06 july 2021, Flor Linckens
Stripping art of its holiness
Until 17 July, the exhibition “Wer nicht denken will, fliegt raus!” can be seen in Coppejans Gallery in Antwerp, in which the work of Joseph Beuys is combined with the work of the German photographer Lothar Wolleh, who has managed to capture Beuys on a whopping thousand negatives.
Lothar Wolleh, Beuys in Moderna Museet Stockholm, 1971, COPPEJANS GALLERY.
This year marks a 100 years since the birthday of the eccentric artist Joseph Beuys. Beuys was known as a critical, politically and socially engaged artist. He was also affiliated with the Düsseldorf Art Academy as a professor of monumental sculpture. He was also a draftsman and an action and installation artist, in addition to his role as an activist and politician. He wanted to shape society in a new way.
He became perhaps most famous for the myth that he created around his person. He would always wear that iconic hat, which he said he wore to cover old burns from the war. Until his death, he maintained that he’d been a Luftwaffe pilot and that his plane had been shot down over Crimea, after which he was found by Tatars, who helped him out of the wreckage and lovingly nursed him for twelve days using felt and grease to keep him warm. Two materials that would be central to his later practice. Nevertheless, archive research showed that it was mainly a self-created myth: Beuys was never a pilot, but rather a radio operator. His plane crashed in a storm and it was found by German soldiers within 24 hours. After that, he spent three weeks in an army hospital.
Joseph Beuys, 1 Wirtschaftswert (Matches), 1977, COPPEJANS GALLERY.
Beuys was one of the best-known artists within the Fluxus movement. He believed that all human expressions and actions should be regarded as art, because art and life are inextricably linked. Beuys: “Every person is an artist. The concept of art has been expanded so far that every normal situation is art. I’m not an artist at all, unless we say that everyone is an artist.” He began to think about art in new ways, at a time when abstract painting was especially popular in Germany. He made use of unconventional symbols such as the deer and the hare and materials like copper, wax, fat and felt. When he died in 1986, the Dutch Volkskrant newspaper wrote: “Joseph Beuys wanted to strip art of its sanctity”.
Wer nicht denken will, fliegt raus! - COPPEJANS GALLERY.
The exhibition focuses on the collaboration between Beuys and Wolleh. While it may be a slightly thankless role to be exhibited alongside the work of perhaps the most famous artist of the second half of the twentieth century, Wolleh was himself a well-known artist, who captured over a hundred artists in his lifetime, including Magritte, De Saint Phalle, Richter, Christo, Uecker, Baselitz and Tinguely. He was closely associated with the international avant-garde art scene of the 1960s and took several photographs that are now identified as iconic with the memory we have of many of those artists.
