Peripheral witnessing: needlework repair in Tacita Dean’s “Darmstädter Werkblock” (2007)

ABSTRACT

This short provocation considers the entangling potential of visible needlework mending, using Tacita Dean’s 2007 film Darmstädter Werkblock to question how paying attention to sites of repair can highlight ongoing, often unnoticed, forms of maintenance within an institution. During the film Darmstädter Werkblock, Dean pays homage to the markers of age in the original textile paneling of Block Beuys, giving attention to the frayed, faded and restored areas of the walls. In contrast to the large-scale refurbishment chosen by the gallery, the earlier needlework repair presented by Dean reflects a slower, more ongoing form of maintenance.

KEYWORDS:

• Tacita Dean
• Joseph Beuys
• fiber art
• film studies
• repair
• visible mending

If You want to have a museum, you have to do a whole bunch of things and they never go away. (Ukeles & Freilich, 2020, p. 21)

Tacita Dean’s film Darmstädter Werkblock depicts a rich tapestry of repair work found on the walls of Block Beuys prior to its largescale renovation. Block Beuys was installed by Joseph Beuys at the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstädt in April 1970. Presently holding works spanning from 1949 to 1972, the seven rooms of Block Beuys house 290 listed objects, installations, drawings, and watercolors. The long-planned renovation removed the aged hessian fabric walls and carpets of Beuys’ choosing in favour of a sparser, white cube layout, though the initial plans only described an update of the museum’s climate control system. While the shift tapped into aesthetic trends within arts institutions, Beuys scholars were divided on whether the removal of the fabric marked too stark a departure from Beuys’ creative intentions, so often centered on themes of memory, reparation, and slower engagements with sites of damage. In addition to eliminating traces of past repair, the removal of the fabric resulted in deeply notable shifts to sound pressure, light and temperature within the rooms, profoundly altering the sensory experience of the Block on numerous levels. Prior to the 2007 renovation, the wall coverings had remained on display in unchanged form since their installation in 1970 – or at least, this is how it seemed when viewed from a distance. However, contrary to concerns over dilapidation and neglect, Dean’s film serves to highlight the smaller, less obvious modes of repair enacted by museum staff throughout the Block, most notably sites of patchwork, restitching and darning found across the aged hessian wall coverings. In just under 18 minutes the film observes 67 spots across the rooms of Block Beuys accompanied by the sound of the rooms’ generators. The camera largely focuses on the corners and edges of rooms, areas where the shifts in tone and texture of the hessian fabric become more visible. Dean reveals these margins to be ongoing sites of maintenance, cases where the minutiae of patchwork repair, sun bleaching, and irregularities of rub and wear point to the smaller processes required in the upkeep of a museum. Dean’s film pays close attention to these peripheries, using repair to reveal “utilitarian aspects of what is otherwise a Gesamtkunstwerk” (Lerm Hayes, 2008, p. 15).

The repair in Darmstädter Werkblock documents the manual work of many hands, presenting the viewer with a methodology of ongoing care rather than timeless preservation. Dean’s appreciation for film comes into play here. By using analog film to present this mending, Dean highlights her practical and theoretical fascination with impermanence: a philosophy that calls for ongoing efforts to engage with, rather than abandon, mediums which fade, decay and rupture. Meditating on the possible loss of analog filming methods, Dean has stated that “I should not eschew the digital […] but for me, it just does not have the means to create poetry; it neither breathes nor wobbles, but tidies up our society, correcting it, and then leaves no trace.” (Eakin, 2011, para. 27, emphasis added). Darmstädter Werkblock seeks to highlight the intimacies lost in this flatness, using analog film to document entangled sites of deterioration and care within the institution. During the film the space of the Block is folded, stretched, and blurred, presenting a disorientating perspective of the museum’s hidden seams.

In focusing my analysis on the hessian coverings’ repair and ultimate removal, I wish to highlight the broader implications of repair within and beyond the case of Block Beuys, the legacies of ageing mediums such as celluloid film, and the potential of slower forms of maintenance within art institutions. In the face of seemingly endless examples of social disintegration, who decides what should be fixed? Who is allotted the responsibility of repairing those things? The needlework repair of Darmstädter Werkblock, while niche in scope, offers us a valuable angle to approach these questions of interdependence; a small example of “the myriad ways that our survival and our thriving are everywhere and always contingent on others” (The Care Collective et al., 2020, p. 30) (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Dean (2007) Darmstädter Werkblock [film still]. Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris, & Frith Street Gallery, London

When the wall coverings were removed, contemporary artist Manfred Leve discerned what he deemed to be a willfully ignorant approach toward the interdependent nature of the Block, stating that “Block Beuys is not a depot for objects but rather a composite. It is not a conglomeration but an arrangement” (Blume, 2004, p. 16). Arguing the opposite, Alison Barker and Rachel Bracker held that, “unlike the ageing objects within the rooms, whose material changes embody Beuys’ engagement with process, the decayed walls detract and distract from the carefully conceived installations” (Barker & Bracker, 2005, p. 5). The case of Block Beuys offers us a clear sense of what Aga Wielocha has recently typified as part of a “new kind of collaboration between artists and museums” (2021, p. 154), one in which the distinctions “between artist, curator, conservator, historian, and even museum lawyer” (p.155) become increasingly blurred, not only due to the work’s site-specificity but also because of the nature of the pieces’ longevity. The state of the Block has emerged not only from a complex set of personal processes, but also from the interactions and choices that curator, museum, artist and restorer have made, and must continue to make, together in order for the work to be viewed, perceived, and interpreted.

