is an amazing project, one of my favorites” - Georg Genot.

Joseph Beuys (German Joseph Beuys, May 12, 1921, Krefeld, Germany - January 23, 1986, Dusseldorf, Germany) - german artist, one of the main theorists of postmodernism.

Biography of Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld (North Rhine-Westphalia) on May 12, 1921 in the family of a merchant. He spent his childhood in Kleve near the Dutch border.

During World War II he served in aviation. The beginning of his "personal mythology", where the fact is inseparable from the symbol, was the winter of 1943, when his plane was shot down over the Crimea. The frosty "Tatar steppe", as well as melted fat and felt, with the help of which the locals saved him, preserving his bodily warmth, predetermined the figurative structure of his future works.

Returning to service, he also fought in Holland. In 1945 he was taken prisoner by the British.

In 1947-1951 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, where the sculptor E. Matare was his main mentor.

The artist, who received the title of professor at the Düsseldorf Academy in 1961, was fired in 1972 after he “occupied” its secretariat together with the unaccepted applicants in protest.

In 1978, a federal court found the dismissal illegal, but Beuys no longer accepted a professorship, striving to be as independent from the state as possible.

Coyote: I love America and America loves me
actresses Fat stool

On the wave of leftist opposition, he published a manifesto on "social sculpture" (1978), expressing in it the anarcho-utopian principle of "direct democracy", designed to replace the existing bureaucratic mechanisms with the sum of free creative wills of individual citizens and collectives.

In 1983, he put forward his candidacy for the Bundestag elections (on the list of "greens"), but was defeated.

Beuys died in Düsseldorf on January 23, 1986. After the death of the master, every museum of modern art sought to install one of his art objects in the most prominent place in the form of an honorary memorial.

The largest and at the same time the most characteristic of these memorials is the Working Block in the Museum of Hesse in Darmstadt - a suite of rooms that reproduce the atmosphere of the Beuys workshop, full of symbolic blanks - from rolls of pressed felt to petrified sausages.

Boyce's work

In his work of the late 1940s-1950s, “primitive” in style, close to rock paintings, drawings in watercolor and lead pin depicting hares, elks, sheep and other animals dominate.

He was engaged in sculpture in the spirit of expressionism by V. Lembruk and Matare, performed private orders for tombstones. Experienced the deep influence of R. Steiner's anthroposophy.

In the first half of the 1960s, he became one of the founders of "fluxus" or "fluxus", a specific type of performance art, the most common in Germany.

A bright speaker and teacher, in his artistic actions he always addressed the audience with imperative propaganda energy, fixing his iconic image during this period (felt hat, raincoat, fishing vest).

Used for art objects shocking unusual materials such as lard, felt, felt and honey; The “fat corner” remained an archetypal, through motif, both in monumental and more intimate (Fat Chair, 1964, Hesse Museum, Darmstadt) variations. In these works, a sense of the dead-end alienation of modern man from nature and attempts to enter it at a magical “shamanic” level came out sharply.

Beuys' well-known performances include: How to Explain Paintings to a Dead Hare (1965; with the carcass of a hare, to which the master "addressed" covered his head with honey and gold foil).

Coyote: I Love America and America Loves Me (1974; when Boyce shared a room with a live coyote for three days).

"Honey extractor at the workplace" (1977; with an apparatus that drove honey through plastic hoses).

"7000 Oaks" - the most large-scale action, during the international art exhibition "Document" in Kassel (1982): a huge pile of basalt blocks here was gradually dismantled as the trees were planted.

After Joseph Beuys was healed Crimean Tatars he realized that human life is the main value of our world. Boyce experienced the healing power of felt, which saved his life. He was forever fascinated by this wonderful material given to us by nature.

All the work of Joseph Beuys was devoted to the idea of ​​preserving Life. And one of the main materials he used was felt. He made sculptures out of it: he wrapped a piano, chairs, armchairs in felt.

Boyce's famous creation is the "felt suit", which symbolizes warmth and protection from outside world like a cocoon.

Beuys was one of the first to place sets of objects in showcases, transferring non-art objects into a markedly museum context.

In his numerous actions, he not only wrapped objects in felt, but also wrapped himself in it and covered himself with lard. Felt in this context acted as a heat keeper, and felt sculpture was understood by him as a kind of power plant that produces energy.

Joseph Beuys broke the old foundations in art and opened the way for a new vision of the world. He became the founder of postmodernism.

Thus, the result of the intersection of the fate of felt, an amazing person and the history of the 20th century, was new stage in relation to humanity to felt. Thanks to the work of Joseph Beuys, interest in this material has greatly increased and has not faded to this day.

During his life, Joseph Beuys carried out 70 actions, organized 130 of his solo exhibitions, created more than 10,000 drawings, a large number of installations, graphic series, not to mention countless discussions, symposiums, lectures, which also took on the character or actions.

Bibliography

• Bychkov V. Aesthetics. - M.: Gardariki, 2004. - 556 p. - ISBN 5-8297-0116-2, ISBN 8-8297-0116-2 (erroneous).
• Gerold J. 03/16/1944. A day in the life of Josef B. / J. Herold; ed.-st. V. Gurkovich and P. M. Pickshouse; ph. J. Liebchen. - [Simferopol]: Crimea. rep. local historian. museum, .

