Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare
Summary
How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (Wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt ) is a performance piece staged by the German artist Joseph Beuys on 26 November 1965 at the Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf. While it was only Beuys’s first solo exhibition in a private gallery, it is sometimes referred to as his best known action.
At the beginning of the performance Beuys locked the gallery doors from the inside, leaving the gallery-goers outside. They could observe the scene within only through the windows. With his head entirely coated in honey and gold leaf, he began to explain pictures to a dead hare. Whispering to the dead animal on his arm in an apparent dialog, he processed through the exhibit from artwork to artwork. Occasionally he would stop and return to the center of the gallery, where he stepped over a dead fir tree that lay on the floor. After three hours the public was let into the room. Beuys sat upon a stool in the entrance area with the hare on his arm and his back to the onlookers.
The performance was the high point of Beuys' development of a broadened definition of art, which had already begun in his drawings of the 1950s. He celebrated the ritual of "explaining art" with an action that was, for his viewers, effectively silent.
The relationship between thought, speech, and form in this performance was also characteristic of Beuys. In his last speech Speaking about Germany (German: Sprechen über Deutschland, 1985) he emphasized that he was essentially a man of words. In another instance he is quoted as saying: "When I speak, I try to guide that power's impulse so that it flows into a more fully descriptive language, which is the spiritual perception of growth." The integration of speech and conversation into his visual works plays a meaningful role in How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare.
The hare is an animal with broad, centuries-old symbolic meaning in many religions. In Greek mythology it was associated with the love goddess Aphrodite, to the Romans and Germanic tribes it was a symbol of fertility, and in Christianity it came to be connected with the Resurrection.
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.