2017 with Joseph Beuys in No Man's Land

2017 11241950 Jasmin Moeller WITH JOSEPH BEUYS IN NO MAN’S LAND On his performative rebirth as an artist and Shaman of the West and his adoption of the Tatars into his artistic persona. Master Thesis Arts and Culture: Theatre Studies University of Amsterdam Faculty of Humanities Theatre Studies 2017 Supervisor: Dr. Peter G.F. Eversmann Second Reader: Dr. Cock Dieleman Studentnr.:11241950 Preface For me, like for any child growing up in 1980s Germany, Joseph Beuys was one of the most important influencers of German culture. He can be seen as the German Andy Warhol, a cult figure who evokes extreme reactions and heated discussions1—an artist who not only created artworks, but also established himself as public figure in a performative way. When Beuys died in 1986, he had already attained the status of one of Germany’s most important postwar artists.2 Many years later, after I emigrated from Germany and developed more of an external view on German culture and art, I finally began to understand both Beuys’ weight in shaping German culture3 and his innovative position in contemporary art.4 When I studied Beuys’ work more in detail, something struck me personally. As the legend goes, Beuys was rescued by Tatars after his JU87 was shot down in Crimea during WWII. Coincidentally, my father is of Tatar origin, studied at the Arts Academy Düsseldorf, and was for a short time even a student of Beuys’. My father repeatedly told me about his pure Tatar ancestry, of which he was very proud and through which he identified himself. I have often wondered about two aspects here. Firstly, my father’s statements about his identity never went beyond stereotypical description; he shared neither personal memories nor cultural insights. His Tatar identity remained an empty terminology to me and mainly reinforced his individual status as a proud, wild, and exotic man. Secondly, I wondered why Beuys never developed any personal interest in my father despite his Tatar descent. According to my father, the only thing Beuys ever said to him directly was, “That looks like a ham” (“Das sieht ja aus wie ein Schinken”), pointing to a nude study my father was working on using rötel chalk. For years, Beuys’ lack of interest as well as the mysteries surrounding my father’s Tatar identity remained urgent questions for me. I was finally able to bring them to rest after 1“Joseph Beuys was an outstanding artistic personality, whose work to this day is accompanied by intense and often heated debates. His influence on the art world of the past fifty years can not be overstated” (“Joseph Beuys war eine herausragende Künstlerpersönlichkeit, dessen Werk bis heute von intensiven und oftmals hitzig geführten Debatten begleitet wird. Sein Einfluss auf die Kunstwelt der letzten fünfzig Jahre kann nicht hoch genug eingeschätzt werden.”). “Joseph Beuys Biografie,” Pinakotheek, accessed Nov. 19, 2017, http://pinakothek-beuys-multiples.de/de/joseph-beuys- biographie/. 2 Frits Boterman and Willem Melching, Het Wonder Bondsrepubliek in 20 Portretten, (Amsterdam: Nieuw 1 Amsterdam, 2009), 165. 3 Boterman and Melching, Het Wonder Bondsrepubliek, 174. 4 Because he was a pioneer in his time, many people only understood Beuys and his message much later. Students who supported Beuys in his active years explained in an interview that they only understood him years later. See the interviews with his students in the documentary Messiahs in Filz, YouTube, accessed November 3, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7xopR0xixM&feature=youtu.be. 1 studying Beuys’ biography in relation to the Tatars, the research that has resulted in the thesis presented here. On my quest, I have considered different ways of approaching this topic. Finally, the most convincing approach was from the field of theater and performance studies. As Schechner states in his introduction to performance studies,5 the field is endless and open; this feature of performance studies immediately caught my interest. The possibility to integrate issues of contemporary society and culture with academic theory and the creative potential of humans to regard ethnicity and gender as socially constructed and thus performed identity are fascinating ideas to me. As such, a study on the performance of Western stereotypes of Tatar identity is best suited to understanding the mythical or imaginative potential that underlies Tatar identity. Nevertheless, although the performative quality of Tatar identity in the Western world was convincing to me, some effort was required to integrate this fascination into my study and make my research more concrete through the case of Joseph Beuys. I am deeply grateful to have found an honest, smart, and patient thesis supervisor in Peter Eversmann, who helped me stay focused and guided me