When writing this article, materials from such sites were used:livemaster.ru ,

If you find any inaccuracies or wish to supplement this article, please send us information to the email address [email protected] site, we and our readers will be very grateful to you.

Compiling from various sources

Before asking the question “What can we do?” we must ask ourselves “How should we think?”

We still live in Auschwitz.
He is

Mythobiography of Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) grew up in a strict Catholic family - to get away from home tutelage, he first joined the Hitler Youth, and then became a volunteer pilot in the Luftwaffe. Already at this time, Beuys was fond of Steiner's anthroposophy, and in 1941, before being sent to the front, he visited Nietzsche's house. He retained his love for the latter even after the war, and thoroughly lost faith in National Socialism.

According to famous legend, a Luftwaffe pilot had his sight in 1944, when his fighter crashed over a Crimean village. The Tatars allegedly helped him to survive after a fall and a head injury: they smeared Beuys with fat, fed him with honey and wrapped him in felt to heal and keep his body warm.

Nose Argo (1952)

It is impossible to say exactly how much truth is in this story and whether felt helps to heal fractures of the facial bones. After being wounded, Boyce made sorties for another year until he was taken prisoner by the British. However, having returned to Germany in 1947, he decided to become an artist and set himself the goal of healing a society whose culture had been burned in the furnaces of Auschwitz.

Separated from this story, Boyce's art loses its meaning. Sculptures and installations made of fat and felt originate in the Crimean steppe. Primitive drawings and shamanistic performances of dead and living animals (taming a coyote and discussing art with a dead rabbit) go back to stories about the Siberian taiga and Inner Mongolia, where Beuys is also said to have somehow visited. The crosses and planes on the repeatedly replicated postcards come from a military past and a Catholic childhood.

However, if the story of Boyce's "overthrow" and "resurrection" is indeed a hoax of the artist himself, so much the better. Because it's a beautiful hoax erecting artistic biography to the level of a myth and allowing the artist himself to very unceremoniously take a place in the pantheon of the gods. The story of Boyce's death and "resurrection" in a strange way resembles the myth of suicide and the resurrection of another ace - the Scandinavian god Odin; the resurrected Odin brought from oblivion the secret of writing (the runic alphabet), Joseph Beuys is a new artistic language. Sheep fat and felt, which were used to treat his wounds, became the first letters of this language. Boyce's famous hat, without which he refused to be photographed and appear in public, is unambiguously reminiscent of Odin's felt hat; in this mystical resemblance, of course, there is a certain comedy. Beuys himself called his artistic gestures "shamanism".

Meteor in the Place of Crosses (1953)
Revolutionary hearts. Spawn of the Planet of the Future (1955)
Sibyl (Justice) (1957)

Actresses (1958)
Witches Breathing Fire (1959)
Prisoner (1954-1960)

Fat stool (1964)

Boyes was of the opinion that the modern economic system does not take into account internal needs, locking a person in the prison of production and consumption. The condition for the emergence of a genuine alternative to the existing reality for Beuys was the expansion of the traditional concept of art: the creative process had to cover all areas human activity blurring the line between art and life. Beuys spoke of his work as "anthropological art" and argued that "every man is an artist". Endowed with inner creativity, people can build new social systems and transform the world through artistic practice, that is, to become the creators of "social sculpture" ...

Penetration for piano (1966)

It is impossible to understand Beuys as a contemporary artist of the 1960s if one does not see in art a protest against the state of things that has already gripped the world, against positivist pragmatics. Beuys, the creator of two styles of the late twentieth century, military and ecological, paradoxically united by his will, draws attention with his performances to what is carefully superseded by modern everyday life: life is a sacrifice. Beuys slowly shifts the emphasis on this topic, moving away from specific German history to general Christian symbols. Beuys arranges his first action under the flag of fluxus on July 20, 1964, on the anniversary of the assassination attempt by Stauffenberg, who failed to kill Hitler and was himself tortured to death by the Gestapo. Beuys speaks at the Technical University of Aachen. He melts two cubes of fat to a recording of Goebbels' speech calling on the masses for total war, then raises the crucifix and overshadows it with a Nazi salute. Later, Beuys chooses a more acceptable and neutral symbol for all Germans - a hare.

The Pack (1969)
Two Sheep Heads (1975)
Show Your Wound (1974-75)

Terremoto (Earthquake) (1981
Natural History (1982)
Battery Capri (1985)

Boyce's performances were filled with the spirit of shamanism. In them, he tried to gain some deep experience of contact with nature through a kind of simulacrum of magical actions with natural fetishes. In one of the performances, he lay on the floor for nine hours, wrapped in a roll of felt, in the company of two dead hares. The corners and walls of the room were plastered with grease, and a tuft of hair and two fingernails hung on the wall. Through the microphone, Boyce made some animal sounds (imitating the voices of hares and deer), which, interspersed with contemporary music were broadcast throughout the gallery and into the street.

