About

Peter Anders (Director of Goethe-Institut Tokyo)

Inbeuys on/off, we are conducting field research and supporting independent interpretations of the “Eurasia” that Beuys transfigured into autopian internationalityof a united East and West. We have invitedMizuki Takahashias artistic director to set out on this journey through Eurasia with an international team in Japan. Takahashi has selected various project partners whose working methods focus on the potential to trigger transformative and cooperative processes. The fact that we are largely relying on digital means of executing the project is not only a consequence of external circumstances. It is also a question of the present and future significance of digital media for international art and cultural exchange.Joseph Beuysquestioned the system by which art operated like no one else. The significance of his preoccupation with thesystemic relevanceof art will have in the current discourse of the post-coronavirus crisis remains unclear for the time being. Perhaps we will succeed in giving this project of critical reference a somewhat different look within the framework of the diverse activities taking place as part of beuys 2021.
 

 

In 1984, Beuys visited Tokyo to hold a solo exhibition at the Seibu Museum in Tokyo in exchange for support for his 7,000 Oaks project, a plan to plant 7,000 oak trees paired with basalt columns across the city of Kassel, West Germany. During his eight-day stay in Tokyo to install his solo exhibition, Beuys organised lectures as well as a discussion with students, and staged a performance with fellow artist Nam June Paik, leaving strong impact on Japanese audiences. Throughout his life, Beuys showed a strong interest in the concept of Eurasia, onto which he projected his ideal vision of a utopia where the dichotomy between Western and Eastern culture would be integrated. However, Japan was the first and last Asian country which Beuys would visit during his lifetime.

More than thirty years after his visit to Japan, beuys on/off is responding to Joseph Beuys from the perspective of Eurasia. Connecting artists, musicians, activists, writers, domestic workers and academics across Eurasia, beuys on/off both critically reinterprets Beuys’s multi-faceted practices and updates them by addressing contemporary urgencies through both on- and off-line programmes.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has compelled us to socially distance, though, conversely, propelled new communication through digital platforms. Virtual conference services have enabled people to connect beyond geographical limitations, making information and events more accessible. Then questions arise: What if Beuys were alive in the internet age? How would Beuys use the internet and the web for his idea of social sculpture? What would he do in the virtual space? These questions are the starting points for conceptualising beuys on/off.

The website beuys on/off is a multi-faceted cross-disciplinary online platform. It publishes interviews, journals, pedagogical texts and sounds as well as hosts symposia, discussions, sharings , performances and puppet theatre. All content is conceived as critical responses to Beuys from associates with connections to Asia and Eurasia. In each presented programme is embedded the nature of co-learning based on ideas of collaboration, communication and compassion. In this way, beuys on/off can be regarded as a contemporary form of the Free International University, which Beuys co-founded in 1973 with his associates as a place for research, work and communication.
 

beuys on/off consists of two major streams: Free International University 2.0 (FIU 2.0) and Sounds of Eurasia. In FIU 2.0, six lead associates – Dominique Chen, Sakiko Sugawa, Gulnara Kasmalieva, Muratbek Djumaliev, Taeyoon Choi and Ma Jung-yeong – are designing programmes to explore the topics of “Eurasia”, “Ecology”, “Economy” and “Education”. Curator, artist and informatics scholar Dominique Chen is attempting to invent artistic cartography across Eurasia by inviting visual artists, authors, scholars and critics to create mail art in a relay format. For the theme of economy, Sakiko Sugawa, a cultural worker based in Amsterdam, is revisiting Beuys’s exploration of the structure of economy and critically updating it by focusing on the issues of reproductive labour­ – how its devaluation is rooted in European colonialism and capitalism – and by creating a popular education platform about reproductive labour in collaboration with her fellow activists and migrant workers. Artist and curator duo Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev from Kyrgyzstan are addressing the theme of ecology by organising workshops with young artists from the independent platform Bishkek School of Contemporary Art. Among the theme of environmental pollution, they elaborate the idea of “eco-vernacular buildings” in Issyk-Kul theoretically and practically and share their monthly publication on website. For the theme of education, artist, educator and activist Taeyoon Choi and media art scholar Jung-yeon Ma are organizing an online summer school with participants from Japan, South Korea, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan for learning about each other and unlearning their ideas about education in art. Their discussion will also be shared online as monthly essays.
  In the project Sounds of Eurasia, dj sniff is sending vinyl records with minimum instructions to sound artists and musicians to interact with, and then asking them each to send on the records by mail to other people in different cities and towns across Eurasia. Building a network of sounds based on trust, he plans to stage a live performance in August and September in Tokyo using the collected sounds.

Against the backdrop of COVID-19 social distancing, beuys on/off utilises digital space for experimental programmes, embracing improvisation and sometimes failure, aiming to build a creative network and eventually turning into a unique archive that captures the diverse artistic endeavours across Eurasia today.