The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Joseph Beuys · an action, Beuys’s word for such works, made at the René Block Gallery, 409 West Broadway, New York, the gallery’s opening show in that city · May 1974, over some days · Beuys flown to New York, wrapped in felt at the airport and carried by ambulance to the gallery, kept in one room of it with a live coyote, the room divided from the gallery’s visitors by a wire fence, and taken back to the airport the same way · also known as Coyote · the unit scored is the action as made and as recorded: the event is over, and what stands now is the record, the film shot during it and the photographs of Caroline Tisdall, published in book form as Coyote; objects kept from the room are context
Mode
An action in duration: a performance of some days with a live wild animal as partner, staged with a journey in and out so that the whole is one rite
Mythos
The rite of passage, separation, ordeal and return, enacted whole; the shepherd with his crook, the shaman in his insulating skins, the healer who goes to the wound; the coyote as the trickster of Native American story
Phase
May 1974, at the opening of the René Block Gallery in New York; the action over within days, and held since then in the film shot during it and in Caroline Tisdall’s photographs
Presentation
One fenced room in a SoHo gallery; one man, one coyote; felt; the furnishings as the accounts report them; arrival and departure by ambulance, the man wrapped in felt
Register
Ritual stillness, long waiting, and at intervals a cold dread and a quiet, unforced tenderness
Scale
Two bodies in one room for some days, with a country refused outside it and its history carried in
Governing Proposition
In May 1974 Joseph Beuys flew to New York, was wrapped in felt at the airport, carried by ambulance to a gallery in SoHo, and shut for some days in one room of it with a live coyote, behind a wire fence from the public; then he was carried back to the airport the same way, the whole journey staged so that he would see nothing of the country but the animal. The action makes a rite of passage of its three parts, separation, ordeal and return, and puts at its centre a negotiation of trust with a creature neither tame nor hostile: the animal of the plains, sacred in Native story and vermin to the rancher, met unarmed on ground it was given. The record shows the terms reached. What the work states about the nation it mostly leaves to be told; what it shows, it shows.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Joseph Beuys (1921 to 1986) made the action in May 1974 at the René Block Gallery, 409 West Broadway, New York, as the gallery’s opening show in that city. He called such works actions. The title is I Like America and America Likes Me; the work is also known as Coyote. It was his first action in America, and it was staked on a refusal to see America.
The design was simple and exact. Beuys flew to New York, was wrapped in felt at the airport and carried by ambulance to the gallery. He spent some days in one room of it with a live coyote. The room was divided from the gallery’s visitors by a wire fence. At the end he was wrapped and carried back to the airport the same way, the journey staged so that he would see nothing of the country but the animal.
The parts are few, and the core of them cannot go. Without the coyote the room is a man in a blanket. Without the felt there is no insulated arrival and no shelter for the animal to test. Without the ambulance the journey is travel, not quarantine, and America outside the room is no longer refused. Without the days nothing is shown, because trust between a man and a wild animal is shown only by time. What yields is the furniture of rite, and the furnishings themselves are known only from accounts that do not agree in every item: felt blankets, a stick held like a shepherd’s crook, gloves, a torch, a triangle he struck, straw, and copies of the Wall Street Journal delivered each day. The core is necessary; the edges are assembled.
Movement II
The action has three parts, and they are the three parts of a rite of passage. Separation: the man wrapped head to foot in felt, rolled on a stretcher out of an ambulance and carried into a gallery so as to see nothing of the country he has flown to. Ordeal: the days in the room. Return: the felt, the stretcher and the airport again, the journey reversed exactly. The work enacts the rite whole, and the arrival on the stretcher has a cold dread.
The felt carries the law of the work. It is Beuys’s own material, the material of his legend of rescue, and in his private physics it is warmth kept and insulation given. It insulates the man in the ambulance as it shelters him in the room; the room insulates him from the country and exposes him to the animal. The two most distant elements of the action, the ambulance, a machine of the American city, and the coyote, an animal of its plains, obey the same law of what is shielded and what is exchanged.
The journey is form, not decoration. The refusal to see the country is an act, not an image: no painting of a man and a coyote could make it. That the law is a personal cosmology, felt and warmth, and that its range stays within one room and one pair of bodies, holds the work below the top of the scale on that count; but within the room nothing escapes it.
