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C104
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Joseph Beuys 'extends' James Joyce's
Work
Joseph Beuys
had a fascination with Joyce's writings. Christa-Maria
Lerm Hayes examines here how deep the influences were.
In
his Lifecourse/Workcourse1,
the German artist Joseph Beuys (1921 - 1986) stated that
in 1950 he read James Joyce's Finnegans Wake at
a "Haus Wylermeer" in the Lower Rhine region. The cultural
centre located there, however, had not been making use
of Beuys' contributions and thus the reading is likely
to have been a private one. Among Beuys' statements concerning
Joyce, which themselves appear to be similarly cryptic,
are assertions that the artist "extended" Joyce's Ulysses.
Beuys also said that he wished to "do" Finnegans Wake
again.2 Lifecourse/Workcourse
was written in 1964 for an exhibition catalogue. The opening
of that exhibition was celebrated with a performance festival
at which Beuys earned some notoriety by being involved
in a brawl. Did the artist wish to shock the public by
mentioning Joyce? Are any of the references credible?
In Lifecourse/Workcourse,
the Ulysses-Extension bears the long title: Beuys
extends James Joyce's 'Ulysses' by 2 further chapters
at the author's request. This body of drawings in six
exercise books dates from ca. 1957 - 61. When people visited
Beuys around 1962, he had his copy of the German translation
of Ulysses displayed on the window ledge. One can
thus be certain that he owned this work early in his career
and treasured it. Concerning the alleged Finnegans
Wake-reading, however, neither was there in the past
a source to match this claim, nor is there a work known
to match the intention to do Finnegans Wake again.
I discovered
two Wake first editions in Beuys' estate, the English
and the American one. The Faber and Faber edition was
a gift and contains no annotations.3
The Viking Press copy, on the other hand, had been acquired
second hand - and it is annotated on almost every page.
When Beuys came to own this book, when he read it, underlined
and drew in it, etc., cannot be determined conclusively.
From the beginning of the Anna Livia episode onwards,
the annotations relate closely to the text. This chapter
seems to have been of particular importance; consequently
it will be in the foreground here. Interestingly, wherever
Joyce had worked in a visual way, e.g. on pp. 196, 293
and 308, Beuys chose not to interfere or annotate. This
fact already lets all the other annotations appear as
'extensions' of the writer's visual approach to the remainder
of the book. Joyce was, moreover, a visual artist for
Beuys. The pages up to the beginning of the Anna Livia
episode are also annotated, but in a different way in
that they have words in the margins beginning with the
letter 'C'.
My intention
is to look at the Ulysses-Extension and show that
these drawings are informed by Finnegans Wake.
They may indeed 'do' Finnegans Wake again and may
thus also have 'extended' Ulysses in the way in
which Joyce himself had extended Ulysses in Finnegans
Wake.4 The drawings
are a nucleus for much of Beuys' later work and his ideas
concerning the materiality of his sculptural substances.
Therefore, some other representative works will also be
introduced.
Beuys mentions
"The Jury" in English on one page of the Ulysses Extension,
but the clearest reference to Finnegans Wake can
be found in drawings of book sculptures or objects. In
book 3, p. 74, one can see a book balancing on a pole
with a supporting base, while the spine is curled around
so that the covers approach one another. I suggest this
to be as clear a visualisation of the cyclical structure
of the Wake as is possible to achieve. This 'round'
book appears again on the same page, seen from either
the top or bottom, i.e., the spine appears as a small
circle in the centre with the pages radiating outwards.
On a different page, subsequently removed form the exercise
books, Beuys uses this shape again. In his drawing Warm
Time Machine, he refers to it as a sun (warmth), a
clock (time) and a flower, while retaining the reference
to the book. One can add a wheel to this multiplicity
of meanings, since Joyce had called Finnegans Wake
a machine with just one wheel and no spokes - a perfect
square.5 Even in Our
Exagmination, the first critical anthology on Work
in Progress (later entitled Finnegans Wake),
the wheel was chosen for the layout of the title. Squaring
the circle is exactly what Beuys does in the writer's
wake - or rather he circles the square book and adds spokes:
the book would not be complete without its pages. This
motif, open for multiple readings, can, as I would like
to suggest, be called a portmanteau shape. Beuys
thus goes further than simply referring to Joyce in terms
of motif. He borrows his procedure and adapts it to his
own genre.
This portmanteau
shape is located in the Warm Time Machine drawing
in the area of the heart of an unidentifiable male. The
brain appears to be quite chaotic and the mouth, the area
which generates speech and language, is a test tube. It
would be surprising if Beuys did not think of Joyce's
experimental use of language when drawing this. He could
also have meant Bloom. After all, the portmanteau shape
is also a flower. Formal innovations were for Beuys (unlike
for most of his contemporaries in the visual arts) never
important for their own sake. The social implications,
warmth (sun) as social warmth and love, were to him as
important as they were for Joyce, who after all chose
Odysseus and conceived Bloom for their humane characteristics.
