The Birds – Natural History in Beuys and Deleuze/Guattari
Beuys’ work shows his attempts to make tangible the philosophic and political post modernism that we now identify with Deleuze and Guattari. Where the two philosophers rely on examples from natural history to work out pre- and para- political theories, Beuys attempts to work out and apply political theories through his selection of materials from nature.
The frequent appearance of ‘special animals’[1] in Beuys’ works derives from a totemic or shamanic instinct, but one that is harnessed to resolve modern humanity’s ‘condition’[2]. Besides appearing as images, animals and animal nature are immanently, bodily present. Animals appear as corpses, like the dead rat in Auschwitz Demonstration, and eponymous Dead Hare of his November 26, 1965 action. Animals also appear partially abstracted to their ‘metabolic’ components: as horns and antlers, fat (sometimes in the form of sausages), wax, honey, and felt. In I Like America, and America Likes Me, Beuys lived with a coyote for three days inside the Rene Block gallery in New York. This last action also saw the addition of urine – both of Beuys and the Coyote – to his repertoire of animal allusions. These inclusions of animal-nature in his work convey the ‘psychic and spiritual energies of animals to draw behavioural analogies that would embrace the life of all creatures, including human creatures.’[3]
Natural history is a recurring motif in Thousand Plateaus: biologists such as Darwin and Jacob von Uexküll have their formal theories of evolutionary differentiation celebrated. As tropes, these examples demonstrate that theory can be grounded – even tested – by observation. Proceeding from axioms and first principles can be disproved by the slightest error, observation and trope allow for variation. The success of the natural history approach in postmodern philosophy is easy to observe: Deleuze and Guattari’s successors, such as Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz have followed suit with tropes of their own.
The Bees – Folds and Flows
Beuys is well known for his esoteric and often challenging use of non-specialist materials as the media for his works. Fat and felt are, of course, his most famed media and have been covered at length in the literature. These substances are removed from their natural state, and processed with very little human intervention: fat must be rendered, and wool must be felted, but both processes rely on inherent qualities of the raw material. In this paper, I will examine four more of Beuys materials: honey, bee’s wax, basaltic rock, and living trees. These materials also require minimal intervention before they can be employed as media: the honey and wax must be separated from each other, the basalt quarried, and trees must be uprooted. As I’ve shown above, natural history forms a guiding principle in Beuys’ work. I argue that an interest in the materiality of nature (rather than its symbolic or formal qualities, on display by Beuys in paintings such as ‘Moose’ [1952]) first appears in Beuys’ work with bees wax. Furthermore, I argue that a partial return to wax – in the form of honey – near the end of his life signalled a new synthesis and praxis of his philosophy.
Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy is frequently cited as a major force behind Beuys’ work[4]. Steiner, like Deleuze and Guattari, was creating a humanist philosophy based upon heterodox interpretations of natural history. His Nine Lectures on Bees exemplify his approach, and are cited by Beuys as the inspiration for his use of wax – and of informing his work with fat of the ‘element of heat’[5]. I will examine the role of bee products in two of Beuys’ works: How to Explain Paintings to a Dead Hare (action) [November 26, 1965], and Honey Pump at the Workplace [1977]. An examination of Steiner’s Lectures, and their parallels with Deleuze’s Leibniz, will frame my analysis.
Steiner professes a cosmological principle of resemblance that is observable in the hive building behaviour of honeybees. Specifically, the hexagonal shape of the cells are said to resemble the crystals of quartz (71). These shapes follow from an event, ‘a definite point in the evolution of the Earth’, where the creative forces of the cosmos acted upon the primordial ‘mountains’ to crystalize silicic acid into quartz. ‘There you have the forces that come from the circumference, working as etheric and astral forces, and forming the quartz crystals in the siliceous substance.’ At the origin of the hexagonal crystal-shape, we have the primordial Earth receiving an impression of the cosmological hex-principle (Steiner might say silicic-principle) and expressing that principle. These are, as we learn from Deleuze, infinite ‘regimes’, ‘a vertical immanent causality’[6]: the hex-shape ascends and descends via the primal Earth’s receptivity to the ‘etheric and astral’[7] hex-forces. This is inseparable from the ‘transitive horizontal causality’[8] expressed by the presence of hexagonal crystal-shapes in the ‘world’. For Steiner, this transitive causality can be expressed by positing a siliceous principle, which proposes that silicic acid is present throughout the ‘world’, and that its expression as crystals is suppressed by some ‘force’ of life (he’s sadly quite vague about this force). For example: in ‘man’ this force constantly wants to be expressed by forming crystals in our bodies[9] – it is suppressed by its own impressive force: ‘there streams incessantly downwards from the head what the earth once upon a time caused to flow from within outwards’[10]. The cessation of this flow, at least for Steiner’s ‘man’, means death – in other words: process equals life.
