Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments
Until May 2; Tate Modern, London

If every young artist in Scotland was asked to name their hero, two names would probably come out top: Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys. In the early 20th Century Duchamp blew the lid off the art world by putting an ordinary urinal in a gallery and calling it art. Joseph Beuys came along in the second half of the century and threw the gallery’s doors open to the world.

Beuys’s legacy is seen everywhere, from Jeremy Deller’s orchestrated public events to Anya Gallaccio’s rotting apple trees; from Gilbert and George’s role as living sculptures to Tracey Emin’s notorious unmade bed. Beuys made numerous forays into Scotland with the encouragement of Richard Demarco, and his ghost still lingers in the corridors of our art colleges.

Despite his legendary status, Beuys is hard to grasp. There’s no one object, like Duchamp’s Fountain, which has been singled out for posterity’s convenience. There’s no one groundbreaking event to seize upon, and there’s no way of reproducing the charismatic power which drove the German artist’s ideas into the public realm.

What remains of Beuys’s art is smelly, dirty, and hard to explain. Most of his installations are permanently fixed in galleries around the world, and the records of his “actions” are often in German. No wonder that there have been no major Beuys shows in Britain since the artist’s death in 1986. Finally, nearly 20 years later, Tate Modern is having a shot.

If Tate’s intention is to get to the heart of Beuys, and convey his greatness to the world, this exhibition, inevitably, falls short. Museums may display the decayed bones of a dinosaur, wired together in a ferocious pose, but their visitors will struggle to picture the living, breathing animal which once possessed them. It’s the same with Beuys. His animated personality was so much a part of his work that all we have left is remnants, dead and decaying.

Ironically, many of these remnants, in their museum-like vitrines, were curated by Beuys himself, as if in anticipation of his role as a dead hero. He even fabricated his own biography, ensuring that his posthumous reputation would be in keeping with his work. So, his copious use of fat and felt are explained by the mythical story of his rescue by Tartars in the Crimea, after crashing his Luftwaffe plane. Yes, he crashed, but no, he was not wrapped in lard and felt and nursed to health by romantic primitives.

Be warned – many of the vitrines play host to decomposing materials that have been around since the 1970s. Chocolate is melted and mouldy; plants dried up; fat crystallising; and foodstuffs rotten beyond all recognition. One room installation, Economic Values, is so pungent that you’re unlikely to hang around for long.

The fact that his materials are still changing would please Beuys. From his early bronzes to his late tree-planting activities, the artist’s notion of sculpture was expanding all the time. His materials were subject to constant chemical and physical change, and to regular re-use and rearrangement. Beuys’s “expanded concept of art” meant not only that anyone could be an artist, but also that anything could be the medium. By this he didn’t just mean the readymades of Duchamp, but the very fabric of society.

Beuys’s “social sculpture” came in many forms. He was dismissed from Düsseldorf Academy of Art for encouraging the students to revolt. He stood as a candidate for the Green Party, and protested in support of the imprisoned Jimmy Boyle. He performed numerous “actions” around the world, from political lectures to enigmatic performances.

The rooms devoted to these actions are the most problematic in the show. Beuys put himself at the centre of his art (his earnest eloquence a striking counterbalance to the fey persona which Andy Warhol was cultivating across the water). He was a teacher, an enchanter, a purveyor of ideas. In his trademark felt hat and fisherman’s jacket he was instantly recognisable, and a crucial component in his own social sculpture.

It’s impossible to fully comprehend Beuys’s magic, now that he’s gone. The nearest thing Tate can offer is the photographs, blackboards and videos associated with his actions. To be fair, Beuys himself accorded the blackboards, with their scrawl of signs and phrases, the status of independent works of art. These confusing scribbles are brought to life with a video of the lecture where they originated. Unfortunately before you can watch the video, you’ll have to loiter with intent to pounce on one of the two headsets provided.

In another action, I Like America and America Likes Me, Beuys was flown into New York and whisked, wrapped in felt, to a gallery where he lived with a coyote for three days. Afterwards he was removed in the same way, having experienced nothing of America but the coyote, a powerful spiritual totem of the Native Americans.

Fourteen photographs document Beuys’s time with the coyote, while a second video shows Beuys’s arrival and departure, swaddled in felt. Without any explanatory text on the walls to link the two, it’s unlikely to make any sense unless you remember to consult your exhibition pamphlet. With nine other rooms to wrap your head round, whatever you do, don’t lose your pamphlet.

It’s not just Beuys’s actions which are riddled with curatorial pitfalls. Every time he installed a new work he would change it, sometimes radically, in response to the space. So, while the long pipes of Tramstop were stood vertically at the Venice Biennale in 1976, Beuys subsequently decided to lay them flat, the way they’re shown at Tate.

It all makes you rather nervous about drawing firm conclusions on the basis of this show. If Beuys had been around, he would have changed things. But in his absence, many of the objects on show are like a clock that’s stopped, frozen in time. Then the smell of the food and fat become strangely comforting: they, I can assure you, have definitely not been frozen.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 06.03.05