e traveled around Scotland visiting Archeological sites and modern artists.www.demarco-archive.ac.uk/
Demarco had run the tour beginning in 1970 and the most well known artist involved was Joseph Beuys. Demarco introduced Beuys to the English speaking world.
Beuys didn’t travel with the tour in 1979 but was referred to so often that when I left the tour and went on to Paris, I went out of my way to see an exhibit of his blackboards at the Pompidou Center. They were completely lost on me at that time. Subsequently I’ve grown to love them especially the one at MOMA. When they redesigned the interior ,
they also got a new Head curator of Painting and Sculpture; Ann Temkin; who has written a book on Beuys and devoted a room to his work. I‘ve been a couple of times and when examining the blackboard had the sensation of piecing a jigsaw puzzle together only to find I’m falling into Alice’s rabbit hole each time.
Several years ago I decided that things I didn’t understand about art I would tackle head on and Beuys seemed to be a prime subject. I bought at least 8 books. The most recent is called" Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition". It's a catalogue from a show of the blackbo
ards of Beuys and Rudolph Steiner. It is a very accessible book. Steiner’s pretty, colorful blackboards help make Beuys wordy diagrammatic blackboards easier to understand. I had the most wonderful experience when I first got the book. I was with my daughter Gillian and I opened the book and randomly read what I found ...“Only the poets have understood what nature can be to man... They find everything in nature. They are the only ones familiar with its soul and their quest to find in their surroundings the blessings of the golden age are not in vain... They do not know the powers they have at their disposal,the
worlds that obey them. Is it not true that the rocks and the forests obey music and , tamed by her, follow every command like domestic pets? Do not the most beautiful flowers grow near the loved one and delight in adorning her? Do not the heavens become brighter for her and the sea smoother? Does not all nature, like a face and its gestures, the pulse and the colors, express the state of one of those higher, most wonderful beings we call mankind? Does not a rock become strangely like you when I speak to it? And how am I different from the stream when, full of melancholy, I gaze down into the waves, and lose my thoughts in its murmurings?”If as Novalis writes, natur
e is understood as a great external world analogous to the world of man, able to communicate with the forces of nature as if talking with a brother or sister, then the Kantian “other” disappears. This, in turn, brings us closer to the idea we find when we look at Steiner: that mankind is the transcendental creator of all these things. It was Freidrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling who recognized that the imaginative, inspirational and intuitive powers of art included the power to combine inner and external creativity. This was a power from which we get an acute sense of what creation is and of the forms it creates.Schelling and Novalis were both interested in artistic and philosophical questi
ons.They turned their attentions to the phenomenon of a “secret capacity” in art linking the artistic process with nature’s creative processes. Schelling thought that inside us lived
a subconscious creative energy that we could not explain but which was able to create, through various means, forms similar to those produced by nature. According to Schelling, it had long been recognized that,” not everything in art is consciously arranged.” There needed to be “ a link between conscious activity and subconscious energy” for works comparable to those of nature to be created.
Steiner turned this idea into the basis of his entire philosophy. Schelling’s thinking on subconscious creative energy was still relatively imprecise and it was Steiner who defined it more precisely as a form of thinking. In essence. his idea is as follows:
we are not the ones doing the thinking, but rather, as Steiner formulates it in “The Philosophy of Freedom”, 1894, we live “by the grace of thought”. Thinking is bigger and more encompassing than mankind. It is a great cosmos of thinking that creates the apparent world and, with it, mankind.
At the same time, however, mankind does not exist outside this all encompassing thinking but is enveloped by it. Man himself is a thinker. When we think something,
part of this invisible, world- structuring material lives in our inner activity. If we are dealing with something material in the external world, then this external object is also something we have originally conceived of. We would be unable to perceive and recognize it if we could not first conceive of it.
This key allows us to unlock Steiner’s hieratic work, piece by piece, and reveal where Beuys follows in his tracks. When, for example, Beuys says THINKING =SCULPTURE,
he has reduced Steiner’s philosophy to an ingenious short form. But here, thinking
means something other than a purely formal logic. Beuys and Steiner both agree
that thinking is much more than the rudiments we encounter in the intellect. It is, as
Schelling said in his talk about subconscious creative energy, a formative power. Its
imaginative side creates images, its inspirational side opens awareness to the world
of sound and in its intuitive aspect it is able to achieve form. Just as nature magically
creates a plant before our eyes without us really knowing what is happening, thinking
creates the internal and external spaces to which we move.” Wolfgang Zumdick
Deeply profound and liberating!
