My last
blog entry dealt with an unexpected question that was asked during the Artist
Rooms session on Beuys at Tate Modern on 18 September. Here is another one: was Beuys a feminist?
My own
answer was brief and purely factual: his Office for Direct Democracy through Referendum
went in for equal rights for men and women. A blackboard that was used at Documenta
V in 1972, where Beuys’s contribution consisted of the presence of the Office
throughout the entire 100 days the exhibition lasted, said:
“Our
suggestion: Equal Rights for men and women! 20 years of party politics have not
managed to realise this basic right: the recognition of domestic work as labor
(career); to legally place this career on an equal level with others and to
legitimate it through salary. Homemakers [sic] salaries! Women and men! If you
would like to support our work toward the citizens’ demand to secure a true
equal rights [sic] for women, then please sign this list. True freedom for
women”.
At face
value, unconditional basic income does nothing to secure equal rights for
women. It only makes it easier for women (and for men to force women) to stay
at home and do the chores. I will return to the question of true equal rights
and true freedom further down.
First, I
want to paraphrase what another participant, the collector Anthony D’Offay, had
to say about the matter. D'Offay, a former art dealer who knew Beuys personally, pointed
out that the latter distinguished between a male and a female “principle”, that
he counted intuition among the characteristics of the female principle and that
he had great respect for women’s intuition.
One might
add that he also tended to represent the male principle by means of hard iron
and the female principle by means of soft copper. Beuys’ entire universe consisted of opposites, with the energy that animates it circulating permanently
between them. In his view, no pole should dominate. If one particular pole appeared to be fixed, it should be liquefied by means of the
other.
In terms of
sex and gender, such views no longer hold up. To take but one obvious
reference, Judith Butler has argued convincingly that being female is not the same
as being a woman. Gender roles are established and perpetuated performatively. From this perspective, any female principle set within a bipolar system is suspect. Respect for women’s intuition is all fine and
well, but within a bipolar system built up around a male and a female principle it will only serve to perpetuate conventional
gender roles.
Several
arguments could be made against this. One of them is historical: the first wave
of feminist artists, roughly contemporary with Beuys’s formative period during
the 1960s and early 1970s, was concerned with visibility. In order to achieve
equality between the sexes, it was felt that traditionally “female” activities,
materials and tasks ought to be made visible and to be recognised as equally
important as “male” ones. In this respect, Beuys is first and foremost a product of
his time.
More
importantly, however, Beuys’s ideas about the circulation of energy extended
to the field of economics. If he mentions labour, salary and domestic work in
one sentence, it is because his Energy Plan distinguishes between “production
capital” and “consumption capital”. Every citizen, he said, ought to receive consumption
capital in order to satisfy his/her needs. After a particular need had been
satisfied, the money, having lost its value, would be returned to a central bank
and be issued again as consumption capital. Everybody has needs, so everybody
deserves his/her portion of consumption capital, no matter what they do.
Payment for domestic labour follows logically from this scheme.
So was
Beuys a feminist? I would say not. He wasn’t one in the modern sense of the
word because he thought in terms of bipolar opposites and he wasn’t one in his own time
because he thought in terms of flows. He isn’t one now because he is not radical enough
and he wasn’t one back then because he was too radical. So please don’t get me
wrong: if I say that he wasn’t a feminist I don’t mean to say that he was a
male chauvinist, heterosexist pig. I mean to say that a concept like “feminism”
would have been secondary in his scheme of things. Whether he was right to give
it that position is another question.
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