through the cluttered forest of academic research. This undertaking sprung from a deep personal wish, and as such this research became important for my personal development. I had to understand Beuys’ connection to the Tatars, in addition to solving the mystery surrounding my father, one of the proudest Tatars I ever met. Rather than denouncing the myths surrounding Beuys and my father, this thesis is an attempt to fill in the outline of their mysterious Tatar identities. In this thesis, I attempt to understand which mythical promises go hand in hand with the adoption of Tatar identity and, consequently, how this appropriation might reflect the latent longings of the individual and the culture at large. In doing so, I attempt to deepen the understanding of Joseph Beuys’ use of Tatar identity, as well as seeking more general answers about Tatar stereotyping in Western culture that can shed more light on my father’s case. 5 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, (New York and London: Routledge, 2013), 1. 2 Abstract Tatars have long been present in the Western imagination. Since the Middle Ages, the term has generally been used to describe a group of foreign people who are experienced as a threat coming from the East. The term and the stereotypical image have undergone different stages and have been instrumentalized politically, socially, and culturally. Due to the fragmentary Western knowledge about their origins, narratives about the Tatars have attained a mythical dimension in Western culture. The rise of Genghis Khan enriched these narratives with an illustrative hero. As such, the Tatar warrior has come to occupy a place in Western cultural expressions as threatening, exotic, and/or erotic. Similar to many other East-West discourses, Tatars serve at times as an enemy to the West, and at others they are romanticized as “noble savages” living in harmony with nature. In this thesis, stereotypical Tatar identity is explored as it has been constructed in the West in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. This analysis is complemented with a concrete case study of the postwar German artist Joseph Beuys, who applied Tatar stereotypes in the creation of his artistic persona. Based on a comparative analysis of Tatar stereotypes in Western cultural expressions, Beuys’ work and autobiographical narrative are reconsidered. The leading questions in my research are how Joseph Beuys appropriated Tatar identity in his oeuvre and what function this appropriation played in the creation of his artistic persona. Based on this analysis, it can be concluded that stereotypical Tatar identity has been shaped throughout Western history mainly by the specific needs of the creators and consumers of cultural products. In nineteenth-century British theater, for example, Tatar identity was linked with physicality, exoticism, and eroticism. In twentieth century literature, comics, and movies, Tatar identity mainly embodied horror, lust, and excess. In twenty-first century films, a spiritual connectedness with nature, monogamy, and quality of life are foregrounded in the representation of Tatars. The beginnings of the latter shift can be already observed in Beuys’ employment of Tatar identity. His use of Tatar identity ultimately reflects his belief in and striving towards a holistic world in which everything carries the potential for creation. By including Tatar figures in his narrative supporting his artistic persona, he demonstrated this creative energy and sought to legitimize his position as “Shaman of the West.” 3 Table of Contents Preface 1 Abstract 3 1. Introduction 8 1.1. Problem statement 8 1.1.1. Introducing the Tatars 9 1.1.1.1. The Tatars in ethnic terms 10 1.1.1.2. Tatar or Tartar? 11 1.1.1.3. The vagueness of the term Tatar 11 1.1.1.4. Tatars = Genghis Khan= Mongols? 12 1.1.1.5. Early Western stereotypical images of the Tatars 14 1.1.1.5.1. Primary stereotypes 16 1.1.1.5.2. Secondary stereotypes 18 1.1.2. Joseph Beuys and the Tatars 19 1.2. Relevance 19 1.3. The aim of this research 20 1.4. Literature review 21 1.5. Methodology 23 1.6. Thesis design 23 2. Tatar stereotypes in Western cultural expressions 25 2.1. Tatars in poetry and theater 26 2.1.1. Mazeppa 26 2.1.1.1. Lord Byron’s poem 26 4 2.1.1.2. The legend of Mazeppa 27 2.1.1.3. The Tatars in Lord Byron’s Mazeppa 29 2.1.2. Henry Milner’s production 29 2.1.2.1. The equestrian element and Orientalism 29 2.1.2.2. Physicality and nudity 30 2.1.3. General key points on the depiction of Tatars in nineteenth-century British theater 31 2.1.3.1. Limited knowledge about the East 31 2.1.3.2. Climate, landscape, and Orientalism 32 2.1.3.3. Exoticism 32 2.1.4. Conclusion 33 2.2. Tatars in literature and music 35 2.2.1. Tatars in literature 35 2.2.1.1.

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