Joanna Scavone performing "Body as a Sphere"

This seems to be the summer of Bruce Nauman, at least at the the Venice Biennale, where he won the Golden Lion, and to some extent here at the Walker, where his work in The Quick and the Dead is garnering particular attention from Walker staff. One of our installation technicians, the multimedia whiz Peter Murphy, wrote on the complexities of setting up Nauman’s 1971 Microphone/Tree PieceMurphy, and now several staff from our visitor services department have written on Body as a Sphere, a 1969 performance work situated near the beginning of the exhibition.

Joey Heinen gives a thorough overview of performing this deceptively demanding piece, while Eric Jones offers a concise yet searing take on what it means to become an object of stranger’s gaze. Kaitin Kelly recounts her truly visceral response to it; and Emily Rohrabaugh puts her experience in a broader context with Nauman works at the Walker and the artist’s overall career, including his early training as a physicist. Finally, the pugnacious Joseph Rizzo gives his own irreverent account of Body as a Sphere. Just as Rohrabaugh says that performing it “has set a new standard for me as I look at conceptual art,” after reading these accounts, you will never look at a person curled up in a corner in the same way again.

== JOEY HEINEN ==

“If a viewer announces that I am not real but in fact a piece of sculpture, I get the urge to clear my throat to prove my humanity, which seems like such an absurd thing to prove that I change my mind and allow them to think what they want to.”

Approximately once a week, I get paid to curl up in the corner of a gallery for up to two hours. Nice work if you can get it, right? To some extent, yes, but there is much more to it than what may meet the average gallery patron’s eye. The Visitor Services team accumulates all sorts of interesting odd jobs across the Walker that simply do not fit in many administrative employee’s job descriptions. Usually within the realm of performance art, we have recited news headlines after completing transactions at the box office, dug lemons from a sometimes rain-drenched “garden,” and now we bring Bruce Nauman’s Body as a Sphere, a “selection from untitled performance” (1969), to life (albeit very still and motionless life) in Gallery 4 of The Quick and the Dead exhibition, during select hours.

The basic instructions for this performance read “curl your body into the corner of a room. Imagine a point at the center of your curled body and concentrate on pulling your body in around that point. Then attempt to press that down into the corner of the room.” It goes on to describe the ideal time length of the exercise and explains that it is both a mental and physical activity. These instructions were pretty vague, but that actually helps since there are so many of us employed in Visitor Services, and obviously so many different bodies that require different positions and postures for comfort and performability. Some performers, for instance, keep their eyes wide open, directed out at the viewer, whereas I channel my vulnerable side and keep my face mostly hidden. The fetal position is popular, as is fitting oneself directly in the corner or kneeling and tucking oneself inward, though that last one can prove to be most uncomfortable.

After clocking in about 9 hours with this piece (during multiple performances), I have abandoned a sense of experimentation and now hold the same position every time. I press my face and shoulders against the ground so as to equally distribute weight, with one bent arm somewhat covering my face and completing a circular motion with my legs, which are resting on top of each other. According to Nauman’s instructions, the performer should be able to hold the same position for a longer amount of time with each successive performance, probably as a result of the performer discovering a position best suited for his or her body. After many attempts at positions that would inevitably cut off blood flow or pinch nerves (thus creating temporary muscle paralysis), I think I’ve settled on the position that’s best for me.

A Nauman “shift” begins as innocuously as any other work shift, by punching the ol’ time clock—and maybe doing some brief calisthenics before assuming the position. It’s always humorous to see a coworker come in all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, marching briskly up the gallery stairs and making a bee-line for the appointed corner, whose walls are now covered with shoe scuff marks from restless repositioning, only to return two hours later with a glazed-over facial expression and a few hair cowlicks. All in a day’s work, I guess.

But at least there is always a guaranteed take-away at the end of a shift—the eavesdropping. Maybe it’s because an astounding number of patrons believe that you are a wax sculpture (maybe they’re thinking of Duane Hanson?), but many of them make statements so unguarded and ridiculous you can’t help but feel like more of an earless art “object” than a performer. My favorite story involves a woman who, seeing one of my co-workers performing Body as a Sphere, responded “Oh, yes, they have one of these in Denver.”

