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Joseph Beuys: Artistic Activism

In the second half of the 20th century, a significant new phenomenon emerged through the avant-garde movements, shifting the focus from the art product to the artist's personality, actions, and performances. In performance art, the artist uses their body as the medium, performing actions that become the artwork itself. Due to the ephemeral nature of these acts, photographs, films, or videos are often used as documentation for a wider audience.

The works of Joseph Beuys, one of the leading figures of this movement, were closely tied to his political activism. According to Beuys, what he called "his actions" or "social sculptures" had the power to change society, even though they were drawn from his personal experiences.

Beuys' most famous action, I Like America and America Likes Me, created in 1974 at the René Block Gallery in New York, combines his political anxieties with his personal history. To understand the context, one must recount the myth. In 1943, during World War II, while serving as a pilot for the Luftwaffe, Beuys crashed in Crimea. The legend says that severely injured, he was rescued by a tribe of nomads who healed him with animal fat, felt, and honey. Although this story is likely fictional, it marks the beginning of Beuys' personal mythology. These materials—fat, felt, honey—became recurring elements in his works, appearing in his sculptures, paintings, and performances.

I Like America and America Likes Me (1974) is perhaps his most famous performance. Wrapped in felt, Beuys was transported to the United States without ever touching American soil due to his opposition to the Vietnam War. He spent three days in a gallery, enclosed with a wild coyote. Beuys, holding a staff and performing a series of shamanistic gestures while staring intently at the coyote, shared the space with the animal. The coyote sometimes urinated on a large stack of Wall Street Journals. After three days, the animal, which initially displayed aggressive behavior, became almost sociable. According to Native American beliefs, the coyote was a powerful deity, while European settlers viewed it as a pest. For Beuys, it symbolized the harm caused by white men, and his performance took on the function of a ritual healing process.

Additionally, the title can be interpreted as a critique of American artistic hegemony and U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, which Beuys firmly opposed. However, I Like America and America Likes Me can also be seen as ironic, as Beuys barely touched American soil: after the performance, the ambulance took him directly to the airport. This performance is often seen as an attempt at reconciliation between peoples and a reflection on the geopolitical tensions of the time.

Ceskary

[inapat17]

Dancing with eyes closed

Pina Bausch, an emblematic figure of the Tanztheater, premiered one of her most iconic works, Café Müller, in 1978.

Café Müller takes place in a gloomy setting, a café with a minimalist décor dominated by empty tables and chairs and a revolving door in the background. The dim lighting reinforces the atmosphere of desolation and isolation. From the beginning, two women in white nightgowns, barefoot and with their eyes closed, move with small steps and erratically, like sleepwalkers lost in their own inner worlds. 

In contrast to these figures, a woman in a red wig bursts onto the scene, moving quickly through the space before disappearing. This sudden and brief entrance adds an element of tension and dynamism to the static scene. Meanwhile, a man in a dark suit, wearing shoes and with his eyes open, moves chairs and tables to prevent one of the women from being knocked over as she escapes in different directions to the sound of an aria by Henry Purcell. This man, in the original premiere played by set designer Rolf Borzik, acts as a silent guardian, manipulating the environment to protect the vulnerability of the characters.

One of Café Müller's most iconic moments is the scene of the embrace. A woman and a man, both barefoot, meet and gently embrace, evoking a sense of mutual recognition and consolation. This embrace is repeatedly interrupted by a third man, who breaks up the hug and positions the couple in a kissing posture. This cycle of interruptions and returns to the embrace is repeated with increasing intensity and speed, highlighting the struggle between the need for connection and the external forces that seek to destabilize it. The repetition and increased pace generate a pulsing tension that builds to a choreography of exhaustion and persistence, reflecting the instability and tiredness of the human struggle.

Bausch's work presents two types of movement: that of the dancers, immersed in their inner world, and that of the dancers, whose actions derive from everyday gestures. This duality is reflected in the set design itself, where the everyday elements of the café are transformed into obstacles and points of interaction for the characters. Moreover, the tension between the couple's embrace and the intervention of the third man questions and disrupts any sense of stability or consolation that the initial embrace might have suggested.

According to André Lepecki, Bausch works from a perspective where fragmentation becomes a way of elaborating this crisis, synthesizing her approach in the famous idea that what really matters is not how people move, but what moves them or why they move. Bausch herself reflects on this theme: "Why do we do what we do? Why do we dance after all? It's quite dangerous, where we are heading at the moment and in the last few years. Everything is routine and nobody knows why we move anymore".

