Completely withered, the azaleas planted alongside the approach to the driveway at the Akasaka Prince Hotel made for a pitiful sight.
Whenever I see azaleas I think, How can a flower that looks so vivid, brilliant, and beautiful in full bloom end up in such a miserable state? Of all the flowers, I don’t think any of them die quite as easily as azaleas.
The top-heavy petals of a peony fall with a thud like a bandage coming undone, and the entire head of a camellia, its beauty still intact, plops onto the ground. Cherry blossoms scatter in their inimitable way. Only azaleas turn brown and die, stubbornly refusing to give up the fight and fall. I wonder if there’s some kind of significance to this way of dying. Maybe it’s also a kind of art...
These were the peculiar thoughts I was having as I walked along with my back hunched. I was making my way toward Tameike-Sanno via the Esplanade Akasaka Shopping Street, an entertainment district one block off the main road near the Akasaka-Mitsuke Intersection, clutching a single rose in my hand.
Until just a few minutes ago, I had been waiting in the lobby of the hotel, hoping to meet a certain “celebrity.” I had never done anything like that before in my entire life. I waited patiently for an hour, but eventually I got the feeling that my timing was completely off. The object of my affections, Joseph Beuys, never turned up.
Joseph Beuys was a German artist. Except that the word “artist” didn’t begin to convey the kind of person he was. Of course, I never met him, but I’m sure that was the case.
Beuys made sculptures. He painted pictures. He did performances. He gave lectures to university students. He debated politicians. He taught painting to a dead hare. These days young people would probably try to sweep it all aside and say, “Oh, an artist! I get it. Anything can be art, right?” But that’s not the way it was. Everything Beuys did was directly linked to art and his actions were filled with a sincerity that cannot be summed up by this kind of attitude. Beuys put his life on the line in his confrontations with art and the world. That’s just the kind of person he was. Rather than thinking of him as a star, I call him the Big Bang.
Just when I was trying to figure out the logistics of going to meet Beuys in Dusseldorf, where he was based, I was stunned to find that he was coming to Japan.
It wasn’t like he was coming to see me or anything – he was making his first trip to Japan in conjunction with an exhibition. I couldn’t have hoped for anything better.
Joseph Beuys was holding his first solo show in Japan at the Seibu Museum of Art, inside the Ikebukuro branch of the Seibu Department Stores. This was an absolutely brilliant achievement. After all, it wasn’t an exhibition of Van Gogh or Renoir or Picasso – it was Beuys. He was well known in the international art world, but to be honest, he wasn’t that famous in Japan. It wasn’t the kind of exhibition that would attract throngs of fans, generate long lines in front of the ticket window, or force you to gaze at the works from a distance over people’s heads.
I’m sure that Seiji Tsutsumi, the president of the Seibu Department Stores, didn’t decide to hold the Beuys exhibition with the idea that it would be a big hit. He probably did it because he thought it was necessary to introduce Japanese people to the Joseph Beuys phenomenon. I never met him either, but I’m sure that was the case.
I went straight into the museum. Perhaps because the show had just opened, there was no line in front of the ticket window and I was able to quickly make my way into the venue. Then it struck me.
The place was so empty that you could have heard a pin drop. It felt wonderful. There were just a bunch of objects scattered around the deserted gallery.
There was a stone connected to a black telephone by a telephone line in a glass case, a box with a crimson Red Cross mark stamped on it, a helmet filled with milky white fat, a suit made of felt hanging on the wall, a sled with a felt blanket on top of it, a shovel with Beuys’ name on it, and a blackboard with white letters written on it.
I was on the verge of shouting, “Wow, what is this stuff? This is so cool!” But I managed to restrain myself.
This was an exhibition landscape unlike any I had ever seen before. I had always thought of an exhibition as something arranged chronologically with a fixed route that the viewer followed while looking at each of the works in the proper order. But there was no fixed route here. You were free to start wherever you liked and look at whatever you wanted to. There were explanation panels. But it probably didn’t make any difference whether you read them or not. And the things on display weren’t paintings in splendid frames or sculptures on pedestals. To some people, these things probably didn’t look like art at all. Yet everything in the space gave off a faint energy. Admittedly, when you looked at each of the individual works, it was hard to understand what they meant. But if you saw them as part of a whole, you had the sense that each of them had its own function. It was as if the space was a world of the artist’s own creation, and the individual pieces were constituents of that world. You could hear a low mutter rising up from each of them. This created a resonance throughout the space that had the sound of a single loud voice: “The things that I make have a social function. To me this is art. Because I am sculpting society.”
