Jeder Hase ein Künstler. Eine Beuys Fabel

Patchett’s play alludes to Beuys’s fictive burial and gives the mourners, all of them contemporaries of Joseph Beuys, the opportunity to comment grotesquely or movingly on the phenomenon of Beuys, to question his role as German art saviour, to take his work down from its pedestal and to meet him at eye level.

Nussbaumer’s magical interpretation of Patchett’s text elevates Beuys’s mascot, the hare, to the sole protagonist, taking the piece into a bustle of fairytale activity. Holes are deliberately punched into the current image of Beuys: the piece remains true to Beuys’s system of insignia and symbols, while interpreting the funeral in Patchett’s text not as an obituary show but as zero hour. The hares explain the artist’s images, which have formatively influenced our consciousness. An ‘extended Beuys concept’ is propagated in which the séance is not conducted by the artist himself but by his art objects.

Following Beuys’s performative aesthetics, the piece oscillates between theatre and performance, and makes demands on the minds and bodies of its audience. It invokes Beuys the actionist in a way that takes him out of the context of museum, documentary or veneration. During his lifetime Beuys was hardly a museum artist but a performer, whose relics only entered the hallowed halls after his death.

The questions about the current relevance of his work and the possibilities of further developing his concept of art in and for the 21st century will be captured in a multilayered theatre crystal framed by the past and present and shot through with distortions.