Eurasia Siberian Symphony 1963

Joseph Beuys, 1966 · Gallery 408 · Floor 4

The hare can wait. Look at the bottom of the blackboard first. Felt angle, thirty-two degrees. Fat angle, twenty-one. Then a temperature. Forty-two Celsius. That's about 107 degrees Fahrenheit. Berlin. October 31st, 1966. Ya know, Halloween over here. But it's Reformation Day in Germany. Martin Luther, the whole church splitting apart thing. And Joseph Beuys is in a gallery, tying a dead hare to wooden poles. This is what's left of that performance. And outside, at this point Berlin's got that wall running through it. Has for five years. So Beuys is thinking about divisions. East and West. Europe and Asia. How you might put them back together. He's written the name across the board. Eurasia. Or most of it. The felt's hanging over the end. Above the name, half a cross. The bottom's missing. And the hare? To Beuys, that's an animal that can make the leap. Get from one side to the other. He teaches sculpture at the academy in Düsseldorf. Three years earlier, he'd done a performance there with a hare. Hung it from a blackboard. Took its heart out. Called it the first movement of a symphony. This is the thirty-second. So, yeah... there's some catching up to do. Anyway, back to the fat and felt. He said they were about warmth. Spiritual warmth. He even thought of himself as a kind of shaman. And his explanation starts with a plane crash. It's 1944. He's in the Luftwaffe. Back seat of a Stuka dive bomber over Crimea. The plane crashes. The pilot dies. Now, the way Beuys told it, the German search parties gave up. Local Tatars found him in the snow days later. He said he was unconscious for twelve days. They covered him in fat to get his body warm. Wrapped him in felt to keep the heat in. Without them, he said, he wouldn't be alive. So look at those triangles hanging off the poles. In his story, that's what saved him. Except there's another account. The crash happened on March 16th, 1944. The military records put him in a German field hospital on March 17th. The next day. That doesn't leave much room for his version. But that's the story he told about fat and felt. And here they are again.

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