Movement III
In the room the man stands hidden in a cone of grey felt, a crook rising from its top. The coyote circles him, or lies beside him. The photographs keep the figure: a shepherd, a hooded penitent, a tent, a thing with no face, in a bare room in SoHo, and one of the strange summits of the century’s art. The moment of the animal settling beside the man, and of the man lying down with it, has a quiet and unforced grandeur.
Most of what passed was waiting. The days held elevation at intervals, and the record shows those intervals, shaped by the photographer’s choice of frames: dreadful and tender in turn, never sustained as a painting’s height is sustained. That is the cost of the form and also its truth. Only in duration, with an animal whose behaviour cannot be scripted, can the work find out whether trust is reached and how long it takes. The outcome is real, not represented, and the photographs show it reached: the animal at ease beside the shrouded figure.
The command is the command of a body, a material, an animal and time. By the record Beuys’s gestures with the crook are slow, exact and unhurried; his stillness and patience with the coyote hold; the felt is handled as both shelter and lure. The decisions are clean and bear load. But the room is bare by design, the lasting images are Tisdall’s and the film’s, and much of what happened was the animal’s doing. The making is precise and narrow.
Movement IV
The archetype is built in the room, not cited from outside it. The man takes the shape of the shepherd with his crook, the shaman in his insulating skins, the healer who goes to the wound, and these are the figures the body actually assumed. The coyote brings a further layer: the trickster of Native American story, a sacred figure to the first peoples and vermin to the rancher. That layer is partly summoned by naming rather than built, and partly taken from a tradition not Beuys’s own, and the taking costs it.
What the work brings into the open can be put in words. A reckoning with a wrong done at a country’s founding, to its land, its animals and its first peoples, is not made by statement but by entering the wronged one’s ground unarmed and staying until terms are reached. And what the nation prints about itself is, to the animal, bedding and a place to urinate: by the accounts the daily newspapers were stacked, torn and soiled beside the straw. The image discloses the negotiation of trust as fully as words would.
The historical claim is another matter: it is mostly told, by Beuys’s commentary and by the name of the animal, and a viewer without them meets a mood of ritual stillness more than a stated truth. That is why the disclosure stands lowest among the work’s epochal axes. The orders the rite holds are several and integrated, the nation’s history and, in the year after America left Vietnam, its present, the wild animal, the sacred offices, capital in the newspaper, the body and its healing, the institution of art; absent are the family, labour and any human society beyond the two parties and the onlookers behind the wire.
Movement V
The action ended in May 1974, and no one can meet it now. What stands is the record: the film shot during it, cut from far more time than it shows, and the photographs of Caroline Tisdall, published in book form as Coyote. Objects kept from the room are context. The form is legible in the record, and the work is known and taught; but the record keeps a fraction of the days, in images whose making was another’s, and it turns duration into emblem. The loss of the live event weighs on survival and on no other axis.
The inheritance was the performance of the 1960s, the Happening, Fluxus, in which Beuys had begun, and the body works of New York; the animal action was already his, since How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965). The turn was to rite with a historical charge, carried across days, with a wild animal as partner. It became the emblem of European performance in America and of the artist as healer. Oleg Kulik answered it in I Bite America and America Bites Me (1997, New York), playing the dog in a cage. It has been returned to as the height of Beuys’s shamanic practice, as the case against his self-mythology, as appropriation, as an early work of encounter between species, and as the problem of a performance known only from its record; much of that argument is about Beuys rather than this room.
Beside it on this desk stand The Artist Is Present, at 7.7, the later durational action with a public behind a line, which this one precedes and outranks; Fountain, at 8.0, level by a different profile and with a far larger reach; A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, at 8.0, another temporary work known as record; Spiral Jetty, at 8.5, the larger swerve of the same years, still standing in its lake; and A Hunger Artist, at 8.7, a performer of endurance in a cage, which states its condition with a completeness the action leaves to commentary. It stands at the foot of Tier IV. The departure repeated the arrival exactly: the felt, the stretcher, the airport.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged part by part, the core cannot be touched. Take away the coyote and the room is a man in a blanket: the animal is the other party. Take away the felt and the man no longer arrives unseeing, nor is there a shelter for the animal to test and tear. Take away the ambulance and the wrapping and the journey stops being an act of quarantine; the whole of America outside the room is no longer what is refused. Take away the time and nothing is shown, because trust between a man and a wild animal is shown only by duration. What yields is the furniture of rite: the struck triangle and the torch, as the accounts report them, are his standing equipment, and the newspaper delivered daily is an emblem put in place.
