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Rated by many (this author included) as one of the most important works of twentieth century art, this is a complex piece that incorporates aspects of performance, installation, photography and conceptual art. Joseph Beuys was flown into the USA from Germany. Upon his arrival, he was wrapped in felt and carried from the plane on a stretcher into an awaiting ambulance that delivered him to the warehouse that was to become the René Block Gallery, in New York. Here he was gurneyed to a room on the second floor where a cage had been constructed. Beuys shared this cage with a wild coyote for three days, before being once again wrapped in felt and ambulanced back to the airport and carried onto his departure flight.
For this event, there was no audience, though a photographer recorded the situations throughout. After the event, a selection of these photographs were exhibited in galleries and later published in the book titled, Coyote (1976). So, where and when did the art happen? What is the actual art here? Is it the performance, the temporary installation, the photographs in the gallery, the internationally published book?
Beuys proposed that we never actually see art, we can only have an individual experience of it which may be triggered by the artefacts that represent it, amongst many other factors. Art itself happens in two places: the mind of the artist and the mind of the audience… For example, the fifteen years in the life of Leonardo Da Vinci, his thoughts and actions, comprise the art that the Mona Lisa is a record of, though the artefact is not per se the art itself, just a conduit from artist to audience where the art continues.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Beuys often produced Vitrines. These were glass cases in which he collected and displayed items used during his performances, objects that had become imbued with symbolic, ritual and personal meaning. Each Vitrine contained items that related to one another and combinations of these Vitrines were exhibited in galleries. These exhibitions presented items in the same way that museums present ancient artefacts or scientific specimens, and also resembled the altar reliquaries of saints found in some cathedrals.
Approaching Coyote as an aesthetic experience is rewarding enough, the black and white photographs are beautifully composed and technically adept, with well balanced formal elements and a lovely range of grey tones that lose no detail through white-out or shadow. As images alone, the piece is a Surrealist work of two non-contextual elements being brought together to create some sort of synthesis.
Coyote is an artwork that may be simple to describe, yet the meanings and interpretations seem endless. The use of an ambulance implies that there is an injury or sickness, though the patient it delivers becomes the shamanistic medicine man in a series of random and ritualistic interactions, with an animal, that could be a symbolic healing process. During the performance part of this work, the relationship between Beuys and the coyote changes. To begin with the animal mistrusts the human and there are many photographs of it shredding the heavy felt sheets that Beuys used to protect himself, or of Beuys using the shepherds crook to fend off the dog. Later they become accustomed to each others presence, and later still there are photographs of the two cuddling up and sharing food. Two elements, neither of which is in their natural environment, have been artificially brought together. The initial conflict is eventually resolved and a harmony is achieved. All this took place on a visit to America during which Beuys did not actually ‘set foot’ on the continent. He remained isolated and apart, the only thing of that land he directly experienced and interacted with was the coyote.
Beuys and the coyote could represent the human and its animal nature, the artificial and the natural, the immigrant and the native, the intellect and the emotions, the European and the American, almost any two things that have a potential to be in opposition or harmony... documented in black and white.
This work is part of what Beuys termed the Extended Art of Social Sculpture. Part of this concept is that the work is extended by the viewers, who become participants in the creative act. His overall motivation was to create a continuum that allows people to exist as creative beings. So, the art of Coyote did not happen within that room, it was not recorded in the photographs, it is not in the pages of the book that commemorates the events. These things are like totems that Beuys, as shaman, presented in his ritual. The art did not happen, but continues to happen within the minds of those involved, which now includes you…
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