Contemporary witnesses report – “Those who don’t think are thrown out” – Ebersberg

Who was Joseph Beuys? Inventor of the fat corner? Provocateur? The man in the felt hat? Avant-garde? Voice of the sixty-eight? Artist? Visionary? Total work of art? All of these terms may fit him. If you talk to Wolfger Pöhlmann, you would think he was much more than that. “Jesus could have had such a similar charisma,” says the art historian sitting in a café in the Munich area on a very real and earthly autumn day, and with his words he brings the metaphysical dimension into play, which has always resonated with the legendary artist which was one of the driving forces behind his work. He has always practiced the Christian guiding principle of humanity. And so Beuys’ followers were like Jünger, says Pöhlmann, who met the then professor for monumental sculpture at the Düsseldorf Art Academy as a very young man, as an assistant manager at the Deutscher Künstlerbund – and he does not try to hide the fact that he himself is one of those disciples is close. Even if he did not want to follow the master in everything – Pöhlmann cites his call to boycott the democratic system of the Federal Republic as an example after Beuys first launched the Greens at the end of the 1970s.

In May the Rhinelander Joseph Beuys would have turned 100, and Pöhlmann, chairman of the Meta Theater Moosach association, has taken on the curatorial supervision of a program that is dedicated to that exceptional phenomenon in the German art world and includes seven venues in Munich and Upper Bavaria. The gallery in the Lenbachhaus, the Academy of Fine Arts, Das Maximum / Kunst-Gegenwart Traunreut, the Münchner Kammerspiele, the Pinakothek der Moderne, the municipality of Tyrlaching in the Altötting district, the Omnibus for Direct Democracy and – in charge – the Meta Theater with Axel Tangerding are the cooperation partners of the events between Thursday, September 30th and Tuesday, October 5th. The main protagonist is Johannes Stüttgen, author, artist and companion of Beuys, who will give lectures and bring the diverse genius and his expanded concept of art closer to the audience with the maxim “everyone is an artist”. In his “Tafelrede” in the Meta Theater on Friday he will revive that legendary appearance that has gone down in collective memory through the great photography by Ute Klophaus: Beuys in front of a hay-eating white horse on stage.

That the sculptor, action artist, art theorist and draftsman Beuys with his legendary felt hat on his head and in a one-man stage production “Iphigenie auf Tauris” and “Titus Andronicus” poured gesticulating and quoting into one, while the original texts from the tape in the background were played, would have been avant-garde enough – “and it would still be today,” Pöhlmann suspects. To combine the ancient Greek tragedy with the drama that occurred in the late Roman period, to bring Goethe and Shakespeare together in a collage and to represent the whole thing in the form of a horse before the moment of incalculable nature, has thrown all common notions of theater off their hinges. Critics from back then, Botho Straus and Peter Handke, who discussed the performance, were “both deeply touched”. He himself, Pöhlmann, was not there at the Frankfurt Theater am Turm, “but the picture impressed itself on me incredibly”. In the theater, however, there were many young students who stormed the stage at the second performance and tried to free the horse. Even Beuys, who used art as a vehicle to provoke reactions, to encourage his audience to think along – “if you don’t think, you are thrown out” – was too much of “such a destructive reaction that can be dangerous”, according to Pöhlmann . “But Stüttgen was there, and he can tell about it in the Meta Theater too.”

Johannes Stüttgen, who joined the Beuys class at the Düsseldorf Art Academy after dropping out of theology and became the teacher’s favorite student and dialogue partner, closes a gap in the artist’s reception with his panel speech, explains Pöhlmann. After his work, he himself had a long friendship with Stüttgen as an employee of the Munich cultural department and later a representative of the Goethe Institute in Madrid and Athens. He is always surprised that a lot has been written about Beuys, about his relationship to music, material, Christ or medicine, but nothing about his relationship to the theater.

Open detailed view

The artist was much closer to the theater than to the visual arts, as his works and sculptures were always composed of “props from actions”, like the cabinet from the Karl Ströher collection in Düsseldorf that Pöhlmann had confronted with Beuys for the first time . “A large open closet full of utensils – that was unlike anything I had ever seen, more like an altar, a high altar,” he describes. When Beuys applied for an exhibition at Komm in Nuremberg in 1968, not with a work but with the request to be given a room, Pöhlmann met him in person. That is, he heard it. Beuys had asked for 100 kilograms of fat – after his experience of being at the mercy of the Second World War, fat had always been a symbol of warmth, energy and survival. To do this, he ordered 100 air pumps with wooden handles. Then he locked himself in the room for two days. “You could only hear such dull noises behind the door,” recalls art historian Pöhlmann. When the door opened again, the fat was gone – and the tabloid press made a big story out of it, in which they turned Beuys’ mood with the picture of a Biafra child.

Johannes Stüttgen will speak about Joseph Beuys and the theater on Friday, October 1st, in the Meta Theater Moosach. Beginning at 7 p.m., information at (08091) 3514 or [email protected]