Works by Joseph Beuys

Siberian Symphony (1963)

Siberian Symphony (1963)

The Siberian Symphony was first performed in 1963 at the Dusseldorf Academy of Arts, then repeated in 1966 at the Rene Blok Gallery in Berlin. During the first action Boyce played a specially prepared piano. Its strings were littered with heaps of rubbish, and a dead hare with a carved heart was pinned with chopsticks to school board, to which were also attached two triangles of fat and felt. The inscriptions in German indicated exact value sharp corners, and 42 degrees Celsius is the temperature limit human body. So Beuys built a new Trans-Siberian Railway in the space of imaginary geography. And now the border between West and East can be crossed by a jumping hare, the artist's favorite totem animal. During the performance, fragments of the music by Eric Satie “Sonnerie de la Rose + Croix” (“Chimes of the Rose and the Cross”) were played, clearly alluding to the occult practices of the Rosicrucian order, which aimed to combine Eastern mysticism and Western pragmatism. Beuys himself had never been to Siberia, but some of the Rosicrucians were sent there by Catherine II for trying to convert Paul's heir to their faith. One mystery remains. For most Germans, Eurasia is a purely geographical term. It can be assumed that some Russian emigrant from among the service personnel of the Luftwaffe unit, in which the gunner-radio operator Joseph Beuys fought, told the artist about the sublime geopolitical mysticism of this concept.

Source: Kovalev A. Seven works of Joseph Beuys. Critic's Choice

Treat Like with Like (1964)

The gap between already museum art modernism and non-art of fluxus is revealed by the story of Joseph Beuys's participation in the competition for a monument to the victims of the Holocaust, which was created for installation in Auschwitz. One can imagine how in 1964 the jury members, the famous modernist sculptors Hans Arp, Ossip Zadkine and Henry Moore, studied the Beuys project under the motto "Treat like with like". Boyce suggested a display case containing cubes of fat, a crucifix, and next to it a piece of biscuit like a host, a fragment of a dead rat, and a bunch of sausages. This parade of repulsive materializations of disintegration demonstrated precisely the impossibility of an aesthetic formulation of the theme, the impossibility of formalizing the millions of deaths and the very history of the Second World War. If the Dadaist swagger in dealing with the reality and memory of the First World War is perceived quite naturally and historically, then Beuys's neo-Dadaist experience remained the only one of its kind, inimitable due to marginality and extremism.

Source: Andreeva E.Yu. Postmodernism

How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965)

This is one of Boyce's most famous shamanistic actions. Having smeared his head with honey and covered it with golden powder, Beuys shamanized for three hours - with the help of muttering, mimams and gestures, he communicated with a dead hare, like explaining his work to him. The field for the interpretation of this action and the search for its meaning is very large. In any case, this is a very elegant combination of the world of contemporary art and the shamanic practice of communicating with other world. And reconciliation of them, so different. Beuys himself, as befits a decent shaman, acted as an intermediary between these worlds.

In general, the vast majority of Beuys's work suggests great freedom in their interpretation and twisting of meanings. Actually, like the events of our life, if we perceive them as some kind of signs. Perhaps it is this semantic ambiguity and a certain interpretive darkness that underlie the Russian love for Beuys - we also do not like the utmost clarity and the absence of at least a small secret.

Source: Kruglikov V. Joseph Beuys. Avant-gardism as socio-political shamanism

Eurasia (1965)

In a 1965 performance, Beuys explains invisible pictures to a dead hare... In 1966, Beuys once again turns to the image of a hare, presenting a performance of a more complex scenario called "Eurasia" about the utopian unity of the world in the spirit. Dividing the space of the gallery into two unequal compartments (the spectators were accommodated in the smaller one), Beuys, with an iron platform tied to his leg, walked from end to horse between a large triangle of felt and a black board, holding in his hands a complex structure of sticks, reminiscent of banner fasteners, and stilts, and surveyor's tool, to which a stuffed hare was attached. From time to time, Beuys addressed the scarecrow with the words of the German novelist Justinius Kerner: “Wherever you go, I will follow you”, fired a felt bullet from a tube, sprinkled salt, measured the temperature of the scarecrow and wrote it down on the board under the previously made diagram “Eurasia - division of the cross. The hare, the symbol of Catholic Easter, spiritual resurrection, in Beuys's performance is likened to a bullet, a fast-flying projectile, for which there are no boundaries and obstacles. It “penetrates” the space of the West and the East, and the artist follows him, fastening the territories with his heavy, iron tread, uniting them in the movement of his body, despite the difficulty of this movement with an iron on his leg, symbolizing the complexity of social progress. Under the separation of East and West, which are symbolically represented by a felt triangle softening the angle and a slate with calculations, one can understand a wide variety of ideas, in particular, according to Uwe Schnede, the opposition of an Eastern man-intuitive to a Western-intellectual according to Steiner, or, in the words of Steiner himself Boise, Europe divided into East and West berlin wall, which the symbolic hare easily overcomes.

