In the midst of a conversation with Lennart Lahuis in his studio in Brussels, something suddenly starts squeaking next to me, followed immediately by a loud hissing sound. Looking for the source of the noise, my gaze falls on a long black box. As if by itself, steam pours out of this box, forming the words FROM OCEANS TO CLOUDS floating above it. Immediately afterwards, these words dissipate again, along with their meaning. Clouds do, after all, disappear. But the words reappear, hissing again and again as soon as they have vanished, as if matter itself wants to express and constantly reaffirm its own meaning, which is inherent in it anyway, in an emphatically
linguistic way. It is the wisdom of its recurrence. I sit next to it, amazed: the significance of this matter permeates me, like steaming air into my breath and like meaning into my thinking. It is as if a primal substance could communicate.
Could the philosopher Denis Diderot have been right in 1749 with his written assumption of “thinking matter”? 1 Despite being a radical Enlightenment thinker, he was completely averse to anything magical. Yet, the idea of matter “communicating” remains a great surprise, although it is evident that it is Lahuis who has created this artwork and who, in a practical sense, has directed the technical substances used for dual references of spirit and matter. Now, one could argue that art, as a category, inherently has the task of creating and demonstrating meaning using matter anyway. But with Lahuis, it is precisely this circumstance that becomes the epitome of the work.
MATTER
Today, one no longer needs to decide whether the universe was first founded on fire, water, or perhaps even air, or whether it was solely the earth, as a slowly thickening and cooling cosmic soup, responsible for its inception. In India, China, and also in the wider Asian region, similar classifications for primal substances existed. The so-called pre-Socratic thinkers 2 of ancient Greece mistakenly believed they could designate only one of these elements as the primordial and principal one amid the chaos of matter: Thales of Miletus thought he found it in the wet, Heraclitus in the fiery, Anaximenes of Miletus in the solid, and Pythagoras in the light, the gaseous. Anaximander, however, saw the interplay of all four elements in the eternal, the apeiron. Following him, Hesiod and other thinkers, alongside Plato, added ether as the fifth element, as a light encompassing everything else, attributed to the divine as quintessence. They considered light as such, not merely as a source of fire. Thus, there was an attempt at a parallelism between matter and higher significance, implying a commonality or fusion.
Mythologists of all types—Christians, alchemists, Rosicrucians, Theosophists, and Anthroposophists— have always held onto the idea that matter contained its meaning within itself. An artist like Joseph Beuys thought the same, and today Lennart Lahuis emphasises it without wanting to anchor his work teleologically in any way: matter and spirit belong together. Beuys believed, that upon careful examination, one could discover the spirituality inherent in matter.3 There are no separations, he explained in our conversation in his studio in the autumn of 1981: he always wanted to make the correspondences visible, as someone who only shows what is. Because, as he previously said, “What one can start from is the idea that art and insights gained from art can form an element that flows back into life.” 4 A flowing, a stream of matter and meanings, constant transformations of matter—these are correspondences in the work of both artists.
Since the Dutch artist Lennart Lahuis is interested in matter as such, its ambiguity is a peculiarity he wants to explore in his work. In 2011, he discovered it in the Prado Museum in Madrid while facing Velázquez’s monumental painting Las Meninas (1656). From a distance, he looked at the depicted studio scene with the ladies-in-waiting of the Infanta. However, as soon as he approached the painting closely, all he saw were brushstrokes of different colour matter. Any further meaning had disappeared. The being of matter and its appearance became his overarching theme after this discovery.
While decades before Lahuis, Marcel Duchamp was particularly interested in the tiny space between matter on the one hand and meaningfulness on the other, which he noticed, for example, in front of a glass painting on the front side and the imageless back side5 and referred to this insight in 1934 as “infra-mince” (mince as a tiny in-between, which also sounds like the Latin word mens, meaning the mind), Beuys and Lahuis—probably without knowing Duchamp’s posthumously published investigations—were precisely not looking for an in-between, but rather the “both/and.”
By the way, Beuys spread out an orange-coloured area in an etching, aquatint, and lithography (all in a single print) with the title Matter, which lies spread out like a glowing flag on the ground.6 In 1971/72, he repeated this design on the advertising leaflet of his Organisation for Direct Democracy through Referendum, which he founded in 1968, and once again gave it the programmatic title Matter, as if both statements now came together as a whole.7 Thus, the idea of this organisation shines in the warm light of colour and is colour itself, a unity of substance and spirit, in this case with a directed, proclaimed message.
