Great Art: Joseph Beuys’ 1974’s I Like America and America Likes Me performance

I know almost everyone hates/dislikes performance arts or doesn’t really enjoy it that much but I’m going cover almost all styles of art here in my blog posts art exhibitions! So my all-time performance artwork was or when over three days, an artist locked himself inside a cage and spend eight hours a day in the art gallery in the company of a totally wild coyote with just a felt blanket, his walking stick and a pile of straw. I know fucking artists are crazy, yeah tell me something I don’t already know?

As you can tell I like/love the photos of him wrapped up in the the felt blanket and you can’t even really see the artist. I should say his whole trip to America was really the performance too, arriving in New York City bundled in the felt blanket and then delivered to an art gallery in Soho. There where awaiting for him was a live coyote, off course! After the three days he when back home seeing nothing more of New York and America than pretty much the coyote. Below the photographs are by Beuys’ collaborator Caroline Tisdall but first is the best video documenting the artwork but very short clip I can find too!

  Joseph Beuys is yet another German artist, I seem to have blog posted about some of them so far and more are going to be blogged about too, you know? He’s once yet another dead visual artist, he was born in 1921 and died in 1986 at age 64. He will be back again soon or later with more of his art so I will not say anymore now or even explain what the hell I Like America and America Likes Me performance meant, it’s not that hard if you think about it or just google it and someone else will tell you. It was at the Rene Block Gallery, New York city in May of 1974.

I like to think that Beuys’ art above influences the Nick Cave and mates’ Grinderman 2 album cover of 2010 where a wild wolf is in a very white modern looking bathroom. So today’s song is my fave song from that, Palaces Of Montezuma.

Cheers 🙂

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