Joseph Beuys' Performance Art: How To Explain Pictures To A Dead Hare

After watching Marcus Coates’ performance art, I decided to investigate Joseph Beuys, one of the earlier performance artists. He was born on May 12, 1921 in Germany and he is a German performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist, and pedagogue of art. His artwork is grounded with the themes of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy. He can be seen as one of the most influential artists of the 20th Century. His extensive artwork can be broken up into four domains; works of art in a traditional sense (paintings, etc.), performance, contributions to the theory of art and academic teaching, and social-and political activities. Beuys brought aspects of creative practice outside of the institution and into the everyday.

Beuys’s first solo exhibition in a private gallery started on November 26, 1965 with one of his most compelling performances: How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. The artist could be viewed through the glass of the gallery’s window. His face was covered in honey and gold leaf, an iron slab was attached to his boot. In his arms he cradled a dead hare, into whose ear he mumbled muffled noises as well as explanations of the drawings that lined the walls. Such materials and actions had specific symbolic value for Beuys. For example, honey is the product of bees, and for Beuys, bees represented an ideal society of warmth and brotherhood. Gold had its importance within alchemical enquiry, and iron, the metal of Mars, stood for a masculine principle of strength and connection to the earth.

Beuys explained his performance in several ways, one being: “In putting honey on my head I am clearly doing something that has to do with thinking. Human ability is not to produce honey, but to think, to produce ideas. In this way the deathlike character of thinking becomes lifelike again. For honey is undoubtedly a living substance. Human thinking can be lively too. But it can also be intellectualized to a deadly degree, and remain dead, and express its deadliness in, say, the political or pedagogic fields.” He feels that gold and honey indicate a transformation of the head, and therefore, naturally and logically, the brain and our understanding of thought, consciousness and all the other levels necessary to explain pictures to a hare. The idea of explaining to an animal conveys a sense of the secrecy of the world and of existence that appeals to the imagination. He claimed that “even a dead animal preserves more powers of intuition than some human beings with their stubborn rationality”. Joseph Beuys tries o bring to light the complexity of creative areas. I find his work peculiar and although many of his traditional art, such as his paintings and sculptures I consider art, his performance art I do not.