Wikipedia gives this information about him:
Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld (North Rhine-Westphalia) on May 12, 1921 in the family of a merchant. He spent his childhood in Kleve near the Dutch border. During World War II he served in aviation. The beginning of his "personal mythology", where the fact is inseparable from the symbol, was the winter of 1943, when his plane was shot down over the Crimea. The frosty "Tatar steppe", as well as melted fat and felt, with the help of which the locals saved him, preserving his bodily warmth, predetermined the figurative structure of his future works. Returning to service, he also fought in Holland. In 1945 he was taken prisoner by the British. In 1947-1951 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, where the sculptor E. Matare was his main mentor. The artist, who received the title of professor at the Düsseldorf Academy in 1961, was fired in 1972 after he “occupied” its secretariat together with the unaccepted applicants in protest. In 1978, a federal court found the dismissal illegal, but Beuys no longer accepted a professorship, striving to be as independent from the state as possible. On the wave of leftist opposition, he published a manifesto on "social sculpture" (1978), expressing in it the anarcho-utopian principle of "direct democracy", designed to replace the existing bureaucratic mechanisms with the sum of free creative wills of individual citizens and collectives. In 1983, he put forward his candidacy for the Bundestag elections (on the list of "greens"), but was defeated. Beuys died in Düsseldorf on January 23, 1986. After the death of the master, every museum of modern art sought to install one of his art objects in the most prominent place in the form of an honorary memorial. The largest and at the same time the most characteristic of these memorials is the Working Block at the Museum of Hesse in Darmstadt - a suite of rooms reproducing the atmosphere of the Beuys workshop, full of symbolic blanks - from rolls of pressed felt to petrified sausages

In his work of the late 1940s-1950s, “primitive” in style, close to rock paintings, drawings in watercolor and lead pin depicting hares, elks, sheep and other animals dominate. He was engaged in sculpture in the spirit of expressionism by V. Lembruk and Matare, performed private orders for tombstones. He experienced the deep influence of R. Steiner's anthroposophy. In the first half of the 1960s, he became one of the founders of "fluxus" or "fluxus", a specific type of performance art, the most common in Germany. A bright speaker and teacher, in his artistic actions he always addressed the audience with imperative propaganda energy, fixing his iconic image during this period (felt hat, raincoat, fishing vest). Used for art objects shockingly unusual materials such as lard, felt, felt and honey; The “fat corner” remained an archetypal, through motif, both in monumental and more intimate (Fat Chair, 1964, Hesse Museum, Darmstadt) variations. In these works, a sense of the dead-end alienation of modern man from nature and attempts to enter it at a magical “shamanic” level came out sharply.

Capri-Batterie
1985

Animal Woman, 1949

earthquake, 1981

royal palace
1985

Filzanzug (Felt Suit), 1970

“I Like America and America Likes Me,” performance, May, 1974

The Pack (das Rudel), 1969

Wirtschaftswerte, 1980

Das Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts, 1982-83

Bathtub for a Heroine 1950, cast 1984

Four Blackboards 1972

Animal Woman 1949, cast 1984

o.t. aus Spur II (untitled from Trace II) 1977

Fahne (Flag) 1974

Evervess II 1968

boyes da vinci

Little sensations of German museum life - about Doctor Death and two exhibitions that unite Beuys with Leonardo da Vinci and Auguste Rodin

The first part of the legend about the German artist Joseph Beuys tells about the fall of a German plane into the Crimean steppes. I have heard that in fact there was no fall. And then read about the same.
Several weeks of unconsciousness, blankets, fat... Why not? In the end, he then continuously reproduced them in his works. Whether this can be considered strict evidence that Boyce's plane was shot down, I do not know.

Legends and myths
But what can be considered evidence in general ... Unless some young pathfinders find the place where Beuys's plane crashed, find the ancestors of those Tatars who got it out, smearing it with bacon and wrapping it in felt blankets (having written this, I climbed into the Internet and saw that someone actually made such an attempt, and besides, it turns out that in Ukraine there is already a society "Children of Beuys").
“Beuys inspired great sympathy with the Crimean Tatars, they told him: “Dubist nix is ​​a German, dubist is a Tatar!” In another German source, we read that shamans came out of Beuys and - whispered something in his ear ... that the second part of the legend began: "... and I saw how the fall becomes a rise."
And this second part of the legend - about the rise of Joseph Beuys - seemed to me less plausible. Although it seems that it is precisely this that is provable ... As you know, it says that upon returning to the Fatherland, Beuys became the main artist of the twentieth century. His joint exhibition with Leonardo da Vinci can probably be considered one of the numerous proofs of this thesis. The full exposition is called "Leonardo da Vinci: Joseph Beuys - Codex Leicester in the mirror of modernity."

