A Felt Covered Solution for a New Crisis

Joseph Beuys, Infiltration homogen für Konzertflügel (Infiltration Homogen for Grand Piano), 1966

Beuys died three years before the reunification of Germany, in a time that is no longer our time. And history has changed the significance of his work. Freed from his overbearing presence, his art reveals its fullness. In his lifetime Beuys was the unequivocal author of his art, telling people, for better or worse, what it was. Now, his assemblages have to find their own place, without him to explain them.

Because Beuys is a German artist, it is impossible not to see the wounds of history everywhere, with a surpassing melancholy that dwarfs his attempts to commit his sculpture to an optimistic democratic politics. Beuys hoped his lumps of fat spoke of fluidity and progressive change. In fact, they are blocks of rancid yellow memory - fat from Germany.

The first Beuys I ever saw was at the Georges Pompidou Centre: a grand piano smothered in grey felt, with a red cross sewn on it. It struck me as tragic, and it still does. The piano is German culture, the heritage of Beethoven, sealed now inside felt, with an ambulance sign - damaged, wounded, recuperating. It is the sculptural equivalent of the sanatorium in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.

When I tried to find out more about Beuys, I was baffled. The felt swaddling the piano, according to Beuys, was meant to heal it, to save it. Yet this efficacious magic doesn't actually form part of the piano's aesthetic impact. There is no sense of redemption - just of sickness. Now I realise it doesn't matter what Beuys said; probably at some level he knew he was whistling in the dark when he claimed his art was upbeat and spiritually transfiguring, when really it is shockingly lumpen, and macabre.