In engaging with these layered processes, it becomes useful to consider earlier dilemmas of repair in Beuysian restoration practice. A notable case is the uncertainty surrounding the restoration of Felt Suit in 1989. Despite undergoing minor preventative restoration in 1983, “conservators discovered that the object was infested with clothes moths” when it was recalled from storage for an exhibition in 1989, “and, as a letter to the museum’s director describes, ‘has been eaten away extensively’” (Weilocha, 2021, p. 94). Prior to his death, Beuys insisted in interview he had little concern for how the object might be displayed. In the aftermath of his death, however, deciding on the repair protocol for Beuys’ objects proved more complicated.

Despite Beuys’ disregard towards the preservation of Felt Suit, the crucial role of the color and texture of the felt resulted in restorers collectively concluding that the item could not be restored in alignment with Beuys’ creative intentions. It was not that the suit could not be repaired, but that attempts at restoration would ultimately require changes to the quality and presentation of the increasingly vulnerable fabric. Curator Richard Morphet initially wrote to the Tate that “appalling though the loss of our example is, [Felt Suit] is extraordinarily eloquent in its present state. Eroded and horizontal, it gives a powerful sense of Beuys’ presence” (Barker & Bracker, 2005, p. 2). When considering the decay of the material in Felt Suit, stakeholders including the Tate Board of Trustees and Eva Beuys, Beuys’ executor and widow, ultimately determined that the work should not be restored or exhibited in its decaying state. It was therefore de-accessioned into archival storage in 1995.

Documenting the various approaches towards the history of Felt Suit for the Tate in 2005, Barker and Bracker observe the difficulties in assessing how best to repair, restore, and maintain the artist’s body of work given that “Beuys’ position on decay, change, and damage varied from statement to statement, and from piece to piece.” How should restorers unravel these debates when both decisions of “preservation or renovation […] could estrange a sector of Beuys associates”? (p. 12). Beuys acknowledged the fragility of his material choices early on in the making of Felt Suit. However, this cavalier attitude was not representative of his attitude toward his work in general. With Eurasia Siberian Symphony 1963 (1966), for example, Beuys demonstrated a strong desire to preserve the piece in its initial form, spraying the blackboard elements of the work with fixative. These case studies are not Beuys’ only works where his choice of materials continue to pose complex questions of how to practically respond to the physical enactments related to themes of transition, deterioration and change. In light of these continued restoration uncertainties, Morphet’s suggestion that decay might offer another means of understanding the art object provides a radical pathway into Beuys’ creative practice, foreshadowing Dean’s anti-renovation approach to the walls of the Block.

Textiles are unassuming observers, capable of containing rich histories of passing encounters. The hessian fabric at Block Beuys recorded the markings of use: “it endures, but it is mortal” (Stallybrass, 2012, p. 73). Dean embraces this fray and draws the camera into the corners and edges of wear. Accompanied by the audio background noise of the rooms’ generators and humidifier, Dean’s camera moves to the corners, doors, windows, ceilings, exhibition signage, fire sensors and exit signs and the cables threading through the rooms. These moments offer us a valuable lens into Dean’s understandings of the site, focusing on the meeting points between the rich material histories of a space and the ongoing practicalities required to maintain it.

The vivid thingness of the wall coverings, once new and unmarked by patchwork, has been amplified over time. Changing in tactility, scent and form, the coverings affect and are affected by passing bodies. Speaking of the desire to immerse the viewer in both Beuys and Dean’s work, Lerm Hayes writes that:

[Beuys] tangibly achieved this aim in Block Beuys by conditioning the attitude with which Dean filmed his work’s context: immersion. We can conclude that she must have had a difficult time not sitting on, standing on or rubbing against the works while filming them. (2008, p. 18)

The camera observes the fabric in patchwork segments, encouraging the viewer to take in the various textures and layered surfaces, the fringes and peripheries, the static hum of the film’s audio and closeness of the shots evoking sensations of rubbing, stroking and brushing. Portraying the “Beuysian patches” (Lerm Hayes, 2008, p. 18) as traces of maintenance undergone by the hessian walls, Dean depicts the Block as a site of multi-layered care, criticizing the institute’s departure from these methods in favour of a more pristine mode of renewal.

