7. Exhibition visitors in ECA studio C.07 with Joseph Beuys's installation, Arena
At Strategy: Get Arts, the first version of Beuys’s important photographic installation Arena was displayed. It can now be found at the Dia Center, New York.
At Strategy: Get Arts (1970), Arena consisted of photo-documentation of Joseph Beuys’s previous projects:
- his actions,
- performances,
- installations,
- objects,
- and sketches, representing the development of his practice.
Beuys's Arena
Richard Demarco has given his recollections of Arena and its installation in a studio space (C.07) very familiar to him from his own student experiences of ECA.
That room was special to me. It was where I was educated. Anyway, when we were thinking about installing Arena, I said to Beuys, ‘I don’t have any money for frames’. He said, ‘It doesn’t matter, just put glass on each image, just put in on the floor or lean it against a wall.’ […] I believe Beuys only made one work and he underlined that fact by saying, ‘If you look at all these images [Arena] this is what I have done up to now’. I thought, ‘this is the work of a great teacher’. […] And when Beuys was asked whether he wanted the floor of this life room to be cleaned (it was bespattered with paint), he replied, ‘No, no leave it untouched. These marks are evidence of all the human souls who have endeavoured to make art’.
Intriguingly, one SGA contribution by Beuys intersected with another.
Some of the photo-documentation by Ute Klophaus of the ‘action’ Celtic (Kinloch Rannoch) Scottish Symphony would become incorporated into Beuys’s Arena project, first shown at SGA.
He continued to assemble and expand it between 1970 and 1972 with other photographs and steel frames.
It is now in the collection of the DIA Center in New York.
C.W.