FIRE
The shaping, transforming power of fire speaks for itself. In the 1950s, Beuys made many drawings with undifferentiated red paint, which he succinctly called Vulkan [Volcano] 8. In 1969, he actually set a Gully [Drain] on fire on a street, as if not water were pouring in but rather a fire was “flowing out” underground. Wanting to bring warmth instead of cold to people in a metaphorical sense was a constant prophecy and task for him, for which he advocated with his art. In doing so, Beuys revealed himself as a true modernist. He vehemently opposed any form of materialism, as this ideology only called for money and power acquisition. 9 He had a vision of an energy plan that placed every material at the service of human creativity.10 His extensive ensemble THE HEARTH (Feuerstätte) from 1974/1979 at Kunstmuseum Basel does not present an actual bonfire, but in its plastic image, it addresses the idea of an exchange of opinions about a yet-tobe- formed Europe in free self-development, like a Sacra Conversazione against any discord, around a warming fire, so to speak. Copper rods protrude from a lying copper ring, and felt jackets (made of chaotic material) are stacked up next to them, ready to encourage all viewers to participate internally. At the same time, Beuys hoped to use a hearth as an analogy to point out the necessity of a tabula rasa of outdated social structures. In contrast, Lahuis works with actual fire, but not in the sense of a visualisation of the tabula rasa or, for example, the warmth plasticity as opposed to the cold plasticity (like Beuys), but with regard to metamorphosis: in Schloss Moyland, he demonstrates the transformative forces of fire in an action specifically for seven large-scale photos. Initially, he took pictures of things that already generate fire in some way—some lighters—or things that indicate desired revolts. These are recordings that have arisen more or less intuitively and randomly in this context, each one a proof of the shaping power of serendipity (a lucky chance for the artist who is only unconsciously searching). Lahuis prepared these photos with a protective layer so they would not burn completely, leaving their ash on the surface. Ash, like dust, is a fine material with many double connotations, positive as well as negative, hopeful as well as melancholy-inducing. It results from fire but already points to the element of earth. It appeared programmatically to Lahuis to have taken these photos on Labour Day, 1 May 2023, in Brussels—incidentally, in a fictive dialogue with Beuys, who, on this special commemorative day, on 1 May 1972, also performed his action Ausfegen [Sweeping Up] on Karl-Marx-Platz in West Berlin with the help of participants (two of his students). At that time, no fire happened to be involved, but both artists had a kind of change in mind. As to Lahuis the two actions sweeping and burning are related in a spiritual way.
EARTH
For both artists, in their work, the following matters: the element Earth is not to be conceived as something fixed and solid.11 In Beuys’s Erdtelefon [Earth Telephone] (1973), there is an equation for this: an old-fashioned black telephone with the receiver on a fork stands next to a clump of earth, which is threaded by stalks of grain running through it.12 In this way, Beuys suggested, small animals would communicate with each other. It’s a touching notion: earth is a basis for communication. Initially, thickly bundled telegram cables were also laid across the earth of the continents and even through oceans.
Furthermore, for both artists, it also applies: the earth is constantly changing in metamorphoses, eroding, drifting apart, and trembling. Therefore, for Beuys, the earthquake in the mountainous region near Naples in 1980 was an occasion to respond to this event the following year with two larger installations named Terremoto [Italian for earthquake] as “action sculptures.” They were very complex ensembles with many details: one in Palazzo Braschi in Rome (1981), the other in the Modern Art Agency in Naples (1981, as Terremoto in Palazzo).13 Once again, the union of matter and linguistic units in a spiritual sense played a role here. In addition, the alchemical significance of lead melted in fire as a material symbol for the melancholic spirit of Saturn, to which artists have generally felt close, was present. One component of the Terremoto ensemble, briefly described here, is a blackboard on which Beuys sketched with chalk a connection line between two planet-shaped circles depicting the relationship between Saturno and Jove (Jupiter).14 The animated earth, Terremoto, thus received a parallel in the creative human being, whose task is to set insights in motion. Using seismographic-like zigzag lines, Beuys also sought to symbolise the fluid forces of the earth through drawing.15 Things demonstrate their dependence on these forces and subordinate themselves to them. Humans seek a graphic language to point out the dangers of these forces, but they also recognise that things in flux resemble their own lives and attempt to confront these forces, adapt to them, and make them useful for themselves.
