Saturday, 6 July 2024

Beuys Brown and Klein Blue : Colour as substance/the transubstantiation of matter.

Outpost 150722

Cyanotype Durational Sun Print.

Charcoal and Clay trace drawing.








Beuys Brown and Klein Blue

Magdalena Broska.


The Transubstantiation of Matter.


Beuys's materials are not to be understood literally, by their outward appearance.


Beuys emphasises that the brown floor paint is not just a colour but also a plastic substance.


I have chosen brown so as to present a plastic substance and thus express something that relates to every form of substantiality, just as I am trying to do with this superimposed red. I simply want to bridge the gap between a discussion about colour and the problem of substantiality.

Joseph Beuys, Drawings. 1979


For Beuys the real and the concretely employed material is only seemingly real, fully in a philosophical sense: a phenomenon from some essential being that is hidden behind appearances, and that is to be elicited by a kind of counter- image process.


Conceptions of Counter Images/Transformation.

The Homoeopathic Method/Like cures like.


Beuys's brown and Klein's blue form a pair of opposites: according to the hermetic-alchemical world view, such opposites contain the arcane power of polar dissimilarity that seeks to be augmented and joined together, a polar way of thinking that seeks resolution.


With his brown oil paint, Joseph Beuys assumed a counter-position to Yves Klein and his blue, which stands for immaterial manifestations, the sky, the sea, and the light of the south, and which conveys space and wide vistas.


In terms of consistency, Beuys's brown is purely coating paint, as commonly used for rust proofing.


Its visual appearance links it with earth, heaviness, darkness, and also blood.

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