Steiner believes that the hexagonal shape of the bee cell is imprinted into the developing larva within. Once imprinted, the larva as an adult will reproduce the correct hexagonal forms as she works[11]. Until it is used for broods or honey, honeycomb appears to be made from a set of precise angles connected point-to-point. However, the honeycomb is not complete: empty honeycomb serves no purpose in the hive. The bees follow the reason of the curve: once utilized, the cells of the comb are finished with a curving ‘cap’. Seen from the side, in this finished state, the cells resemble a ‘scansion’ of segmental arch and return (Fig. 1)[12]. The ‘return’ of the wax line in construction of honeycomb passes beyond the ‘floor’ of one cell and, following a vector begins to form the walls of the cell beneath it[13]. At the point of inflection, the wax line forming one cell continues ‘according to a law of homothesis’[14] to form the subsequent cell. ‘It envelops an infinitely cavernous or porous world, constituting more than a line and less than a surface’[15]. From individual cell construction, the vectorial nature of bee labour forms complexly folded combs (Fig. 2). This micro to macro unfolding process is obscured by the modern beekeeping practice of using rectilinear ‘frames’. This technique subverts bee’s unfolding instinct by providing them with a perfect ‘bee space’[16] that truncates their vector at a point of intersection (the wood and wire of the frame).
Fig. 1 Cut-away of capped honeycomb showing line and return arch structure
Fig. 2 Folding development of honeycomb without ‘frames’
The processes of the hive – especially the transformation of honey to wax – are some of Beuys’ guiding metaphors. From Steiner’s work Beuys developed his sculptural theories of ‘Plastik’ and ‘Social Sculpture’, which would be increasingly prominent in his later works. Beuys recognized two forms of sculpture: subtractive shaping of a solid – Bildhauerei, and fluid, additive, organic accumulation from within – Plastik.[17] Bildhauerei is equivalent with most classical forms of sculpture – the famous dictum that the sculpture is already within the block of marble. Plastik resembles the process of hive building, it deals with flows of matter that reach various stages of crystallization. In the scheme of bees, this flow begins in the reception of the ’etheric’ by the flowers. Flowers begin the crystallization process as they produce nectar, bees collect the nectar and intensify its ’honey’ attributes by bringing it into life of the hive. In the hive, the honey is available for a further intensification: bees may eat the honey in order to metabolize it and produce wax. In the form of wax, the hex-shape principle of the cosmos expresses a crystallized form via the work of the hive. Bees’ wax is a particularly apt example of the complete process of Plastik because the wax, once crystallized, is not fixed in its solid form. The bees keep the interior of the hive at a temperature that permits easy wax manipulation – the bees can eat old parts of comb, re-liquifying the wax in their bodies, to give it a new form in the hive.
Plastik as a ‘dynamic process that could be experienced as pulsating energy’[18] resembles Whitehead’s ‘creativity’ [19] pushing the cosmos toward greater novelty. It applies to the human world at every level, from the embryo where, as Beuys would point out: ‘In human physiology, everything that is ultimately hard has begun its existence in a fluid process’[20]. Beuys’ ‘Social Sculpture’ is intended to apply Plastik to the human world at the collective level. The ‘ether’ – flower – honey – wax chain of hive building, is mirrored in the human process of thought to action:
I came to see as a prerequisite for the development of a sculpture that first, an inner form would emerge from the process of thought and realization before it could be put into form through manipulation of the physical matter. [21]
How to Explain Paintings to a Dead Hare
This work is one of Beuys’ influential ‘actions’, and took place at the opening of Joseph Beuys…any rope… at the Schmela Gallery, Düsseldorf. Accounts seem to differ on the access the audience had to the gallery- some accounts claim the whole performance had to be viewed through the gallery window. Regardless of the location of the audience, Beuys performed the action of the title. He could be seen carrying the hare from picture to picture, stopping at each one to speak into its ear. After visiting every picture, Beuys sat with the hare cradled in his arms and spoke softly into its ear. The performance concluded by Beuys:
‘Using honey on my head I am naturally doing something that is concerned with thought. The human capacity is not to give honey, but to think – to give ideas…Honey is doubtlessly a living substance. Human thought can also be living. But it can also be deadly intellectually, externally deadly in the areas of politics or education.’[22]
In his comments on his performance, we can see Beuys working out at the level of the individual, the principles of Honey Pump he wishes to promote at a universal social level. Thought, like honey, is produced in the ‘hive’ of the mind as intensification of ‘etheric’ forces experienced as sensation[23]. If a hive is recovering from an illness[24] the beekeeper can remove some of the surplus supply of honey from a healthy hive and provide it to the sick hive. This transferred honey can be crystallized to produce new, healthy, bees. Beuys treats thought the same way: if it is living and healthy one must work to continually intensify it. If thought has become ‘deadly’, it is a danger to external life and must be treated. Some deadly thought can be chewed up and re-metabolized like old honeycomb, other deadly thought must be allowed to wither so that a ‘honey’ of new thought can be introduced. Below, I examine Honey Pump at the Workplace, where Beuys has prescribed two tons of new honey to receive healthy thought, and to treat withered and deadly thought.
