Alchemy

"People first of all have to be able to see. In art, there is nothing to understand, absolutely nothing." Joseph Beuys.

I spent my undergraduate years at London's Goldsmiths College, during the stimulating rise of local boys Damien Hirst and Blur, and of the "YBA" (Young British Artist) acronym that was then synonymous with the "Goldsmiths effect".

Most of my friends studied in the Visual Arts department and were taught by Michael Craig-Martin. And though I wasn't studying art, I too was swept along with the creative rush of those times and started painting, photographing and writing.

The artist Joseph Beuys had died several years earlier, but Beuys mania was still rife among the art student body. One of my friends -- a fish out of water in the arts department because he worked in oils on canvas rather than on grand installations -- would rather unfetchingly dress like the German conceptualist, complete with felt hat and waistcoat, and quote such politically ineffectual lines as "To make people free is the aim of art, therefore art for me is the science of freedom" or "Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline". I found Beuys' work -- blocks of lard, piles of felt -- just as tedious.

So a tiny miracle occurred yesterday when I was persuaded to attend the Beuys exhibition at the Tate Modern and came away impressed. The politics were as insignificant as ever, but the alchemical concepts of decay and regeneration represented in works such as his Vitrines and Hearth installations, and in the materials he used -- copper, felt, lard, blood, beeswax -- made a powerfully visceral impression on me this time around. If it were not for the barriers around each installation I would have felt compelled to sink into the mountain of felt, bury my hands in the jars of fat, and run my fingers across the blocks of basalt.

"My sculpture is not fixed and finished. Processes continue in most of them: chemical reactions, fermentations, colour changes, decay, drying up. Everything is in a state of change." Joseph Beuys.

We left the Tate late in the night and struggled to find a place to eat. On a road to Elephant and Castle, we gratefully gave in to the lure of La Dolce Vita's pink neon signage and ended up having a fantastic meal of salami, parma ham and artichoke antipasti for starters, and seafood pappardelle pasta and grilled sea bream for main courses. Our waiters were also the owners who described the making of their delicious tomato sauce in loving detail; and and their friends were eating at adjoining tables.

Related links:

+ "Beuys did not think Germans should evade their past, or be destroyed by it. His art was in many ways deeply nationalist. Drawing on ancient myths and symbols, he revived the Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich and Richard Wagner, a tradition tainted by Nazism, yet which Beuys made vital again for a generation of Germans who were children in or after the war." The Guardian, Wounds of History.

+ "Oddly, there is a kind of beauty here, or beauty's antidote. Looking at the objects gathered in Beuys's vitrines, one realises that they, too, have a calculated aesthetic. One can get used to anything, and even take a kind of pleasure in it - in the various whitenesses of fat, the rust on a tin, the residue that's left inside it, the chemistry of decay." The Guardian, The antidote to beauty.