Sunday, October1, 11am Galerie Rabus

Kea Wienand
Joseph Beuys’s fantasies of the “East”

1974 was the year of Joseph Beuys’s famous performance “I like America and America likes me”, for which he locked himself up with a coyote in a gallery in New York for three whole days. In the western art world this performance established his reputation as a shaman. Generally, the figure of the shaman is associated with “primitive races” in Siberia and Central Asia. The coyote is linked to the “Indians” as a symbol of uncivilised and primitive life. Beuys saw the coyote as a wanderer between “East” and “West”. Images of so-called “primitive races” are here instrumentalised in a regression to a mythical origin and for Beuys’s self-representation as a healer. My paper connects the various meanings of “primitive alterity” that Beuys’s work conveys to imaginations of German history and to his self-positioning as an artist. I argue that his work combines a particular primitivism with (neo-)colonial fantasies and mythical perceptions of an unspecified “East”.


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