Beuys or Warhol?
Donald Kuspit
I see contemporary art caught in a tug-of-war between what can be called the
media and therapeutic conceptions of art. It is a cold war that has been going on since the
1960s, and that has recently become hot. Warhol is on one side, Beuys on the other; each
is a paradigmatic figure, as important for what he represents as for his actual art. Much is
at stake in this war; one cannot remain neutral in it: I am for Beuys, and against Warhol.
The clearest way to understand their difference is in terms of narcissism. As Erich
Fromm wrote, in it "only the person himself . . . [is]experienced as fully real, while
everybody and everything [else] . . . is not fully real, is perceived only by intellectual
recognition, while affectively without weight and color." Warhol is the perfect narcissist,
summarizing in his art the modern narcissistic idea of art for art's sake, and in his person
the narcissism which supposedly guarantees—but is in fact the dregs—of the artist's
"genius." In contrast, Beuys represents postwar art's major effort to transcend aesthetic
and personal narcissism, and seriously relate to the socio-historical objects of the
lifeworld. Beuys spreads and spends, as it were, the substance of his self in life-world
material, such as the fat and felt on which his being once depended. Beuys responds to
what Habermas calls the lifeworld's pathologies, while Warhol is pathology incarnate.
This distinction between an art that actively engages the lifeworld and one that is passive
toward it correlates with Fromm's distinction between "the (biologically normal) love of
life (biophilia) and the love of and affinity to) death (necrophilia) . . . its pathological
perversion." The choice between them is "the most fundamental problem" of our age. So
long as art has a subliminal reparative function, it remains in the service of life. Beuys
shows art's biophiliac tendency at its strongest. Warhol is the consummate necrophiliac;
to completely submit to media reproduction—Warhol uses it to negate affect and as naive
intellectual recognition— is to embrace living death. In Warhol's use, reproduction is the
instrument of death, a way of killing what has already been fast-frozen by society into an
insidious banality, betraying life's spirit and process.
The current version of the media attitude has been articulated perhaps most
clearly by Jack Goldstein. In 1981, he said that "you're passive to [the media language],
you accept the fact that it manipulates and controls you and you in turn manipuiate and
control the audience that is tuned into your work by using the same processes that the
culture utilizes. It's to do with liking the culture and not wanting to extricate yourself
from it in any way." Is Goldstein speaking cynically, with tongue in cheek? Only a fool
could, without qualification, like the culture, could restrain himself from criticizing its
manipulative and controlling tendencies. But Goldstein is incapable of criticizing media
language because he endorses the passivity implicit in it. His art elegantly embroiders
mediaderived imagery, making its "captivating" quality more evident. He is
comfortably—aesthetically —imprisoned in it. Goldstein's remark seems to have a
militant, calculated naivete, but it is the sign of a fatal flaw. The capitulating passivity he
speaks of signifies infantile, pathological dependence on the media.
In general, there is a dumb rush to media dependence, as if it was art's inevitable
fate to be media-ted and it responded by becoming medialike in the first place. In much
art, the media mode seems more dominant than anything; whatever criticality the art may
or may not have is subsumed by its "media mimesis" This betrays art's power of
imaginative articulation, on which its therapeutic effect depends. Media-oriented art is a
way, as Baudelaire said, of discrediting and disdaining imagination, which "decomposes
all creation, and with the raw materials accumulated and disposed in accordance with
rules whose origins one cannot find save in the furthest depths of the soul . . . creates a
new world"—that of the work of art. The media attitude implies an indifference to the
psyche's health—an indifference which is a symptom of its disintegration and
necrophilia. For the analytic decomposition of "all creation" into "raw materials," which
are imaginatively synthesized into the work of art, is a metaphoric analysis and
recomposition—reintegration—of the psyche, that is, an analysis and cure of "the soul."
Baudelaire's attack on photography (Salon of 1859) is in effect the first major critique of
the media. It is worth emphasizing that for Baudelaire photography's major negative
psychic effect was its encouragement of narcissism, the most regressive and involuted of
psychic tendencies. With photography's invention, "our squalid society rushed, Narcissus
to a man, to gaze at its trivial image." It may be that Baudelaire's remark— half in
passing jest, half in ironic seriousness—is one of the earliest recognitions of the
prevalence of the problem of narcissism in modern society. (Photography-on which
Warhol is totally dependent-may be both its symptom and a way of gaining narcissistic
satisfaction that exacerbates the sickness it pretends to cure.) In any case, media-language
art is: profoundly narcissistic in that it unquestioningly accepts the banal sense of self
manifest in the media. It implies that there is no deep, critical work of imagination—
analysis and synthesis—that needs to be done on the self. The primary appeal of works of
art is that they symbolically do the imaginative work of analysis and reintegration of the
self for us, or catalyze it in us through our identification with them. They give our
decomposition and recomposition of the psyche socio-aesthetic form, and acknowledge
its inner necessity. Thus works of art acquire general human significance because of their
therapeutic "suggestiveness," "contagion."
More than Baudelaire ever thought possible, Warhol uses photography and the
media to invite us to gaze at our trivial image on its screens—indeed, trivializes the
image so that it becomes unmistakably us. It offers us a fixed and superficially complete
idea of our self, as though to be fixed in place and totalized by an image was to be
healthy. Media articulation does not encourage us to alter our sense of reality, or in
general lead to an alternate grasp of it, as imagination does. Nor does the media satisfy
unconscious wishes deeply, which is why it relies on relentless reproduction to make its
shallow point. In contrast, imagination subtly changes our sense of reality by subtly
changing us. Such "change of heart" is part of art's subliminal therapeutic effect. When
Beuys spoke of his work with material as "a sort of psychological process" of self-
healing, or of his performances as "a psychoanalytical action in which people could
participate," he was explicitly acknowledging art's therapeutic task and his biophilia.
Beuys had a "ritualistic respect for the healing potential of material," and tried to make
his art of materials a mode of healing: "Similia similibus curantur:heal like with like, that
is the homeopathic healing process." For Beuys,"the principle of form" is only one pole
of art; the other is "a process of life." Their integration in "social sculpture" was a move
''towards the possibility of creating a new planet." But, as he said, a social revolution can
never occur "unless the transformation of soul, mind and will-power has taken place"—
for him, through healing art.
In the last analysis, Warhol's media-oriented art is a cold art, while therapeutically
oriented art is a warm art. It is worth noting that Beuys was concerned with keeping
warm. He was always recapitulating the situation when, shot down in the Crimea in 1943,
he was found unconscious in the snow by nomad Tartars: "Had it not been for the Tartars
I would not be alive today.... They covered my body in fat to help it regenerate warmth,
and wrapped it in felt as an insulator to keep warmth in." In contrast to this, Warhol was
determined to remain cold;his passivity was a successful form of coldness-a great
necrophiliac achievement, for it rendered him deathlike. Perhaps both Beuys and Warhol
suffered from narcissism, but in Warhol it became ingrained.
The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut wrote that the infant learns "to maintain a feeling
of warmth" by internalizing the mother's "physical and emotional warmth and other kinds
of narcissistic maintenance." "Narcissistically disturbed individuals tend to be unable to
feel warm or to keep warrn. They rely on others to provide them not only with emotional
but also with physical warmth. " Warhol did not really resist his coldness; he apparently
lived surrounded by others—in "society," full of coldness and fake warmth. In sharp
contrast, Beuys fought his inner coldness as well as the world's coldness, and regarded art
as a means of generating warmth. The moral choice between them is clear. To vote for
Warhol is to give the victory to death. To give Beuys a vote of confidence is to give the
victory to life. It is the major critical choice facing art, and the critic.