EURASIA SIBERIAN SYMPHONY 1963
JOSEPH BEUYS, 1966
Okay. So first things first. Yes. That is a dead rabbit. And yes, it does appear to be strapped to some sticks in front of a blackboard. So if your first thought is, what the hell am I looking at? Congratulations. You are having the correct Joseph Beuys experience. This is Eurasia Siberian Symphony 1963. Joseph Beuys. Made in 1966, using material from one of his earlier performances. Chalkboard. Felt. Fat. Painted poles. Taxidermied hare. Basically the supply list of a man who has fully left the normal store. But the fat and the felt have a whole backstory. Beuys told it for the rest of his life. World War Two. He’s in the Luftwaffe. His plane crashes in Crimea. He says local Tatars find him in the snow, wrap him in fat and felt, and save his life. Great story. Maybe too great. Because historians have been poking holes in it for decades. The crash happened. The rescue? Probably not like that. Official records say he was found by a German search party and taken to a military hospital. But here’s the thing. For Beuys, the myth worked better than the facts. Fat became warmth. Felt became protection. The body gets broken, then wrapped, insulated, brought back. And suddenly these weird materials aren’t just weird materials. They’re survival materials. That’s the trick with Beuys. It looks random until you realize he is completely serious. Europe and Asia. East and West. A world split into borders, arguments, ideologies. And Beuys turns that split into this strange little ritual object. Not a map. Not a lecture. More like evidence from a ceremony you walked into too late. The hare matters too. For Beuys, it’s not just a cute woodland guy having a very bad day. It’s low to the earth. Animal. Warm. Instinctive. Connected to dirt and survival. All the stuff modern people like to pretend they’ve outgrown, right before they wreck the place. And the blackboard is perfect. Because a blackboard usually means: okay, here comes the explanation. But this explains nothing. It gives you marks, signs, diagrams — like a professor started solving the problem and then had a vision halfway through. So no, this thing is not beautiful. Wrong question. The question is: Why does this dead little animal feel like it’s carrying a whole continent on its back? That’s the strange power of it. It looks like junk from a performance. But it sits there like a wound that learned how to teach.