‘You Like It. It Likes You’: Stephen Aiken’s ‘Coyote’ Photographs

In 1974, the iconoclastic German artist, Joseph Beuys, arrived in New York City wrapped in felt. An ambulance shuttled him from JFK to SoHo’s Rene Block Gallery, where he was then carried inside and enclosed behind fencing with a coyote named ‘Little John.’ For the next three days, Beuys and Little John shared the space as part of a performance called I Like America and America Likes Me, also known as Coyote. Beuys, who believed that social transformation could come from people choosing to live their lives as creative acts on a mass scale, would have called this an ‘action’ rather than ‘performance art.’ He characterized works such as I Like America as enquiries, ‘aimed at creating in people an agitation for instigating questions rather than conveying a complete and perfect structure.’ Through July, Provincetown’s Schoolhouse Gallery will be exhibiting a sequence of photographs taken by conceptual artist, Stephen Aiken, during Beuys’s three-day performance. Aiken’s sequence ‘agitates,’ straddling lines between the production and observation of artistic ‘action.’ In documenting Beuys’s famous performance, Aiken reframes the scope of I Like America’s questions.

Beuys was a polarizing figure in the art world, the subject of both fierce devotion and critical polemics as late as his 1979 major retrospective at the Guggenheim. In an analogous sense, one central tension in I Like America concerns the problem of charisma. Beuys understood the artist’s persona as a compositional element, a ‘synthetic existence.’ He made a spectacle of his own disruptive power in his performances, positioning himself as a kind of avantgarde shaman. For a 1964 piece called Lebenslauf/Werklauf (Lifework/Worklife), he described his own birth as the ‘exhibition of a wound’ and invented correspondence with James Joyce, whose Ulysses he had decided to ‘extend’ with a series of six exercise books of drawings from 1958-1961. Beuys’s self-fashioning as teacher, mediator, and artistic instigator ‘was a kind of psychoanalysis,’ he explained, ‘with all the problems of energy and culture.’

Most famously, he invented a spiritual and artistic origin myth for his practice. Beuys had been a Luftwaffe rear-gunner on the Eastern Front during World War II, and his plane was shot down in 1944. According to Beuys, his body was recovered from the snow by Tartars, who he described as the ‘nomads of Crimea, in what was then no man’s land between the Russian and German fronts, and [who] favoured neither side.’ In Beuys’s account of his survival, the Tartars covered his body with animal fat and wrapped it in felt blankets to rejuvenate it. These elements would form the basis of both his personal symbolic register and his use of visceral, tactile, and animal products as performance elements. The goal was in part to recover the instinctive, the elemental, and the emotional as a balm for reductive modern rationalism. His model of lived art sought to ‘encompass all the invisible energies with which we have lost contact.’

But Beuys’s calculated persona often risked undermining the interrogative ends of his artistic projects. What if ‘elemental’ parts of ourselves cannot be cleanly mapped by the symbolic meanings imposed by a charismatic leader’s persona? In one of his most striking performances, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, Beuys stood behind a glass gallery window with his face covered in honey and an applique of gold leaf, whispering descriptions of drawings on the walls to a dead hare in his arms. Each element – the gold, the honey, his own head, the hare, a felt-insulated stool, a magnetized iron sole in his shoe that made him limp – had a specific meaning involving transformation, intuition, or the intellect. Of course, the hare figured perfectly and without resistance into the meanings suggested by the other animal, Beuys, because it was dead.

In I Like America, Beuys approached Little John with his personal mythology of gestures and objects – his felt blanket, a shepherd’s staff, a flashlight, and a musical triangle that he would use to beckon Little John. As with How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, Beuys had an argument to make. Informed by the Vietnam War, Watergate, Native American genocide, and the Civil Rights Movement, Beuys wanted to explore the idea of healing social trauma through direct connection with the Other. Aptly, the title of the performance alludes to an ad campaign for 7-Up – ‘You like it. It likes you.’ – subverting an aesthetic of mass consumption with one of individual experimentation. ‘Beuys saw America as having a traumatic energy block,’ Aiken reflects, ‘and he was looking to stage clues for an audience to think through.’ He spent three days in the gallery mirroring Little John’s movements, sleeping on straw, and coaxing the coyote into urinating on copies of The New York Times that were delivered daily. At intervals, Beuys interrupted his routine with Little John using a tape recording of blaring engine turbines, introducing the discordant strains of American trauma that he intended to critique.

