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Lot Essay
Joseph Beuys’ Gefängis (Kabir + Daktyl) (Prison (Cabir + Dactyl)) (1983) is one of the most symbolically charged sculptures of the artist’s career. It has been widely exhibited during its lifetime, including in important monographic exhibitions held in Berlin (1988) and Düsseldorf (1991–1992), as well as a major retrospective which travelled from Zurich to Madrid and Paris across 1993–1994. It is also a rarity in that the autobiographical element—usually so all-pervading with Beuys, the great self-styled artist-shaman of post-war Germany—is here so subtle. The work consists of a large screen, composed of a steel frame with a panel of Plexiglas in its upper section and a metal panel below. This object came originally from the J. W. Froehlich manufacturing plant in Stuttgart, used by factory workers as protection from the sparks that would fly from machines. Froehlich—a friend of Beuys—amassed one of the finest private collections of German and American contemporary art in the world, of which this work formed a part. Beuys took the screen home in 1983 and lived with it awhile, before at length hanging two carbide lamps, labelled KABIR and DAKTYL, from the hole in the Plexiglas and allegedly declaring, ‘There, now it is finished!’
As is typical within Beuys’ practice, Gefängis (Kabir + Daktyl) takes up the Duchampian premise of the readymade—here, the wink to the latter’s Large Glass (1915–1923, Philadelphia Museum of Art) is inescapable—yet carries it into the realm of myth. Beuys asserted that the artist is singularly able to imbue found materials—especially fat and felt, the materials in which he was, according his own foundation myth, swaddled by nomadic Tatars following a wartime plane crash—with spiritual force. His intervention in the present work is slight, but potent. The only evidence of the artist’s hand is his scrawling of two names on the carbide lamps which hang from the patched-up aperture. The lamps underscore the object’s innate associations with the archaic origins of metallurgy: in Greek mythology, the Cabiri and the Dactyls were metalsmiths and healing magicians whose lamps illuminated the underworld. In its communion with ancient alchemical traditions, the present work is singular in Beuys’ oeuvre, surpassing the personal mythology of its maker to communicate powerfully and directly to its viewer.
The present work is also distinctive in that Beuysian archetypes were inherent in the object before the artist ever got to it. Industrial and mass-produced, the protective screen had been already transformed by wear-and-tear in the process of its use. A large gash in the top-left corner is evidence of this, but so too are the evocative, almost painterly marks scorched across the surface of the screen, caused by the sparks from which it protected the workers. In a powerful endorsement of Beuys’ belief in ‘social sculpture’—the idea that everyone is an artist—the screen has been transformed a second time by the workers’ creativity, with their makeshift stitching-up of the hole with tape and their metaphorical title of ‘prison’, acknowledging its resemblance to a barred window. The use of plaster-like tape over the hole further corresponds with Beuys’ shamanistic conviction in the transformative and fundamentally healing properties of art.
As is typical within Beuys’ practice, Gefängis (Kabir + Daktyl) takes up the Duchampian premise of the readymade—here, the wink to the latter’s Large Glass (1915–1923, Philadelphia Museum of Art) is inescapable—yet carries it into the realm of myth. Beuys asserted that the artist is singularly able to imbue found materials—especially fat and felt, the materials in which he was, according his own foundation myth, swaddled by nomadic Tatars following a wartime plane crash—with spiritual force. His intervention in the present work is slight, but potent. The only evidence of the artist’s hand is his scrawling of two names on the carbide lamps which hang from the patched-up aperture. The lamps underscore the object’s innate associations with the archaic origins of metallurgy: in Greek mythology, the Cabiri and the Dactyls were metalsmiths and healing magicians whose lamps illuminated the underworld. In its communion with ancient alchemical traditions, the present work is singular in Beuys’ oeuvre, surpassing the personal mythology of its maker to communicate powerfully and directly to its viewer.
The present work is also distinctive in that Beuysian archetypes were inherent in the object before the artist ever got to it. Industrial and mass-produced, the protective screen had been already transformed by wear-and-tear in the process of its use. A large gash in the top-left corner is evidence of this, but so too are the evocative, almost painterly marks scorched across the surface of the screen, caused by the sparks from which it protected the workers. In a powerful endorsement of Beuys’ belief in ‘social sculpture’—the idea that everyone is an artist—the screen has been transformed a second time by the workers’ creativity, with their makeshift stitching-up of the hole with tape and their metaphorical title of ‘prison’, acknowledging its resemblance to a barred window. The use of plaster-like tape over the hole further corresponds with Beuys’ shamanistic conviction in the transformative and fundamentally healing properties of art.