February 02nd, 2020

In May 1974, Joseph Beuys shared a room in West Broadway’s René Block Gallery with a wild coyote for eight hours a day, for three days.

"It was a performance, entitled I Like America and America likes Me, taut with caution (the animal at first was erratic, and tore apart a blanket in the room), but one that was ultimately a success: the coyote grew tolerant, accepting, simply through Beuys’ desire to heal.
​It’s a potent, profound image, and one that today is as prescient as ever. The United States of America is in a troublesome situation as a declining global power, having to now deal with the failings of modernity and late capitalism." (Source)

​"The animal appears as a heteronomous Other. Whereas humans never cease to reconfigure their societies and their identities within them, a coyote, it seems, is always a coyote. The animal is in this sense a limit, the outermost edge of the human." (Pinto, Ana. The Post-Human Animal, 2015.)

Note: he regarded teaching as an essential element of his work as an artist.


This brings to my mind the film Never Cry Wolf (1983), and the following video.

In 2005, Mircea Cantor brought a wolf and a deer into an empty white-cube gallery room. While Beuys' coyote eventually became comfortable with him, the deer and wolf in Cantor's Deeparture remained eager to avoid each other for the full duration of the performance. (Pinto.)