Score: 7.8 / 10
What the work brings into the open can be stated. A reckoning with a wrong done at a country’s founding, to its land, its animals and its first peoples, is not made by statement but by entering the wronged one’s ground unarmed and staying until terms are reached; and what the nation prints about itself is, to the animal, bedding. The image discloses, as fully as words would, a negotiation of trust between a man and a creature neither tame nor hostile, and the photographs show it reached, the animal at ease beside the shrouded figure. Held lowest of the epochal five because much of the meaning is carried by commentary and by the animal’s name: without them a viewer meets a ritual stillness more than a stated truth.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The height is real and it is in the images. A standing figure wholly hidden in a cone of grey felt, a crook rising from its top, the coyote circling it or lying beside it, in a bare room in SoHo: a shepherd, a hooded penitent, a tent, a thing with no face, and one of the strange summits of the century’s art. The animal settling beside the man, and the man lying with it, carry a quiet and unforced grandeur; the arrival on a stretcher out of an ambulance has a cold dread. What holds the axis is frequency. Over days most of what passed was waiting, and the record shows elevation at intervals, shaped by the photographer’s choice of frames: dreadful and tender in turn, never sustained.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Here the archetype is built, not cited. The structure is a rite of passage in three parts, separation in the felt and the ambulance, ordeal in the days in the room, return in the felt and the ambulance again, and the action enacts it whole. Within it the man takes the shape of the shepherd with his crook, the shaman in his insulating skins, the healer who goes to the wound: not allusions laid over the event but figures the body assumed in the room. The coyote brings the trickster of Native American story, and that layer is partly summoned by naming rather than built, and partly taken from a tradition not Beuys’s own, which costs it. The particular stays particular: one man, one animal, given days.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance is the performance of the 1960s: the Happening, Fluxus, in which Beuys had begun, and the body works of New York at the turn of the decade. The turn is from event and provocation to rite with a historical charge, carried across days, with a live wild animal as partner and not as prop, and from the art world to a nation’s history as the subject. The stake was paid in earnest: physical risk from an animal not trained to a gallery, the risk of ridicule before New York critics who distrusted his mysticism, and his first action in America staked on refusing to see America. Held here because the animal action was already his, since How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), and others had shown live animals in galleries before.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Substitute another form and the work loses most of what it knows. As a painting or a sculpture, man and coyote would be a symbol; as a statement, an argument. Only as an action in duration, with a live animal whose behaviour cannot be scripted, can the work find out whether trust is reached and how long it takes, so that the outcome is real and not represented. The insulated journey is form too: the refusal to see the country is an act, not an image. Held below the top because the work survives only in record, and the record is another form, an edited film and selected stills that turn duration into emblem; and because much of what the form knows has to be told beside it to be known at all.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Evidence, on fifty-two years. The action has been returned to from several directions and has not closed: as the high point of Beuys’s shamanic practice and of his idea of social sculpture; as the case against him in the attack on his self-mythology; as a problem of appropriation, a German artist taking up a Native American sacred animal; in animal studies, as an early work of encounter between species; and in the argument over what a performance is once only its record remains. Return to the record yields detail: the animal’s changing distance, the uses of the felt. Held where it is because much of the well is the argument about Beuys as a figure rather than about this room, and the record is thin for close return.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation of what performance could hold, extending it from the incident to the ordeal of days, from the body alone to a negotiated relation with another species, and from art’s own questions to a nation’s history and guilt. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the action became the emblem of European performance in America and of the artist as healer; Oleg Kulik answered it directly in I Bite America and America Bites Me (1997, New York), playing the dog in a cage; the long durational pieces of cohabitation and the animal works of later performance stand in its line, a line shared with others and credited lightly. Discounted because much of the reach belongs to Beuys’s person, oeuvre and teaching in Düsseldorf, not to this action.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, and for a temporary work, as record. The form is legible: the journey, the room, the animal, the felt and the rite are all carried by the film and the photographs, and the work is known and taught. Presence has been wide for fifty years, and that earns at most a tenth; fame is not proof. But what made the work was duration and the encounter itself, and the record keeps a fraction of it, in images whose making was another’s: Tisdall’s frames, the film’s cuts. The days are gone and the animal is gone, and no one can now meet the action, only its traces. The loss of the live event, more of the work than the loss of an object, holds the figure a tenth below the charged step for its age.