Selective affinity
In the annex to the House of Arts, built specifically for the exhibition, there are glass shelves, each with a Codex Leicester page, the backlight turns on only when you come close to the glass.
So that the pages do not get tired of the light... When you come up, the rack flashes, and you see Leonardo's mirror handwriting, his drawings... Why did he write in mirror handwriting? For cryptographic purposes...
Zero in mind - that's all we have, plus an obsolete version of Windows - the Codex Leicester manuscript, by the way, is the property of Bill Gates, he himself came to Munich for the opening of the exhibition.
In a manuscript that was found relatively recently (in the 60s of the last century) in Madrid, Leonardo asks questions and gives answers to them, in which the foundations of fluid and gas mechanics are laid and often correct guesses are made about phenomena on Earth and the Moon. But the most fascinating thing in his "Code" is the drawings of flows, eddies, counter currents; this is all very similar to drawings in a vector analysis textbook. Only in the textbook the drawings are made on the basis of knowledge gained several centuries after Leonardo made his drawings...
Shelves with pages of the manuscript were in the left wing of the building, and the multimedia part of the exposition was located in the aforementioned extension, where Microsoft did not lose face...
But we immediately moved to the right wing, where, therefore, symmetrically to the "Code" by Leonardo, the second half of the exhibition was placed - the "Madrid Code" by Joseph Beuys - that very "mirror of modernity" in which "Leonardo da Vinci was reflected" ...

Meeting point
As long as we are not lost in this system of mirrors, we need, or at least we can, remember where we are. The House of Arts (Haus der Kunst) is one of the most important buildings of the Third Reich, then it was called the House of German Art. And for the Fuhrer, perhaps the most important - the Fuhrer was an artist, and Haus der Deutschen Kunst was the realization of his most cherished desires. He himself laid the first stone.
At the same time, a small incident occurred, which some interpreted as a bad sign. The hammer with which Hitler hit the stone broke into two parts. For a second he looked at his hand in confusion... Who knows what was in the soul of the involuntary bricklayer at that moment...
One way or another, the building was erected, and in addition to exhibitions of “new German art”, a landmark event for the nation was held - the exhibition “Degenerate Art” (Entarte Kunst), free of charge, by the way, where those who wish could see the ugliness of paintings by Paul Klee, Picasso, Ernst , Yavlensky, Franz Mark, in general, to laugh enough.
Keeping all this in mind, maybe it would not be worth making a wave here. But here, after all, there was a special case, it was not only about graphics - one was figurative, the other was abstract ... Leonardo's were not just drawings ... And my specialization at the university was fluid and gas mechanics, and drawings of flows , naturally, also aroused in me nostalgia for science, which I even betrayed with no one knows who.
So the strange feelings that crowded in my chest are not surprising when, after one “Code”, I began to look at another: at the sheets torn from a school notebook of an eternal repeater and, moreover, slovenly (many pages have oil stains) sheets, where chaotic broken pencil zigzags are most reminiscent of a game of "come on, finish drawing."
It is unlikely that Leonardo could have imagined that in five hundred years a human being would play such games with his drawings. Some of the zigzags really looked like the outlines of Leonardo's charts that I had just seen.
After the war, they wanted to blow up the House of German Art, believing that it was built from some absolute evil, unsuitable for melting down. But then they changed their minds, and a casino for American officers was opened in the House for some time, and then it again became the House of Art, only one word was removed from its name: “German”.

Role drawings
And now there are drawings either of a Luftwaffe pilot who fell to the Tatars, or a Luftwaffe pilot who fell into tartarara, who returned to Germany with good news: “Every person is an artist!”, “We are all free!” - and stuff like that. By God, one should rejoice that ausgerechnet in diesem Haus (just in this house) exactly such drawings hang ... And I rejoice - how can I not rejoice ... But only ... In a quiet whisper : Well, what does Leonardo da Vinci have to do with it?
I even thought: maybe the fact is that Leonardo drew an aeronautical apparatus four hundred years before its appearance? four hundred thousand years... Remembered how "...they kissed with the bayous bark of the chase and were caressed by the peals of the horn and the crackling of trees, hooves and claws"?
I looked at the sheet, where among the zigzags left by Boyce's pencil, one could make out the silhouette of a deer. Boyce believed that pencil drawings are the most important and perhaps meaningful part of his work. They grew later, and everything else is sculptures or just three-dimensional objects that he made, including from animal bones, hooves and claws ... I saw them in different museums- I don’t know how beautiful they are ... The fact that they were only the beginning of a terrible thing also doesn’t prove anything ...

afterlife
H The beginning of the terrible in this sense: Beuys was replaced not so long ago by a disgusting caricature. As in a bad dream or a bad joke, a man now travels through the cities of Germany, emphasizing his resemblance with Boyce with the help of a black hat, which he likewise never takes off his head, and makes sculptural groups from the corpses of people.
Corpses play chess, do gymnastic exercises... This is plastologist Günther van Hagen, the exhibition is called "Body Worlds". The city council of Munich repeatedly banned entry into the city of this exhibition, but then the issue was raised again and again.
Until the last moment, K. did not believe that the exhibition would be allowed here: “There won’t be any in this city, that’s for sure,” she said. But in the end they were let through, van Hagen appeared on local television ... That's when I saw how firmly he was attached to the shadow of Beuys.
First, he stood at the back of the head, and then - a step to the side, a step forward, a step to the side, and he switched to foreground... And now, when you try to recall the face of Beuys, you see Gunther van Hagen instead - it works every time, absolutely clearly, and not only for me ...
Among the accusations against van Hagen was that most of these corpses were exhibited without any consent of their ... owners? relatives? That among them are the corpses of people who were executed in China. It seems that the case against him is suspended, but the fact that van Hagen uses the Beuys shadow without the consent of its owner, from my point of view, inspires suspicion in itself ... That he can do the same with someone body...
The priests of all churches attacked him now and then alternately, then there was also a collective letter from professors-pathologists of the University of Heidelberg, in which they excommunicated the plastologist from science.

