An Appeal for the Integral Character of Block Beuys in Darmstadt
Götz Adriani und Dieter Koepplin, Mai 2007

The temptation to say: if Joseph Beuys was still alive today, he would have done it in this or that way has to give precedence to the fact that Beuys did it in the way in which it has existed since 1970. This fact should not be ignored without good reason.

The subject concerns the Block Beuys at the Landesmuseum Darmstadt (Hessen's County Museum in Darmstadt), the most important sculptural legacy of Joseph Beuys. The Darmstadt Museum is to be renovated over the next few years and its director, Dr Ina Busch, sees this as an opportunity for presenting the entire collection in a new light and for generally improving matters.

However, the nature of the Block Beuys installation within this museum is such that the walls, ceilings and floors of the rooms cannot be considered separately from the elements that they house. To separate one from the other is not possible, since Joseph Beuys used the given architecture and context, including its carpeted floor and various wall panels without skirting boards for positioning his exhibits on the floor and on the jute wall panels (especially impressive are the felt suit and felt skin from Infiltration Homogene for Concert Pianos). The vertical attachment of elements of the work against walls, in unfamiliar relationships, is also part of this contextualising process. The given special relationships and the installed sculptural elements form an integral unit, whilst the transitions from one room to the next are also visually perceived. This is particularly the case with works one can enter such as STELLE and most obviously with the works Trans Siberian Railway and LICHAMEN. The fundamental images of paths and thresholds are intimately connected with Beuys' perception of ‘biography' and ‘threshold situations'. Thus a yellow line, drawn on the grey carpet and part of one of the Trans Siberian Railway even if it appears very simple, nevertheless has its particular significance. We encounter images of duration, events, journeys and processes in many ways, through the whole of the Beuys Block. Beuys incorporated floor forms in several of his works, however, it is only in Darmstadt that they have not become victims of cleaning processes. It makes no difference whether the yellow line in Darmstadt was drawn by Beuys himself in 1984 or by one of his assistants in accordance with his instructions. What matters is that it corresponds with Beuys concept of art. Think for instance of Richtkräfte or Is its about a bicycle?

The Darmstadt museum director wishes to replace the original grey carpet in the Beuys rooms with smooth industrial flooring or with parquet flooring. The wall panels, too, with their original light beige cloth cover are to go. Frau Busch plans instead to paint the walls white. Her reason: Beuys installed other works, elsewhere, in rooms with white walls. However, this was not the case in Darmstadt. Beuys never complained about the given spatial elements, including the original wall panels and their jute covering or the carpet. The then museum director, Gerhard Bott, and the curator responsible for the Ströher collection, Götz Adriani, can testify to this. The latter accompanied Beuys in 1970 during the installation in Darmstadt. Had Franz Dahlem and Heiner Friedrich been told early in 1970 by Beuys, that he considered the walls and the carpets to be irritating, they would have done everything to remove these elements. Eva, Wenzel and Jessika Beuys in their detailed book Joseph Beuys: Block Beuys - with colour photographs by Claudio Abate (Munich 1990) do not mention any discontent by Beuys with regard to the wall coverings and the carpet. Both are presented in their book together with all the others elements. Should the book, after the proposed improvements to the installation also be improved and the new environment, including an irritatingly distracting opening to room 7, become a document of a museum mishap?

In the 1988 pamphlet, Joseph Beuys in the Hessischen Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, the museum director Wolfgang Beeh wrote: "Beuys felt that his work had an optimal place in the rooms of the museum which he had selected, inclusive of the by now olive green [which is factually wrong] to brown wall covering, which according to the artist's wishes in 1984 was not to be replaced, as it had in its totality, become an essential part of his artistic intention - an impression that nobody can miss, regardless how he may judge the value of Beuys' work. It is a necessary conclusion that the complexity of this work will tolerate no intervention and can only fully unfold its full meaning in the context, in the atmosphere and in the form which the artist has determined." It is of no consequence to us today, how happy or unhappy Beuys was from 1970 to his death in 1986 with the situation in Darmstadt, whether it was optimal or only acceptable. The fact is that he accepted and integrated what he found there into the total conception of the work. What is however more important, is that
1. during his life no new installation in other, perhaps more favourable rooms (e.g. in Frankfurt) occurred, 2. Beuys under these circumstances expressly wished to maintain the physical-spatial conditions in the manner in which the whole work came into being.

