Show Your Wound Medicine and the Work of Joseph Beuys

Since antiquity, many artists have used medical themes as subjects in their work (1, 2). However, few visual artists use medical subjects broadly, interweaving them through their oeuvres as metaphors for social and political problems. One such artist is Joseph Beuys (19211986). His work in the world of medicine is embedded in a framework determined by both science and the human psyche (3). In his installations and sculptures, Beuys incorporated discarded bloody bandages, broken pill bottles, rusty syringes, old medical textbooks, animal bones, radiography films, and other medical artifacts (4-6). In addition, Beuys’s work often used symbolic representations of different body parts, such as the placenta, the heart, and the skull (7-11). Although Beuys’s artwork is often ugly, puzzling, intimidating, and disgusting on first viewing, he intended it to do more than simply shock. He wanted to develop a novel concept of total art that reflected the social problems of society. It was Beuys’s hope that critical confrontation with his art would ignite a healing process in the entire social organism. In this regard, Beuys’s drawings, sculptures, and installations are seen as triggers that lead people to question their lives, bring together science and art, and eventually result in the creation of a better society. Joseph Beuys: A Short Biography Joseph Beuys was born on 12 May 1921 in Krefeld, Germany, a small town near Dsseldorf. Young Joseph was very interested in the natural sciences and originally wanted to study medicine. However, after graduating from grammar school in 1940, he was immediately recruited into the army. He served as a radio operator and pilot during World War I. In March 1944, Beuys’s plane crashed in northern Crimea. This incident had a strong effect on Beuys’s later life and on his concept of art. Beuys sustained many injuries, including a basal skull fracture, and barely survived the crash. According to Beuys, nomadic Tartars found him almost fatally injured in the deep snow and brought him to their camp, where they spread grease on his wounds and wrapped him in felt to keep him warm. Art critics later used this episode to explain Beuys’s preference for fat and felt in his work (4, 11). Beuys began studying art at the State Academy in Dsseldorf in spring 1946. He left the State Academy in 1954 to start his own studio. This period in his life was characterized by intense study of the natural sciences, particularly biology. Beuys produced many drawings and several sculptures that combined different organic and inorganic materials and already reflected his later style. In 1961, Beuys was invited to become full professor at the State Academy. From 1962 to 1964, Beuys aligned himself with a group of artists known as Fluxus. Fluxus artists participated in happenings, events, and activities, taking everyday objects out of their normal context and arranging them or performing with them in novel ways to challenge conventional ideas. These artists were against the commercialization of art and believed that every artist should become a kind of social worker, improving society. One of the typical Fluxus events that made Beuys known to a wide public was the Festival der Neuen Kunst (Festival of Novel Art), which was held at the Technical University of Aachen on 20 July 1964. During this event, blocks of grease were melted on a cooking plate and Beuys lifted a copper rod wrapped in felt. Outraged students in the audience, too conservative to accept this happening, stormed the stage and beat Beuys. Beuys had his own singular way of performing and eventually separated himself from the Fluxus movement, which emphasized an anti-individualistic conception of art. To express his growing political consciousness and attempt to directly influence social change, Beuys founded the Deutsche Studentenpartei (German Student Party) in Dsseldorf in 1967. This group developed from discussion circles Beuys held at the State Academy, which dealt with such topics as absolute military disarmament, a call for educational reforms, and metaphysical subjects. The party was so named because Beuys believed that every human being was considered a student during his or her life. In 1972, Beuys was dismissed from his teaching position at the State Academy after clashing with the administration and the state ministry about overenrollment of students in his classes. As a direct reaction, he founded the Free International University, which focused on developing everyone’s creative potential. In 1979, Beuys became one of the founding members of the German Green Party. Beuys began to receive international recognition in 1974, after performing the famous action I Like America and America Likes Me at the Ren Block Gallery in New York. For this action, Beuys spent 3 days in a room with a live coyote. In 1979, Beuys reached the climax of his U.S. fame with his retrospective in the emptied Guggenheim