Of course, many patrons confuse this piece with the work of Tino Sehgal, whose work was both prominently and covertly on view at the Walker in the winter of 07/08. Close, but no cigar—though you do get a gold star for seeing this connection, since one of Sehgal’s pieces referenced Nauman by name: Instead of allowing some things to rise up to your face, dancing bruce and dan and other things (2000). I can certainly see the connection between these two works, not just because a person is rolled up in an empty corner, but also because the ambiguity forces the viewer to piece together what is happening.

Much in the same way that some little children have asked me while I’m performing if I’m hurt, the childlike curiosity of the viewer is also coupled with a very human sense of isolation and a projection of his or her reality. My reality while performing this piece is about altering my perception in order to possibly alter my form. Sometimes I imagine myself filling an impossibly small space or withdrawing into myself like a trapdoor spider. If a viewer announces that I am not real but in fact a piece of sculpture, I get the urge to clear my throat to prove my humanity, which seems like such an absurd thing to prove that I change my mind and allow them to think what they want to.

In many ways, I see the duality between myself and the viewer in this piece to be similar to the social mores in an elevator as people avert their eyes from each other. They see what is familiar, whether that be a famous realist work of sculpture or something absurd and inhuman, and ignore what might be too confrontational. One thing I love about Body as a Sphere, and especially performing it, is its uncanny presence in a gallery. This piece creates a sort of electric charge as stranger after stranger passes over me like the time that measures my two-hour shift, each visitor with his or her own observation or comment. What’s even more interesting is what I cannot see or hear but simply what I sense, to put it nebulously. The feeling I get when an entire family is huddled around me or when I can tell that someone has stopped dead in his tracks from across the gallery to stare at me is almost enough to give me a visible shudder, which of course would give me away instantly.

Granted, Nauman’s piece is simple enough that one could gather a number of conclusions that could speak about human beings and how we perceive our surroundings. For me, it is about the palpable discomfort between viewer and object. Then again, that might just be my legs cramping up.

== ERIC JONES ==

Is that art, a gay guy laying on the floor? —Walker patron on Target Free Thursday Night

In my experience observing audiences observing other performers of Bruce Nauman’s Body as a Sphere, I am convinced their gaze is largely dependent on desire. The body of a young blonde woman performing this piece changes the length of the heterosexual male gaze, changes the distance of his proximity, and certainly inhibits his reading of the didactic label on the wall nearby. Regardless of a viewer’s openness to observing meditation as an art display, the subjective encounter with Body as a Sphere is always distracted by the marked body. Young artist envy, reverence, absurdity, or obscenity—these belong to the viewer. However, if the viewer wishes to communicate something about the piece—or worse, the performer—they do: standing closer, leaning over me, loudly questioning “Is that a boy or a girl?” Yet in the piece, this marked encounter, a shared shock dissolves as my energies float inward, closer toward the corner of the room.

== KAITIN KELLY ==

“I felt a sharp pain in my shoulder blade and my hip from the floor. My face was flushed and I was having a little bit of difficulty taking full breaths … although I was not enclosed in a confining space here at the Walker, the idea of Nauman’s piece and my physical body was now enclosing me and causing my breath to constrict even more …”

I consider myself familiar with the practices of meditation and movement studies. Although I suffer from the typical struggles of meditation like many others, I still have some days when I feel quite accomplished and refreshed after completing a session. So, when I decided to cover a shift for one of my co-workers at the Walker and ended up in the corner of a gallery unmoving for an hour in the name of art, it seemed like an interesting concept that I was ready to experience.

As I was shown the location of the Nauman piece, I was quite calm and plopped right down into my desired pose to settle in to Body as a Sphere. I admittedly tried a few poses in the first couple minutes to decide which one seemed to be comfortable enough to hold for the long haul. I chose one that I often find myself sleeping in. Curled in the corner, my body had a slight twist and I focused my eyes on the ceiling so that I could gather what was going on around me without having to look directly at the people ogling me. The ground was cold and hard and the sounds in the gallery were not conducive to a meditative environment. A pulsating noise similar to a clock and the occasional thunder-type sound seemed to suspend time and space.

