Graphite, ink and oil paint on paper
Tate Collection
Works with images
General Collection
ARTIST ROOMS
National Heritage Memorial Fund
Art Fund
Collection
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/joseph-beuys-747" aria-label="More by Joseph Beuys" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Joseph Beuys</a>
Tunnel Cathode Rays FeltRoom Action
ARTIST ROOMS
Acquired jointly with the National Galleries of Scotland through The d'Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008
abstraction
artist’s notes
defacement
emotions, concepts and ideas
formal qualities
inscriptions
irregular forms
non-representational
symbols and personifications
<p><span>Tunnel (Cathode Rays) Felt-Room Action </span>is a small work on paper by the German artist Joseph Beuys that combines sketches and handwritten notes with paint. The piece of paper appears to have been torn from a sketchbook as it has a rough and ridged left edge. The discoloured and stained cream paper contains a jumble of the artist’s notes, written in both pencil and ink, with a large mass of dark grey oil paint obscuring the majority of the page. This defacement leaves no coherent or complete trace of the artist’s thoughts visible on the page. The oil paint, which is almost black in appearance, has been applied in very thick, swirling brushstrokes, so that it has clumped on the paper surface, accumulating little bubbles and dried paint particles. Remaining visible at the margins of the sheet is the title word ‘Tunnel’, written in English at the very top of the drawing, while beneath the painted mass is written in ink the German word ‘die Wahrheit’, meaning ‘truth’. In pencil in the bottom section of the sheet there are little drawings, possibly of roots and branches. Underneath the paint there are two horizontal pencil lines that seem to indicate that the space of the page was initially organised. The gesture of obscuring a page of notations and diagrams appears to be an act of concealment by the artist. The covering up and cancellation of this kind of raw information could suggest that these notes were for an action that never took place or that, except for a few intriguing drawings, the artist wished to delete.</p>
paper unique graphite ink oil paint
4 July 2009 – 27 September 2009
2009-09-27
4 July 2009 – 27 September 2009
2009-09-27
2009-07-04
De La Warr Pavilion (Bexhill on Sea, UK)
http://www.dlwp.com/
2009-07-04
ARTIST ROOMS 2009: Joseph Beuys
Loan-out
Tunnel (Cathode Rays) Felt-Room Action
support: 236 × 195 mm
frame: 674 × 542 × 27 mm
<a href="/search?gid=999999788" data-gtm-name="tombstone_link_bequest" data-gtm-destination="list-page--search-results">ARTIST ROOMS</a>
Acquired jointly with the National Galleries of Scotland through The d'Offay Donation with assistance from the <a href="/search?gid=999999967" data-gtm-name="tombstone_link_bequest" data-gtm-destination="list-page--search-results">National Heritage Memorial Fund</a> and the <a href="/search?gid=999999968" data-gtm-name="tombstone_link_bequest" data-gtm-destination="list-page--search-results">Art Fund</a> 2008
<div class="text">
<p>
<i>Tunnel (Cathode Rays) Felt-Room Action </i>is a small work on paper by the German artist Joseph Beuys that combines sketches and handwritten notes with paint. The piece of paper appears to have been torn from a sketchbook as it has a rough and ridged left edge. The discoloured and stained cream paper contains a jumble of the artist’s notes, written in both pencil and ink, with a large mass of dark grey oil paint obscuring the majority of the page. This defacement leaves no coherent or complete trace of the artist’s thoughts visible on the page. The oil paint, which is almost black in appearance, has been applied in very thick, swirling brushstrokes, so that it has clumped on the paper surface, accumulating little bubbles and dried paint particles. Remaining visible at the margins of the sheet is the title word ‘Tunnel’, written in English at the very top of the drawing, while beneath the painted mass is written in ink the German word ‘die Wahrheit’, meaning ‘truth’. In pencil in the bottom section of the sheet there are little drawings, possibly of roots and branches. Underneath the paint there are two horizontal pencil lines that seem to indicate that the space of the page was initially organised. The gesture of obscuring a page of notations and diagrams appears to be an act of concealment by the artist. The covering up and cancellation of this kind of raw information could suggest that these notes were for an action that never took place or that, except for a few intriguing drawings, the artist wished to delete. </p>