Natalia Ceskary

[inapat17]

WAITING FOR…

During the industrial era in France, lots of filmmakers showed the social ills of the working class. Bruno Muel's films in particular show how factories exploit workers. At the time, there were lots of similar documentaries, but today's post-industrial France is moving on to new themes. Even so, the working class is still struggling all over the world. Marcelo Gomes' 2019 documentary looks at the living conditions of the people of Toritama in Brazil. In this small, remote town, 20 million pairs of jeans are produced every year in old factories. The workers seem unaware of their situation, even though the conditions in which they work are pretty bad. They say they want freedom, and they want to be able to earn more or less according to their own will and ability. This documentary is all the more relevant because the village has changed a lot between the generation of the director's father and his own. There's no trace of the old village left. The wait for the carnival is a source of desire and motivation that gives meaning to this work and this search for money. It's tough to describe the film because it covers so much ground. I'll try to break it down thematically, looking at the most notable approaches that make this documentary a film with a social, personal and artistic purpose.

I'll focus on the idea of a social portrait of the inhabitants, both in terms of the city's organization and the pursuit of a cyclical temporal objective: the carnival.

Are we working to live or are we living to work? It's a tough question about the differences in perspective between the audience and the main characters. Marcelo Gomes shows us a dystopian city that's been caught in the grip of capitalism. The city is basically a factory, and people spend their entire lives 24/7 working. It's a society that's totally trapped by modern capitalism. It's incredible how much work is shown throughout the documentary. When Marcelo Gomes interviews people, they don't stop working to talk. The machines never stop, so people keep going and talk to the filmmaker at the same time. People's houses have been turned into jeans factories. The streets are covered in jeans, on the floor, on bags, on cars, and even on people's backs. They live and work from home, which is bad for their health. It's causing back problems, stress, and respiratory issues. They're putting their lives at risk at work. Movies are a great way to show what life can’t be like. It’s a dystopia for the audience and a reality for the people of Toritama. The mechanization of the jean industry has affected many people’s lives and has led to a loss of humanity. The first scenes of the film show how workers are always on the move at work. People produce from the comfort of their homes and from the streets of Toritama.  The people of Toritama are grateful for this job. The good humor makes this film less tragic. It is reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times and burlesque cinema. Comedy in difficult times. Cinema is used to show the notion of the impure. Like Marcelo Gomes, the viewer asks: why are people happy?

It's chance that creates such an impure documentary. It starts with childhood and the present, which is manipulated by a dominant system. Carnival is a symbol of hope. The cinema immerses us in an existentialist subject. The phrase "there are only 365 days left to wait for the carnival" shows us how these beings are organized. Like in Waiting for Godot, two characters wait for Godot. We don't know what Godot represents, but the characters wait for it. It's an absurd expectation, but it keeps the story going.

Written by Natalia Ceskary

[inapat17]

Unearthing Chimeras

When considering the value of an archive, I am reminded of the importance of understanding the past in order to comprehend the present. To illustrate this feeling, I have chosen the film 'The Chimera' 2023 by Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher. As the movie says, 'Everyone has their own Chimera, something they try to get but never manage to find.'

This quote is particularly relevant to the band of tombarolis, who are robbers of ancient tombs and archaeological wonders. For the thieves, their Chimeras symbolise the redemption of work and the dream of easy wealth. In contrast, Arthur's Chimera is very different; it is Beniamina, his deceased wife. To find his Chimera, Arthur must challenge the invisible, search the earth and find the door to the other world of which the myths speak. This is a voyage between the living and the dead, the visible and the invisible, between people and solitude, each character searching for his chimera.

In an interview with Alice Rohrwacher from Film at Lincoln Center, the filmmaker discusses the inspiration for the film. She begins by talking about her first love, archaeology. For her, archaeology is closely linked to memory. The act of finding ourselves in the past allows us to understand that the present is the result of many layers. There are layers, and whatever the present is, it will eventually pass. This leads Alice to reflect on what she wants to leave behind as an individual.

Rohrwacher's cinema evokes spirituality through the use of 35mm and 16mm film formats, blending the past and present. The artist seeks to leave beautiful things behind. As archaeology tells us a lot about things that have ended and that we will end. Making a film is like leaving a trace. Alice Rohrwacher once said, 'When you make a movie, you put together so many different things, and at least in your intentions, you want that to be good.'

Alice grew up in the same Tuscan region as the film. She describes it as an area where the dead give life, and where a 2500-year-old civilization thrives. The tombs in the area are full of wonderful objects that can be found anywhere, and with a little digging, one can find fragments of things that were built by someone. In that village, there is a notorious object thief who used to share his adventures at the local cafe or bar. As a child, Alice was deeply impressed by this thief and listened to him carefully.

It is important to consider that these objects may belong to someone.  As time passed, she found herself wondering: 'If you can escape the law of the day, the law of paper, the law of authority, but what about the law of the night?, And the law of souls? because these objects belong to someone. The film's intention is to explore this fear. Then there is the notion that an entire civilization would construct beautiful objects and then hide them, make them invisible, and that is how the idea for Alice was born: to make a film about this world in which the visible and the invisible would have the same value.

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