Listening to people decide whether or not I was in fact a real person and not a mannequin was amusing. One French couple speaking very close to my head in their native tongue joked that I came to the museum by myself and ended up “ici” in the corner. A girl commented that I couldn’t be real since my hair looked fake (humorous because I had died my hair with an $8 box of color the night before).

Throughout this observance of sound, the cold floor, and my concentration of breath, I started to have the strange sensations that one has from not moving from one position for an hour. Granted, I could have gotten up and slowly moved to a new position, but that seemed like cheating. I got myself into that position and I was going to keep it! My arm went numb; I felt a sharp pain in my shoulder blade and my hip from the floor. My face was flushed and I was having a little bit of difficulty taking full breaths in the twist that I had placed myself in. The idea of not moving morphed itself into not being able to move. I wondered if I could get myself out of the position I had purposefully chosen to be in. A few months back, I had discovered on a boat in an enclosed cabin space that I am in fact claustrophobic. And although I was not enclosed in a confining space here at the Walker, the idea of Nauman’s piece and my physical body was now enclosing me and causing my breath to constrict even more than it had before.

Through meditative breaths and some yoga and dance-training techniques, I managed to combat a full-blown panic attack, which would have been admittedly very embarrassing (but, I’m sure, an interesting development in the work of art as a whole, especially for viewers who kept streaming by on what seemed like a busy Saturday at the Walker). I became calm again and soon I saw a face and heard a voice saying “hi……..I’m here to relieve you.” I felt like I was underwater and this person was fuzzy. But I busted out with a “Thank God!” and clumsily climbed to my feet, asa Visitor’s Services staff person asked if I needed help.

I stumbled from the gallery and had to stop outside and hold onto the railing, for my vision was narrowing in with blackness and my eyes were starting to water. I managed to gather myself long enough to have a conversation with someone about my “interesting pose” and then stumbled to the employee kitchen. Feeling worse by the minute, I ended up in the bathroom getting sick and seeing blackness for what seemed like a good two minutes. I felt as if I had consumed much too much vodka or as if I had had the flu for the third day in a row. Luckily, my supervisor recognized the fact that I looked a little under the weather and bravely volunteered to do the second hour of my Body as a Sphere shift. He is my hero. I learned a lot about myself and experienced art more than I have in awhile. I don’t think that an exhibit or a shift at the Walker has ever made me vomit before. I guess that is a new and courageous place for art to go … ?

== EMILY ROHRABAUGH ==

“I am not just sculptural material; I actively work to manipulate the viewer’s experience. … For the hour that I am in the gallery corner, I fill the room with my energy and slow down my actions to 1 task/hour.”

My method of performing the Bruce Nauman piece Body As Sphere from untitled performance (1969) is informed by my study of the three Bruce Nauman pieces in the Walker’s collection that are currently installed in Gallery 2 of The Shape of Time. In these pieces the artist filmed himself performing what appear to be simple physical tasks described by their titles, which are shown on small televisions on the far side of the gallery. One piece in particular, Bouncing in a Corner No. 1 (1968), was useful in assessing how to interpret Nauman’s instructions. Here Nauman is performing a simple motion; the artist begins at a standing position and lets his body fall into the corner of the room, the television emits the sound of his body hitting the wall, “BOOM,” and then Nauman bounces back to standing. The film is looped so that as soon as he gets to standing he begins falling back again, making him appear locked in a repetitive, meditative cycle, his actions stretching time in that corner of gallery 2.

This work is not only helpful in that I can see Nauman’s performance style and the discipline of his actions while performing the piece, but also because Nauman manipulated the film, showing that the viewer’s experience is an important part of performing. He also rotated the film and manipulated the speed of the tape, making his body appear sideways and fall slower than a person would fall in real time. As Nauman was trained as a physicist, there can be no doubt that he understood the way an object would fall due to the effects of gravity. Instead of making his body into a sculpture in action, bouncing against the wall, Nauman’s body appears to defy gravity.

I see the way that Nauman manipulated the viewer’s experience of his motion as a cue for my own performance of Body As a Sphere. I am not just sculptural material; I actively work to manipulate the viewer’s experience. My goal is to remain focused on the meditation of finding the center of my body and pressing that point into the corner of the room, for one hour, as specified in Nauman’s instructions. For the hour that I am in the gallery corner, I fill the room with my energy and slow down my actions to 1 task/hour. By slowing down my actions, I blend in with the other objects in the gallery—yet I am separate enough to be out of place, and thus engage the viewer.

