The spectacle Joseph Beuys pulled off in Frankfurt was pure, uncut confrontation dressed up in mystical horseshit, and that’s exactly why it mattered.
You walk into that theater in ’69, Europe’s still got the psychic stench of the war clinging to everything like cigarette smoke in an underground bar, and there’s this German shaman motherfucker in a fur coat, whispering gibberish to a white horse like he’s trying to exorcise the entire 20th century through some alchemical mindfuck. Sugar cubes and cymbals. Shakespeare’s meat grinder tragedy smashed against Goethe’s prissy redemption fantasy. It shouldn’t work. It’s absurd. It’s pretentious as hell.
But that’s the hook. That’s where Beuys gets his claws in.
Because what he understood, what all the academics writing their tidy essays about “Social Sculpture” keep dancing around, is that Germany couldn’t just think its way out of what it had done. You can’t footnote your way past Auschwitz. You need ritual. You need something primal and embarrassing and raw that makes people squirm in their seats, something that bypasses the intellect and goes straight for the lizard brain where guilt and shame and maybe, maybe, some fucked up version of grace actually lives.
The horse isn’t a symbol. It’s a presence. Dumb, beautiful, incapable of irony. Beuys feeding it sugar while mumbling like a broken radio is him trying to find some language that hasn’t been contaminated by propaganda, by lies, by the bureaucratic syntax of genocide. He’s treating words like felt, his other favorite material, something you compress and reshape until it barely resembles what it was.
And yeah, the whole thing reeks of charlatan energy. The fur coat, the gold cymbals, it’s theater, it’s costume, it’s calculated. But that tension between authenticity and performance? That’s where the electricity is. Beuys isn’t offering you closure or catharsis. He’s offering you a ritual that might mean something, that carries the possibility of transformation even if you suspect it’s all bullshit.
The violence of Titus, that cascade of rape and mutilation and revenge, pressed up against Iphigenie’s civilized forgiveness: it’s not synthesis, it’s friction. Two incompatible narratives grinding against each other, and somewhere in that friction, maybe something sparks. Maybe not. Beuys doesn’t give you answers. He gives you fur and horsehair and the smell of animal panic and human desperation.
And here’s what I love: the documentation, these Tüllmann and Klophaus photographs, they’ve become the canonical version of something that was supposed to be about being there, about the unrepeatable moment. The prints and editions and multiples, Beuys commodified his own ephemerality, turned the anti object into objects you could sell. Hypocritical? Sure. But also honest about how art actually functions in a capitalist system. You can’t escape the market, so you might as well make it part of the work.
What Beuys did in Frankfurt wasn’t entertainment. It was an exorcism that might not work, a spell cast in bad German and horse-breath, an attempt to find some thread of humanity in a culture that had demonstrated its capacity for mechanized inhumanity. Pretentious? Absolutely. Necessary? Maybe that’s the better question.
Because somebody had to stand there in a fur coat with a white horse and make the attempt, however ridiculous, to transmute historical horror into something resembling possibility. The fact that it looked insane was part of the point. Sanity hadn’t exactly covered itself in glory.