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Lot Essay
'The transition from one state to another, the passage from chaotic energy through action to organised form: these are the invisible processes that are the most difficult to convey in a visual form. The hand and mind that guide the pencil or arrange the material must be in tune with the forces that are being expressed. The drawings, like the environments, convey this sense of the passage between one state and another: the feeling that something must emerge from the material just as wind, water, clouds and smoke are in constant transition.
In the earlier drawings this sense of transition is necessarily conveyed more through images than through matter, and this was one of the reasons why the form had to expand, first beyond drawing as such and then beyond solid matter to the voice and the formation of language. In the drawings the passage from one state to another is often presented as an image of metamorphosis: man into mountain, soul into bee. There's an echo of the interchangeability formulated by Novalis and Goethe: if God could become man, then he could equally appear as a stone or plant or anything else.'
(C. Tisdall, Joseph Beuys: The secret block for a secret person in Ireland exh. cat., Oxford, Museum of Modern Art, 1974, p. 9).
In the earlier drawings this sense of transition is necessarily conveyed more through images than through matter, and this was one of the reasons why the form had to expand, first beyond drawing as such and then beyond solid matter to the voice and the formation of language. In the drawings the passage from one state to another is often presented as an image of metamorphosis: man into mountain, soul into bee. There's an echo of the interchangeability formulated by Novalis and Goethe: if God could become man, then he could equally appear as a stone or plant or anything else.'
(C. Tisdall, Joseph Beuys: The secret block for a secret person in Ireland exh. cat., Oxford, Museum of Modern Art, 1974, p. 9).