I was drawn to focus on the time element on this piece because of another performance in The Quick and the Dead that requires performer input. In John Cage’s Organ²/ASLSP (”ASLSP” being Cage’s own acronym for “as slow as possible”), Cage specified that the performer determines the length of the performance. In both Body as a Sphere and Organ²/ASLSP (performed nearby in Saint Mary’s Basilica on Thursday nights), the performer has instructions: a musical score in the Cage piece and (like the George Brecht pieces that are also part of The Quick and the Dead) a written set of instructions for the Nauman piece. By giving the performer control, the success of the piece becomes contingent on the openness of both the performer and the audience.

Body as a Sphere actively changes the space around it and invites the viewers to imagine a space being created by the performance. It is not a traditional sculpture, in that it is not an object in empty space to be examined; nor is it about the way a body looks when performing a set of instructions. When performing, I focus on a conceptual point within space, a point that a person viewing me could never see, and would never experience without the invitation. This kind of thought experiment was a necessity in Nauman’s math and science studies—visualizing concepts about physical matter that cannot be simply identified using our senses; he is using Body as a Sphere to share something very fundamental about how he saw reality.

In 1967, Nauman made a neon sign explicitly spelling out the function of art as a vehicle to reveal new experiences: “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths.” This piece, selected as one of the Nauman works representing the U.S. at this year’s Venice Biennale (click here for a video walkthrough of his installation there), explicitly informs us how to view the rest of his work.

I’ve always liked Bouncing in a Corner No. 1, but only after performing Body as a Sphere was I able to see that both pieces were working on the same goals of revealing basic mystic truths. The works are simple, concise, full of meaning and aimed at transparency, which has set a new standard for me as I look at conceptual art.

== JOE RIZZO ==

“I positioned myself in such a way where I could see the visitors reading the didactic panel on the wall. They would read the panel, look at me, see that I was staring at them blankly, and hurry away. It was great fun, until this heartbreaking scene …”

First off, I should say that whenever Bruce Nauman comes to mind I have a recurring fantasy of knocking his stupid cowboy hat off his head with a satisfying smack. I’m not quite sure what fuels my hatred of all things Nauman. Perhaps my bullshit detector is a little too sensitive. To me, Nauman personifies all the bad stereotypes of contemporary art—pretentious, aloof, inaccessible, irrelevant. Anyway, as much as I genuinely enjoy The Quick and the Dead, which includes several works by this artist, I respectfully asked to be excused from “performing” Body as a Sphere. Twice, though, I volunteered when my brothers and sisters from the Visitor Services department were in a jam: once when performing the piece made my colleague physically sick, and once when another colleague called in sick, presumably ill in anticipation of performing this piece.

At first, the experience of performing Body as a Sphere was exactly as I expected. Cold, painful, boring, humiliating. As I settled into a state of semi-consciousness, I found the reactions of Walker visitors to be pretty interesting. Some people seemed unsettled by the sight of a curled-up person in the gallery. Conversations ceased when they came near. Some, in hushed tones, discussed whether or not I was real. I heard one man say to his companion, “Look, there’s a taxidermy dog over there, so there’s a taxidermy man here. Taxidermy dog, taxidermy man.” Taxidermy man?

The second time I performed this piece, I positioned myself in such a way where I could see the visitors reading the didactic panel on the wall. They would read the panel, look at me, see that I was staring at them blankly, and hurry away. It was great fun, until this heartbreaking scene: a small girl, about 5 or 6, tugged on her father’s sleeve while he was reading the didactic panel. She said, “Daddy, that’s a real man on the floor.” He said, “You know what’s interesting, Honey? He looks like a real man, but he’s actually a statue.” “No,” she said sternly, “He’s breathing and he’s staring at me. He’s a real man.” Daddy replied, “Yes, Honey, he does look very real.” He took her hand and led her away.

