Above all the hat (Beuys’ hat). Beuys, formed as a conventional (academic) sculptor, is remembered as an iconoclast of a sort.
With the project of “social sculpture”, he was amongst the first
sculptors of the early 1960’s that “dematerialised” sculptural art and
brought it to become action and performance. By choice of materials, according to the artist, that need to be intended as a metaphor
of pure energy (pre-technological), materials such as felt, grease,
had further carried sculpture towards a performance act. Performance that is most clearly visible in the attentive creation of his public
character. Like a theatre actor (dramatis persona) Beuys was easily
recognised in public by his particular uniform that he always wore
until his death in 1986. The uniform for all of his public appearances
was identical, an assemblage, one could say, consisting in a pair of
jeans, a pilot’s vest, a shirt and boots. Above all, his hat was impossible to forget. The suit had the function of constantly and at all
times recalling to the artist of his own personal myth. Myth of “origin” where he, during the World War II, as a Nazi pilot, was deadly
wounded and rescued by the Tatar shamans. The encounter with
this nomad tribe was the moment of transformation for Beuys. The
moment in which an academic sculptor, a Nazi pilot became a transgressive iconoclast, a preacher of the “third” way of the German
Green Party and a leader of the new, “dematerialised”, art. Above
and after all, it appears to me, he seems to be the first artist of the
Cold War whose medium was history, which offered him his “worldwide” revelation in 1970’s and a sure place in the world history of
transgressions (not only artistic ones).
The glass cylinder (the glass “bell”). It is in the 70’s that Beuys
comes to Belgrade during the April Meetings in the Student Cultural
Centre (Studentski Kulturni Centar). Lectures, drawing on a board
that afterwards disappeared (or was “destroyed”) so that every material “trace”, “physical” proof of presence and work of Joseph Beuys
in Belgrade came down to a sequence of shows. Photographical, described, short reminiscences. Reminiscences that unmistakeably
lead towards the Belgrade art of the second line (whose member
Caranović briefly was). That alternative, dematerialised art that Belgrade opposed to, in combat t with the first one, state and totalitarian (academic?) art.
The cylinder and the hat. Not by chance, the axis of the work
of Caranović is precisely that iconic hat that made the artist worldly
32