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Read to the same anchors as any medium. The command shown is the command of a body, a material, an animal and time: Beuys’s stillness and patience with the coyote, his handling of the felt as both shelter and lure, the gestures with the crook, which by the record are slow, exact and unhurried, and the staging of the journey so that it reads at once. The decisions are clean and they bear load. But the making is narrow and partly not his: the room is bare by design, the lasting images are Tisdall’s and the film’s, and much of what happened in the room was the animal’s doing. The figure credits only the decisions and the bodily command that are Beuys’s: a precise command of a small set of means.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the ambulance, a machine of the American city, and the coyote, an animal of its plains. They obey one law, which is Beuys’s own physics of warmth and insulation, of energy kept and exchanged. The felt insulates the man in the ambulance as it shelters him in the room; the room insulates him from the country and exposes him to the animal; the newspapers, as the accounts report them, a country’s printed self, become the animal’s material. Every element turns on what is shielded and what is exchanged, and the departure repeats the arrival exactly. Held below the top because the law is private, a personal cosmology of felt and warmth, and its range stays within one room and one pair of bodies.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The orders held are several, and one rite holds them together: the nation and its history, the wrong done at its founding and, in the year after America left Vietnam, its present; the natural order, in a wild animal; the sacred, in the offices of shepherd, shaman and trickster; capital, in the newspaper; the body and its healing, in a man in felt; and the institution of art, in a gallery’s opening show. They are integrated, because the encounter touches all of them at once. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the form: a single encounter in a single room, with no family, no labour and no human society beyond the two parties and the onlookers behind the wire. For that form the figure is generous.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.4, then The Archetypal Deep, The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.2, and The Swerve at 8.1. A form held legibly in its film and photographs and known and taught for fifty years; a rite of passage in three parts enacted whole, with the shepherd, the shaman and the healer taken on by the body in the room; an action in duration whose outcome, trust reached with an animal that cannot be scripted, is real and not represented; one law of warmth and insulation governing the ambulance, the felt, the room and the animal; and a turn from event to rite with a historical charge, paid for in earnest.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: several orders held and integrated in one rite, within the form of a single encounter in a single room, with no family, no labour and no society beyond the two parties and the onlookers. Next above it, The Unconcealment at 7.7: trust between man and animal shown, the historical claim mostly told. Then The Inevitable, The Sublime and The Made at 7.8: a necessary core with assembled edges, a height reached at intervals among days of waiting, and a precise command of narrow means, the lasting images another’s.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.2, The Made at 7.8, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Unconcealment at 7.7, The Archetypal Deep at 8.2, The Swerve at 8.1, Pressure on Tradition at 8.0 and The Imperishable at 8.4 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum clears, its lowest figure The Unconcealment at 7.7 against 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 95.4, an average of 7.95 that displays 8.0, at the foot of Tier IV; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, a whole point short of 9.0, would withhold it besides.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the work’s record: its outline, its well documented parts and its critical reception are known well; its day by day sequence, its exact hours and the order of events within the film are known thinly, and where a judgment turns on them it is held more loosely. The work scored is I Like America and America Likes Me, also known as Coyote, by Joseph Beuys (1921 to 1986): the action made in May 1974 at the René Block Gallery, 409 West Broadway, New York, the gallery’s opening show in that city, as made and as recorded. One man, one coyote, one room divided by a wire fence from the visitors; arrival and departure by ambulance, the man wrapped in felt. The action is over, and what stands now is the record, the film shot during it and Caroline Tisdall’s photographs, published in book form as Coyote; objects kept from the room are context, and the survival of the action as record is weighed on survival only. The furnishings of the room are given as the accounts report them, and the inventory is not certain. No words are quoted but the titles. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the number of days and the hours of the action, the film’s maker, length and stock, the year of the book, the name reported for the coyote, and Beuys’s own account of what he saw and where he set foot.