Honey Pump at the Workplace
In the Dead Hare action, the connection between the individual act of thought and the impressive force of the cosmos is made clear by Beuys’ head covering. Honey Pump expresses this impressive force in a collective, dynamic, environment that becomes politically charged by the flow of Steiner’s ‘forces’ through and around the exhibition space. It is an attempt to bring the ‘warm household of the bee colony’[25] to the scale of human experience. Beuys explicitly manifests the flowing movement of the siliceous force in Steiner’s metaphor –from the head downward – in this work with honey as media.
This work was displayed for 100 days as a part of Beuys’ participation in documenta VI, where it accompanied his Free International University [FIU] actions. Honey Pump was comprised of a pump circulating two tons of liquid honey through a network of Plexiglas tubing snaking around the FIU’s exhibition space. The pump was lubricated by 220 lbs. of ‘fat’ or ‘margarine’[26] Within the exhibition space, Beuys was present 10 hours a day over the 100 days of the show, holding workshops such as ‘Nuclear Energy and Alternatives’ or engaging visitors in unstructured dialogue around his political vision.
The movement of the circulating honey represents Beuys’ interpretation of Steiner’s cosmic schema. ‘[T]here is a general honey operation in nature. The bee simply collects what is there and takes it to a higher level’[27]. In the installation, the pump is located out of view of visitors, in the basement of the museum. It is here that the honey returns, and receives the influences of ‘what is there’. So, what is there? A possibility for understanding this exists in the form of the ‘Baroque house’ found in Deleuze’s The Fold. The house is a metaphor for the two attributes possessed by every monad (and therefore every thing): the pleats of matter and the folds of the soul. The lower floor expresses matter, movement, ‘the material universe of bodies’[28] it also perceives these same expressions from other bodies because it is open, ‘pierced with windows’[29]. The upper floor is closed to direct perceptions of matter; instead it is infinitely inflected, but resonates from its contact with the lower floor and integrates those perceptions as impression.
In Steiner’s lectures the bee, as symbol of love, goes about her day enlarging the clear areas of different monads: her congress with the flowers benefits them both: the flower spreads its genetic material and receives the bees ‘influences from the starry worlds’ [30]. The bee’s return to the hive becomes a transmutation of the acts of love with the flowers into the provision of nourishing and sheltering love within the hive. The products of this love, honey and wax, go on to nourish and shelter man, expanding his clear area as well.
The bees go out and collect nectar ‘which is really the plant’s own honey’[31], and bring it into the circulation of the hive. The entrance to a modern beehive is in the lower, eastern facing ‘super’ – an exact image of the lower floor of the Baroque house. The bees move from outside, carrying nectar, up into the darkened interior. The bees deposit the nectar, which becomes honey through the warmth created by the activity of the bees. In the dark upper ‘supers’ of the hive, nectar is transformed into honey, and honey is transformed into wax. Something else remarkably Leibnizian also occurs: bees returning with nectar from a new source perform a ‘dance’ in the dark, communicating its location by vibration. Those vibrations are picked up by other bees, and are passed up through the hive ‘resonating as if it were a musical salon’[32]. The bees transmute the ‘matter’ of nectar, into the ‘soul’ of the hive, bringing it its ‘etheric’ essence. For humans, the ‘what is there’ that needs to be drawn into circulation and warmth is a creative force.