Museum, the first time since 1945 that the entire museum was dedicated to the works of only one artist. This exhibition made Beuys a star in the United States (3). His famous installations included 7000 Oaks, which was begun in 1982 at the Documenta 7 art exhibition in Kassel, Germany. The final goal of the action was the planting of 7000 oak trees in Kassel or, as Beuys put it, urban afforestation, not urban administration (11). These busy years took their toll. Beuys was never very healthy after being injured so severely in the war. He smoked with relish, consequently developed arterial occlusive disease, and had a heart attack in 1975. In 1985, Beuys developed interstitial pneumonia, and during the last years of his life he worked literally day and night on his many projects. Beuys died on 26 January 1986. Medical Aspects in the Work of Joseph Beuys The many medical aspects of Beuys’s artwork can be arranged into roughly three areas (8, 10). His early drawings and paintings often depicted various body parts, such as hearts, skulls, bones, and placenta (7, 9). These anatomic, structurally correct depictions were used to demonstrate Beuys’s concepts of energy flow, force fields, and the dynamic of life. For some of these drawings, Beuys used iodine tincture and diluted blood as additional paints, which resulted in extremely unusual colors. Beuys also used diverse medical waste or equipment, including old radiography films, dressing gauze, figures of red crosses, old syringes, and empty bottles from blood transfusions, in a novel context. In addition, such materials as animal bones, hair, teeth, blood, and clipped toenails were integral parts of some of his pieces (8). Finally, in his actions and performances, Beuys often appeared in the role of a healer and shaman, which was reflected externally by his use of felt to cover himself. A shaman is usually called on only after a person survives a serious illness, for a completion of life through death; this attribute is certainly appropriate for Beuys’s life experiences. In some performances, such as the encounter with the coyote in 1974, Beuys almost resembled an ancient medicine man or priest, extending the healing process of scientific medicine to encompass a holistic perspective. Kinderbadewanne (Children’s Bathtub) is a work from 1960 that has a strong autobiographical element. As a child, Beuys was actually bathed in this tub (Figure 1). The flaking enamel on the surface is covered with several adhesive bandages, and Beuys fashioned the bathtub slightly differently for various exhibitions, occasionally adding bloody medical dressings or filling it with water in which grease lumps swam. For Beuys, the contents of the tub represented the remains of the placenta and umbilical cord after birth. The whole arrangement reflected his own birth trauma: the injury that every newborn child experiences after the first sudden contact with the unfriendly, cold external world. Figure 1. Kinderbadewanne (Children’s Bathtub) , 1960. In Kreuzigung (Crucifixion), a work from 19621963 (4), two old bottles from a blood bank are displayed on a wooden stand (Figure 2). The reference to crucifixion paintings of the Middle Ages is obvious. Christ is represented by the stele in the middle, and the Virgin Mary and John kneeling in front of the cross are depicted by the two empty blood bottles. Although this piece can easily be interpreted as a metaphor for human suffering and subsequent redemption, its iconographic aspects diminish its holistic element. Figure 2. Kreuzigung (Crucifixion) , 19621963. Part of the installation Zeige Deine Wunde (Show Your Wound), a work from 1976, is shown in Figure 3. This complex arrangement of several paired objects included stretchers obtained from a morgue; boxes filled with grease and a single glass tube; boxes with glass windows coated with grease; slates; and old-fashioned farm devices, such as pitchforks. The arrangement was originally installed in the Munich Art Forum, which was a room in an underground pedestrian passage in Munich, Germany. Location was important because the depressing atmosphere was further reinforced by the echoing traffic noise. In its entirety, the installation radiates feelings of death and of dying in an inhuman environment, perhaps after a life of hard physical work, as reflected by the farm tools. Since the work was completed after Beuys recovered from his heart attack, he may have used it to visualize his own suffering and fears of death. However, the title, Show Your Wound, seems to suggest the potential for healing. Showing an injury to a physician or even to a spiritual healer is a prerequisite for successful recovery. Figure 3. Zeige Deine Wunde (Show Your Wound) , 1976. Conclusions Superficially, it seems that Beuys’s prime purpose was to shock, in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp. However, Beuys’s work also had social and political dimensions. Beuys was unique in this regard and has had no real successor.