The book
drawing from the Ulysses-Extension
took on another life of its own, one at least as multifaceted
as this sun/clock/flower image. Again, the spine is a
small circle. The covers, however, are like a hill with
the spine as a sun at its summit. This angle appears in
Beuys' work in many guises, but its origin is that of
a leitmotif in the last three books of the Ulysses-Extension.
It may relate to the drawings of Beuys' wife Eva's pregnant
belly with navel in exercise book number six - this again
not without Joycean associations. Indeed, that shape was
female for Joyce, too, maybe a breast, maybe genitalia
and legs, but certainly the delta and 'O' from the typographical
layout of the beginning of the Anna Livia episode. Joyce's
mentioning of ALP's "sugarloaf hat with a gaudyquiviry
peak" (FW 208,07) turns the motif into a mountain hat.
Beuys apparently
noticed here that the peaked cap is associated with both
male and female elements. The visual motif, which clearly
derived from the beginning of the ALP episode, Beuys called
the "Penninus-motif" in his Ulysses-Extension
after the Celtic mountain god, whose name relates not
so much to the pen as to pen in the sense of pin or ben
as mountain. The artist apparently followed Joyce in his
way of thinking and employed their shared interest in
Indo-European etymology, repeatedly accompanying the diagram
with the words "book with Penninus motif." Sometimes,
several such motifs appear as if they were cells, one
after the other, maybe denoting the different episodes.
Tumescence and detumescence in Ulysses (especially
Nausicaa) come to mind.
In order
to understand better Beuys' ideas of extending Joyce's
works - and that is what it really appears to be in an
intellectual way - one needs to refer to more figurative
Penninus drawings by the artist. One of them shows a man
reminiscent of ecce homo depictions with just such a peaked
cap. Another one shows a walking man, whose upper body
is covered by the peaked cap, while the legs echo its
angle. This brings closer a solution as to how Beuys meant
to extend Ulysses, while not repeating anything.6
As a visual
artist, Beuys knew that the peaked cap is iconographically
the attribute of Odysseus. With this link, he had discovered
a fundamental parallel between Ulysses and Finnegans
Wake. The two works in fact melt into one in more
respects than the formal link between the cyclical book
and the flower as Bloom. Following Bloom's gender metamorphosis
in Circe, Beuys felt that Joyce had given him leave to
stress the masculine attributes of ALP's Odyssean mountain
hat. This suited his interpretation of Haus Wylermeer
as the claimed locus of his Finnegans Wake reading
in 1950: the house is mountain-shaped and also in reality
called Wylerberg, i.e. "'mountain'. The two inhabitants
of the house from 1950, however, were female. Beuys consequently
changed the house's name in the Lifecourse/Workcourse
to 'Wylermeer', i.e. '-sea'.
Penninus
appeared to be an ideal main protagonist for Beuys' Joyce-inspired
work: The "mightmountain Penn" (FW 19,32) and all the
connotations of writing and drawing appear clearly enough
in Finnegans Wake for Penninus to be recognisable
and understandable as Wake reference, while looking
back to Ulysses could bring some innovation. Beuys
followed Joyce in turning the seafarer Odysseus' adventures
into a land-based and walking odyssey. He moreover paradoxically
rendered the Wake's male protagonist, Tim Finnegan,
lying in the Dublin landscape with the hill of Howth as
his mountain head, as a walking mountain, Penninus.
Apart from
Tim Finnegan, Europe's geographical make-up and cultural
landscape pointed Beuys in this direction: both the Pennines
in England, the Swiss Pennine Alps (ALP!) and the Apennine
range in Italy are named after Penninus, the Celtic mountain
god. They serve as the spine in Beuys' anthropomorphic
view of the continent. Ireland is then logically the 'Brain
of Europe', a conviction which Beuys asserted in many
of his drawings, some of them carried out on blackboards
during public lectures in Ireland in 1974. Joyce, moreover,
had in Beuys' view left his mark on the European landscape
through his life's wanderings as much as through his work.
The artist owned three Joyce biographies and followed
the writer as behatted artist.
He also followed Odysseus. It
is, I believe, no coincidence that Beuys chose to abandon
his usual felt hat on a rare occasion and sported instead
a peaked cap (similar in style and material to Aran jumpers)
when he sailed the Mediterranean on a friend's yacht.
Beuys referred to Odysseus several times - always it seems
with Joyce in mind. In 1977, owning at this stage at least
three books with illustrations of Joyce's drawing of Bloom
contained in them, Beuys chose to accompany a blackboard
drawing of his own antlered everyman with the opening
lines of the Odyssey in Greek, just as Joyce had done.
