Joseph Beuys

Fabrice Marcoloni’s mounting of Joseph Beuys’s “Difesa della Natura (Defence of Nature)” at his Toronto gallery, Artcore, was the first North American showing—and the 20th anniversary—of the final metaphysical enterprise of the great Teutonic shaman and transcendental artist-gardener-shepherd, who was to devote much of the last 15 years of his life to this prodigious, never-ending project.

Larger in scale and duration than any installation or action or even a protracted manifestation of any of these conventionally encountered Beuys engagements, “Difesa della Natura”—which Beuys referred to as a “phenomenological unicum” of world art—can be said essentially to have begun in 1972, and to have continued until the artist’s death in 1986. Indeed it continues still.

It is not easy to isolate the actual beginning of this presumably endless meta-action. Beuys’s fascination for and veneration of nature—nature as the possessor of a “secret manifest,” through the pious study of which, man could come finally and fully to himself—began as early as 1956-57 when, in the throes of a profound depression, he was given care and protection at the 37-acre farm in Kranenburg, Germany, owned by the artist’s first collectors, the brothers Franz Joseph and Hans ver der Grintin. Beuys worked the land as therapy (“During this crisis,” he wrote, “I determined to search, with all my strength, for what is deep in life, art and science … “) and developed, during the three or four months of his physical and spiritual rebirth in the countryside, the essentials of his proliferating “Theory of Sculpture as a Social Plastic Art.”

It could be argued, however, that the galvanizing moment of Beuys’s dialogue with emblematic nature that became “Operazione Difesa della Natura,” and the beginning of his long-standing relationship with rural Italy, happened on a ferry to Capri, during a fortuitous meeting with Italian curator, collector, writer (The Felt Hat: Joseph Beuys, a Life Told) and editor Lucrezia De Domizio, Baroness Durini. It was the Baroness who, with her husband, Baron Giuseppe Durini of Bolognano, would soon open their villa in the Abruzzian mountains to Beuys and his ideas, hosting there several pivotal moments in the trajectory of what would develop as the lineaments of the “Defence of Nature” enterprise: the agriculturally oriented meeting and discussion “Incontro con Beuys” on October 3, 1974; a conference on “Direct Democracy and Creative Freedom”; and another conference on February 13, 1978, in Pescara, the “Fondazione dell’instituto per la Rinacita dell Agricoltura,” presented by Beuys’s venerable FIU or Free International University.

These meetings, with their attendant blackboard lectures and photos and the production of subsequent multiples (a son of Beuysian tic), came to fruition in May of 1982 with the first official “Difesa della Natura” operation in Abruzzi, the “beginning of the plantation work” (the “Piantagione”), which was followed hard upon by Beuys’s similar ritual planting of 7000 oak trees at the opening, a month or so later, of Documenta 7 in Kassel. “In planting trees,” Beuys maintained, at the “Difesa della Natura” discussion in Bolognano in May of 1982, “we plant the tree and the tree plants us, since we belong together. It’s something that takes place by moving in two directions at the same time. So the tree has awareness, or consciousness, of us just as we have awareness of the tree. It’s therefore extremely important to try to create or stimulate an interest for these kinds of interdependencies. If we don’t respect the authority, or the genius, or the intelligence of the tree, the tree has so much intelligence that it can decide to telephone a message about the sad state of humankind and, if humankind fails, nature will take terrible revenge.” The “Difesa” work also included continuing analyses of the land, the FIU Wine Grape Harvest and the analysis of wine. The culmination of the agricultural activity in Bolognano, however, was the generation, in all its variants, of the encyclopedic “Olivestone” work, September 1984—a complex, multi-valenced, time-related, metaphorically rich, sculptural/agricultural operation revolving around the production and aesthetic/symbolic/allegorical analysis of the olive oil produced on the estate (“the condition of pressure is the source of energy …”).

The Artcore exhibition in Toronto, which bore the handy umbrella title “The Nature of Joseph Beuys,” was cocurated by Beuys scholar Antonio d’Avossa and by Lucrezia De Domizio herself. It brought together, in the whitened sepulchre that is the vast new Artcore Gallery, in the city’s historic Distillery District, a host of distinguished Beuys relics (I use the religious language advisedly), venerable by their relevance to and position in the “Difesa della Natura” epic.

