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12/12/2010

Joseph Beuys - We Are the Revolution

MAM - Bahia Museu de Arte moderna, Salvador de Bahia

Joseph Beuys – We Are the Revolution is the largest retrospective ever held in Brazil of a body of work that has helped shape our concept of art—and continues to expand it. The choice of the greatest German 20th century artist as the center of the exhibition, which will feature 250 works at SESC Pompeia (São Paulo) and the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia (Salvador), is not by any means fortuitous.
Within the context of the debates on the art/politics relation proposed by the 29th Bienal de São Paulo, the thinking that Beuys’ multiples, posters, and videos promote is a reference that does not become less instigating as time passes.

On the contrary: engendered by spheres of influences ranging from Nietzsche to anthroposophy, from botany to the French Revolution, he professes a belief in social transformation as the masterpiece of humankind, necessarily collective and essentially plastic. In order to shape up our future, we count on an endless wealth of creativity; every man, Beuys says, is an artist.

A contemporary art professor at the Accademia di Brera, in Milan, curator Antonio d’Avossa rebuilds, in the exhibition, the “arsenal of propaganda” that the artist built in the 1970s and 1980s. During that period, intense political activity and the desire to concretize his communication with men—potential agents of social sculpture—led him to multiple print runs and to advertising-related media, notably the poster. “I am interested in distributing physical vehicles, in the form of editions, because I am interested in disseminating ideas. Ideas geared toward political change, or ones that hold philosophical insights in them,” Beuys said at the time.

This production is represented in all its diversity in the exhibition, by the two-hundred-poster collection of the Italian Luigi Bonotto, Europe’s largest; and by forty multiples of different print runs, culled from private collections in Brazil and Italy. In chronological terms, it corresponds to the period in which Beuys alternated his work as artist and professor with debate promotion, the establishing of organizations, and the coining of slogans.

Sentences, stamps, and enunciates link posters and multiples up with political, ecological, artistic initiatives: the Free International University, the Defense of Nature project, the Organization for Direct Democracy through Referendum, the We Are the Revolution slogan. This set of efforts bears witness to the key role played by the word in Beuys’ oeuvre—or in the “communication project” that is a part of it.

The word—and beyond its noise, the action—also provides a foundation to the artist’s important video production. In We Are the Revolution, it is represented by a set of twenty works, which encompass the period from 1964 to 1987 and remain permanently on display within the exhibition facilities.

Part of the videos feature footage of actions that have become historical, ranging from Fluxus’ seminal performances to others in which the artist manipulates the elements of his own vocabulary to conjure ritualistic acts of unity, communication, and healing, such as Eurasienstab (Eurasia staff, 1968) and I Like America and America Likes Me (1974). The selection also includes a series of documentaries in which Beuys outlines his thinking and explains key concepts of his work, such as the use of felt and fat, at different moments of his career.

The exhibition is complemented by a vast Educational Curatorial Program. The Joseph Beuys International Seminar – We Are the Revolution brings together artists, researchers and three close collaborators with the artist: aside from d’Avossa, Volker Harlan, the author of What Is Art? Conversations with Joseph Beuys (1986), and Rainer Rappmann, who created the F.I.U.’s publishing house.

Mediated visits, lectures, and workshops open to the public of São Paulo and Salvador will explore the libertarian notion of a creation that is no longer the privilege of the artist—and on which the transformation of the plastic matter of the future depends. “Freeing up the people is the goal of art; therefore, art to me is the science of freedom,” says Beuys.

One of the starting points for the entire contemporary conception of art, Joseph Beuys’ body of work enlightens, at an appropriate moment, the artist’s deep social commitment. What is more: upon creating actions, sculptures, installations, drawings, objects, watercolors, debates, blackboards, multiples, posters, manifestos, postcards, political parties, protest songs, discussion groups—as well as his own unequivocal figure—, Joseph Beuys has shown us that the ends justify multiple strategies.

Joseph Beuys, We Are the Revolution reaffirms the partnership between Associação Cultural Videobrasil and SESC São Paulo, guided by the quest for relevant content for understanding contemporaneity—and for creating educational actions that enable its transforming potential to be tapped into.

Danilo Santos de Miranda
Regional Director of SESC São Paulo

Solange Oliveira Farkas
President of Associação Cultural Videobrasil and
curator of the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia

Press contact:
Teté Martinho (+55 11) 9901.0375 tetemartinho@videobrasil.org.br
Fernando Oliveira tel. (11) 7028 0834 fehenrique77@hotmail.com

Museum of Modern Art of Bahia
Av. Contorno s/n - Solar do Unhão Salvador - Bahia - Brasil

SESC Pompeia
Rua Clélia, 93 Pompéia - São Paulo Brasil

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