At a press conference he gave at the Akasaka Prince Hotel, Beuys said, “During my short eight-day stay, I have no plans to overthrow Japan. All I want to do is show you the things that I’ve made.”
Really? Did he really mean that? By pretending like he wasn’t going to overthrow Japan, wasn’t that exactly what he was trying to do? First of all, had there ever been anyone in the history of art who said that everything that happened in society was art, including everything that we do? Beuys didn’t try to emphasize the obvious truth that he was an artist. Instead, he suggested that every part of our lives −− waking up in the morning, eating, going to school, working, and sleeping as well as being born, growing up, falling in love, losing hope, and being reborn −− were artistic acts. And since all of these things happened in society, assuming we were human beings, we were necessarily involved with art. Wasn’t that the obvious truth that he was working to make us understand?
Beuys was born in the northwestern German town of Krefeld, and raised in Kleve, an area blessed with a rich natural environment. His interest in nature, animals, the environment, legends, and myths, which would later surface in his work, was cultivated during his boyhood. As a teenager, Beuys joined the Hitler Youth. During a book-burning rally, the sight of a collection of works by the sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck had a huge impact on him, making him aware of the potential of sculpture. During World War II, Beuys served in the German air force. His fighter plane was shot down by Soviet troops over the Crimean Peninsula and he was forced to make an emergency landing in a grassy meadow. Though Beuys was hurt, a group of Tatar nomads rushed to his aid. They applied fat to his body to prevent his body temperature from falling and swaddled him in felt. All of these experiences became the basis for Beuys’ work.
After the war, Beuys began teaching at an art university, and after a long struggle, he managed to establish the Free International University as a school within the school, marking the start of a wider range of art activities. Based on a variety of actions, including engaging in dialogues with students, making artworks, and staging performances, Beuys carefully considered education, society, the environment, and a variety of other things involving people, and attempted to arrive at a definition of art. Although this is an eternal question for artists, Beuys continued his struggle undaunted. At the same time, he was always running a fever.
The Beuys exhibition at the Seibu Museum was my first full-fledged experience with a contemporary art exhibition (full disclosure: I was 22 at the time). I was totally overwhelmed. If Beuys’ search for the definition of art was the ultimate truth, could figuring out how to survive in this society, which I found so difficult to live in, be my art piece? A nobody like me?
If I had made contact with Beuys, that’s the question I would have asked him. But since he was reportedly unable to hide his irritation during a debate with some students at Tokyo University of the Arts when it proved impossible to come to an agreement about capitalism, our conversation would probably have come to an end without him answering my question...
Nevertheless, I wanted to meet him. That’s why I brought the rose with me. At one symposium Beuys had said, “We can’t do without the rose,” and he visibly expressed his oneness with the flower (i.e., the natural world) by displaying a rose on the table. He was a feverish rose-like person.
Accidentally catching a whiff of ramen, I suddenly remembered I was hungry. Come to think of it, since I’d been busy looking for Beuys, I hadn’t had anything to eat since morning. I had given up trying to make contact with him, but I thought I would at least have a bowl of Akasaka’s renowned Ittenbari ramen before I went home. What I really wanted to do was head to Roppongi and quietly flip through the pages of an essay collection by Yoshiaki Tono that I had bought at Art Vivant while sipping cafe au lait at the Rain Tree Café on the first floor of Wave. And while pondering social sculpture, I wanted to keep trying until the very end to make contact with him.
But my hunger edged out that stylish scenario. An army marches on its stomach, right? I pushed back the shop’s white curtain. And then...
Right there in front of me at the counter, I saw him. Sitting with his back to me, he was dressed in an earth-colored fisherman’s vest, a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and a felt hat.
It was the last day of Beuys’ eight-day trip to Japan. The Big Bang was sitting by himself at the counter of an Akasaka ramen shop. What captured my attention was the astounding, dreamlike irreality of his feverish back. Everything was art.
(Excerpted from the short-story collection 20 CONTACTS: A Series of Interviews with Indelible Stars.)
The first Joseph Beuys exhibition ever held in Japan was staged at the Seibu Museum of Art in 1984.
Beuys, who only visited the country once in his life, engaged in a discussion with students at Tokyo University of the Arts and made a huge mark on the Japanese art world.
The blackboard that Beuys used during the performance (now part of the Sezon Museum of Modern Art collection in Karuizawa, Nagano) was displayed in the CONTACT exhibition.
Sezon Museum of Modern Art website https://www.smma.or.jp/
Translated by Christopher Stephens
© 2022 Maha Harada