In Leibniz, the most reasonable monads are bringing their own world into being – these are the ‘souls’ of his cosmos. Because ‘there is no difference in kind between the organic and the inorganic,’ people, honey, Plexiglas tubing, and mechanical pump assemble as a ‘being’[33]. The FIU is a kind of soul, the honey pump its organs, and the people as a ‘sphere of appurtenance’.
Like the life of the beehive, the honey pump installation relies on ‘dominated’ monads, conveying their own point of view of the world. In the hive, honey is the dominating monad. Although it is variable, and its attributes are in constant flux because they are dependant on the miniscule contributions of individual bees; the honey remains the ‘fixed’ term of relation. The individual bees live a brief six weeks – only two of which are spent foraging outside the hive. The hive may endure for hundreds of generations of bees, but would not exist without the ‘vinculum’ that ‘yokes’ it to honey[34].
Honey as a monad ‘dominata’ is an excellent medium for the work Beuys wants to undertake with the FIU, and his Social Sculpture in general. Steiner links the evolution of honeybees to a mythic ‘Atlantean’ civilization that lived alongside a species of wasp whose egg laying habits damaged wild figs in such a way as to produce sweeter figs. The Atlanteans observed this increase in ‘honey’ made by the figs, associated the honey power with the wasps, and bred them to make honey in hives rather than increase the ‘honey’ in figs[35]. This allegory illustrates the dominating power of ‘honey’: the ‘honey’ was already present in the fig tree, the wasps, and the Atlanteans. Honey expanded its ‘clear zone’ as it dominated fig, wasp, and Atlantean monads. Honey Pump is another stage in the allegorical domination by honey: its power to guide the society of the Atlanteans to breed bees from wasps, is the same power to guide current society to ‘breed’ its own honey source. In the mythic past, it was enough for a society to work with nature for a source of literal honey. In the present, our society is so integrated with the honeybee that Beuys can procure two tons of honey – equivalent to the life’s work of one million bees[36]. As we’ve learned from Steiner it is very difficult to exceed the bees’ capacity to increase honey, but Beuys does not shy away from such challenges, as his approach at documenta VI demonstrates. Beuys is more concerned with the ‘how’, the lower level, allowing the ‘mental landscape’ of the upper level to emerge over the course of the fair[37]. His open and engaged ‘action’ of being present to debate anything illustrates a willingness to allow the soul of the project to follow its own reason.
Basalt and Trees – Process and Event
Beuys’ interest in natural history was not reserved solely for animals and their products. On December 14, 1971 he conducted his first ‘action in the manner of environmental protection’: The Party Dictator Finally Conquers[38]. The action took the form of a protest against a Düsseldorf tennis club that planned to expand its courts into a forest used as a public park. Beuys, and fifty of his students used birch brooms to sweep the pathways; they also painted white circles and crosses onto the trees that would be felled. The action was a success, and Beuys was set on to his path of ecological spokesman.
Beuys’ interest in ecological consciousness would continue to grow; in 1980 he founded the German Green Party. In 1981 he launched one of the most ambitious art installations of the 20th century: 7000 Oaks, a planting of 7000 trees[39] throughout the town of Kassel in West Germany, each tree was also accompanied by a basalt ‘stele’ approximately half a meter in height. The installation took five years to complete. Beuys proclaimed that this project signalled a new direction in his work – a ‘going outside’ the studio and gallery. Although he died before 7000 Oaks was finished, it is clear that he was serious about his new direction. After the initiation of the Kassel project, his speaking engagements and actions stressed the importance of trees, and in 1984 he planted the first of 400 trees in Bolognano, Italy – part of a discussion Difesa della Natura [40].
7000 Oaks points to another Deleuzean element of Beuys’ work: the question of the ‘event’. Conventionally, the concept of ‘event’, if applied to this installation, would cover the first planting in 1982. A more generous application of the term might consider the time between Beuys launching the project in 1981 and the final planting by his son in 1987. Neither of these notions of event serve any justice to Beuys’ conception of the project: he considered the duration of the project to be 300 years, and that every moment of those years would be laden with rich significance. I will consider the trajectory of one linden tree/basalt pairing, at the intersection of Johannesstraße and Julienstraße ‘near the Kunstakademie’[41] to unfold the Deleuzean implications of this celebrated installation.
