ALMOST SHADOW
QUESTIONING BEUYS ?
Commissioned by Norbert Attard to accompany DVD.

ALMOST SHADOW, 2008, 180 mins, DV format, is a filmed series of interviews with artists and academics about Joseph Beuys by Maltese artist Norbert Francis Attard. QUESTIONING BEUYS is an accompanying interactive installation by Attard using Electro Luminence technology.

Invited by Attard to take part in ALMOST SHADOW because of their particular relationship to Joseph Beuys and his work, the subjects in the film speak with unique insights and knowledge about Beuys, their experiences of working and travelling with him or his influence on their own and others artistic practice. They speak of places that Beuys visited such as Edinburgh, Dublin, Belfast, London. They talk of the influence on Beuys of major thinkers such as Steiner and Shiller and how he drew on literary figures such as Homer, Joyce, O’Brien. The interviewees include artist and promoter Richard Demarco, art critic Dorothy Walker, performance artist Alastair Maclennan, art historian Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, performance artist Nigel Rolfe, artist and Director of Social Sculpture, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, Shelley Sacks.

First begun in 1999 this project was continued in 2008 during Norbert Francis Attard’s three month artist-in-residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. It is a work in process. Eighteen videos have so far been made and represent a significant part of this major new project by Norbert Francis Attard within which he goes head to head with the grandfather of contemporary art, the one whom all artists at some stage have to deal with, Joseph Beuys.

ALMOST SHADOW and QUESTIONING BEUYS by Norbert Francis Attard are a response to Jospeh Beuys but act as more than an homage to him. They are a combined attempt by Attard at facing Beuys and his influence and making a re-evaluation of the importance of him. They are an enquiry by an experienced practitioner into the relevance of Beuys to contemporary art practice today, twenty two years after his death. Whilst acknowledging his influence, Attard poses questions that are rooted in Beuys’s biography or teaching and reflects them back at aspects of Beuys’s thinking and attitudes. Through the development of the innovative interactive installation QUESTIONING BEUYS, Attard invites the viewer to participate in this process in variously performative and experimental ways.

The project is intrinsically about how artists research and it is also about two artists, Norbert Francis Attard and Joseph Beuys and the dialogue between them. It is not fanciful to describe it thus despite one party being long gone. All artists look to their forebears and in their own and various ways discourse with them. They seek to understand why they do what they do and in so doing attempt to peel back the layers of time and art-history and reveal the motivations, the strategies for making, the lives lived, of those who have gone before and how they may be interrelated across time and intellectual shifts. The lineage continues and the dialogue will be as vital and enriching posthumously as the substance of the thinking the art embodied. The curiosity of the artist in the now will always re-animate the art of the past, it is part of the legacy and privilege of being an artist.

Joseph Beuys is indisputably one of the major artists that any contemporary artist must at some point turn to in order to understand their heritage, the development and very content of contemporary art. A pioneer, together with artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, he has shaped contemporary sensibilities and attitudes amongst both artists and audience to Art and Life and the fusion between the two. Much of the art made today would not be made without his far-reaching influence as artist and teacher. That is simple fact, like it or not and a lot don’t.

Norbert Francis Attard has been as aware of the influence of Beuys on art practice as any artist. Not ashamed to admit, as many won’t, that he has at times found Beuys inscrutable and irrelevant to his own work, he has nonetheless the dogged and ultimately insightful drive to continue to wrestle with things that are hard for him to understand. And few who have studied him would deny that to understand the enigma that is Beuys is a big ask. But then Attard is an artist of big asks.

A former architect and abstract painter, now multi-disciplinary artist, he works in a site/context-specific way making architectural interventions, sculpture, photography and video. Recurring themes in Attard’s work include aspects of memory as evidence of place, of social interaction and as a generative process. His inventive and challenging works expose the pendulum of opposing forces in flux, whether culturally, politically or socially. He persistently deals with the exhausting engagement of dualities. It is the contradictions that are implicit in Beuys and that echo the very same in life, that first acted as a strong point of connection for Attard with Beuys.

Attard is an artist who does not like to be categorized through repetition or signature style and constantly seeks to re-invent and employ new attitudes and approaches to making his art. It makes him hard to pin down, a fact that pleases him, in fact is an essential aspect of him as it was of Joseph Beuys. This was one of the first similarities between the two of them that struck Attard when he first engaged with Beuys’s work and thinking. The title of the film ALMOST SHADOW leads us to Attard’s fascination with the image of the Penumbra, the partial outer shadow that is lighter than the darker inner shadow (umbra), for example the area between complete darkness and complete light in an eclipse. It is an indeterminate and indistinct area, especially a state in which something is unclear or uncertain, or even in complete obscurity. Beuys can be said to inhabit the Penumbra of art-history as he has never been easy to fit into the established categories. Attard too resists easy pigeon-holing and he too is happier orbiting the less certain but perhaps more exhilarating girdle of the Penumbra of art.

There are differences too between them, as there must be between all artists, especially over the span of decades. Difference in the appearance of their work is most evident in the use by Attard of the latest Electro Luminence technology as a means of transmitting the work in the gallery or museum space. Beuys as we know, insisted on using the low tech of fat or felt or the found object to make his art and so it is hard to imagine that Beuys would have had much time for Attard’s enthusiasm for the high tech.

So much has been said and written already about Joseph Beuys, can there really be anything new to be added to the weight of research and analysis of him ? ‘Why bother?’ one almost feels like asking when approaching this ambitious project by Attard. In answer, it is perhaps time that someone other than the academics took on Beuys. It is time that an artist of weight and with a strongly developed and authentic voice did more than revere, emulate or mimic. It takes courage for sure, a raising of the stakes but Norbert Francis Attard seems to be up to the task. It is critical, arguably un-necessary, but then obsession usually is. Whether there is really anything new to be thought about Beuys, whether further enlightenment is attained, at the very least it will generate an important and innovative series of new works that make a fresh contribution to the canon of works made in response to Beuys, as well as reinvigorating the posthumous debate that continues on the real value to us all of Joseph Beuys.

Clare Carswell. Irish Museum of Modern Art Dublin July 2008

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