'More impact than the Venice Biennale’: Demarco, Beuys and Strategy: Get Arts

In this essay for Tate Papers, ‘More Impact than the Venice Biennale’: Demarco, Beuys and Strategy: Get Arts’, Weikop closely examines primary source correspondence and press material from the Demarco Archive at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, in order to assess the impact of the ground-breaking exhibition Strategy: Get Arts, staged at the Edinburgh College of Art in 1970. This exhibition brought many key figures of post-war art, who were based in the city of Düsseldorf, to the United Kingdom for the first time. Most notable among these was Joseph Beuys. Weikop fully examines whether Strategy: Get Arts was indeed the most important exhibition of German art to be shown in the UK since 1938, as was stated by the journalist Cordelia Oliver and others writing in 1970.

His essay in issue 31 of Tate Papers, forms part of a cluster of essays on Beuys by international scholars, which Weikop guest edited. Issue 31 offers new perspectives on the work of Beuys and his engagement with European history, mythology and geopolitics during the 1970s and 1980s. Subjects covered include the work he made in response to a devastating earthquake in Italy in 1980; the legacies of his counter-educational Free International University; Beuys’s interest in the notion of Eurasia; and his collaboration with Danish composer Henning Christiansen. Issue 31 also features an interview between Weikop and the artist, gallerist and impresario Richard Demarco. In this interview, they discuss Demarco’s involvement in Strategy: Get Arts and his close relationship with Beuys and other artists, and reflect on the impact that the ‘Celtic world’ had on Beuys’s creativity. Additionally, Weikop edited two papers on Beuys in issue 32, thereby extending the cluster, one on Beuys at the ICA in 1974, the other on Beuys and Nietzsche.