Visible repair offers both a reminder of a fabric’s temporality and a trace of its interaction with the human. These signs of wear and attention stay within the material, revealing histories of care even after the mender has departed. Prior to the renovation of the Block, Eugen Blume, the Director of the Hamburger Bahnhof, argued that the hand of Beuys was present throughout the original space: “The creator of this organisation, which escapes every known order, seems to be present among the objects with his hands and feelings on and in everything, like a tangible form that wanders hazily through the rooms” (Blume, 2004, p. 14). As if trying to take in as much as possible before it is gone, the camera lingers on these moments of patchwork – instances where Beuys’ original practice and the maintenance work of later museum restorers intermingle. Dean’s films frequently use uninhabited spaces such as studios, workrooms, and galleries to evoke the residual evidence of a maker’s creative practice, “underscoring the previous owner’s presence through his absence” (Von Bismarck, 2013, p. 18). Dean’s emphasis on the mnemonic potential of older forms such as celluloid and the Block’s hessian walls can be read as an invocation to preserve these sites of maintenance, despite the potential difficulties of such a project.

The value these coverings hold for Dean centers around their impermanence, echoing her approach to the anachronism of her own creative medium. In her essay “Save celluloid, for art’s sake,” she draws parallels between the disposable approach towards the renovation of Block Beuys and the difficulty of accessing celluloid-based filmmaking since a change of ownership at the Soho Film Laboratory and the subsequent ending of 16mm film development. Through this frame repair appears in Darmstädter Werkblock both through the thematic depictions of patchwork mending by museum staff, and in the process of post-production negative cutting. Dean describes in detail the manual process of analog film development and editing, as well the laboratory’s memorial significance within her own artistic career: “my relationship with the lab is an intimate one; they watch over my work, and are, in a sense, its protectors” (2011). Dean experiences the defunding of analog technologies as both a professional and personal loss, and her continued use of celluloid can be read as both homage and protest to the medium’s gradual disappearance.

Slicing, gluing and fragmenting the raw footage to create a final composition, Dean’s process is centered around the inevitability of breakage and repair. Drawing parallels between the arrival of the Block’s white cube pristine-ness and the anachronism of celluloid in favour of digital editing methods, Darmstädter Werkblock stands as a tribute to imperfect and embodied modes of physical handiwork. Dean’s writing on analog film highlights the mnemonic capacity of the material in artistic practice, as well as the lengthy and detailed processes needed to maintain said material. In addition to these elements, Dean’s screening stipulations require that the film be projected in its analog form. This requirement grounds Dean’s film in curatorial implications paralleling the maintenance of the Block. The film not only speaks to repair, but offers itself as a case study, a challenge in how best to care for deteriorating objects. In documenting the coverings of the Block and being committed to a continued use of analog media, Dean’s film offers a homage to fading artistic processes, calling attention to the loss occurred in institutional preference for the new, the pristine, and the undamaged.

While Beuys himself was deeply concerned with the philosophy of repair and healing in his artistic practice and pedagogy, instances such as the Felt Suit de-accession and the Block Beuys renovation reflect a deep curatorial uncertainty surrounding the gradual decay of his artworks. Closing their analysis of Beuysian restoration dilemmas, Barker and Bracker observe the following: “The imperative to discuss notions of replacement, reproduction, and renovation of Beuys’ work is crucial for its future care” (2005, p. 12). Regardless of institutional efforts, materials such as fabric and celluloid are particularly disposed to destruction. Viewing Beuys and Dean’s repeated return to these methods serves to question our relationship to decay.

While many institutions have taken pre-emptive measures to slow the gradual disintegration of Beuys’ work, the approach evoked in Richard Morphet’s letter suggests a radical alternative to these varying methods of conservation, restoration, and pristine renewal. Building on this, we might imagine an alternative Block where the hessian wall coverings, like the intentional ageing of Beuys’ vitrine assemblages, continue to offer us major opportunities to physically and theoretically investigate the time-based nature of installation work. In Darmstädter Werkblock, the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstädt’s decision to entirely remove Beuys’ fabric is presented by Dean as a loss of this opportunity; an illustrative critique of the “ideology of flawlessness” (Attia & Friedel, 2016, para. 6) present in curatorial practice.

In looking at this case study, I have sought to question the ways in which we are drawn to fix things, and how we become attached in the act of fixing them. Dean’s film stands as a key intervention in efforts to maintain the (now lost) original design of Block Beuys; and offers a potent case study when studying issues of repair in museums and cultural institutions. In contrast to Hessisches Landesmuseum’s white cube renovation, Darmstädter Werkblock challenges the critical presentations of the Block as anachronistic and obsolete, instead offering a homage to the beauty found in the detailed instances of repair in the coverings. In form, Dean’s film uses a chemically unstable medium to capture the ongoing care enacted on an object ultimately designated as anachronistic by the museum. The film shows repair to be Sisyphean but valuable, both futile and deeply necessary.

By focusing on mending, Dean’s film reveals the multi-authorship of the Block, situating the object within an ongoing narrative of constant alteration and tinkering. Dean’s film functions as a surviving document of care within and towards the museum, celebrating the spectral presence of other hands: restorers, staff, and visitors who contributed to its history of maintenance.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Ren Ewart

Ren Ewart is a Scottish writer and researcher based in Amsterdam. She is a member of the Amsterdam Graduate School of Humanities and the literary collective plot twist. Her research explores the relationship between textile repair, material maintenance and invisible labor.