An Evening with BEUYS Featuring JOSEPH BEUYS/TRANSFORMER, a film collaboration between Joseph Beuys and John Halpern. Roundtable and Wine reception to follow.
Direct link for purchasing EventBrite Tickets:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/evening-w-beuys-at-anthology-nyc-june-13-tickets-918532895617
Tickets also available at Box Office for $10.00
We’d be delighted to share this evening with you! Thank you.
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An Evening with BEUYS
Featuring JOSEPH BEUYS/TRANSFORMER
Film Collaboration between Joseph Beuys and John Halpern
+ Panel Discussion
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue, New York, NY 10003
(212) 505-5181
7:00pm Short Intro
7:10pm Film Starts
Thursday, June 13, 7-9:30pm, the one-hour film JOSEPH BEUYS/TRANSFORMER, a collaboration between Joseph Beuys and director John Halpern, will screen at Anthology Film Archive’s large theater. There will be a panel discussion and town hall style audience interaction. A wine reception follows.
This rare public screening of TRANSFORMER followed by a conversation with panelists operates in the broader space of social art practice and community engagement – through cultural methodologies.
Beuys’ Social Sculpture theories seem to correspond to an inner transformation, a medically diagnosed “psychosis,” identified in his RUBBERIZED BOX object. (referenced at 27 min. into the film) ~ John DiLeva Halpern
Program
After a short introduction, the screening will start at 7:10pm sharp. The panel and audience discussion will begin at 8:10pm and continue until 9:00pm. Refreshments will be served. This event is the first New York screening of the film to include the director and a curated panel.
Upon entering and leaving the theater, glimpses of interviews with the 1979–80 Beuys Guggenheim exhibition entourage: Thomas Messer, museum director; Caroline Tisdall, curator/catalogue author; Ronald Feldman, art dealer; Heiner Bastian, Beuys’ personal secretary; more, will be on view in multiscreen format, in the Anthology theater entrance.
We are honored to welcome this distinguished group of panelists. To date – Carin Kuoni, Senior Director and Chief Curator of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, artist Ernesto Pujol, artist/director John DiLeva Halpern, and moderator, artist Elaine Angelopoulos, a Feldman Gallery staff member.
Back Story by DiLeva–Halpern for more information
In 1977, Art Corporation of America Inc., with the assistance of then Ronald Feldman Fine Arts on 74th St, Manhattan, executed the scaling of NYC’s seven major suspension bridges to supplant terrorism in mass media news content for one day, replacing it with a creative and empowering community action. The German artist, Joseph Beuys (whose work I rejected, then) heard of the event through his art dealer, Ronald Feldman. Through him, Beuys requested my participation at Dokumenta 6, in Kassel, West Germany, and invited me to be his guest there for 100 days. Feldman urged me to consider this, directing me to study Beuys’ practice which he called “social sculpture.’ Upon hearing this concept, I immediately decided to meet Beuys at Dokumenta 6. Within three days being there, I proposed to Joseph a film “…that would explain your art to Americans,” to which his spontaneous reply was “Yes, let’s do it. You will be the only filmmaker of my Guggenheim exhibition.” And so a friendship, trust and collaboration developed, through the summer of 1977. The summer of Sam and the summer of Elvis Presley’s death. The summer when Beuys was also casting TALLOW with 25 tons of molten fat.
TRANSFORMER was my first attempt in a “documentary” format. It enabled me to spend a lot of time with my mysterious friend, Beuys, to work with Caroline Tisdall, the Guggenhem guest curator, to travel frequently to Europe, and to produce, together with a crew, a very unusual film project. Actually, Beuys had also asked me to supervise and install the Guggenheim exhibition with the Art Corp, but at Heiner Bastian’s request we were replaced by Beuys’ Düsseldorf Art Academy students (wearing bright red jump suits with FIU stencil logo, in the style of our Art Corp BRIDGING outfits – mine was red).
In 1986, Les Levine, an art icon for me, whose work I immediately loved and understood in the early 1970’s, came on-board as a video advisor and brought the celebrated composer, Michael Galasso. For me, throughout my lifetime and career, collaboration among artists has been a sacred experience and process. With TRANSFORMER I was working with a dream team on a dream project.
This collective art product organically evolved concurrent with my own personal metamorphosis. The enthusiasm of working in a creative team, making a work that we all felt would benefit the world, in some way, turned out to be life changing.
Since its release in 1988, TRANSFORMER premiered at Locarno Film Festival. It premiered at Tate Modern, theatrically released at The London Film Theater, premiered at Babylon Cinema, Berlin, Bilbao Guggenheim, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, in festivals and more. It was televised internationally including a worldwide broadcast on Italy’s RAI. The film and its companion “ARCHIVE ADDITION” film have been translated into nine languages.
ICAI/FIU
In 1977, Beuys, Tisdall and Robert McDowell, of FIU Europe, asked Art Corp and Halpern-DiLeva to represent the FIU in the US. Still, forty-seven years later, through Institute for Cultural Activism International, and its active alliance with FIU Amsterdam, (Babeth Mondini vanLoo, Waldo Bien, Carl Giskes) FIU’s work continues in the United States.
The strategic work of Institute for Cultural Activism International is to identify cultural activism, grow its worldwide network and – activate communities explicitly through cultural activist methods and events. Since the 2020 lockdown, for their TUNING FORK project, Harris and Halpern have interviewed 42 artists for their on-line public program. They create participatory art and exhibitions internationally and regionally and maintain an active program from Delaware County, in the New York Catskill Mountains. Babeth Mondini vanLoo is featured on the TUNING FORK this June 25th.
Halpern–DiLeva adapted video technology to Beuys' theories on aesthetics, politics and spirituality to create a sensational visual adventure.
~ Dr. Harold Szeemann, Director
Kunstmuseum, Zurich / Documenta / Venice Biennale
Photo by Wolfgang Volz, Beuys Exhibition, Guggenheim Museum, 1979
John DiLeva Halpern