Additionally, Lahuis points to the flow of time in the geo-history of the earth.16 It also contains our memories. He created a large area of soft clay (earth), onto which he engraved a scientific article with the title “Two Stage Opening of the Dover Street and the Origin of Island Britain” in 2018; he then let it weather and erode and collected the shards especially for the exhibition in Schloß Moyland. With the material, the context of the writing changed. Earth shifts result in shifts in meaning. Destruction also becomes a kind of order and “calls forth” new meanings. This requires a change in thinking. For Lahuis, an image of the drifting apart of earth masses from each other arises associatively, like the once washing away of the land mass of present-day Great Britain from the continent. Temporally shifted; even today, an analogy to Brexit arises. This is intentional on Lahuis’s part.
WATER
Like fire, water also has a cleansing power.17 This is vividly represented in Beuys’s work by a bathtub for birth as a poignant symbol. In his work, Beuys adorned it with a cross-shaped bandage, although the baby is absent, for whom one would need to protect the cut umbilical cord. The bathtub and adhesive plaster already speak for themselves. The significance of the cleansing power of water also inspired Beuys to incorporate the typically Arabic, but also Christian, ritual of Fußwaschung [Foot Washing] into his actions in Düsseldorf and Basel in 1971. It was his caring action.
In the case of the element of water, Lahuis continues a work by Beuys, much as Beuys once made additions to Leonardo da Vinci’s Codices Madrid (1975) or James Joyce’s main literary work, Ulysses (1957, 1961). This time, it has a particular historical significance: The photographer Lothar Wolleh had accompanied Beuys to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1971 and documented the exhibition setup in numerous photos. Beuys seemed to want to “dissolve” the fixation. He called it Unterwasserbuch [Underwater Book] and placed the photos on the bottom of a crate, protecting them from the water that he then let flow in.18 Although the project was not realised as a multiple, two copies were executed.
In another way, one could remember: Lahuis, for his part, hangs his own garments in a water tank.19 Clouds of clay nebulise the textiles and then slowly make them reappear. These clay particles cause a heat movement in the water, much like the smallest pollen floating in it. This physical phenomenon is called Brownian molecular motion. Now, precisely this molecular movement, with its heat-generating effect, provides a bridge to Beuys’s energy plan, for which the internal and external generation of heat in humans was a central theme of his work. Perhaps then it will become a geo-history in the underwater book as a memorial for Beuys in Lahuis’s work, and, after the extension action, it will become part of the Schloss Moyland collection.
AIR
Since Marcel Duchamp gave his friend Walter Arensberg a vial of Parisian air as a souvenir from Paris and appropriately named it Air de Paris in 1919, air as such suddenly became an artistic material. Later, he returned to the element of air: in one of his notes on infra-mince, he suggested exhaling onto a surface, then writing something in the breathed-on spot, waiting for the vapour to dissipate, and then breathing against it again: 20 lo and behold, the writing reappears! Duchamp considered his own breath a significant material. Therefore, he did not call himself an artist but a “respirateur.” 21 Another breath work was apparently particularly important to him, as he mentioned it multiple times: it consisted in the union of two tobacco exhalations. And again, he referred to this amalgamation of breath air as a tiny difference in
infra-mince.22
Beuys and Lahuis work with breath in a different way: since steam is the visible state of air, it seems only appropriate that Beuys and Lahuis focus on this aspect of the element in the visible part of their work. But it does not stop there. In the breath of all viewers, the element of steam enters into invisibility, warms the lungs, and draws all participants into the artwork. This happens in Lahuis’s aforementioned work, which releases these words in steam: FROM OCEANS TO CLOUDS / TO RAIN TO RIVERS / TO OCEANS TO CLOUDS / TO RAIN TO RIVERS. In 2023, he named this work Hydrology (created from water reservoirs, HDPE, a mist maker, steel, and a pneumatic system). The time of becoming and passing determines the work, as well as the time until the rhythmic reappearance.23 Thus, the work seems to define dimensions and the rhythm itself.
Beuys called his small cloud of steam, which billowed up from the plinth of a room in the tenant’s house of the sculpture park (Merian Park, Basel), Thermisch-plastisches Urmeter [Thermal-plastic Prototype Metre].24 Breath is a primal measure, not only as a cosmic principle of an element but also naturally for life. The tiny cloud of steam never stopped billowing up. Even if it constantly evaporated, it was renewed. This happened with the help of an invisible furnace behind the wall of the tenant’s house.25
Lahuis also ensures the constant recurrence of steaming words. His themes of “temporality” and “memory” are those of circulation time. His art must, for example, be continuously inhaled so that the meaning of the words can materially penetrate into the physicality of the human being. “Inside Outside Exchange”: this conceptual statement already moved and inspired the artist Donald Burgy in 1970.26 But it was only a principled statement as a work of concept art, which still points in all directions. Obviously, the exchange of breath was first concretely realised as plastic by Beuys and Lahuis.