Doctor Death
In an open letter published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the professors wrote that the goals of the exhibition, which van Hagen calls, are false, that in fact all this has nothing to do with educational activities. Van Hagen's calls to come to the exhibition with the whole family, to take small children there, only further fueled the anger of the professors, who roughly indicated in a letter what enlightenment in this area actually looks like.
But so far nothing has stopped the plastologist, the exhibitions continue, at all stops in the city there are luminous advertisements - the cover of Spiegel, where he poses against the backdrop of butchered corpses. Another article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, this time about Dr. Tod (ie Dr. Death) wanted to make a sinister contract with the biggest man on Earth. Most big man on earth (in this moment his height is 2.5 meters) lives in St. Petersburg and continues to grow. This is a hormonal disease, incurable, but it can be fought for some time with the help of very expensive medicines. Van Hagen undertook to pay a man something like a life annuity on the condition that he sign a contract according to which his body after death would become the property of van Hagen. The man did not sign the contract, despite all the flirtations - the plastologist flew to St. Petersburg, several times increased the promised amounts. The biggest man was simply afraid that, having signed a contract, he would die with the help of these medicines even earlier, because what is death for a Russian, then for a German ... a performance?

Boyce and Rodin
Until November 27 at famous museum Frankfurt Shirn hosts the exhibition "Roden: Beuys". As an intermediary between Rodin and Beuys, the curator Pamela Roth names the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
It was Rilke's monograph on Rodin, which contained many illustrations, that led Beuys to the idea of ​​starting a "timeless dialogue" with Rodin, which resulted in a series of drawings made between 1947 and 1967.
The parallels between them and Rodin's late watercolors (at their time, in 1906, which caused a whole series of scandals because of their "obscenity") have long been a commonplace for art historians, but for the first time at an exhibition in Frankfurt, the works of two artists are brought together, and this , according to the organizers, should help to see the "dialogue" in a new way.
Quote from an article in the Frankfuter Allgemeine Zeitung: “Even shown in this way, the parallels between the work of Rodin and Beuys can only at a stretch confirm the thesis that Rodin’s innovations - fragmentary bodies, the torso as an autonomous art form, dynamically moving surfaces of sculpture, received in Boyce's "new concept of plastic movement in space and time" a certain further development. These claims seem unsubstantiated and look more like interesting example artificiality of interpretations, writes Konstanz Cruwell. And then she makes a gesture of reconciliation, which, just like the doubts she cited before, applies to my recollection of another Beuys exhibition: - But be that as it may, the exhibition is certainly impressive. If only because the organizers managed to collect such an unprecedented number of unique exhibits.”

P.S. The third part of the Joseph Beuys legend says that he did not actually die. That he quietly lives among us, and, like Elvis, you can accidentally meet on the street.
P.P.S. When I wrote this text, the exhibition of Gunther van Hagen was officially banned throughout Germany, and Doctor Death moved with his theater to the USA

Meet Doctor Frankenstein

According to Professor von Hagens, he wants to instill in the people a love of anatomy

One of the Berlin exhibitions had already become scandalous before opening. They were mummified, then dismembered and put on display.
The exhibition is educational in nature. According to its organizers, it should instill in visitors a love for anatomy. However, many believe that the exhibition is a typical example of degradation.
Plastinoids
Professor Günther von Hagens, one of the organizers of the exhibition, uses technology he developed at the University of Heidelberg in the 80s.
The 57-year-old anatomist developed the plastination method. This method allows scientists to preserve human tissue by replacing the liquid with synthetic resin.
At first glance, mummies resemble anatomical models. muscles, internal organs, nervous and circulatory system - everything seemed to be frozen in time.
Some exhibits cause particular irritation of the public, especially the mummy of a young woman in whose uterus there is a fetus. Despite the fact that all future exhibits agreed to mummification during their lifetime, many believe that the creations of Professor van Hagens are very reminiscent of the experiments of the famous Nice doctor - Joseph Mengele. Others compare von Hagens to modern-day Frankenstein.
Professor von Hagens denies these accusations: "For the entire world history, except for the Renaissance, the human body was constantly considered something dirty and disgusting. I decided to prove otherwise. These "plastinoids" demonstrate the beauty of the human body, Frankenstein is not about me."
ethical question
The opinions of visitors to the exhibition were divided. Someone considers the exhibition strange, someone - frightening, someone - bewitching.
Nevertheless, the exhibition aroused high interest, and negotiations have already begun to hold a similar exhibition in London and New York.
3,000 people have already signed a pact with Professor von Hagens that he will turn them into "plastinoids" after death. The church has protested against the Body Worlds, planning to hold a memorial mass in memory of the people exhibited in Berlin.
However, there is no doubt that more bitter battles about the ethical side of the issue are yet to come.