Aiken’s presence as participant was almost an accident. When he saw what was happening at Rene Block, he came back with his camera and shot a roll of film over the course of an hour. ‘Apart from the someone recording a film of the performance,’ he recalls, ‘I was really Beuys’s audience then. I could see him performing for me.’ As photographer, though, Aiken’s relationship to Little John was at least as close as Beuys’s was – and as instigating – in an important way. No matter what register of symbols Beuys hoped to implicate Little John in, the latter was under no compulsion to mean them. Unlike the dead hare, Little John could nip at Beuys’s felt shaman cowl. He could force Beuys to accommodate his rhythms and decisions. He could ignore Beuys. Similarly, Aiken as photographer was free to assume perspective, choosing his entry points into the captivity scene and reconfiguring its potential meanings.

‘For me, it was about how you can transform into something free,’ Aiken reflects, ‘even in a cage.’ Aiken had just spent time on a Florida chain gang for a minor offense. In a sense, he came to Beuys’s action from within the situation that Beuys had envisioned and orchestrated from without. Being within the operation of I Like America’s project acts as a compositional principle in Aiken’s photographs. He captures intrusions and disruptions of Beuys’s action. At turns, this involves foregrounding the material and apparatuses of the performance. One of Aiken’s photographs, for example, captures Beuys performing one of his ritual gestures with Little John while his felt cowl crumples closer to us in the lower left corner. In another, we see Beuys smoking at some distance from Little John through strands of metal fence.

In others, Little John intrudes on the frame without context, captured in part and in motion. Perhaps the most striking images decenter Beuys and frame Little John as portrait subject. ‘Since the Ice Age, the North American coyote has shown us what it means to survive and evolve into something new,’ Aiken reflects. ‘No one then would have imagined coyotes in New York but there it was.’ In one image, Beuys disappears under his felt cowl, virtually indistinguishable from another felt blanket, while our eyes are drawn to Little John at rest. In another, Aiken seems to have photographed Little John while crouching or laying the floor, level with him. In a significant sense, this is both the antithesis of Beuys’s authoritative position as provocateur and precisely the sort of engagement that I Like America sought to provoke from viewers.

For contemporary audiences, Aiken’s photographs are less ‘documentaries’ of a particular art-historical milieu than they are documents that make that milieu accessible and fresh from Aiken’s perspective. Because I cannot see Beuys’s performance of I Like America firsthand in a present that entails risk, uncertainty, and open-endedness, reading explanations or summaries of it by the artist himself has as much living possibility as a dead hare. I can, however, assume a powerful relationship to Little John’s situation with Beuys through Aiken’s photographs, which both unsettle Beuys’s mediation of the encounter with the coyote and invite me to participate in Beuys’s experiment myself as both observer and living, thinking animal.

What would it entail to view one’s own life in Beuys’s terms as an artistic expression? How would one begin to explore the question through the perspective assumed in Aiken’s photographs, which both capture complete situations as critical observer and incomplete gestures as participant? Aiken’s photographs evoke a liminal shift in perspective, a space between Little John and Beuys. In one sense, the poetic companion to Aiken’s photographs is the conclusion to Randall Jarrell’s ‘The Woman at the Washington Zoo,’ which circulated through my animal brain like a spinning turbine when I first saw Aiken’s work at The Schoolhouse Gallery. I thought of Beuys in his cowl and of myself growling all the days of my life at shadows and gestures and cages:

‘Vulture,

When you come for the white rat that the foxes left,

Take off the red helmet of your head, the black

Wings that have shadowed me, and step to me as a man:

The wild brother at whose feet the white wolves fawn,

To whose hand of power the great lioness

Stalks purring ….

You know what I was,

You see what I am: change me, change me!’

Stephen Aiken’s work is being exhibited along with work by Amy Arbus, David X. Levine, Jo Sandman, and Han Feng at The Schoolhouse Gallery, 494 Commercial Street, Provincetown, Massachusetts, through July 16.

Stephen Aiken’s photographic work from Artists in Residence: Downtown New York in the 1970s is also available here.