For both artists, Beuys and Lahuis, it is true that they instrumentalize the four elements to harness their inherent energy and release their sense for the benefit of all. Therefore, Beuys’s early drawing from 1949 titled Erde Feuer Wasser Luft [Earth Fire Water Air] seems programmatic for his philosophy, as it depicts a human being.27 For him, everything that exists exists solely for humans.28 Both artists could have agreed with Friedrich Nietzsche for the determination of their cosmology, who admonished: “Look here! Look right here! This is your life. This is the hour hand on the clock of your existence.” 29 Discovering the parallelism or simultaneity of cosmic connections with one’s own life is not reserved for their solitary work in the alchemical laboratory,30 but it serves their art and thus art in general as a category, more in the sense of an epiphany. Their field of action is purely pictorial. In this, they now also have a virtual side, but above all, an exemplary one for the sudden perception of this emerging insight.
1 Denis Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient. Paris 1749.
2 Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Berlin 1903.
3 See Volker Harlan and Wolfgang Zumdick, Mit Beuys Evolution denken. Munich 2020.
4 Antje von Graevenitz, “Erlösungskunst oder Befreiungspolitik: Wagner und Beuys.” In Gabriele Förg, ed., Unsere Wagner: Joseph Beuys, Heiner Müller, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hans Jürgen Syberberg. Frankfurt am Main 1984, p. 38.
5 Paul Matisse, ed., Marcel Duchamp. Notes. Paris 1999 [1980], p. 24, no. 15: « Peinture sur verre vue du côté non peint donne un infra-mince » [Painting on glass seen from the unpainted side results in an infra-thin].
6 Joseph Beuys, Materie, after a draft from 1968. Ill. in Liechtensteinische Staatliche Kunstsammlung, ed., Joseph Beuys. Späte Druckgraphik. Bern 1996, pp. 34–35.
7 Joseph Beuys. Schwurhand. Zeichnungen 1950–1970. Cat. Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Joseph Beuys’s death and in connection with the exhibition “Der Tod Hält Mich Wach” [Death Keeps Me Awake]). Munich 2006, p. 38.
8 Joseph Beuys, Vulkan, 1949, drawing. Ill. in Joseph Beuys. Ed. by Tobia Bezzola and Harald Szeemann, exh. cat. Kunsthaus Zurich/Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid/Centre national d’art et de culture Georges-Pompidou, Paris, 1993/94. Zurich 1993, p. 209, no. 17.
9 Joseph Beuys on shaping society. Excerpts from a coffee house conversation on 27 January 1983, in Beuys en Vienna. Exh. cat. Casa de la Cultura, Santa Cruz, Teneriffa/Sala de Arte, La Regenta, Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. Vienna 1991, pp. 161–62.
10 Beuys: Energieplan/Beuys: Energy Plan. Zeichnungen aus dem Museum Schloss Moyland. Exh. cat. Museum Schloss Moyland, Bedburg-Hau 2010/11. Bedburg-Hau 2010.
11 See Uwe Claus, “Erde.” In Joseph Beuys. Die Materialien und ihre Botschaft. Ed. by Barbara Strieder, exh. cat. Museum Schloss Moyland, Bedburg-Hau 2006/07. Bedburg-Hau 2006, pp. 48–9.
12 Joseph Beuys, Erdtelefon, 1968, 7/8 ´ 30 ´ 19 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Ill. and text in exh. cat. Zurich/Madrid/Paris 1993/94, p. 77, no. 25. Colour ill. in Joseph Beuys. Natur, Materie, Form. Ed. by Armin Zweite, exh. cat. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf 1991/92. Munich/Paris/London 1991, no. 189.
13 Petra Richter, Joseph Beuys. Ein Erdbeben in den Köpfen der Menschen. Neapel, Rom 1971–1985. Düsseldorf 2017, pp. 107–109, 113–15.
14 Richter 2017, p. 119.
15 Detail from: Joseph Beuys, Hauptstrom, 1967, pencil drawing. Ill. in Joseph Beuys. Parallel Processes. Ed. by Marion Ackermann, exh. cat. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, K20, Düsseldorf 2010/11. Munich 2010, p. 181 no. 186.