The Darmstadt Work Block was for Beuys complete. He interfered with it only slightly in 1980 and again in 1984 with regard to the newly added room, and then in a complementary and wonderfully precise way (inclusive of the yellow floor line). Beuys considered signs of aging, change and decay as positive, whether in the glass cases filled with small objects or in rooms with the large forms (the glass display cases bear an analogous relationship to the architectural containment). One encounters this perspective in the opening sentences, of the catalogue written by Caroline Tisdall for his retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, that he himself signed. Whoever takes Beuys seriously cannot ignore these words.

The museum must not attempt to improve matters and play Beuys in an arbitrary manner. It can, we believe, act responsibly only in one of the following two ways:
1. either it leaves the whole installation, as it has come down to us and limits itself to precise conservation and restoration; or it reconstructs -with great care- the spatial conditions with which Beuys worked in 1970. In the second instance the museum would have to renew the by now heavily browned and in parts torn wall covering with potentially strong and durable material in its original light beige colour and material. The carpet would either have to be left or would have to be replaced with new, grey carpeting, except for the first room where the existing carpet cannot be removed on account of the attached line. The yellow line of the Trans Siberian Railway must not be allowed to disappear.

One thing must be clear: ‘Clean' white walls and an easy to clean surface or parquet flooring do not accord with basic museum principles in relation to the Beuys' rooms in the Landesmuseum Darmstadt, even if the planned changes are carried out with the best of intentions. The idea (that Frau Busch suggested might be possible) that the carpet, once removed and rolled up for several years and stored and rotting somewhere, could at a later stage, should it be desired, be brought out in its original state, corresponds in theory only with the restorative claims of reversibility. The Darmstadt Block Beuys with regard to its contextual encasement or ‘skin', which is more than mere aestheticisation, needs no cleansing or improvement. The artist's expressed wish, of 1984, must be taken seriously. No one should ignore his intentions, and certainly no one who was close to Beuys and now takes the liberty to assume, in the name of Beuys (reasoning with the formulation ‘but Beuys would have...')

Arbitrary change must be rejected; it would amount to a falsification of history and an act of partial destruction. Neither we, nor all the friends of the deceased artist can know how Beuys would have acted in view of the architectural renovation of the museum.

The undersigned, for whom Beuys' work is close to their hearts, appeal to Frau Busch to revise her intentions.

Götz Adriani, Kunsthalle Tübingen, und Dieter Koepplin, Basel, unterstützt von Thomas Bayrle, Frankfurt; Wolfgang Beeh, Darmstadt; Gerhard Bott, Fratta Todina; Christoph Brockhaus, W. Lehmbruck Museum Duisburg; U We Claus; Jacqueline Burckhardt, Präsidentin der Eidgenössischen Kunstkommission, Zürich-, Christof Engelhorn-, Ronald Feldman, New York; Matthias Frehner, Kunstmuseum Bern; Helmut Friedel, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus München; Josef W. Froehlich, Stuttgart-, Antje van Graevenitz, Amsterdam; Volker Harlan, Witten; Eva Huber, Darmstadt; Gudrun Inboden, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; Raimer Jochims, MaintalHochstädt; Kaspar König, Museum Ludwig Köln; Mario Kramer, Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt-. Cäsar Menz, Musée d'Art et d'Histoire Genève; Franz Meyer (†), Zürich; Norman Rosenthal, Royal Academy London-, Shelley Sacks, Oxford-, Werner Schade, Berlin; Uwe M. Schneede, Hamburg; Dieter Schopohl Griesheim; Carla Schulz-Hoffmann, Pinakothek der Moderne München; Dieter Schwarz, Kunstmuseum Winterthur; Reiner Speck, Köln; Manfred Stumpf, Frankfurt-, Rhea Thönges-Stringaris, Kassel; Caroline Tisdall, London; Wolfgang Zumdick, Aachen.