‘You choose always for looks,’ pop artist Sister Corita Kent told her art students in the 1960s. ‘That’s what you’re in an art class for.’ So obviously, also as an art critic I start with visuals. It is the red polka dotted dress of curator Catherine Nichols that catches my attention while watching Tuesday’s online talk on Beuys and democracy in Düsseldorf.
By the way, democracy − people love dots (Query: Why does politics never use the aesthetics of dots?). Lines make you think of prison, or horizontally positioned they seem to expand your body on both sides. But dots are fun. They radiate optimism. Also in art. Take the dot art of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. Her current exhibition at Gropius Bau, Berlin is already sold out for the month of June.
Roy Lichtenstein was big on dots, and Pointillism was so too. Did Beuys do anything with dots? I decide to google Beuys and the funny German word “Pünktchen”. I find something about a letter with ellipses … Above the three dots Beuys wrote: “immer wieder versuchen” (try again and again).
Erik Satie, Beuys’ favourite composer, loved to mark his talks with a variable of dots to reach the rhetorical effects he intended. Like in his 1918 Eulogy of Critics:
‘I will go ahead & speak in praise of critics …”
………
………
………
………’
I tune back in to Catherine Nichols, who is talking about a film of 1981. It shows Beuys filmed from the back, facing a wall, and explaining his ‘sculptural democracy’. Nichols points out Beuys’ peculiar ending of his talk, repeating the start of a thought that he doesn’t finish: 'Das diese ganze Ansatz …, Das diese ganze Ansatz …’ (That this whole approach …, That this whole approach …)
To Nichols, Beuys sounds tired in that last half sentence. But I look at Nichols’ polka dotted dress and Beuys open-ended thought, and decide …