Beuys Page #4

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everything was...

Yes, well...

I remember hearing

the voices of the Tatars.

I remember them finding me

and standing around me.

But then I lost consciousness.

All the things I remember happened

when I was only partly conscious,

because I didn't regain consciousness

for about 12 days.

When I came to,

I was in a German hospital in the Crimea.

ACADEMY O F ARTS

Beuys was a very slim,

very skinny young man...

with a face that you never forgot.

It was somewhat deform ed

as a result of one of the crashes.

He'd suffered a broken nose

as well as injuries to his skull.

And...

But he was a man with tremendous charisma,

who radiated a tremendous warmth.

KLEVE, FEBRUARY 28,1957

"After not having visited Beuys

for a long time, I called on him today.

He was going through another phase

of neither washing

nor putting on any clothes.

He's abandoning himself more and more,

as an artist too.

How often he weeps,

says he's going to leave,

go somewhere, forever."

It probably had something to do

with the fact that he was undernourished.

And also with his total lack of success.

In any event,

that was the...

That was the time

when he sank into the quagmire

of his own inner misery.

"The chief resident spoke

about the examination in Essen.

As I understood it,

he'd diagnosed Beuys as being incurable."

He stayed there all summer.

He stayed in my room,

and when he was...

When he was depressed,

he hardly responded.

And during the worst periods,

he hardly ever left his room,

not even for a meal.

And on his better days...

he'd spend the whole day outside with us

from morning till evening,

in the meadows or fields.

And then we told him he should

do something again, at all costs.

He said, "I'm finished with art.

I don't want anything more to do with it."

I said, "You can't carry on like this."

And then my mother went up to his room

and knocked on the door, "Mr. Beuys?"

But Mr. Beuys didn't want

to come out, and she said,

"I want to talk to you, open the door,"

which he did.

And then she appealed to his conscience.

And she told him that his gift

was also an obligation, a duty

toward the spirit

that had given him that gift.

After you graduated from art school,

you withdrew to the countryside

for ten years.

Yes, I didn't feel the need to be pan

of the contemporary an scene.

When did you decide

to start doing performance an?

I think it developed quite organically

from my aim to expand

the boundaries of art.

Beuys had to create a basis for himself

in order to overcome this crisis.

He needed a pedestal to stand on,

rather like the Archimedean point,

"Give me a place to stand

and I'll move the Earth."

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