Joseph Beuys, Table with Accumulator (Tisch mit Aggregat), 1958-85 (Tate Modern, London)
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:05] This is a very strange object. I see a box that has two wires coming out of it from screws. It looks like an old-fashioned camera made out of wood. It’s sitting on just a table with these wires, and on the floor connected to the wires are these clay balls. It’s just the weirdest thing. It reminds me of Surrealism, of objects being put together that don’t make sense, like a dream.
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:33] I think the reference to Surrealism is perfect. It’s a kind of Surrealism of the reality of the absolute diseased insanity of the 20th century, which the artist, Joseph Beuys, was trying to address. That camera-like wooden box is an accumulator, which is kind of a battery.
Dr. Harris: [0:52] Wait, am I supposed to know?
Dr. Zucker: [0:55] No, you’re not.
Dr. Harris: [0:55] So this is private iconography.
Dr. Zucker: [0:57] No, I think that’s an actual object in the world which stores electricity imperfectly, nevertheless. But it’s an old object and it is handcrafted.
Dr. Harris: [1:06] Right, it looks like it belongs to an early 20th century world.
Dr. Zucker: [1:09] There’s something somewhat menacing about the way the wires come out of it and are sort of screwed into it. It sits squared on this table.
Dr. Harris: [1:17] The table itself is square.
Dr. Zucker: [1:19] The reference to Surrealism makes me think of Magritte. The table itself is the most reduced, almost platonic example of a table. A table in its full table-ness.
Dr. Harris: [1:29] There’s a box-ness and cube-ness.
Dr. Zucker: [1:32] So, they’re both perfect expressions of the things that they are.
Dr. Harris: [1:36] Right, but the accumulator is a mechanical, electrical object.
Dr. Zucker: [1:40] So these wires come out, not very carefully. And they’re sort of strewn around until they’re plugged into, quite literally and it’s really funny, into these balls of clay.
Dr. Harris: [1:50] They should be plugged into something that has an electrical relationship to it.
Dr. Harris: [1:55] But that’s the metaphor, right? That’s where this becomes a kind of poetry. We have this clay, this stuff of the earth. That this energy is being drawn from and is being stored in this accumulator. Beuys was really interested in healing our culture.
[2:11] Beuys was very much a product of the Second World War, of the violence of totalitarianism, of the violence of genocides of the Second World War. He very much wanted to use art as a spiritual means to heal the earth, to heal our culture. He was very interested in the way that art could transgress science, could transgress rationalism…
Dr. Harris: [2:32] Do you mean “transcend” science?
Dr. Zucker: [2:34] No, no, no. I don’t mean transcend. I mean undercut. Displace science to find a kind of irrational means of understanding our place in society and society’s place in the world. So this notion of drawing energy directly from the earth, from the clay, from the most primal material, I think is absolutely key here.
[2:52] We need to step outside of rational structures and look to a kind of magic that might heal us now.
Dr. Harris: [3:00] We’re sick with the illness of the 20th century, of the scientific focus of the Enlightenment — the ways that we rely on medicine, technology, and progress. We’ve lost some connection to something that’s eternal, and magical, and mysterious, and miraculous?
Dr. Zucker: [3:19] I think that for Beuys the Holocaust could not have happened — the second World War could not have happened — had it not been for our bureaucratic strength, had we not been such good record keepers, had we not understood and structured the world.
Dr. Harris: [3:32] If we couldn’t run the trains on time.
Dr. Zucker: [3:34] If we couldn’t run the trains on time. That’s right.
Dr. Harris: [3:36] So this starts to feel a little bit like a primitivism that isn’t so divorced from Gauguin leaving Paris and going to Tahiti to find something more pure, and true, and natural, and looking to primitive cultures to solve something that’s wrong with modern culture.
Dr. Zucker: [3:56] That’s true, but I think that Beuys’ goal is grander and, in a sense, a bit less self-serving.
[4:02] [music]