"Children of Joseph Beuys"

This was the name of an art project that began in September 2004. Then the Ukrainians Vladimir Gulich, Anatoly Fedirko, Yuri Volgin, Irina Kalenik, Gennady Kozub, Vsevolod Medvedev, and the Pole Pavel Khavinsky went from Zaporozhye to the Crimea, to the alleged crash site of the plane, 22-year-old Luftwaffe pilot Joseph Beuys.

In 1943, over the Crimea, on a narrow strip of land washed by the Black and Seas of Azov, a German aircraft was shot down. The pilot survived, he was rescued by the Crimean Tatars, who saved his life folk remedies- felt and fat.

Felt, fat, felt, wax left their mark on Beuys's life in art - these objects became attributes of his most famous installations. Some of them are presented at the Center for Contemporary Art. J. Pompidou.

Here, in a deserted place on the seashore, the artists erected a symbolic monument to Joseph Beuys - a mast with a yellow stocking to determine the wind - according to which the pilots were guided during the Second World War, and outlined with paper runway. Khavinsky made paper airplanes with written messages and launched them into the sea.

Such symbolic monuments - masts were installed as part of the continuation of the project in Kyiv on the Poskotyno mountain, and in Lvov on the Armenian street.

The whole process was recorded in video and photographic materials, which became exhibits of the project. Plus - exhibited artifacts found in the Crimea (for example, they found a wonderful flask), and installations - reflections on notable projects Beuys. His famous work "7000 oak trees" (planting 7000 thousand trees) was continued in the work "7000 + 1 oak tree", where the 7001st oak tree is a broom. Initiates will appreciate such quotes.

In February 2005, the action continued in Kyiv, then - in Poland, at the Museum of Modern Art in Lublin.

As part of the project "CHILDREN OF BOYS", within the walls of the Zaporozhye National Technical University, a lecture was held on such areas of contemporary art as installation and performance, and a demonstration of works, including video installations, by Pavel Khavinsky.

European art after Beuys will not be the same. This statement is the internal engine of the artist from Poland. In the past, professor at the Department of Painting at the Krakow Academy of Arts, Khavinsky continuer of the Beuys line. In the same way, Paul left the walls of the academy in a direct and figuratively for the sake of a total art, an art similar in power to religion.

One of the most famous installations was an ordinary chair, on the seat of which a prism of animal fat was placed, into which a knife was stuck obliquely.

The venerable public, who visited the exhibitions in the mid-sixties, was quite shocked by the appearance of these works. "A real German professor would not do such things," the critics were indignant.

“My work will remain incomprehensible until, instead of perceiving only color and form, the viewer begins to pay attention to the features of the material,” Boyce answered them.

And fat (wax), according to Boyce, is a symbol of the life-giving power of the human body and at the same time a symbol creative process: the transformation of an indefinite formless mass into any form.

The concept of "plasticity" Boyes refers not only to fine arts but also to the whole life process of man. Plastic embodies the ability to creative improvement. Boyce's "plastic theory" is based on the fact that the artist must form his work "from the inside, like the growth of a bone in the human body."

Human life is (ideally) a continuous process of creation, and in this sense of the word, any person is a creator. With characteristic uncompromisingness, Boyce put these principles into practice. Therefore, in 1972, when he was a professor at the Dusseldorf Academy of Arts, Beuys accepted into his class all comers, and not just students approved by the admissions committee.

Pulled from here, thanks art night

There are not even a dozen hundreds of people in the world who understand painting. The rest are pretending or they don't care.
/Redyar Kipling/

Number 7. Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys (German Joseph Beuys, 1921-1986, Germany) is a German artist, one of the leaders of postmodernism.
Born into a family of a merchant. Boyce is already in school years absorbed a lot of books: Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Schopenhauer - up to the treatises of the founder of anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner, who had a special influence on him. He was interested in everything: medicine (he wanted to become a doctor), art, biology, the animal world, philosophy, anthroposophy, anthropology, ethnography.
Joined the Hitler Youth. In 1940 Beuys volunteered for the German Air Force. He mastered the professions of a radio operator and a bomber pilot. He made many sorties, was awarded the Crosses of the second and first degree.

In 1943, his plane was shot down over the Crimean steppes. Boyce's partner died, and he himself, with a fractured skull and severe wounds, was pulled out of a burning car by local nomadic Tatars, apparently shepherds or cattle breeders. He did not stay with the Tatars for long. For several days, the Tatars, using animal fat and woolen blankets, warmed the half-frozen body of the pilot.
Eight days later, German rescue teams discovered him.
Beuys himself considered this period of time decisive for his subsequent creative career. Here, in the Crimea, he came face to face with the very anthropology that he had been fond of since childhood. The Tatars treated him with ritual methods rooted in the ancient tradition of this people. Boyce's wounded body was wrapped around with pieces of fat pouring into the body vitality and wrapped in felt to keep warm.
Fat and felt subsequently became important materials for his sculptures and installations, and the anthropological principle formed the basis of his concept.
/ A well-known theorist of contemporary art with beautiful surname Bukhlo, however, casts doubt on the story about the disaster in the Crimea - and not without reason, since there is a photograph depicting a healthy Beuys standing in front of an undamaged Ju-87 /

