I Love America And America Loves Me, 2023
Photography, plant, dead hare and dirt from the back alley (Biograph Theater Chicago)
Slemmons camera collection
“[…] re-stages the performative intervention from 1974, exploring the power of the German art shaman, who believed that we can turn negative energy into love.”
The title is obviously borrowed from Beuys’ famous 1974 performance in New York, but decisively altered. It’s precisely the change from “like” to “love” which carries the sociopolitical differences between the two countries, their contrary mentalities and Beuys’ German sensibility. With deliberate exaggeration, Geissler and Sann underscore the heightened frenzy of contemporary culture.
On July 22, 1934, local and federal law enforcement surrounded the Biograph Theater in Chicago. As Bureau of Investigation agents moved in to arrest John Dillinger, he attempted to flee but was shot in the back. His death was later ruled justifiable homicide.
On January 9, 1974, Joseph Beuys (1921–86), together with Klaus Staeck and Gerhard Steidl, traveled for the first time to America. This trip was a carefully planned performance that took place in airplanes, taxis, hotels, universities and galleries, and was comprehensively documented in photographs and video. In Chicago, Beuys delivered a series of provocative lectures culminating in an impromptu reenactment of Dillinger’s death.
Much of Beuys’ work explores Anti-Space and Anti-Time—concepts that reach beyond the physical world to pre-birth existence and the afterlife. For Beuys, the eternal question of God’s existence is, at its core, a question of space and anti-space: “The question ‘Who created space?’ presupposes a creator.” His Actions function as ritualistic expressions of his philosophical beliefs, grounded in his conviction that negative energy can be transformed into positive energy at any moment.
Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann are artist researchers and educators. In their work they are interested in exploring entanglements and interdependencies in the world and how human actions transform the planet and how those transformations alter our existence. Their work concentrates on inner alliances of knowledge and power, their deep links in western culture and the escalation in and transformation of human beings through technology. The themes of our work are drawn from our observations about climate change and its most significant contributor, the human being. Seeking indicators, embedded traces of human interaction, social habit, and shared emotional states is at the core of our work. This part of our research is as much informed by the discipline of cultural studies, with its emphasis on locality and specificity, as it is by my commitment to give expression to global issues of contemporary relevance, especially the socio-economical effects of climate change and global trade. They are interested in the shapes of collectivity, and in the collective structures of individuality.
Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in museums, galleries, and alternative spaces, including: the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; the Fotomuseum Antwerp; the NGBK (New Society for Visual Arts) in Berlin; the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts; the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland; the Museum Ludwig in Cologne; MAST Foundation in Bologna, Italy; and German Pavillion at the Photography Biennial Dubai, UAE, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin and the Prada Foundation, Venice. They have been the recipient of a number of grants and awards, including: the Videonale Award from the Museum of Art, Bonn, Germany; the Herman-Claasen-Award (Cologne, Germany); production grants from the Graham Foundation, Chicago and a Humanities Without Walls Grant; they participated in the project Mississippi. An Anthropocene River (https://anthropocene-curriculum.org) and were awarded a residency at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. They published four monographs: Return to VesteRosenberg (2006), Personal Kill (2010), Volatile Smile (2013) and the bio-adapter (Oswald Wiener) / you won’t fool the children of the revolution (2019). They are founding members of Deep Time Chicago an art/research/activism initiative formed in the wake of the Anthropocene Curriculum program at HKW in Berlin, Germany.