16 Cf. Lahuis’s works on the topic of time: Tim Roerig, Steam engine time. On the occasion of the exhibition With sighs too deep for words, Dürst Britt & Mayhew, The Hague 2022. Available at: <https://durstbrittmayhew.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/ LennartlahuisEssay.pdf> [Accessed 1 February 2024]; exhibition Lahuis’s Le Mal du Pays , Dürst Britt & Mayhew. The Hague 2019; on this, also Lorenzo Benedetti, An Attempt to Measure the Fragility of Time. Ed. by Dürst Britt & Mayhew. The Hague 2016.
17 Joseph Beuys, Badewanne, 1960, with adhesive plaster. Ill. in exh. cat. Düsseldorf 1991/92, no. 116.
18 Exh. cat. Zurich/Madrid/Paris 1993/94, p. 87.
19 Cf. Lahuis’s further works with the element of water, see on this Domeniek Ruyters, “Water Werken. Lennart Lahuis.” In MetropolisM, 28 May 2015. Available at: https://metropolism.com/nl/feature/23863_waterwerken/ [Accessed 1 February 2024].
20 Matisse, ed., 1999 [1980], pp. 33–34, no. 36: « Les buées – sur surfaces polies (verre, cuivre infra mince [)] on peut dessiner et peut-être rebuer à volonté un dessin qui apparaîtrait à la vapeur d’eau (ou autre). » [Mists— on polished surfaces (glass, infra-thin copper [)] one can draw and perhaps rebuff at will a drawing that would appear to steam (or other).]
21 Serge Stauffer, ed., Marcel Duchamp. Interviews und Statements. Stuttgart 1992, p. 85.
22 Matisse, ed., 1999 [1980], p. 24, no. 11v; p. 33, no. 33, as well as on the cover and reverse of the magazine VieW, March 1945.
23 Cf. The Thalassophiles. A conversation between Lennart Lahuis and Alex Farrar. Ed. by Dürst Britt & Mayhew, The Hague 2021. Available at: https://lennartlahuis.net/a-conversation-between-lennart-lahuis-andalex-farrar [Accessed 1 February 2024].
24 Theodora Vischer, “Joseph Beuys: ‘Thermisch-plastisches Urmeter’ – ein Spätwerk.“ In Volker Harlan et al., eds, Joseph Beuys-Tagung. Basel, 1–4 Mai 1991, pp. 214 19; cf. Hans van der Grinten et al., eds, Joseph Beuys. 4 Bücher aus Projekt Westmensch 1958. Basel/Cologne/ New York 1993, p. 62.
25 Joseph Beuys, Thermisch-plastisches Urmeter in the exhibition Skulptur im 20. Jahrhundert at Merian Park, Basel, 1984; see Antje von Graevenitz, “Das Schweigen brechen. Joseph Beuys über seinen Herausforderer Marcel Duchamp.” In Rainer Jacobs et al., eds, In medias res. Festschrift zum siebzigsten Geburtstag von Peter Ludwig. Cologne 1995, pp. 208–10; cf. in general on the topic of breathing with Beuys: Sabine Röder, “Atmen und Sprechen.” In Beuys & Duchamp. Künstler der Zukunft. Ed. by Magdalena Holzhey/Katharina Neuburger/Kornelia Röder, exh. cat. Kunstmuseum Krefeld 2021/22. Berlin 2021, p. 230; cf. work on paper by Joseph Beuys, Der Atem, 1966, grease, copper oxide, pencil. Ill. in Joseph Beuys. Piirustuksia/Zeichnungen. Ed. by Heiner Bastian, exh. cat. Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere/Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach 1986. Tampere 1985, p. 36.
26 Donald Burgy, “Inside Outside in Exchange.” In Art Ideas for the Year 4000. Addison Gallery of American Art. Andover, Mass. 1970, n. p.
27 Collection Museum Schloss Moyland, inv. no. MSM00842, Department of Cosmology.
28 See Wolfgang Zumdick, “Material, Materie, Substanz. Philosophische Implikationen des Beuysschen Materie- und Substanzbegriffs.” In Barbara Striede, ed., Filz, Fett, Honig, Gold, Blut … Joseph Beuys. Symposium “Filz, Fett, Honig, Gold, Blut … zur Material-Ikonographie bei Joseph Beuys,” 2–3 March 2007, Museum Schloss Moyland. Bedburg-Hau 2008, pp. 21–24.
29 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. [Basel 1871]. Translated by Ian Johnston. Nanaimo (British Columbia, Canada) 2008, p. 82.
30 See Magdalena Holzhey, Im Labor des Zeichners. Joseph Beuys und die Naturwissenschaft. Berlin 2009.