Beuys and me

[imomus]

Colour me gobsmacked, bollock-chuffed and flyposted all over town. Not only is there a one-page picture of me in Street magazine this month, I've just found another rather amazing picture in another of my favourite magazines.

Leafing through the September issue of British art magazine Frieze I found, on page 155, a picture of Joseph Beuys doing a didactic lecture-performance called The Jimmy Boyle Days at the Canongate Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh in 1980. It's an illustration for an article by Jan Verwoert called "Class Action". You can read the feature here.



"Fuck," I thought, "I went to that!" And sure enough, on closer inspection, there I am, sitting in the front row, a skinny, glaikit student wearing Doc Martens and Metzler Harvard spectacles. I don't even think I have any photos of myself aged 20, but it's me all right, a stern virgin with a big crush on art. How bizarre that it should appear in Frieze magazine, 26 years later! And that I should have morphed in the meantime into some kind of performance artist myself!

I was in that historic, hot little room (it took a lot to make me roll my sleeves up in those days) largely thanks to two people: dynamic Edinburgh curator and culturepreneur Ricky Demarco, who invited Beuys to Scotland several times, and writer Caroline Tisdall, who the year before had published a very big, very stern and grey book on Beuys which I'd bought at the Edinburgh Bookshop. It was full of strange introverted drawings of hares and honey, or grainy black and white photographs of performances. Perhaps I hoped to impress the art student I was currently longing helplessly for, Paula Garcia Sarria, or perhaps the book just tied in with the grim, grey, grainy aesthetic of the latest album from Dome.

"Caroline Tisdall's book on Joseph Beuys, published by Thames and Hudson in 1979, was the first contemporary art book I bought," I wrote last year. "I can honestly say it changed my life. I fell under Beuys' shamanic spell and, when Richard Demarco announced in 1980 that Beuys would deliver a lecture in Edinburgh as part of the Free International University (Beuys' informal university), I made sure I was there. About twenty-five of us sat in a little room in a courtyard off Edinburgh's Cowgate as Beuys, rather enfeebled by his hunger strike in solidarity with Jimmy Boyle, sipped from a glass of water and made one of his tortuously intricate spidery blackboards explaining the connections between the striking British Aerospace workers at Coventry and ancient Celtic snakelore. There is a connection, you know. Let's find that blackboard and I'll prove it."

Well, I know it looks a bit like a scene out of Gnarls Barkley's Smiley Faces video, but proof that I was there in that room with Kunstler Beuys in 1980 is now on page 155 of the current edition of Frieze. For me, it's a giddy thrill.

Comments

Re: I'm curious to know something..

[imomus.livejournal.com]

How exactly did you go from international boarding school to "art school"?

I don't really understand the question... Is it for me? I didn't do this. I was at a boarding school for three years in my early teens while my family travelled doing TEFL stuff (so the fees were partly paid by the British Council). I never went to art school.

Re: I'm curious to know something..

[svenskasfinx.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry I implyed something that you are not.. thats why I thought it seemed so curious.. and yet you teach as a guest teacher as well as your tour guide stint in New York, perhaps you can direct me to some reading to give me some understanding of how one gets to one point in one's life which does seem contradictory to end up on the red spot marked "you are here and everyone knows it"..

Re: I'm curious to know something..

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Don't worry, I'm not annoyed, but I just don't quite understand what you're asking. It seems to me that all sorts of people can get asked to a creative conference, or even to participate in a biennial. You just have to be spotted at some point by people whose job it is to recognize talent. Nobody will ever even ask if you went to art school. They'll just look at what you do and find it interesting, or not, and include it, or not.

Re: I'm curious to know something..

[svenskasfinx.livejournal.com]

... sorry about the confusion. I should be doing your chart properly to find out.. and then come back to it, but I know anyone can get a degree in anything - basicly unrelated to their work, and for you, well it was a sociology degree then, or english.. I can't recall.. but you were creative, you formed a band, like me and many of my friends did at one time... but I was at the time curious to understand if at anytime in the past when you were following this direction did your family step in and give you a world of "hell" for it, even if it was for one day over the dinner table?

Then there is the underlying question of contradiction, I mean, if you generally come from one place (not always because I too have to look at my own life and where I come from) one generally stays there.. surpasses it or totally rejects it, which of these did you do?

Ah, maybe I'm just getting question crazy, but I would like your take on it, not so much about the random recognition which happens to many who are standing on the stage, but where you intentionally find your tallent for being in the right place in time in the whole world. I know its an assumption but there has to be some intent on your part if it even be in just the idea of hope, or wishing for "something".

Forgive my curiosity. I'll try not to pester you any farther after this. :)

Re: I'm curious to know something..

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I was at the time curious to understand if at anytime in the past when you were following this direction did your family step in and give you a world of "hell" for it, even if it was for one day over the dinner table?

No, they've been supportive.

Then there is the underlying question of contradiction, I mean, if you generally come from one place (not always because I too have to look at my own life and where I come from) one generally stays there.. surpasses it or totally rejects it, which of these did you do?

Well, the Scottish contradiction is that it's actually very Scottish to leave Scotland. That's why large parts of the population of Canada, Australia and New Zealand are "Scottish". I'm in the diaspora, and there are more of us here than there are in Scotland, many times over.

where you intentionally find your tallent for being in the right place in time in the whole world. I know its an assumption but there has to be some intent on your part if it even be in just the idea of hope, or wishing for "something".

I may have caught a few boats, but I've missed many, many more. I think the important thing is not to stop producing. Don't lose heart after a few rejections. Believe in yourself, even when no-one else does, and finally other people will too. How Polonian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonius) of me!

Thank you !

[svenskasfinx.livejournal.com]

Thank you-


For taking the time out to answer my sudden bunch of crazy questions..
I really am in awe that you've taken time out to be so kind. I'm kind of impressed also that you "Stick to it" (the action of creation) without self doubt.. Howard Devoto could actually learn alot from you!

My inner critic hardly keeps silent enough these days to find the time to do my "work", but then again I have had it both good and bad and in the face of that I've always noted that the action of creation is, even without an audiance, the therapy - the release of energy and the perpetuation of itself.. so it only makes sense, not to doubt, and not to stop. Same is true of love, not to doubt and not to stop.. even if its like a kind of punishment without rewards.

Thanks once again for your answers!

Dorian