Holding Open the Wound: Daniel Spaulding’s Joseph Beuys and History

Joseph Beuys, 1979. Photo: Bernard Gotfryd.

Daniel Spaulding ends his monograph Joseph Beuys and History with a striking assertion. After around two hundred densely argued and precise pages, Spaulding repudiates the discipline within which he has apparently been working. One reads that the book has “joined the project of historicizing” its subject, and that, at the same time, the author wants to “postpone the onset of art history in order to hold open the wound” that Beuys represents.1 The German artist, Spaulding suggests one page earlier, has “never been mourned,” and it is this fact that makes the project of writing about him now both possible and interesting (205). If art history is graspable as a series of introjections and canonizations whereby the negativity—Spaulding uses this word throughout the book to name that part of Beuys’s work which exceeds both the artist’s own interpretative frameworks and the industry of commentary that has grown up around it—of an artist’s oeuvre is digested and sanitized, then Beuys is interesting because, despite his voluminous reception, he continues to exist as a kind of residual pain. Art history can elaborate the conditions of this pain, but it cannot, nor should it try, to heal it. Spaulding’s ambition, one might say, is to use the art-historical method to elaborate that which is resistant to history without making this negativity itself into history—without closing the wound.

The grammar of Spaulding’s title is appropriate in this regard: Beuys is in history, because of course he is, but he is also to be considered alongside it. One might say that at their most effective, Beuys’s art and social practice—the two come together in the idea of “social-sculpture”—give shape to history by tying it into antagonistic knots and rendering it cryptic and therefore interrogatable as a cipher. Think of the footage, easily available online, of the artist wrapped in a felt cloak with a walking stick where his head should be, standing slightly off balance while a coyote with whom he has been attempting to commune for three days tears chunks out of the aforementioned cloth. This footage, which documents the piece I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), is, as Spaulding suggests, far stranger than the quasi-messianic white-savior fantasy promulgated by the artist to explain it. Much of Spaulding’s thinking hangs on the conviction that it is by focusing on the gap between what one sees and what one is told to see—on the irreducible, sometimes funny, and not infrequently deathly, strangeness of these and other images—that one comes to understand the darkness that persistently haunts Beuys’s work as part of a shared history. Spaulding insists that the wound that Beuys’s is is also “ours, since we inhabit the world it figures” (205). Articulating this while doing justice to the artworks in all their vivid oddness is a delicate task.

Spaulding’s book is not a biography. Nonetheless, it makes certain facts of Beuys’s life and, specifically, the artist’s own narration of it, central to its arguments. The first chapter is dedicated to the notion of “myth.” To me, the term seems productively slippery, but one of its meanings in relation to Beuys refers to something like the discursive content or significance contained in the artist’s choice of materials and in his arrangement of them, without which the work would be incomprehensible. One of the book’s early major art-historical points is that, unlike the minimalist sculpture of Beuys’s contemporary Robert Morris, for example, works such as Stuhl mit Fett (1964) and Unschlitt / Tallow (1977), both of which are constructed in part out of animal fat, cannot be grasped simply according to their facticity. Beuys’s work incorporates semiotics and personal myth, not least his own—almost certainly apocryphal—story about having survived a World War II plane crash in Crimea due to the intervention of local Tartars, who found him and wrapped him in felt and fat to keep him warm and restore him to life. This story gives fat an association with healing, something it carries throughout Beuys’s work and which becomes a part of the aesthetic experience it makes possible. The point, Spaulding insists, is not to interrogate Beuys’s truth claims on their own terms and in doing so to determine whether or not he fits the label of charlatan often applied to him. The point is to recognize that the artist’s “self-staging is not external to the work but instead part of it” (42). A smooth wedge of fat on a wooden stool does not immediately speak to either comfort or warmth. However, once one is aware of the artist’s personal semiotics, it is impossible to simply exorcise these associations. Beuys’s work remains important partly because of this dissonance, and because of the necessary “distinction between the material and the conceptual” which the work enacts (43).

Spaulding positions Beuys’s art as sitting uncomfortably between myth—those qualities of a work that are a component of the aesthetic experience it enables, and that cannot be derived from its facticity—and its existence as intractable “aesthetic fact” (43). Beuys associated fat with healing, but who can look at a work such as Zeige deine Wund (dated 1974–75 but first shown in 1976), in which two stretchers are positioned above zinc tubs containing the aforementioned biological substance along with a bird’s skull and a thermometer, and feel reassured? As Spaulding puts it, “We are told ‘healing’; we see death” (170). Negativity resides in the wound that aesthetic fact leaves on semiotics. This occurs to the extent that one cannot tell whether Beuys’s mythology serves to “reterritorialize what has been rendered unstable in the physical oeuvre, or if indeed the objectivity of the latter called forth, as its inverse, a radically self-undermining discursive apparatus” (91). What would it mean, one might ask, to synthesize this instability via interpretation and analogy without neutralizing its fundamental negativity? To do so would be to write art history while deferring its onset. Part of the wager of Spaulding’s book is that such a writing is possible.

