Joseph Beuys

● Joseph Beuys was a German-born artist active in Europe and the United States from
the 1950s through the early 1980s, who came to be associated with that era's
international, Conceptual art and Fluxus movements.
● Beuys is especially famous for works incorporating animal fat and felt, two common
materials - one organic, the other fabricated, or industrial - that had profound
personal meaning to the artist. They were also recurring motifs in works suggesting
that art, common materials, and one's "everyday life" were ultimately inseparable.

Fluxus was an avant-garde art movement that emerged in the late 1950s as a group of
artists who had become disenchanted with the elitist attitude they perceived in the art world
at the time. These artists looked to Futurists and Dadaists for inspiration, focusing especially
on performance aspects of the movements,

1. How to Explain Painting to a Dead Hare, 26/11/1965

In this performance piece, Beuys could be viewed - his head and
face covered in honey and gold leaf - through a gallery's windows, a
slab of iron tied to one boot, a felt pad to the other, as the artist
cradled a dead hare. As though carrying out a strange music (if not
some macabre bedtime story), Beuys frequently whispered things to
the animal carcass about his own drawings hanging on the walls
around him. Beuys would periodically vary the bleak rhythm of this
scenario by walking around the cramped space, one footstep
muffled by the felt, the other amplified by the iron.
Every item in the room - a wilting fir tree, the honey, the felt, and the
fifty-dollars-worth of gold leaf - was chosen specifically for both its
symbolic potential as well as its literal significance: honey for life,
gold for wealth, hare as death, metal as conductor of invisible energies, felt as protection,
and so forth. As for most of his subsequent installations and performance work, Beuys had
created a new visual syntax not only for himself, but for all conceptual art that might follow
him.

2. Coyote: I like America and America likes

me, azione presso , René Block Gallery, New York
1974

The whole scenario must be considered on a

symbolic level, taking into account the fact that
symbols were a central element in Beuys’
production. The coyote is the most appropriate
animal to represent the American spirit, and it is
often associated with the indigenous communities
who lived in the land before the arrival of the
European colonizers. With this performance, the
artist wanted to share a message of solidarity and communion, showing everyone using the
figures of the coyote and the shaman as an example, that through communication and
acceptance coexistence is possible – as he did by living with a coyote in a small space. Living
with a wild animal was obviously difficult, but an effort had to be made by both parties.

3. Joseph Beuys’s hat

Bruce Nauman
● Bruce Nauman was one of the most prominent, influential, and versatile American
artists to emerge in the 1960s. Although his work is not easily defined by its
materials, styles, or themes, sculpture is central to it, and it is characteristic of
Post-Minimalism in the way it blends ideas from Conceptualism, Minimalism,
performance art, and video art.
● Much of Nauman's work reflects the disappearance of the old modernist belief in the
ability of the artist to express his ideas clearly and powerfully. Art, for him, is a
haphazard system of codes and signs, just like any other form of communication.
Aside from informing his use of words, it has also encouraged him to use readymade
objects - objects that, unlike paintings or traditional sculptures, already carry
meanings and associations from their use in the world - and to make casts of objects
ranging from the space underneath chairs to human body parts.
● Nauman's work can be understood as an interrogation of the banality of his white
male body: its scale, identity, and relationship to his environs.

1. Self-Portrait as a Fountain, 1966-67

The portfolio reveals Bruce Nauman’s interest in the functions
of language, as he humorously depicts literal interpretations of
common phrases. In Self-Portrait as a Fountain, Nauman
questions the traditional role of the artist. He depicts himself
shirtless, with raised arms and open palms, spewing an arc of
water out of his pursed lips, in imitation of the nude statues
customarily found in decorative fountains. Thus the artist and
the work of art become one and the same. Self-Portrait as a
Fountain also pays homage to Marcel Duchamp‘s notorious
Fountain (1917)—a readymade porcelain urinal that Duchamp provocatively exhibited as a
sculpture.

2. Neon templates of the left half of

my body taken at ten inches intervals,
1966
Neon Templates of the Left Half of My
Body Taken at Ten Inch Intervals is a
self-portrait in absentia. The shapes of the
neon tubes were molded against the
contours of the artist’s body.
 3. From Hand to Mouth, 1967
Bruce Nauman's From Hand to Mouth is a relief sculpture
designed to be hung on a wall. The sculpture is cast in a synthetic
hydrocarbon wax and supported from the reverse by a layer of
woven jute fabric strips. Wax is a vulnerable material that is easily
deformed, especially at elevated temperatures.

4. Green Corridor, 1970

More antagonistically, Bruce Nauman's Green Light Corridor, 1970, one
of the few works in the show to overtly emphasize the relationship
between embodiment and vision, presented viewers with a
claustrophobic passageway suffused in green light.

5. Live Taped Video Corridor, 1969

The work originated as a prop for a solitary,

videotaped performance, Walk with
Contrapposto (1968), in which Nauman is
seen walking up and down a narrow
passageway, shifting his hips back and forth
with each step in an exaggerated imitation
of the conventional pose of classical
sculpture.

Rebecca Horn
1. Unicorn, 1970
Unicorn is a white sculpture designed to be worn by a female performer. A series of vertical
and horizontal white fabric straps serve as a kind of bodice that binds the performer’s naked
body, with further straps connecting the neck to a tall, conical, horn-like structure that
extends vertically from the top of the performer’s head.
Horn has made work in a variety of media throughout her career, from drawing to installation,
writing to filmmaking. Yet it is with her sculptural constructions for the body that she has
undertaken the most systematic investigation of individual subjectivity.
Her bodily extensions, for example, draw attention to the human need for interaction and
control while also pointing to the futility of ambitions to overcome natural limitations.
Similarly, her constructions, despite their medical imagery, are deliberately clumsy and
functionless, while other works attest to the unacknowledged affinities between humans,
animals and machines.

2. Handschuhfinger (Prolungamento delle dita delle mani),

performance 1972

Finger Gloves, by the German artist Rebecca Horn, consists of

two black prostheses, each with five thin, rigid, metre-long
‘fingers’ made out of wood and fabric. Each prosthesis is
designed to be worn on the hand of a performer, attached to the
wrists with black straps. This focus on the human body took on a
particular personal resonance for Horn, who was confined to
hospitals and sanatoria for much of her early twenties after
suffering from severe lung poisoning while working unprotected
with polyester and fibreglass at Hamburg’s Academy of the Arts.