Joseph Beuys, 1971, Düsseldorf, Germany; Tadeusz Kantor, 1980, Paris, Théâtre Bouffe du Nord, photos by Tadeusz Rolke / Agencja Gazeta
Kantor’s group was staging Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes, and the performance always included a scene in which one of the audience members was asked to play one of the forty Mandelbaum Hasidic Jews. Rumours have it that in Edinburgh, Kantor selected Beuys to play this part. In spite or maybe because of their striking similarities, the two artists visibly did not take to each other.
Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) was a German artist connected to the Fluxus movement, who created pioneer happening and performance art works, and was also a sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, and art theorist and pedagogue of art. Teaching was important for him, and he became known for opening his classes to any and all interested, without prior exigencies. Ultimately, he strived to create an "extended definition of art" and the idea of social sculpture as a gesamtkunstwerk – a total oeuvre. Through this Gesamtkunstwerk, Beuys claimed a participatory role in shaping society and politics.
Both artists worked in a wide range of fields and media, deliberately testing limits and crossing lines. Although they drew constantly, and Kantor also painted, they are chiefly known for their actions – happenings, theater performances, street manifestations, lectures, debates, and more. Another point of convergence lies in the key to the artists’ work. It is anamnesis, the process of calling to mind, summoning up both the individual’s and a society’s forgotten memories.
History
The trauma of the Second World War – an event crucial for the shaping of contemporary art as such – is also one that directly influenced both artists. Time and again, Beuys and Kantor turned to personal stories from their lives, and the complex issues of German-Polish-Jewish relations, as well as the war. Yet, this is an event which they experienced in very different ways.
In 1941, Beuys – a member of the Hitler Youth as a teen – volunteered for the Luftwaffe. It is also during this time that he began to seriously consider a career as an artist. From 1943 on he was deployed as rear-gunner in a dive-bomber. Drawings and sketches from that time have been preserved and already show his characteristic style. On 16 March 1944, Beuys's plane was shot down on the Crimean Front and crashed close to Znamianka. He was rescued from the crash by nomadic Tatar tribesmen, who had wrapped his broken body in animal fat and felt and nursed him back to health. This particular story and this single happening has served as a powerful myth of origins for Beuys's artistic identity. Many critics and researchers delved into historic fact to demystify the account’s credibility. Yet, regardless of historic accuracy, it is not inconsistent with Beuys' work that his biography would have been subject to his own reinterpretation. Through this myth, Beuys also provided an initial interpretive key to his use of unconventional materials, amongst which felt and fat were central.
Similarly, Tadeusz Kantor (1915-1990) was a most colorful theatre director, the creator of happenings, as well as a painter, set designer, writer, art theoretician, and an actor in his own productions.
Motives of pilgrimage and returning to the places of one’s origin – especially through the vehicle of memory – constitute a recurring theme, and even an axis of Kantor’s work. His personal biography, strongly marked by the events of World War II, gives rise to the theme of these returns. Such is the case, for exemple, with the iconic The Dead Class performance. In it, a group of aged men return to their school desks, carrying backpacks and mannequins that stand for their bygone childhoods. As the dolls are tossed in fire, Kantor evokes the extermination of a whole nation. Growing up as a child and studying in Wielopole Skrzyńskie, a vast majority of Kantor’s colleagues were Jewish. Upon his return to the town after the war, he would find that they had all been killed, and vanished without a trace. The loss and impossibility of return – a theme which is universally true – thus mingles with the particular tragic loss of the Holocaust.