Also interesting is the feeling I had after I was done with the piece. My mind was in a thick cloud. My body, bruised and stiff from the cold gallery floor, was lethargic and uncoordinated. I had to sit and stare for quite some time before I was ready to talk to anyone. I honestly did not think this piece would affect me at all. My experience and the reactions I witnessed to Body as a Sphere were pretty unexpected. I must admit that. It’s just as well, because in a fight with Bruce Nauman, I would probably go down. I could take a big piece of him down with me, though.

This always seemed a little strange to me. I always thought of photographs as fictions, like all other ways of making images and telling stories. Some people started making paintings that looked like “ distorted” photographs and that seemed very interesting – to make a very carefully rendered painting of a distorted image produced by a camera. It called into question thereliability of realism. Were such paintings less realistic? But how could that be if they were faithful copies of the photograph?

The Painted Word was a slightly hysterical attack on modern art in general and Conceptual art in particular. It was strange because Wolfe’s earlier book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a novel about San Francisco in the 1960s and the Merry Pranksters – (“ are you on the bus or are you off the bus?”) was so cool. Perhaps Wolfe had started the decent into masculine middle age which often seems to be paved with disappointments, broken dreams, and fear of impotence which is then translated into a longing for a more dependable past when art was art and there were universally-accepted standards of quality, or so they say.

Photorealism appeared at the end of The Painted Word as a kind of realist rebellion against the tide of Conceptual art. It gave such pleasure, an in-your-face revenge for Wolfe to note that “ [Richard] Estes is reported to be selling at $80,000 a crack” in the galleries of New York or London. The greatest artistic absurdity imagined by him would be an exhibition in the year 2000 in which the words of art critics would be reproduced in huge panels in the gallery while the artworks under discussion — by Jasper Johns and Morris Louis — would appear as visual footnotes to the text, little postage-stamped sized reproductions. Actually, that sounds to me like it could be an interesting exhibition, although to tell you the truth I think an exhibition of photorealist paintings could be interesting, or an exhibition of work by Jasper Johns or Morris Louis could likewise be interesting.

The greater absurdity to me is the stratospheric heights of the art market. $80,000 for a painting by Richard Estes sounds so quaint in this moment of hyper-capitalism we inhabit. The auction houses routinely display their latest broken records in the art magazines; a million dollars for this photograph, a few million dollars for that painting – not for “ blue chip” artworks but for recent work by living, younger artists. The magenta heart by Jeff Koons is probably very impressive but was it worth twenty-five million dollars? Who knows, maybe it cost thirty million dollars to produce and the artist and his investors took a five million dollar bath at auction. Not to be outdone, Damien Hirst achieved the coveted distinction of producing (and investing in) the highest priced artwork by a living artist: the diamond-covered skull that sold for one hundred million dollars. Perhaps art has lost its power to shock and the only shock that’s left is the price at auction. I’m waiting for the artwork that will sell at auction for one billion dollars.

A week ago I walked into the Medtronic Gallery at Walker Art Center and encountered a work by Tino Sehgal. A young man, following the directions issued by the artist, was sort of crawling, sort of turning around on the floor of the empty gallery. He was moving his body in slow-motion and had his hands up to his face, sort of framing his field of vision with his fingers while he looked straight ahead or closed his eyes. I asked him what he was doing and he said something, so quietly, that I couldn’t quite understand him. Maybe he said “ I see it there” or maybe he said “ Tino Sehgal” or maybe he said something else, I’m not sure.

I watched him for a while. It was beautiful. It felt like fresh air filling my heart and mind, reminding me of Stevie Winwood’s high, thin voice singing “ Can’t Find My Way Home.”Just when I thought the art market had stolen from art its power to shock, I was shocked by this project. I was shocked by its subtlety, its quietude. Watching the piece was like reading a poem. The poem operates at a different standard of time than the one we normally inhabit. Reading the poem forces us to get out of that normal time and into a slower time. Watching the piece stopped the normal time. It interrupted the normal expectations of what “ should” happen in the gallery, and this was a great pleasure for me.

Why must everything constantly make sense? I loved Tino Sehgal’s piece because it refused to make sense.The piece refused to make sense, and what shocked me was its subtlety, its quietude. I thought of other Conceptual or Performance artworks, other projects that were so different. I thought of Through the Night Softly, performed by Chris Burden in 1973, in which he crawled over broken shards of glass without a shirt and Vito Acconci’s Seedbed from that same era, in which he was hidden under a ramp in the Sonnabend Gallery, masturbating. Such projects seemed to me like the artists had something to prove, kind of an artist-manhood hazing ritual. Chris Burden once said that he wanted to be taken seriously as an artist and having yourself shot in the arm with a .22 is certainly one way to do that.

