The questions and actions of Joseph Beuys The raw and the cooked

By Rod Mengham

Joseph Beuys was never risk-averse, whether in art or in life. Born in 1921, he was old enough to serve throughout the Second World War as a pilot in the Luftwaffe. This meant that he did not become an art student until he was twenty-six years old. Nevertheless, he quickly made a name for himself, less for his work in traditional media than for his performance works or “actions”. A selection of his drawings and a handful of small sculptures are currently on show at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Mayfair.

At the centre of this exhibition is a bathtub. A monstrous parody of the genuine article, its dimensions are those of an old-fashioned hip bath, but where we would expect to find taps, there is instead something resembling a sledge with a tow bar and fender. Cast in bronze, lead and copper, “Badewanne” (“Bathtub”, 1961–87) seems designed to carry into the present some form of ancient menace, as if its function were to enable not refreshment and cleansing, but termination – something like the bathtub of Jean-Paul Marat as painted by David. The other, more insidious feature of this talismanic sculpture is its creepily anatomical character. The inside is curiously ribbed, while the base bears a distinct resemblance to a row of teats.

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What this show demonstrates clearly is Beuys’s ability to bring together humanity’s early feral realities and its earliest cultural imaginings – its proximity to other species and symbolic responses to them – then to show how this amalgam extends forward into the present. The bathtub contraption, with its projecting shafts, also brings to mind Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage, trundling her handcart through the conflicts of the Thirty Years War: homeless, houseless and continuously uprooted; lurching from one disaster area to another; trying and failing to keep track of her three children, all of whom are slaughtered. She is a figure who could be from any century between prehistory and now. She would serve well as the parodic heroine of Beuys’s twentieth century.