One of the first things you encounter at the Joseph Beuys exhibition at IMMA is a set of three large photographs of the artist and Andy Warhol. Surely some mistake? One of the last great idealists of the avant garde rubbing shoulders with its arch cynic? Yet the conjunction makes sense, for, like Warhol, Beuys was a self-publicist of genius. Like Warhol he invented and promoted an instantly recognisable stylistic identity. For Warhol it was a blond wig, a blank face and glasses, for Beuys a wide-brimmed fedora, gaunt cheeks, and a flyfisherman's vest with its masses of pockets.
As Joseph Beuys: Multiples the title of the current IMMA show implies, Beuys wasn't just an artist, he was a brand. The multiples are prints, sculptures, objects - the whole 600 or so pieces that he produced in multiple editions bearing the Beuys stamp by the time of his death in 1986, of which a formidable 300 are at IMMA.
But Beuys was trying to sell more than art market product. There was a messianic import to his self-mythologising. For him, art was nothing less than a means of changing the world by engineering a paradigm shift in human consciousness, a road to utopia. If the meeting between Beuys and Warhol is viewed in terms of a confrontation of ideologies, then it was Warhol who prevailed in the long run.
Beuys has been enormously influential, but increasingly it seems as if his influence, like ripples in a pool spreading from an initial point of impact, is fading into calmness. This is evidenced by the absorption of his oeuvre into the canon and into the art market, by the trivialisaton of the avant garde into a theatre of novelties, and even by the ossification of his legacy of intellectual activism in, for example, the self-absorbed monumentality of his ex-student, Anselm Kiefer. But could it all have ended any other way? How seriously, that is to say, were we supposed to take Beuys's utopian dreams?
Whatever of his theorising, he was certainly a poet of materials. With a bronze by Henry Moore the medium is not the message, but when Beuys uses copper or, famously, felt and fat, he prompts us to look at and think about the material itself, its personal relevance, its physical nature, its cultural significance, its potential for metaphor. Personal relevance was paramount. If any one incident in his life can be described as his road to Damascus it was, by his own account, his experiences in Russia.
In 1940, barely out of school, he joined the Luftwaffe, and was trained as a radio operator and then as a pilot. He was posted to the Eastern Front, and in 1943, his JU 87 dive-bomber was hit by Russian anti-aircraft fire. Though he managed to fly back behind German lines, his altimeter failed in a sudden snowstorm and he crash-landed. Badly injured, he was discovered in the wreckage of his plane and cared for by Tartar tribesmen for about eight days, until a German search commando found him and brought him to a military hospital.
The Tartars saved his life, he said later, by putting fat on his burn wounds and wrapping him in felt to protect him from the cold. Hence felt and fat became emblematic materials for him, their appeal greatly heightened by their association with the nomadic tribes-people. But, equally - recalling his training as a radio operator - batteries and conducting materials were Beuysian staples. All of these materials might have remained merely elements of a personal iconography, things illustrated in the work, but they became important constituents in the work in themselves, implicated in his convoluted ideas about order and chaos, life and death, energy and transformation. The Beuysian Felt Suit, for example, symbolically preserves heat and life. His survival sled recalls his wartime ordeal, with a roll of felt for warmth, fat for nourishment and a torch to show the way.
An inspirational teacher and talker, his rhetoric of "social sculpture," of the need for spiritual regeneration, and his harking back to a pure, pre-civilised consciousness have strange, disturbing echoes of Hitler and Nazi Germany. This is not to imply for a moment that Beuys was a closet fascist. He clearly wasn't. But perhaps he was, more than he could consciously realise, imbued with the mythology of German nationalism, which had been deeply rooted in the German psyche for several hundred years. To his credit, he was certainly the first post-war German artist to evoke in his work the spiritual legacy of the Holocaust for Germany. The grating, uncomfortable aesthetic of his museological sculptures, with their raw, pungent materials and ordinary objects laid out like relics in glass cases, referred explicitly to the grim evidence of the concentration camps.
One of Beuys's more overt influences was the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, whose ideas intersect with much of the European artistic avant garde in a fairly complex way. As with Steiner, Beuys's understanding of science was inextricably bound up with his mystical beliefs. In fact he felt that science, like politics and just about everything else, should by rights fall into the domain of art, something that could be achieved by the recovery of a state of prelapsarian, integrated consciousness posited by anthroposophical theory.
THE snag was that to grasp all this you had to attain a transcendent level of perception, beyond the reach of conventional logic. That is partly why both his genuine interest in scientific matters and his political ideas never amounted to a coherent body of knowledge. Partly that, and partly, it must be said, because there is no significant, logically consistent set of ideas there, though his devotees might be loath to admit it. Long after his Luftwaffe days, Beuys was often winging it, carrying his audience on the basis of intoxicating rhetoric and personal charisma.
For him, the artist was a modern-day shaman, a magician and healer who could soothe the spiritual ills of contemporary society. His animal imagery - hares, stags, bees - was highly symbolic. One of his most famous "actions" or performances was his 1965 How to Explain Paintings to a Dead Hare in which the artist, his head covered in honey and gold leaf, cradled a dead hare in his arms and did just that. It was a coup de theatre that stands as a landmark in performance art and has inspired legions of imitators. Beuys's tremendous presence as a performer can be gauged from the several videos of actions included in the show at IMMA, including Felt TV in which he blocks TV transmissions with his beloved felt and beats himself about the head wearing boxing gloves - symbolising the barrage of images from the box. It's the sort of thing that provokes snorts of derision in outline, but it's extraordinarily good when you actually look at it.
There are other brilliant pieces in the show, some of them so well known as to be trademarks, others perhaps less well known but displaying his superb feeling for combining materials and ideas. "The silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated," he provocatively stated in 1964, throwing down the gauntlet to the king of conceptualism, and silence and sound remained important metaphors in his own work. Here, The Silence is a 35-mm print of Ingmar Bergman's film, on five reels, dipped in a galvanising bath and rendered truly silent. An etching of nondescript substance with the word "matter" scrawled across it illustrates his fine, nervy graphic style.
Beuys loved documentation. Much of his work is pure documentation, but it is a pity all the same that the IMMA show is such a documentary affair. The work really comes alive when actual drawings, objects and videos are involved. The show is, though, a model of organisation and presentation. It takes time and concentration but it is worth the effort and, surprisingly, it is considerably lightened by Beuys's main saving grace: his sense of humour.
Joseph Beuys: Multiples, is at the Irish Museum of Modern Art until July 25. Admission is free.
