Healing the World by Joseph Boyce: The Ideas of the Last Utopia in the Twentieth Century
Joseph Boyce is a German artist and activist, one of the main theorists of postmodernism. He advocated the expansion of the traditional concept of art: the creative process was to encompass all spheres of human activity, blurring the boundary between art and life. Boyce referred to his work as “anthropological art” and claimed that “every person is an artist”.
From childhood, Joseph Boyce dreamed of becoming a doctor. He enthusiastically studied works in biology, zoology, as well as art and philosophy. Therefore, when the National Socialist Party came to power in Germany, the boy painfully experienced the burning of his so beloved books in the schoolyard and saved Karl Linnaeus from the fire. He forcibly enters Hitler’s youth, escapes once with a circus, where he cares for animals, and becomes a Luftwaffe pilot during the war. Such is the biography of Joseph Boyce before the miraculous metamorphosis that occurred to him in March 1944, when a Soviet fighter downed his plane over Crimea.
According to Boyce himself, he was rescued by nomadic Tatars who smeared his body with grease and wrapped it in felt to warm it, and when he woke up a few days later, he tasted the honey in his mouth that fed him. Whether or not that story is real doesn’t matter. Boyce creates personal mythology and thus legitimizes himself as an artist, cleansing himself from previous experience. At that crucial moment, Joseph made the decision to heal humanity with a “brush” in his hand. It undergoes the ceremony of initiation, rebirth, after which artist Boyce is born from the cocoon.
Medicinal properties of organic materials
After the war, Boyce turned to sculpture in search of new forms of art. He may not have chosen this type of art by chance, because sculpture is basically a pagan idol, a worshiped totem, a medium that conveys ideas.
It uses unconventional fragrance-specific materials, organically, associatively warm, which saved it: felt, grease, honey. The artist conceptualizes the special properties of matter. For example, animal fat is a very tricky carving raw material that can only be poured or molded at a certain temperature – a metaphor for the smoothness and caution with which changes in society should occur. Felt has thermal and sound insulation properties. Boyce uses them in the Felt Suit to signify his function of preserving not only physical warmth but also spiritual warmth.
The work “Homogeneous Infiltration for the Piano” is the artist’s reference to children who, due to their pregnant mothers taking talmidol, had upper limb mutations. Here is a felt in the felt because it is music in potential, because there is no one to play it. The Red Cross here is a symbol of both the cure and the crucifixion found in many of the works of the healer. As an avant-garde artist, Boyce develops his own artistic language as well as manifests and theorizes. Therefore, you can always explain what this or that piece is about.
“Homogeneous infiltration for the piano”