I saw another piece by Tino Sehgal in the Burnet Gallery at Walker Art Center. I’ve seen this one performed several times, by different women wearing the gallery guard uniform, in which the guard sings sweetly “ This is propaganda.” Indeed, museum and gallery exhibitions are a form of propaganda — all art is a form of propaganda, including the piece by Sehgal which sweetly announces this dichotomy. Again, I loved the work for its quietude, its poetry, its music.

I thought of another project, The House with the Ocean View, performed by Marina Abramovic in the Sean Kelly Gallery in 2002. She lived in the gallery for twelve days without eating or speaking. It seemed to me to be a kind of purification ritual after the horror of the attack on September 11. There is a quiet tension in the work; the self-negation is balanced with an equally powerful self-affirmation. I find the quiet tension in these projects bySehgal and Abramovic to be very powerful.

Our experience of an artwork occurs within the context of our own assumptions and expectations, our own hopes, fears, and ideologies. Perhaps I responded to Sehgal’s work the way I did because of my need to counter the stratosphere of the art market, the hyper-capitalism of this moment we inhabit, the hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives wasted to prove a point that never can be proven because the point keeps changing. There is too much nonsense out there; I need something that doesn’t make sense.

Conceptual art did not overturn the art market, but neither can the art market rob art entirely of its power even as it endlessly absorbs and converts art to higher levels of capital. Tino Sehgal’s work is wonderfully atmospheric and ephemeralbut neither is it immune from the market. It is now entering the market, where it will be bought and sold. Nothing is pure, clean or easy. But the work has the power to shock, in its own gentle, quiet way. It doesn’t make sense and that is beautiful.

Paul previously posted videos here and here, but it is well worth a click to view the videos from Perjovschi’s recent MoMA show of the artist in action.

Rosenblum starts his lecture by laying out his thesis, which was that Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein were not the first to use elements of popular culture in their art. Name brands, pop songs, and newspaper clippings are all over Picasso’s artwork. However, for many years, scholars ignored what the words in Picasso’s paintings might be saying, preferring to concentrate on the formal, more abstract aspects of his Cubist paintings. But when Pop art came on the scene, suddenly all of these hidden meanings started to pop out. You can just barely make out a woman playing a stringed instrument in Ma Jolie (winter 1911-1912). Yet despite the cryptic imagery, Picasso has written the title across the bottom of the canvas, his nickname for his lover at the time and the refrain to a song often played in the music halls of Paris. Rosenblum looks in depth at Ma Jolie as well as a 1912 painting by Picasso that uses the French brand of bouillon cubes, Kub, to ironically comment on Cubism.

Rosenblum said in his lecture that he wanted his audience to think about “ how new art changes our idea of what old art looks like.” Rosenblum asserted that when one thinks young artists are crass and audacious, one should take another look at many of the artists already considered to be “ masters,” for even more established artists were often radical in their own time. Maybe seeing Matthew Barney as a goat in Drawing Restraint 7 can give us insight into Picasso’s self-portraits as a minotaur. Perhaps Robert Gober’s bronze, fake wood plank in Quartet can inspire us to reflect on the trompe l’oeil wood grains in Picasso’s Cubist still lifes; or maybe considering Kara Walker’s provocative scenes and Demoiselles D’Avignon can spark ideas that illuminate both artists’ work. In any event, Picasso and American Art is a rare opportunity for us to consider not only how Amercian artists continue to respond to Picasso, but also how contemporary art can give us new ways of looking at one of the 20th century’s most acclaimed artists.

Excerpts from Rosenblum’s lecture:

rosenblum1mytopic.mp3

rosenblum2ononelevel.mp3

rosenblum3oneofthemost.mp3

References:

Robert Rosenblum. On Modern American Art: Selected Essays. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999.

______. Cubism and Twentieth Century Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979.

______. “Cubism as Pop Art” in Modern Art and Popular Culture: Readings in High and Low. Edited by Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990.

