J. Beuys: Flâneur Experience and the Pyrexial Arts

Key experiences can come in many different forms. For example, wholly external key experiences—practical life encounters with various matters can become a key experience, but there are also obviously key experiences which, how can I put it, have almost visionary character, say childhood or eidetic images, or … one can even have key experiences in dreams, and—well, I think I’ve had quite a few such key experiences. (pause …) But I think it’s always right to start with the practical, that is factual, key experiences. Those that arise somehow from working.

One can also say that true key experiences always inherently have something experiential about them in the broadest sense, something that cannot be purely accounted for by rational cognition. [emphasis added]

Anyway, in the consciousness of a human being with a completely rational stance towards life, these experiments often appear as something mythical, graphic or simply put, as something mythological.¹

—Joseph Beuys (September 27, 1976)

The Archive and Its Fever

Building an archive is a pyrexic art. To experience the fever of creating a future (à la mode J. Derrida) or to edit one’s future (à la mode S. Kierkegaard), to collect one’s future (à la mode W. Benjamin), to socially sculpt (à la mode J. Beuys). The archive is a fever—a place of construction, of un-rationality, of material and non-material, of impressions, regressions, and so forth—but also a site of inquiry … Had it not been for the Tartars I would not be alive today. They were the nomads of the Crimea, in what was then no man’s land between the Russian and German fronts, and favoured neither side. I had already struck up a good relationship with them, and often wandered off to sit with them. ‘Du nix njemcky’ they would say, ‘du Tartar,’ and try to persuade me to join their clan. Their nomadic ways attracted me of course, although by that time their movements had been restricted. Yet it was they who discovered me in the snow after the crash, when the German search parties had given up. I was still unconscious then and only came round completely after twelve days or so, and by then I was back in a German field hospital. So the memories I have of that time are images that penetrated my consciousness. The last thing I remember was that it was too late to jump, too late for the parachutes to open. That must have been a couple of seconds before hitting the ground. Luckily I was not strapped in—I always preferred free movement to safety belts. … My friend was strapped in and he was atomized on impact—there was almost nothing to be found of him afterwards. But I must have shot through the windscreen as it flew back at the same speed as the plane hit the ground and that saved me, though I had bad skull and jaw injuries. Then the tail flipped over and I was completely buried in the snow. That’s how the Tartars found me days later. I remember voices saying ‘Voda’ (Water), then the felt of their tents, and the dense pungent smell of cheese, fat and milk. They covered my body in fat to help it regenerate warmth, and wrapped it in felt as an insulator to keep warmth in.²

The Pyrexial Arts and Poïetic Research

Bringing forth experience within the pyrexial arts is poïesis. Getting lost (flânerie) in making/unveiling phenomena: these are functions of art and research (poïesis as inquiry).

[A]ll these images fully … entered me then, in a translated form, so to speak. The tents, the felt tents they had, the general behavior of the people, the issue of fat, which is anyway … a general aroma in their houses … also their handling of cheese and fat and milk and yogurt—how they handle it, that all practically entered into me: I really experienced it. You could say, a key experience to which one could forge a link. … I probably would never have come back to felt, without this key experience. … Just...