Returning to service, he also fought in Holland. In 1945 he was taken prisoner by the British.
He studied (1947-1952) and later taught (1961-1972) at the State. Art Academy Düsseldorf. Beuys worked extensively on numerous bronze works. He also created the so-called living sculpture"from organic materials - fat, blood, animal bones, felt, honey, wax and straw.
He took part in the collective art actions of the international group "Fluxus", created the "German Student Party as a Metaparty" (1967), "Organization for Direct Democracy through popular vote"(1971)," Free International Higher School of Creativity and Interdisciplinary Progress "(1973)

Fry wrote that the story of Boyce's death and "resurrection" strangely resembles the myth of suicide and the resurrection of another ace - the Scandinavian god Odin; the resurrected Odin brought from oblivion the secret of writing (the runic alphabet), Joseph Beuys - a new artistic language. Sheep fat and felt, which were used to treat his wounds, became the first letters of this language. Boyce's famous hat, without which he refused to be photographed and appear in public, is unambiguously reminiscent of Odin's felt hat; in this mystical resemblance, of course, there is a certain comedy.

Stripes from the Shaman's House 1962

Boyce perceived objects organic world as plastic equivalents of their thoughts. According to Boyce, the vague, obscure and creative power of the intellect, associated with heat and chaos, reincarnated into the cold of dead matter.

Boyce put forward two revolutionary propositions:
a different understanding of sculpture as such, which, in a broad sense, should be regarded as a social activity
as well as the development of a new approach to all people without exception as creators (every person is an artist).

He knew a lot about titles: "Honey Pump", "Show Your Wounds" and " Wet laundry virgins"
By the way, perhaps Pelevin took "Inner Mongolia" from Beuys - that was the name of his exhibition in Pushkin Museum in 1992

Eurasian Siberian Symphony 1963

Beuys was a supporter of creative democracy. In June 1967, during a large student demonstration in West Berlin, a student was killed in a confrontation with police. In response to this tragedy, Beuys founded the German Student Party in Düsseldorf that same month. Its main demands were self-government, the abolition of the institute of professors and free for everyone, without exams and admissions committees, admission to higher educational institution.

July 1971 passed in the usual academy selection routine for students who applied for the competition. Beuys comes out with a sharp protest: the selection of students according to their abilities violates the democratic principle of equality - for every person carries a creative beginning. A narrow artistic endowment only hinders the molding of a true creator from a student. And Boyce proposes to accept all the rejected into his own class. His proposal, of course, was not accepted. A similar situation was repeated in next year. And when the administration of the academy again did not agree to Boyce's demand, he, along with 54 rejected ones, occupied its administrative building. This was in direct violation of the law, and Boyce was removed from his position as professor at the academy. At a meeting where the issue of his resignation was being decided, Boyce said: "The state is a monster that must be fought. I consider it my mission to destroy this monster."

"Where I am, there is an academy," Beuys argued, considering it his democratic duty to shake the existing order and teach the masses of people. Having suffered a fiasco in Düsseldorf, he moves his activities to Berlin. In 1974, together with Heinrich Böll, he founded the Free International University. Everyone could become his student, regardless of age, profession, education, nationality and, of course, abilities.

The Free International University, according to Beuys, was supposed to be an ideal model for educational center where a creative democratic person could be sculpted from raw human material. Boyce claimed that he had nothing to do with politics, but only art. However, his concept of social sculpture set as its main goal the transformation of society as a whole. And whoever Beuys considered himself to be, art and politics went hand in hand with him. His incredible activity extended to everything. He spoke out in defense of nature, defended the rights of women. He demanded wages for housewives, proving that their work is equal to any other work.

In 1974 in Chicago Boyce dedicated one of his shares to Dillinger, a famous gangster in the 1930s. He jumped out of the car at the city theater, ran, as if fleeing from a hail of bullets, fell into a snowdrift and lay for a long time, portraying a murdered bandit. “The artist and the criminal are fellow travelers,” he explained the meaning of this action, “for both have a wild uncontrollable creativity. Both are immoral and driven only by the impulse to seek freedom."

"Together with members of his German student party, he cleared a forest near Düsseldorf under the slogan "Everyone talks about the protection environment, but no one acts." And one of his last projects was called "Planting 7000 oaks in Kassel" - a huge pile of basalt blocks here was gradually dismantled as the trees were planted.

"A chair with bacon" - its seat was covered with a layer of animal fat, and a thermometer protruded from this thickened mass on the right. In disputes, Beuys defended the aesthetic qualities of fat: its yellow color, pleasant smell, and healing qualities.

In his numerous actions, he wrapped chairs, armchairs, pianos in felt, wrapped himself in it and covered himself with lard. Felt in this context acted as a heat keeper, and felt sculpture was understood by him as a kind of power plant that produces energy.

Boyce's notable performances include:
“How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare” (1965; with the carcass of a hare, to which the master “addressed”, covering his head with honey and gold foil);
Coyote: I Love America and America Loves Me (1974; when Boyce shared a room with a live coyote for three days);
"Honey extractor at the workplace" (1977; with an apparatus that drove honey through plastic hoses);