Joseph Beuys Coyote

What can push a contemporary artist to wrap himself up in felt, pick up a cane, a complete collection of the Wall Street Journal and an electric lamp, and to live during a whole week in captivity with a coyote in a New York gallery? That is what spectators must have asked themselves when faced with this performance by Joseph Beuys, carried out in May 1974 and now a well-known legend. Brown gloves, the recording of noises and turbines, a triangle one strikes to establish harmony, the cane that extends the head: it still remains difficult to decrypt thirty odd years later. Caroline Tisdall’s images in black and white show a strange dialogue and question us on our relationship to time, to education and to nature. They preserve a part of unfathomable mystery that authorises all interpretations and which makes the magic of this New York week.

• Joseph Beuys Coyote, par Caroline Tisdall, Hazan, 2009, 160 p., 25 €, ISBN : 978-2-7541-0358-9