Primal forms of a latter-day shaman
Joseph Beuys: Utopia at the Stag Monuments Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London
Joseph Beuys’s reputation isn’t quite in the doldrums, but it’s certainly becalmed. The German conceptual artist with the trademark porkpie hat is one of the key cultural figures of the late 20th century, but 32 years since his death in 1986, his fat-and-felt sculptures have become such ubiquitous icons of modern art, you’d imagine it’s very unlikely there would be anything new to discover.
This exhibition, however, Beuys’s largest in Britain since Tate’s 2005 retrospective, promises a Beuys newly relevant to our difficult times. It reunites the main elements of one of his most important installations, Stag
Monuments, for the first time in the UK since its creation in 1982. According to the show’s curator, Norman Rosenthal, the former Royal Academy artistic director, who originally commissioned the work for Berlin’s Martin Gropius Bau, this presents a vision of “societal rebirth” that still speaks to a world that is “now more than ever searching for new solutions for basic social and economic problems”.
That’s quite a claim, but then Beuys rarely thought on a small scale. The first rooms, however, offer few surprises, more a scene-setting collection of greatest hits. Beuys is seen striding towards us in the role of heroic teacher and activist (he co-founded Germany’s Green Party) in the photographic self-portrait We Are The Revolution. Then a suit in thick felt hanging from the wall, and two cardboard boxes full of fat (actually rancid orange margarine) – materials with which he was obsessed, having been wrapped in felt and fat, he claimed, by Tartar nomads, who saved his life when he was shot down over Russia as a Luftwaffe pilot in 1944.
Far less well-known are small early works from the late Forties, drawing on seminal Germanic art forms, from Gothic sculpture (in expressionistic crucifixes) to the prehistoric art of the Eurasian steppes (in images of stags etched on bronze). If you can sense the influence of such potent, primal imagery on his later work, it’s satisfying to have the connection spelt out, even if these early pieces at times look like rather clunky museum replicas.
The stag, as symbol of virility and “signifier of Christ”, dominates the central installation, though not in a form you’ll immediately recognise. Unsure what to put in the 1982 exhibition, Beuys moved the entire contents of his Düsseldorf studio into the gallery and turned them into an eccentric, but resonant, collection of sculptures. Random bits of wood with his mother’s ironing board balanced on the top become the stag, a sculptor’s stand a man, with a plant pot for a head. A table with telephone wires spooling out towards some testicle-like spheres embodies Beuys’s preoccupation with the transmission of energy. There is also a collection of turd-like forms created from Beuys’s work tools encased in brown clay.
Given Beuys’s insistence on the artist’s responsibility to respond politically to his or her time, you’ll be justifiably befuddled as to how these elements relate to the That-cherreagan “Big Money” era when the work was created, let alone to the explosive realities of our own time.
The work isn’t, of course, intended to be taken literally, even if you could work out its literal meaning. Beuys saw himself as a kind of latter-day shaman operating in a capitalist art world, creating primordial images for a public beset by mass consumerism and a then very present nuclear threat, who might not understand the entire message, but get the general drift.
Standing in the presence of Beuys’s suggestively elemental forms you can’t help but get something of that drift in the form of a shiver under the skin. The political, cultural and spiritual resonances are secondary to that physical sensation. This exhibition may not tell us anything new about Beuys, but it’s a reminder that today’s art world is painfully lacking in artists of his level of scale and ambition.
Until June 16. Tickets: 020 3813 8400; ropac.net