Table Of Contentfelt
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felt
Fluxus,
Joseph Beuys,
and the
dalai lama
Chris Thompson
University of minnesota press
minneapolis | London
see page 305 for information on previous publications.
portions of The Art of War: The Denma Translation, translation, essays, and
commentary by the Denma Translation Group, copyright 2001 by The Denma
Translation Group, are reprinted by arrangement with shambhala publications, inc.,
Boston, massachusetts. www.shambhala.com.
portions of The Secret History of the Mongols, translated and edited by Frances
Woodman Cleaves (1982), appear courtesy of harvard–Yenching institute.
Words and music of “Ghetto Defendant” by Joe strummer and mick Jones
copyright 1982 nineden Ltd. and Emi Virgin music, inc. All rights for the United
states and Canada controlled and administered by Emi Virgin music, inc. All rights
reserved. international copyright secured. reprinted by permission of hal Leonard
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Copyright 2011 by the regents of the University of minnesota
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication Data
Thompson, Chris, 1975–
Felt : Fluxus, Joseph Beuys, and the Dalai Lama / Chris Thompson.
p. cm.
includes bibliographical references and index.
isBn 978-0-8166-5354-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isBn 978-0-8166-5355-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Fluxus (Group of artists). 2. Beuys, Joseph--Friends and associates. 3. Bstan-’dzin-
rgya-mtsho, Dalai Lama XiV, 1935—Friends and associates. i. Title. ii. Title: Fluxus,
Joseph Beuys, and the Dalai Lama.
nX456.5.F55T49 2011
700.92'2--dc22 2010044989
printed in the United states of America on acid-free paper
The University of minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
(Remember that we sometimes demand definitions
for the sake not of the content, but of their form. our
requirement is an architectural one: the definition is a
kind of ornamental coping that supports nothing.)
—ludwig wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Robert Filliou, Télépathique musique no. 21, Art-of-Peace Biennale, Hamburg, 1985.
Photograph: Herstellung Druckhaus Hentrich, Berlin. Courtesy of Marianne Filliou.
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Contents
Prefaces | ix
intrigue: toward the scripting of intimate space | 1
1. interhuman intermedia | 49
2. Rate of silence | 85
entanglement | 133
3. what happens when nothing happens | 139
4. overgave | 193
Acknowledgments | 251
Notes | 253
Publication History | 305
Index | 307
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prefaces
i
on January 23, 1998, i made my first visit to Amsterdam to meet with
Dutch artist and writer Louwrien Wijers, who had organized the 1982
meeting between German artist Joseph Beuys and his holiness the
XiV Dalai Lama of Tibet. This meeting was the subject of my ph.D.
research, which i had just begun a few months before. in fact my
first step as a researcher had been to write a long letter to Wijers
in october 1997, explaining my great interest in this meeting and
in her work. it was the kind of heartfelt and effusive student letter
that one, in looking back on it, cannot imagine writing as a “profes-
sional scholar,” and it was probably precisely for this reason that it got
so prompt and warm a reply, in a way that no well-seasoned prose
ever could. she wrote telling me that she was delighted that some-
one was actually interested in this meeting and its consequences, and
she invited me to come to Amsterdam as soon as i could, to meet
her and begin a conversation in person. This book is the result of
that conversation; it is an indirect result, in that the project that has
unfolded from that point to this has been circuitous and anarchic, but
a direct result in the sense that it was from precisely that moment—
my receipt of that welcoming reply from an artist i had never met—
that the project started. And upon its completion, of even those parts
that had nothing directly to do with her, this book reveals itself to be
circumscribed by that friendship in a way that makes this at once my
project and her invention.
After arriving at schiphol Airport i took the train to Amsterdam
Centraal and then, following the canals, managed to find my way to
ix
Wijers’s home. Just one block from it, i passed the bar that, i would
soon learn, had been the favorite haunt of her close friend the Dutch
Description:Felt provides a nonlinear look at the engagement of the postwar avant-garde with Eastern spirituality, a context in which the German artist Joseph Beuys appears as an uneasy shaman. Centered on a highly publicized yet famously inconclusive 1982 meeting between Beuys and the Dalai Lama, arranged by t