The Artcore walls were awash in big hagiographic photographs of the maestro, in colour and black and white, views of his appearances and actions, debates and discussions, most of them—as is almost always the case with photos of Beuys—the triumph of adoration over any sort of photographic felicity (though the grainy ineptness of the canon of Beuys photos has always somehow added both to their earnestness and to their candid nature, as if you were looking over the master’s shoulder rather than gazing upon him). There was a single, unique, signed and carefully framed FIU wine label (stark, and stylish in its stylelessness). And a whole wall—100 cardboard cases—of FIU wine (FIU Wine Sculpture, 1983). One assumes there were bottles of FIU wine in each case, but who can tell (they were certainly not solid, wooden, rectangular prisms like Warhol’s Brillo boxes)? Given the fact that Beuys’s decisions, actions, fugitive thoughts and exhalations generally have come to be regarded as the stuff of holy writ, the wine cases were here accompanied by certain framed documents pertaining to the chemical analysis of the wine, transport customs documents, a Calcimetric chart and a report on soil analysis, all of which are uniformly dull and dusty-bureaucratic, and therefore, when shored against the zippy graphic works displayed by less transcendent artists, perversely avant-garde and thus curiously desirable.

Also at the heart of this cathedral full of Beuysiana were 200 glass bottles (with signed labels) of FIU olive oil, a small barrel (Botticella) used by the master to make vinegar, and the charmingly charmless coloured umbrella (displayed here in a respectful vitrine) found “by accident” on the site of the “Olivestone” undertaking (Umbrella, 1984). As Antonio d’Avossa writes in his essay “Beuys and Nature,” in the exhibition’s superb catalogue, the umbrella “was used as the object for homage and greeting to the rest of the artists attending the exhibition, ‘Ouverture,’ at the Castle of Rivoli near Turin; with it, Beuys bowed in front of his work … he bowed three times referring to the operative triad of three directions (liberté, fraternité, egalité to which the action … had been dedicated.” The Artcore exhibition also offered Beuys’s wonderfully appealing Three Bladed Spatula, 1984, which may well honour the same trinity.

Also on view were several of the original banners from the pivotal conferences “Striscione—Difesa della Natura Joseph Beuys,” 1981, “7000 Oaks,” 1984, the Branding Seal 7000 Oaks, 1983, that Beuys used to stamp multiples, and, delectably, the handsome Svecciatoio—Operazione Grano (Shelling Machine, Operation Grain), 1983, an antique farming machine “used to select the grain after the harvest”; that is, to separate the grains according to weight and size, and used by Beuys as a mechanical metaphor, a machine for staving off world hunger, and connected, as d’Avossa puts it, “to the idea of a healthy and productive agriculture, not a nostalgic, rudimentary or pre-industrial one.”

Beuys’s “Difesa della Natura,” as I mentioned, grows on. On May 13, 1999, the Piazza Joseph Beuys in Bolognano, a villa and square built according to the maestro’s concepts of Nature and Humanity, was inaugurated. “Piazza Joseph Beuys,” writes Lucrezia De Domizio Durini, in her catalogue essay “Who ls Joseph Beuys,” is built “in the form of an amphitheatre, facing the valley below. It has four great terraced flower beds planted with rosemary (energy), laurel (the otherness of art), an olive tree (warmth and productivity) and an oak (strength and longevity).” Beuys “sculptured with his word,” the Baroness writes. “With his actions he taught. He did not look for utopia, he simply practiced it…”

The Artcore show consists of the fallout from that utopia. It is made up of a kind of precious evidence that Beuys actually dreamed, talked and acted in the world. Yes, the exhibition was applied hagiography. And, in the end, very moving in the way it urged an intensification and acceleration of the sensibility and impelled you towards the shafts, facets and valences of rebirth. ■

“The Nature of Joseph Beuys” exhibits at Artcore/Fabrice Marcolini Gallery in Toronto from May 1 to August 31, 2004.

Gary Michael Dault is a writer, critic, artist and poet living in Toronto.