THINKING IS FORM:
For me, the most familiar of his works–gray felt suits on wire hangers and grand pianos wrapped in gray felt–have a raffish, intuitively poetic charm that doesn’t require much thought. The notion of Beuys as a thinker, as someone who created art that embodies social, philosophical, and spiritual ideas, might impress some people, but it will intimidate a lot more. I finally felt more at ease with this exhibition once I stopped regarding it as the minor show of a major artist and started appreciating it as the comprehensive show of a truly smart but finally minor artist. I had to get over the feeling that I was seeing the tip of the iceberg, merely the drawings of an artist whose greatest achievements were his performance art pieces. In fact, everything anyone needs to know about Joseph Beuys is on display, and then some: the exhibit includes a videotape of Eurasia Staff, showing Beuys alone in a room going through some enigmatic maneuvers, and the Art Institute has installed a sculpture in the next gallery, his Rescue Sled, an assemblage incorporating a blanket, a sled, and a flashlight.
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“Democracy Sings” is a series of 25 quasi drawings–I call them that since they often contain more text than image, and what images they do have are more diagrammatic than abstract or representational. These present comments and embryonic thoughts about various projects, written or typed on graph paper or blank paper, all but two of them stamped with the artist’s logo–a cross, the word Hauptstrom (“mainstream”), and assorted typographic dingbats all enclosed in a cricle. This device clearly lampoons romantic notions about the artist putting his personal stamp on the work: here’s my personal stamp, Beuys seems to say, you can borrow it and make an original Beuys. But as with many of his inventions, the question remains whether this is brilliant or merely clever. This time I think it’s the latter.