<p>The mention of ‘cathode rays’ in the work’s title suggests a link to television sets, which use cathode ray tubes to create the onscreen image. (Beuys would perform an action in Copenhagen in 1966 entitled <i>Felt TV</i>, later re-staged and broadcast on German television in 1970.) The type of dark grey oil paint in this work has been used elsewhere in Beuys’s drawing practice to suggest felt, one of the artist’s signature materials (see for example <i>Felt Sculptures </i>1964, Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/beuys-felt-sculptures-ar00661" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>AR00661</span></a>). The paint essentially encases the artist’s words, diagrams and notations and, like felt’s noise-cancelling properties, ‘muffles’ the page’s contents to achieve a state of mute cancellation. The artist’s materially inventive approach to drawing links the works on paper to every other aspect of Beuys’s art, including sculpture, installation, performance, or his political actions, teaching and lecturing, which all feature an interrelated set of materials and gestures developed by the artist over many decades. Beuys explained in a 1984 interview that: ‘My thinking on drawing as a special form of materialized thought is this: they are the beginning of changing the material condition of the world, through sculpture, architecture, mechanics, or engineering, for instance, where drawing ends not only with the traditional artist’s concept.’ (Quoted in Rose 1993, p.17.) </p>
<p>While <i>Tunnel (Cathode Rays) Felt-Room Action</i> has a very specific and detailed title, in fact this drawing has no obvious or direct connection to any documented ‘action’ performed by the artist. Despite this, 1964 was a crucial year for Beuys’s development of his public performances, with his action <i>Kukei/Akopee-nein/Brown Cross/Fat Corners/Model Fat Corners</i> at the Festival for New Art<i> </i>in Aachen, West Germany on 20 July 1964 marking the beginning of his ascendancy to worldwide fame as an artist. This event is notorious for the interruption of Beuys’s performance by right-wing students, and its descent into violence with police arrests at the scene. </p>
<p>The curator Anne Seymour has clarified the artist’s approach to drawing, writing: ‘Although the appearance of a drawing is not of first importance to Beuys, its colour or substance are likely to have some sort of relationship with its subject or meaning. Beuys uses materials in drawing very much as substance, and in ways comparable to how he would use them on a much larger three-dimensional scale.’ (Seymour 1983, p.20.) Related to this observation is the art historian Maja Naef’s statement that: ‘With Beuys, the space of drawing in his oeuvre is larger than the corpus of his drawings in the strict sense in that it also encompasses archives, broadcasts, performances and installations, which belonged to the scene of drawing as Beuys understood it.’ (Naef 2010, p.337.) Acknowledging this conceptual overlap between different media is crucial to understanding many of the artist’s works on paper, including this work, that appear as wilfully impenetrable and mysterious objects, while nonetheless hinting at multiple influences and interpretative possibilities.</p>
<p>
<b>Further reading</b>
<br/>Anne Seymour, ‘The Drawings of Joseph Beuys’, in <i>Joseph Beuys Drawings</i>, exhibition catalogue, City Art Galleries, Leeds 1983, pp.7–26, reproduced pl.99.<br/>Bernice Rose, ‘Thinking is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys’, <i>MoMA</i>,<i> </i>no.13, Winter 1993, pp.16–23. <br/>Maja Naef, ‘Beuys, Drawing’, in Marion Ackermann and Isabelle Malz (eds.), <i>Joseph Beuys, Parallel Processes</i>, exhibition catalogue, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf 2010, pp.336–48.</p>
<p>Stephanie Straine<br/>March 2011</p>
</div>

Summary
2012-06-22T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT
<p>As elsewhere in Beuys's drawings, here we see a sheet of notes in pencil and ink which have been obscured by thick sweeps of dark grey oil paint. This is frustrating for the viewer as we can see only the title and a few glimpses of what is written on the page, yet the covering of paint was a deliberate act by Beuys. It may have been his intention for the paint to 'absorb' the sentiments on the page. The work does not appear to relate to an 'action' which the artist performed, but may be a plan for an intended 'action'.</p>

Online caption
2009-04-16T00:00:00
online-caption
ONLINE_CAPTION
abstraction artist’s notes defacement emotions, concepts and ideas formal qualities inscriptions irregular forms non-representational symbols and personifications