Joseph Beuys, Or the last of the proletariat by Thierry de Duve

The ritual, obsessional, and quasi-exhaustive character of this list of the roles he either assumed or impersonated )lacking - and this is significant - only those of factory worker and prostitute) sets up echoes between Beuys’ work and an already extensive litany of similar identifications, all of them allegorical, of the condition of the artist within modernity, and all of them leading directly - more than a century distant - to a mythical country peopled with all the romantic incarnations of the excluded as bearers of social truth. THe name of this country - where strollers and dandies cross paths with peddlers and ragpickers; wehere art students and medical students thumb their noses at philistines; where the sins of the streetwalker are redeemed by the love of a young poet; where humanity is more humane in the brothel than in the church or palace; where the underworld is the true aristocracy, tuberculosis the pardon of syphilis, and talent the only riches - the name of this country is of course bohemia. It is a literary and imaginary country where in a deformed image at once tragic and ideal, there was dreamed a humanity to replace the real humankind that peopled the Europe of the nineteenth century, and that industrial capitalism had pitilessly set against itself by dividing it into two new antagonistic classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Doubtlessly, the real name of bohemia or at least, the name of its correlate within the actual world , is the lumpen proletariat: a no man’s land into which there fell a certain number of people...Dickens nd Zola have described this dark fringe of industrialization, these shady interstices of urbanization. Like Baudelaire, Hugo and many other novelists who hardly professed naturalism, they also poured their inspiration into it, and contributed to the fabrication of the image of this marginal lumen proletariat society transposed into bohemia. Bohemia functions all the more as the figure of a humanity of replacement in that it is a suffering humanity, such that nothing but true human values - liberty, justice, compassion - can survive there, and such that it contains the seeds of a promise of reconciliation.