A drawing
from 1957, when the Ulysses-Extension was begun,
is entitled Odyßeus. It shows - appropriately
- both human and animal footprints. The double 'S' of
Odysseus is substituted in the title with a sharp 'S'
or 'Eszet'. This letter looks like a capital 'B'. One
can therefore also read 'OdyBeus', with Beuys' own name
clearly inscribed into what turns out to be a portmanteau
word, making use at the same time of the visual appearance
of a letter.
Beuys used
further letter-based sigla from Finnegans Wake
- and that is what one can call them - in his work, expanding
Joyce's own visual procedures into a multifaceted and
programmatically underpinned artistic practice. Beuys'
annotations of deltas and staff- or 'J'-shaped underlinings
in his Finnegans Wake copy clearly show that the
artist consciously viewed what Joyce scholars call sigla
as closely related to the writer.
Beuys created
many works using 'J'-shapes. In one of his last multiple
artworks, Joyce's initials feature twice and in such a
way that the use of the staff and the sled - one of Beuys'
signature motifs - clearly appear Joyce-inspired. Joyce
with Sled consists of an interview passage from 1972,
carefully centred on the page - almost like in the Portrait,
where Stephen determines his position. The text reads
like a confession of faith:
Yes, [he would begin with
"yes"] there is a parallelism and I referred to Joyce
because I believed that these things, which change the
universe should be a part of our consciousness. [...]
this principle of self-transformation is an ingredient,
a substance that has been crucial, one could also say
a dynamic medicine, to me.7
The final
sentence is a reference to Beuys' deep depressive crisis
in the second half of the 1950s, where one can assume
with some degree of certainty that reading Joyce provided
him with therapeutic help - and along the way, he developed
the conviction that art is therapy. Beuys ends the text
not with another 'Yes', but with a 'yin and yang signature',
which deviates from the eastern symbol of wholeness by
means of three gaps. In fact, this yin and yang sign consists
of two intertwined 'J's, alluding to how 'JJ', according
to Beuys, bridged the gap between East and West, rationality
and spirituality.
The other
two 'J's are the runners of the sled, which is shown upside
down in the centre. This is peculiar, as Ireland is not
a particularly cold place. But the island was Hibernia
to the Romans and Joyce would therefore be 'hibernian',
which in Latin also means wintry. Such word games, Beuys
knew, were Joyce's staples in Finnegans Wake -
and the writer was as prone to over-interpreting them
as the visual artist was after him. Joyce, as a spiritual
writer with an interest in humanity, would therefore be
well placed to serve as an example of how to negotiate
the metaphorical ice around us. Joyce was for Beuys a
Warm Time Machine, a land crossing, behatted Penninus,
bearing the 'J'-shaped ashplant, a 'pen-man', artist and
mountain man. Beuys as an artist followed Joyce's many
eccentricities, found them entirely logical and thus turned
(in many people's view) into as much of a mountainy man
as the Irish writer before him had been.
Having established
the ways in which Beuys took up Joyce's example in terms
of motifs and procedures, including creating portmanteau
shapes and words, operating with sigla and phenomenological
coincidences in order to let the quirky particular represent
the universal - it can almost be taken for granted that
the artist would claim to have received a post mortem
"request" from Joyce to extend Ulysses. However,
a more detailed and 'Joycean' instance within the artist's
mythologised biography was seemingly required: Beuys spoke
of a recurring daydream during his childhood, which can
be linked to the Finnegans Wake reading in House
'Wylermeer'. A man dressed in black told the artist: "You
are the prince of the roof. I've led the way, now you
have to do things your own way."8
The Ulysses-Extension drawings are the first
attempt to work in such an independent way, following
the depressive crisis already mentioned. The connection
to Joyce is that Beuys became the 'prince of the roof'
(or so he wishes us to conclude) by reading Finnegans
Wake in or rather on the Penninus-motif-like roof
of house Wylerberg.
ALP's (river)
delta was indeed for Beuys a life-giving and work-inspiring
force from the beginning. It is hardly surprising that
Beuys then chose the two circles from the Euclidian Finnegans
Wake diagram (FW 293) separated - i.e., without the
gyroscope of two deltas in its centre - as an image of
death. In Palazzo Regale, Beuys' last major installation,
two cymbals lean on one side of the central, grave-like
vitrine without overlapping one another. Life has ended.
In his last Joyce-inspired wish (if not work), Joseph
Beuys requested to have his ashes spread over the North
Sea. He thus shares Anna Livia's fate even in death.
Dr. Christa-Maria
Lerm Hayes is Government of Ireland Post-doctoral
Fellow in History of Art at University College, Dublin,
and author/curator of a forthcoming book/exhibition on
'Joyce in Art' at the RHA, Dublin.
1
3
4
5
6
7.
8
Article
reproduced from CIRCA 104,
Summer 2003, pp. 35-39.
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