5. I Like America And America Likes Me By Joseph Beuys
German artist/shaman Joseph Beuys’ 1974 ‘action’ ‘I Like America and America Likes Me’ began as soon as the artist landed in America. He was wrapped in felt at the airport, and driven in an ambulance to René Block’s Manhattan gallery. The artist then spent three days locked in the gallery space with a coyote, to form a dialogue with the animal, and quite successfully at that, before being driven straight back to the airport and flown home. The coyote is sacred to Native Americans and represented an aspect of the country’s past that Beuys liked. Each day of the ‘action’, he made two piles of the current ‘Wall Street Journal’. These would be duly torn or urinated on by the coyote – we think possibly his statement on contemporary America.