Deleuze asks the question ‘What is an event?’ in the course of his musings on Leibniz. He suggests that Whitehead’s philosophy is necessary to fill in the elements of the individual that are elided by Leibniz’ ‘connection or a conjunction’[42]. Briefly, events are comprised of extension, intensity, and prehension. A look into the life of our linden and its basalt companion will help us unpack each of these components.
We know that the linden/basalt were planted in this location sometime between 1982 and 1987 – and that planting was an event. We know that not long after it had been planted a citizen’s campaign succeeded in having a connecting road closed to traffic, this resulted in the creation of a little plaza (Plätzchen), which was paved with cobblestones; and the creation of a pergola around the base of the tree. The addition of the pergola had the effect of concealing the basalt – this meant that residents were unaware that the tree was part of Beuys’ planting[43]. The life of this tree has been a relatively successful one – some of the Beuys trees have already died because of poor planning and accidents. Other trees were planted in marginal land at the edge of town, and now are little more than maintenance liabilities. Our tree has been cared for: ‘aphids, for example, were washed away in summer with soap’[44] and the plaza has hosted street festivals, baptisms, children’s birthdays and more. This lively social engagement around the life of the tree (pace basalt stele) fits with Beuys’ desire to create Social Sculpture.
It’s clear that many ‘events’ have been recorded in the life of our tree. Each event possessed a certain duration, but these durations were nested within the duration of the tree itself. What we learn from Whitehead is that the entire duration of the tree’s existence[45] should be considered an event. We can consider the event as a departure from ‘chaos’, from a ‘chaotic multiplicity’[46]. Chaos, however, is problematic in it’s own right, for pure chaos would be ‘purely disjunctive’ and nothing could ever come from a chaos such as this. Something must intervene between chaotic ‘many’ and a singular unity. Deleuze calls this intervention a ‘screen’:
If chaos does not exist, it is because it is merely the bottom side of the great screen, and because the latter composes infinite series of wholes and parts, which appear chaotic to us (as aleatory developments) only because we are incapable of following them, or because of the insufficiency of our own screens.[47]
From the screen, we are able to discern the first condition of the event: extension. By stretching the screen over chaos, so that it is a whole, all elements that follow are its parts. This extension forms an ‘infinite series’, and the event becomes a wave on the stretched surfaces, vibrating ‘with an infinity of harmonics’.
The poor, hidden basalt at the base of our tree demonstrates this extension. Although it was obscured for many years (happily, the pergola rotted away, revealing that the tree was in fact part of 7000 Oaks), this duration was barely the most minute valley on the extensive wave of its event. Basalt is volcanic rock; to a human observer its origins appear as some of the most chaotic forces on earth. Inside the earth, basalt is dissolved in the amorphous mass of liquid rock. The surface of the earth acts as a secondary ‘screen’ through which liquid rock passes over from undifferentiated magma to the multitude of possible volcanic rocks. Our basalt may have undergone this birth-by-extension tens of millions of years ago.
Once extension is established, the second condition of the event arises: intensity. ‘[E]xtensive series have intrinsic properties’, such as the height, color, etc., and these properties belong to their own infinite series as well[48]. All basalt, wherever it is found shares many of these intensities: it must contain a certain proportion of feldspar for example, or posses a certain degree of hardness. Hardness itself is extensive; it arises from the screen and mixes in varying intensities with the infinite. Our specific piece of basalt shares intensities that are expressed in greater proportions by it, than by any other extension of basalt. For example, it expresses its corner-of-Johannesstraße-and-Julienstraße-ness unlike any other.
The third component of the event is named by Whitehead as ‘prehension’. Individuals, such as our tree, posses both intrinsic and extensive elements. The relationships to other elements in extension are not mere ‘connections’ or ‘conjunctions’; they receive the ‘datum’ of other elements as ‘prehensions’. One element’s prehensions are objectively available to the other elements, when that datum is received; it becomes part of the subjective form of that element. 7000 Oaks functions at these levels of prehension – the kind of objective/subjective exchange in the event as described fit Beuys’ professed application of the installation.