Spaulding argues that the synthesis of Beuys’s contradictions is to be found in the fact that, whether he knew it or not, the artist engaged in a “mimetic appropriation” of capitalist social relations and of the value form per se (6). The singular quality of Beuys’s mimesis, and what sets his work apart from the countless artworks that represent the commodity in its various guises, lies in the “figuring of value accumulation as process instead of object” (7). Spaulding understands value as unrepresentable, as a relation rather than a thing. This relation produces forms of nonidentity—“the nonidentity of a commodity with money, its form of representation; of labor power with its alienated objectification; and of substance with concept or number”—in and through “the abstract identity of value” (7). The deathly ambivalence of Zeige deine Wund then is expressive of a set of social relations in which “things are what they are, in material terms, at the same time as they bear something called value, which is ‘immaterial’ yet nonetheless socially effective and indeed coercive” (170). Negativity resides in the wound that aesthetic fact leaves on semiotics, and it is through this negativity that the world is, in a sense, illuminated. It is to Spaulding’s significant credit that the demonstration of this claim carries neither the insidious sense of tautology nor the feeling of superfluity that can sometimes accompany so-called value-form theory. To be confronted with even the most virtuosic demonstration of the fact that artworks produced under capital bear its traces and adopt its logics can sometimes feel like it justifies a response of: “Yes, so what?” That such a question does not feel appropriate here has, I think, to do with both the political and aesthetic convictions that underpin Spaulding’s project. These convictions have as much to do with history and its potentials as they do with art.

The central work for the book is Honigpumpe, first staged at Documenta 6 in 1977. This piece—to whose historical origins within the crisis of the West German Wirtschaftswunder Spaulding devotes an admirably lucid and detailed analysis—consisted of two elements. The first was the titular device which used an engine or “heart” in the building’s basement to pump honey around the Friedericanum museum in Kassel via translucent pipes. The second element of the work, which Spaulding notes made it a “textbook example of social sculpture,” was the workshops and panel discussions on politics, education, and aesthetics which Beuys held in the same building between June and October that year (9). What makes Honigpumpe a paradigmatic example of social sculpture was its capacity to subsume “collective discussion to the artwork of which it was an element” (12). Honigpumpe is vital for Spaulding’s argument because it is in this work that Beuys came closest to realizing a prefigurative instantiation of the principle of Gestaltungen, “the free shaping of all social and material relations,” and, in doing so, to demonstrate a world in which art, rather than capital, can be a mediating, binding concept through which to organize human activity (15). At the same time, it is the most vivid example of an incapacity to properly separate a figuration of the full subsumption of life within free artistic processes and collective self-constitution from the full subsumption of life under the capital relation. Honigpumpe, with its accompanying mythology of circulation and the accumulation of knowledge and spiritual energy, presents a utopian “proposal for an economy that has never yet existed” via a mimesis of “the social form that stands in the way of liberation” (137).

It is important, however, that the title of Spaulding’s book is not Joseph Beuys and Value. His arguments would feel significantly less important were history not the domain on which Beuys’s negativity presses most palpably. For me, one of the most memorable moments of the book’s analysis concerns the1979–80 Guggenheim retrospective, “a self-conscious presentation of Beuys as something like a finished product for US consumption” (178). The work involved several stations, as per the design of the building, and it turns out that putting Beuys’s various outputs side by side reveals the possibility of a deeply disconcerting latent content. Spaulding quotes the art historian Kim Levin stating that the final stations of the exhibition appear to unintentionally but unavoidably express a narrative of Nazi genocide, moving as they do from the representation of a tram stop, to animal fat, to felt clothing, to the nonfunctioning relic of Honigpumpe which itself, and not for the first time, appeared to carry connotations of blood and soil. When laid out almost chronologically—Spaulding notes that the variable structural integrity of the Guggenheim meant that Unchlitt / Tallow had to be placed out of sequence—and therefore narrativized, Beuys makes history a vortex of unreconciled violence. Honigpumpe, the epitome of social sculpture, might prefigure a society in which human activity is organized according to the principle of properly free democratic action, but it also represents “the consumption of human beings in the death camps” (186). These temporalities are inseparable: “The Guggenheim installation reverberated with echoes of the Nazi era, even as it was an image of the capitalist economy of its own day, the 1970s, and a vision of an order yet to come” (186).

To say that Beuys’s art performs a mimesis of value at the same time that it prefigures the abolition of relations mediated by value is also to say that utopia figured in the world as it is is “soaked through with death’s stench” (187). It is perhaps a truism to insist, as Spaulding does, that “a way out” of these conditions will be found “not in representation, but in [collective] practice” (205). It says something about his writing, however, that this statement feels earned rather than tacked on. There is political and historical value in demonstrating that the contradictions of Beuys’s art demand to be resolved in practice, and that the work prefigures collective transformation even as it plunges back into the mess of blood and fire, fat and felt, from which it emerges. To say that these contradictions are to be resolved outside of the domain of aesthetics, and that no amount of analysis will enable one to properly distinguish Beuysian reconciliation from the shadow of horror, might also be to say that history, unlike value, has not really started yet. If it does, Beuys may yet enter into it, and even if it does not, art history might yet claim him. What Spaulding’s book enables me to think, however, is that if the latter is to happen in a manner which realizes rather than forecloses the potential that the artist’s work, in all of its queasiness and discomfort, represents, both the words “art” and “history” will have changed their significance.