(piano playing) Voiceover: This is a very strange object. I see a box that has two wires
coming out of it from screws. It looks like an old fashioned
camera made out of wood and
it's sitting on just a table with these wires and on
the floor connected to the
wires are these clay balls. It's just the weirdest thing. It reminds me of surrealism of objects
being put together that don't make sense, Voiceover: I think- Voiceover: I think the reference
to surrealism is perfect. It's a kind of surrealism of the
reality of the absolute diseased
insanity of the 20th Century, which the artist, Joseph
Beuys, was trying to address. so, that camera-like wooden box is an
accumulator which is kind of a battery. Voiceover: So wait, it's an
accum-, am I suppose to know- Voiceover: No, no, no, you're not. Voiceover: This is just
kind of private iconography. Voiceover: No, I think that's
an actual object in the world, which stores electricity
imperfectly, but nevertheless, but it's an old object
and it is handcrafted. Voiceover: Right, it looks like it
belongs to an early 20th Century world. Voiceover: There's something
somewhat menacing about the
way the wires come out of it and it's really screwed into it. It sits squared on this table. Voiceover: And the table itself is square. Voiceover: The reference to surrealism
makes me think of [unintelligible] in that the table itself is the
most reduced, almost platonic, example of a table, a table
in its full table-ness. Voiceover: There's a
box-ness and cube-ness. Voiceover: So, they're both perfect
expressions of the things that they are. Voiceover: Right, but the accumulator
is a mechanical electrical object. Voiceover: So these wires
come out, not very carefully and they're sort of strewn around
until they're plugged into, quite literally, and it's really
funny, into these balls of clay. Voiceover: They should be plugged
into something that has an
electrical relationship to it. Voiceover: That's the metaphor, right? That's where this
becomes a kind of poetry. So, we have this clay, this stuff of the
earth that this energy is being drawn from and is being stored in this accumulator. Beuys was really interested
in healing our culture. Beuys was very much a product
of the second World War, of the violence of the totalitarianism,
of the violence of the genocides
of the second World War. He very much wanted to use art as a
spiritual means to heal the earth, to heal our culture and he was
very interested in the way that
art could transgress science, could transgress the rationalism- Voiceover: You mean transcend science? Voiceover: No, no, no, I don't
mean transcend, I mean undercut, displace science, to find a
kind of irrational means of
understanding our place in society, and societies place in the world. So, this notion of drawing
energy directly from the earth, from the clay, from the most primal
material, I think is absolutely key here. We may need to step outside
of rational structures and look to a kind of magic
that might heal us now. Voiceover: And we're sick with
the illness of the 20th Century, of the scientific focus of
the enlightenment, the way
that we rely on medicine and technology and progress
and we've lost some connection
to something that's eternal and magical and mysterious and miraculous. Voiceover: I think that for Beuys the
Holocaust could not have happened, the second World War could not
have happened had it not been
for our bureaucratic strength, had we not been such good record
keepers, had we not understood
and structured the world. Voiceover: If we couldn't
run the trains on time. Voiceover: If we couldn't run
the trains on time, that's right. Voiceover: This starts to feel a
little bit like a kind of primitivism that isn't so divorced from Gauguin
leaving Paris and going to Tahiti
to find something more pure and true and natural and
looking to primitive cultures to solve something that's
wrong with modern culture. Voiceover: That's true, but I
think that Beuys' goal is grander and in a sense, a bit less self-serving. (piano playing)