Beuys wanted to encourage an intersubjective relationship with nature – both an archaic return and a hastening to the ‘End of the 20th century’. Our specific tree/basalt assemblage demonstrates this principle at work. From the day they were planted together, the tree and basalt have intimately prehended each other. The tree prehends (feels) the solidness of the basalt where its roots come into contact with it, and the tree prehends (tastes) the minerals washed from the basalt into its soil when it rains. The basalt prehends (sees) the shade of the tree in summer, and it tastes the sticky sweet linden blossoms that fall on it in spring. These are some of the prehensions the assemblage makes of itself, but Beuys intended a project with far reaching extension. Time, social relations, and relations to nature are part of this event.
Beuys took an interest in sculpting the element of time. In 7000 Oaks time is represented on a continuum stretching from the geological past of the basalt, to the unformed future of a growing tree. Our own little pair have prehended many events in their time together that mark time. The site is used to celebrate baptisms, which prehend the future, as does the tree. Birthdays are also celebrated there – these prehend the past by marking the passage of another year. These events are, of course, social occasions. Our pair prehend social events: their own situation as a couple suggests prehension of social elements. The care given to the tree (removing aphids) by the people living around the plaza encourages social prehensions. Even the basalt’s ignominious tenure as substrate to a pergola put it into intrinsically social relations with people sitting on it.
Beuys referred to 7000 Oaks as ‘city reforestation’, and when taken as a whole, a forest does seem to appear. Each tree prehends the presence of all the other trees (and those lowly trees that do not have stele), this extension of forest-ness allows the whole city to prehend ‘nature’. The city becomes an event of forestation.
Concluding Thoughts/ Preliminary Hunches
Beuys’ art confronts us with a beguiling amalgam of mystic allusion, forms that cannot be explained, and enigmas where other artists would seek clarity of expression and form. So does the natural world. By considering natural history as the furnisher of philosophic tropes, we can follow some of Beuys’ own thinking on problems of philosophy. The work is messy, and this is the clue that it is in fact the method for unfolding meaning from the messy world of Beuys, and the messy world that prehends the messy world of Beuys…long may our clear zones expand.
Bibliography
Adriani, Götz, Winfried Konnertz, and Karin Thomas, Joseph Beuys, Life and Works. Translated by Patricia Lech. Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron’s Educational Series, 1979
Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conely. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993
Kramer, Mario. “Joseph Beuys: ‘Auschwitz Demonstration’ 1956 – 1964.” In German Art: from Beckmann to Richter, edited by Eckhart Gillen, 261 – 274. Berlin: DuMont Buchverlag, 1997.
Körner, Stefan, and Florian Bellin-Harder “The 7000 Eichen of Joseph Beuys – Experiences After Twenty- Five Years”. In Journal of Landscape Architecture, 4:2, (2009) 6-19
O’Sullivan, Simon. “From Possible Worlds to Future Folds: Abstracts, Situationist cities and the baroque in art,” Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 121-143.
Stachelhaus, Heiner. Joseph Beuys. Translated by David Britt. New York: Abbeville
Steiner, Rudolf. Nine Lectures on Bees. Translated by Marna Pease and Carl Alexander Mier. Steiner Archives, 1923
[1] Heiner Stachelhaus. Joseph Beuys. Translated by David Britt. (New York: Abbeville) 54. Gives ‘the hare, the stag, the elk, the sheep, the bee and the swan’ as Beuys’ ‘special animals’
[2] A condition he characterized in shocking terms: ‘The human condition is Auschwitz, and the principle of Auschwitz finds its perpetuation in our understanding of science and political systems, in the delegation of responsibility to groups of specialists, and in the silence of intellectuals and artists.’ From: Mario Kramer. “Joseph Beuys: ‘Auschwitz Demonstration’ 1956 – 1964.” In German Art: from Beckmann to Richter, edited by Eckhart Gillen, 261 – 274. (Berlin: DuMont Buchverlag, 1997.) 270
[3] Stachelhaus 55
[4] Götz Adriani, Winfried Konnertz, and Karin Thomas, Joseph Beuys, Life and Works. Translated by Patricia Lech. (Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron’s Educational Series, 1979) 38
[5] Adriani 41 quotes Beuys
[6] Gilles Deleuze. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conely. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 100
[7] Rudolf Steiner. Nine Lectures on Bees. Translated by Marna Pease and Carl Alexander Mier. (Steiner Archives, 1923) 71
[8] Deleuze 100
[9] In another example of the holism in his argument, Steiner claims that, if not for the impression/expression of ‘quartz-fluid’ in ‘man’, we could not taste the sweetness of sugar. The sweetness is an expression of ‘the will within it to become hexagonal like a crystal’. No crystal impression: no sweetness expression. (P.23)
[10] Rudolf Steiner. Nine Lectures on Bees. Translated by Marna Pease and Carl Alexander Mier. (Steiner Archives, 1923) 23
[11] Ibid. 4
[12] These cells have a noticeable resemblance to the cells that make up an oak tree.
