Intentionality and its Results

The piece above is a glimpse of a performance art ensemble by Joseph Beuys, a German artist who became widely recognized in teh 1960s. The piece is entitled "I Like America and America Likes Me" (1974) and is the result of Beuys staying in a room with a coyote for 3 days. He came into America and was immediately covered in felt, put into an ambulance, and then taken to the root with the coyote without having put his foot on any American soil. He wanted the coyote to be the only thing he saw in America. The reason behind this piece was that Native Americans saw the coyote as a powerful god and after colonialization, the coyote was seen as a pest to the European settlers. Beuys felt as though he was consolidating the two beliefs with his piece.

While Beuys obviously had intention for his piece, he did not have an intention as to how the piece would form. His observations and research became the art much like to me, science seems to be similar to art. The creative development is inclusive in most art forms and in science, the creativity and ingenuity necessary to develop novel methods and form connections between observations is also apart of the final result. Beuys sought to achieve something with this piece- he sought to rectify the past. Science similarly does this also. While science may delve into the objectivity of the outside world and find the truth in it, art seeks to delve into the subjectivity and subtleties of the mind and its expression. The only difference is that society dictates restrictions on one and not the other.

-Reshma