from the archives

Excerpt from OSMOS Issue 20

VAHAP AVSAR

AMERICA

BY CHRISTIAN RATTEMEYER

In 1974, German artist Joseph Beuys visited the United States for the first time. After he landed at the airport in New York, he was picked up by assistants who wrapped him in felt blankets then placed him in an ambulance that transported him to the SoHo outpost of Berlin gallerist Rene Block. Beuys didn’t touch American soil until he reached the gallery where, for eight hours a day, he communed with a live coyote. After three days, Beuys was wrapped again in felt, picked up, driven back to airport, and returned home to Germany. The performance, with the title I Like America and America Likes Me, has attained near-mythical status. Beuys’s shamanistic art and his symbolically loaded materials (felt, fat, sulphur, lead, and various animals, both living and dead) have come to be regarded as one of the most daring and significant contributions to post-war art.

For Beuys, the coyote was, as Jon Mann has said, “America’s spirit animal,” the embodiment of ancient histories, Indigenous populations, and marginalized communities in this young country, and it was this America, not the realities of life in 1974, that Beuys wanted to commune with. The coyote is a trickster, a symbol of transformation and resilience, and, for Beuys, the necessary act of a social reckoning at the height of the Vietnam War could only be undertaken when in communication with the ancient, Indigenous, and marginal.

Turkish-American artist Vahap Avsar’s 2019 video installation I Hate America, America Hates Me directly references Beuys’s iconic performance and updates it for our own tumultuous times. Responding to an urgent request by a breeder, Avsar took in five feral native Anatolian Shepherd (Kangal) dogs at his studio in upstate New York, and, over the course of several days, attempted to domesticate the wild and traumatized animals.

Just as Beuys’s seminal performance survived through video documentation, so is Avsar’s performative action transformed into a four-channel video installation that documents the hostile animals from the artist’s viewpoint. In Avsar’s video, the animals resist the kind of taming Beuys seemingly attained with the wild coyote. The failure of spiritual communion and domestication seems the ultimate outcome, and, for the artist, this resistance must be understood as a double negative. Compared to Beuys’s performance, in which the coyote signified the spirit and myth of the host country, the Kangal is Avsar’s spirit animal by being native to the same parts of Eastern Anatolia where the artist himself grew up. The dogs’ resistance to assimilating into their new surroundings elicits in the artist a feeling of alienation. This was not the artist’s failure to integrate after two decades of life in a new country, but, rather, an illustration of his lack of kinship with the native culture of their shared origin. By resisting Avsar’s instructions, the dogs’ behavior suggests a rift, indicating that Avsar no longer shares an identity with the animals. He has become, in effect, more American than Anatolian, part of the hostile new environment they resist.

Avsar’s video installation thus is not simply an update of Beuys’s mythic communion with America, adjusted to today’s more partisan times. It is a reflection on the difficulties and complexities of migration and assimilation. His work illustrates that the purity Beuys perceived to be the spiritual core of a country and its history is just as much a myth as Beuys’s invocation of it, which distracts from the muddier realities. Avsar’s Situationist performance, a cinematic and theatrical verité, reveals that we are all from somewhere else, on our way to somewhere else, hybrid beings in conflict with the ideals of purity we so conveniently claim as our own.