[13] Once that wall is complete, the line again ‘inflects’, this time from the ‘top’ of the cell and toward the floor of the next cell in the comb.
[14] Gilles Deleuze. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conely. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 16
[15] Ibid.
[16] ‘Bee space’ is generally held to be 8mm between ‘frames’ of a modern apiary – it is roughly the amount of space wild bees leave themselves to move between combs in their nest. Bees will not fill this size space up with wax, so rectangular frames hung in ordered rows 8mm apart allow bees to follow their instincts while simultaneously providing efficient access to the beekeeper. I learned everything in this section helping beekeepers, this info is also at http://www.dave-cushman.net/bee/bsp.html
[17] Heiner Stachelhaus. Joseph Beuys. Translated by David Britt. (New York: Abbeville) 70
[18] Ibid. 71
[19] Whitehead : ‘creativity is the ultimate behind all forms, inexplicable by forms, and conditioned by its creatures’
[20] Stachelhaus 70
[21] Götz Adriani, Winfried Konnertz, and Karin Thomas, Joseph Beuys, Life and Works. Translated by Patricia Lech. (Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron’s Educational Series, 1979) 135 quotes Beuys
[22] Götz Adriani, Winfried Konnertz, and Karin Thomas, Joseph Beuys, Life and Works. Translated by Patricia Lech. (Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron’s Educational Series, 1979) 132
[23] Like the flower transforming the etheric forces into nectar, matter must achieve a minimal density of these forces before a human faculty of perception can apprehend them.
[24] It must be recovering: hives with runaway infections must be destroyed. The multiple is always singular when referring to a hive: individual bees do not get sick; a disease for one is a disease of the hive.
[25] Adriani 41
[26] A precise description of this element seems to be missing from the literature. Antliff claims that the fat was melted and stirred constantly in a kettle, though photographs and other accounts clearly indicate that the fat was semi-solid, and strewn about the floor around the pump. Precise reporting of the quantities of fat and honey also seem elusive.
[27] Beuys quoted in: Heiner Stachelhaus. Joseph Beuys. Translated by David Britt. (New York: Abbeville) 57
[28] Gilles Deleuze. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conely. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 100
[29] Ibid. 4
[30] Rudolf Steiner. Nine Lectures on Bees. Translated by Marna Pease and Carl Alexander Mier. (Steiner Archives, 1923) 2
[31] Beuys quoted in Stachelhaus 57
[32] Gilles Deleuze. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conely. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 4
[33] Simon O’Sullivan. “From Possible Worlds to Future Folds: Abstracts, Situationist cities and the baroque in art,” Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006) 124
[34] Deleuze 110 – 111
[35] Rudolf Steiner. Nine Lectures on Bees. Translated by Marna Pease and Carl Alexander Mier. (Steiner Archives, 1923) 41 – 44 and 73
[36] http://www.superbee.com.au/honey/fun-facts/
[37] Simon O’Sullivan. “From Possible Worlds to Future Folds: Abstracts, Situationist cities and the baroque in art,” Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006) 127 quotes Deleuze
[38] Götz Adriani, Winfried Konnertz, and Karin Thomas, Joseph Beuys, Life and Works. Translated by Patricia Lech. (Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron’s Educational Series, 1979) 240
[39] Though more than 5000 oaks were planted, conditions in the city required the planting of other trees – mainly Linden – if the trees were to thrive.
[40] Adriani136
[41] Stefan Körner, and Florian Bellin-Harder “The 7000 Eichen of Joseph Beuys – Experiences After Twenty- Five Years”. In Journal of Landscape Architecture, 4:2, (2009)16
[42] Gilles Deleuze. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conely. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 76 -78
[43] Stefan Körner, and Florian Bellin-Harder “The 7000 Eichen of Joseph Beuys – Experiences After Twenty- Five Years”. In Journal of Landscape Architecture, 4:2, (2009)17
[44] Ibid.
[45] Including its duration in memory, in texts such as this one that describe it –even after the tree as a fact of existence in Kassel.
[46] Deleuze 76
[47] Ibid. 77
[48] Gilles Deleuze. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conely. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 77