“ In the West we tend to regard the Shaman or the Witch Doctor at best unscientific at worst a mere charlatan who deliberately exploits people’s credulity. We tend to forget that the shaman has long fulfilled a very real need. The need to come into intense physical and psychological contact with the material world. To feel and understand its energies and its substance rather than just skim over the surface of experience. Without this life becomes perilously abstract and we lose our sense of meaning and purpose. ( For Beuys) the principle of Shamanism represents a form of corrective- a return to a richness almost lost from our materialist world.” Caroline Tisdall. From a recorded interview accompanying the 1979—Joseph Beuys exhibition at the Guggenheim New York City
veloped an incisive parody of his very initial premise. At first the work was about his relationship to nature, but had morphed into a commentary about the role of the artist in a most complex, specific and reflexive stance that is both playful and caustic. This new and challenging attitude is evident, too, in Coates’ exhibiting his performance costumes at Frieze Art Fair (2010) and in a consequent one person show entitled Psychopomp in Milton Keynes (2011). The reification of his clothing and prop objects displayed as if in a quasi natural history museum a la Topshop store window was like an attempt to consecrate Coates into some kind of contemporary art reliquary.
Cynical Coates is not, and subsequent and parallel works betray a sensitivity and sensibility that circumvents his new-found, if cagey, sophistication. A As an extension of his early interest in ‘being’ animal beautiful photograph (Vision Quest, Ernie 2009) in language, form, sound and territory, Coates atshows Coates and an older man (presumably the tended a “how-to” workshop in Shamanism. Though Ernie of the title) in a traditional suburban sitting aware from the beginning of the pitfalls and limitaroom. They both wear glasses covered in white pations of its very premise, during the course of the per. Ernie sits in a chair, Coates is on the floor in a workshop Coates seems to have experienced a silver suit holding a taxidermied bird of prey in full deepening of the understanding of the mind and flight position- wings spread wide making the formal the power of imagination. His previous interest in human environment feel diminutive. In this piece being connected and useful merge in Journey to Coates touches the metaphor of journeying again the Lower World, performed in a Liverpool Housing in a striking image that also illustrates how we conEstate in 2003. The piece follows a standard Shastruct arrangements, domestic, architectural and manic practice form. Coates invites the audience emotional, that are limited and limiting. Both men to present a question, and he then goes on a are subject to and represent the suburban ‘white‘journey’ (shrouded in the skin and head of a stag), out’ effect- the “not seeing the elephant (or in this encounters and speaks to several animals there in case the predator) in the room” - and so the image the ‘lower world’ and then surfaces again with an reveals, through stark contrasts, the intense fear and interpretative answer. There is a innocence and its permutations that inform human behavior when awkwardness to it. The inherent doubt and embarinstinct is not refined into intuition. rassment- palpable in the audience’s reactions as well as in Coates’ brave endeavoring- make it very It requires a lot of discipline to live beyond the simpbelievable, honest and real. At the end, the quesly personal level. -Joseph Beuys tion hangs in the mind of the viewer ‘Is it art? And if it isn’t art, what is it?’ May all beings everywhere Plagued with sufferings of body and mind Obtain an ocean of happiness and joy This eccentric beginning soon seemed to devolve By virtue of my merits. into some kind of predictable sideshow, however. Just like space Each consequent performance/event sported the And the great elements such as earth same sounds, the same posturing, the same aniMay I always support the life mals. Different costumes for different countries: a Of all the boundless creatures. (politically obvious) light blue and white track suit for -from A Guide to the Boddhisattva’s Way of Life. Israel, a Monroe-esque pleated white dress for Ja(trans.Stephen Batchelor) 1979. ► pan, a dark suit for Norway. It was while watching the video of Coates striding down the centre aisle of the church in Stavanger like some kind of deranged self-proclaimed superman with a skinned stag for a cape here to serve the world and answer questions, that I had the sense somehow that he had crossed a line; that the medium of his performance had been pushed to a point of epic wry reversal; that through calculated and ironic choices (of venue, of clothing, of presentation), he had de-