APPRECIATING CONTEMPORARY ART

Joseph Beuys: Fat Chair (Fettstuhl) 1964–1985

Masterpieces of modern/contemporary art #1

Joseph Beuys ‘Fat Chair’ (1964–1985). Displayed through WikiArt under the Fair Use Rationale.

(The idea behind this series is to let the individual artworks speak directly to us from their own mysterious realm, rather than interpreting and ‘explaining them away’ in conventional terms.)

Fat Chair looks, at a glance, to be some kind of emergency storage attempt, though perhaps only temporary. The fat has been deliberately smoothed off on one side at a 45° angle to form a kind of wedge triangle. Maybe it’s waiting to be put to use. But you don’t usually store fat on a chair unless something has gone oddly wrong somewhere.

There is also a length of wire sticking out of the top of the smooth edge, suggesting that, were the fat to harden into a solid lump, you could pick the whole thing up using the wire as a handle. Then again, maybe not. But we’re definitely in the presence of something delightfully weird, and possibly morbid.

The Beuys aesthetic — meaning the look and feel of the objects he was attracted to, and chose to work with — often speak of a kind of dereliction and neglect; he often dealt with the kind of stuff you might find in an abandoned factory, where the purpose of the individual bits and pieces would not be apparent to…