Images:

Jasper Johns, Two Maps II (1966)

Pablo Picasso, Ma Jolie (winter 1911-1912)

Bouillion Kub advertisement

Pablo Picasso, 1912

Joseph Beuys, Fan Photo, 1982, black-and-white photograph, 12 x 9-3/8 inches, Alfred and Marie Greisinger Collection, Walker Art Center, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1992

© 2006 Estate of Joseph Beuys/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

I’ve spent a lot of time pondering Joseph Beuys‘ work. In 1997 I curated an exhibition from the Walker’s deep collection of Beuys objects; I’ve published a few essays on him; and in 2004 I taught a college class just on his work — a whole semester, thirteen lectures, on one artist. I could have done thirteen more, if I’d had the time and the stamina; for me, his work is gut-wrenching, inspiring, precise, aggravating, perversely beautiful, and undeniably Important. And there’s a lot of it: Beuys was nothing if not prolific. He used to say that his totem animal was the hare. I’d guess the Energizer Bunny was part of the family, too.

Even after all my thinking and looking, I wasn’t prepared for the punch of seeing Tierfrau (Animal Woman) (1949/1984) for the first time. It’s a bronze, about 18 inches tall, and on loan to the Walker for just a few months from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. I was excited to see the piece, which I knew only from reproductions, so as soon as we had it installed I went to take a look. I was amused to see the gallery guard slowly circumnavigating the sculpture on its pedestal, seemingly mesmerized by its presence. I was, too — it was so much more powerful than I’d expected. Seeing it confirmed for me something I already knew: photographs are a terrible way to look at sculpture. Besides the obvious problem of only being able to see one side of a work, in a photo you also can’t confront it with your body — to visually, viscerally feel it, to relate its heft, texture, size, and temperature to your own. What happens when you do is often surprising. This skinny, prickly little bronze thing had me completely entranced. I found it mysterious, and mystery is seductive. So I decided to do some research. (Yes, I’m a nerdy historian. I like research. This is not an apology.)

I found that Animal Woman bridges Beuys’ entire career, which is the reason for its unusual date of 1949/1984. The upper half is based on Zinnakt (Tin Nude), made in 1949 while he was a student at the Kunstakademie in Dsseldorf, Germany. Tin Nude is a portable fetish object with a tiny head and feet that bracket conical breasts, ballooning thighs, protruding buttocks, and a smooth, swollen abdomen suitable for rubbing. It has no arms and it can’t stand up; it can only lie there, with its arched back and thrusting pelvis. The object has no relationship to walking, talking flesh-and-blood women — it’s an Archetype, all about fecundity, rituals, and the Great Mother Goddess.

Beuys was clearly fond of his little Tin Nude, because in 1984 — just two years before he died — he placed it upright on a lumpy, bell-shaped base, cast the whole thing in bronze, and named it Animal Woman. The transformation is astonishing: no longer a passive fertility figure, this regal creature looks as if she is queen of some netherworld, and has just emerged from the goo still sporting a few prehistoric spines. The protrusions are actually remnants of the casting process that Beuys decided not to smooth off, and the mottled patina he added to the bronze suggests woodsy camouflage or maybe molting skin. (You aren’t tempted to rub this belly!) And what’s up with that crude pedestal she’s standing on? Is it a water spout that’s thrusting her up out of the primordial sea? There is some kind of movement implied by her stance — I can almost imagine her bounding through the forest or winging off into the ether. It’s true that Animal Woman and her predecessor embody well-worn ideas about the primal link between the feminine and the earth (a cornerstone of Beuys’ ideology), but the artist has accomplished something extraordinary here — Tin Nude has morphed from a quasi- Venus of Willendorf to a sister of the Winged Victory of Samothrace – an Extreme Makeover of the art historical kind.

We installed Animal Woman in a gallery of postwar paintings and sculpture by the likes of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, and Ad Reinhardt (part of the exhibition The Shape of Time). She completely holds her own in their company — in fact, the earthiness of Beuys’ sculpture offers a pungent counterpoint to all those ethereal American abstractions. But she’s only in Minneapolis through the end of May. Don’t miss the chance to see her.

(Rights to reproduce Animal Woman on this site were not freely available, so come to the Walker to see the real thing.)