In May 2009 I went to the ex servicemen’s club in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, to hear Richard Demarco¹ talk about the points at which his own history intersected with that of Joseph Beuys². The event was an Arts Breakfast³, one of a series co-ordinated and devised by Merlyn Riggs in association with Deveron Arts, and as the audience listened to Demarco in his role of part lecturer, part raconteur, we sat at small breakfast tables sipping fresh coffee and with the prospect of a shared meal before us.
I made an audio recording of the Art Breakfast, and later listened back to it – too aware at first of the chinking of saucers and murmuring of other’s private thoughts, but soon settling into the distinctive cadence of Demarco’s voice, educated, persuasive, and only at times with an edge of frailty or indecision. The talk was wide ranging, personal and anecdotal, full of the passions and prejudices of the speaker’s long life. Perhaps inevitably, because I was in the middle of preparing material for the Collaboration Season, I began to think of Demarco’s words in these terms: as an essentially collaborative conversation; or as conversation as an essentially collaborative act.
Here then is a transcript – not of Demarco’s whole talk (it’s far too long), but of a section from it that seems to me to be a kind of collaboration in miniature. Here we have a man remembering a conversation he had many years ago. At some time in the past he made a written version of this conversation and published it in a magazine. Here he recounts this written version, straying sometimes from the script in his effort to convey the immensity he feels is embedded in this memory. I record the conversation and listen back to it, transcribing the conversation for a second time and editing it in the process. I fill out some sentences and cut back others to make the meaning clear. I allow the words to transform themselves so that they sit comfortably on the page, giving a sense of both Demarco, and Demarco’s Beuys – a figure always at one remove from the ‘actual’ Beuys. The text as you read it now sits somewhere in between us all as a tiny collaboration through stages of translation: The meaning (and perhaps even the memory) now exists between you and me, and between us and Richard Demarco, and maybe even somewhere between all of us and the ghost of Joseph Beuys. It is no accident that the conversation in question relives the genesis of a canonical work of social sculpture: Beuys’ 7000 Oaks. RB June 2009

Note: in order to give a sense of Demarco’s spirited delivery, I have reproduced his anecdote in the form of an interchange between two people: Demarco’s younger self and his present recollection of Beuys. If you want to imagine the presentation, picture a play with both parts played by the same, now elderly, actor. Demarco gives his Beuys a deep and gutteral German accent, while his own part is delivered in clearer Edinburgh tones. He strides about the room as he talks, alternately staring off into the distance or roaring conviction and waving his hands as the moment dictates.

“I must say I am completely delighted, overwhelmed, amazed, that I find myself involved in a conversation with all of you gathered here. It’s the one great work. And that conversation, I think we are agreed, is happening because we need to speak to each other and to share our ideas and our hopes, our fears, and our concerns for our idea of art in our lives.
[Richard talks expansively around the idea of Beuys and the ideas of Beuys, introducing the term ‘social sculpture’ and giving a background of his personal association with the artist. He then goes on to describe a particular conversation he had with Joseph Beuys at a function hosted by the wealthy London art dealer Anthony d’Offay.]
Imagine the kind of conversation I had. Imagine 600 people invited to a club in London, all paid for by Anthony d’Offay, and of course everybody wanted to meet Joseph Beuys but I said to him ‘Joseph, I want to talk to you.’ And he said, ‘well come with me, because I don’t want to be with all these people.’ So we went upstairs to an attic room and he said ‘I’m sure they can’t find us here,’ and this was the conversation, alright?”

Richard Demarco: ‘Joseph, your exhibition at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery strikes a sombre note, underlined by the title ‘Dernier Espace Avec Introspecteur’. This London exhibition was first presented in Paris in 1982, and the title could be misunderstood – but in Caroline Tisdall’s catalogue she makes the point that Dernier Espace or Last Space is not to be interpreted as a personal statement about the last work of an artist. It is rather more to do with reflecting your feelings about the world. And I know from the conversations we’ve had here tonight in London that your feelings about the world have lead you to consider your next creative step, which will be to develop a sculpture on a gigantic scale. This project will involve you in a personal expression of positive and optimistic energy, but it will also involve you in the next Documenta – Documenta 7, directed by Rudi Fuchs. But that’s going to be this summer Joseph! How are you going to deal with that?’

Joseph Beuys: ‘Can we relate it to the idea of 7000 oaks? The work will be a celebration of many things, including the life of Jean Giono, the French writer who told the story of Elzéard Bouffier, the French shepherd who, like you, believed in the importance of planting oak trees.’

RDM: ‘First of all, I’d like you to tell me how you can see a link between this present exhibition at Anthony d’Offay and this next step that you will take, the major work of planting 7000 oak trees at Documenta, in the centre of the city of Kassel in Germany! If you dig down in the centre of any city you’re going to come across electricity cables, water pipes and God knows what, so the planting of even one oak is going to cost a fortune! Are you mad, Joseph? Do you really want to do this?
You seem to see it as a natural and inevitable step to link the world of the artist with that of the ecologist and the naturalist. You say you will concentrate all your energy on this new project, and in some way relate this action to the idea of sculpture, to a form of social sculpture.’

JB: ’It is right, and you see already in this title [of the Anthony d’Offay exhibition] the words last space. They appear in relation to time. This is not as a demise for my work, but rather it puts a kind of line under my so-called spatial works, and so-called environments. I want the 7000 Oaks project principally to mark the finish of the kind of work I’ve been involved in so far. I wish to go more and more outside, to be among the problems of nature and the problems of human beings in their working places. This will be a regenerative activity; it will be a therapy for all the problems we’re standing before. That is my general aim. I proposed this to Rudi Fuchs when he invited me to participate in the Documenta. I said that I would not like to go again inside the buildings. I wish to go completely outside and to make a symbolic start to my enterprise of regenerating the life of humankind that is the body of society, and to prepare a positive future in this context.

‘I think the tree – the image of the tree – is an element of regeneration, which is itself a concept of time. The oak is especially so because it is slowly growing with a solid heartwood. The oak has already been a form of sculpture and a symbol of this planet ever since the time of the druids, who used their oaks to define their holy places. To use the oak in this way will represent a really progressive aspect of the idea of understanding art, as art is placed next to the life of humankind within the social body of the future. The tree-planting enterprise provides a very simple but very radical possibility for this when we start with the 7000 oaks.’

RDM. ‘Why 7000, Joseph?’

JB: ’I think there’s a kind of proportion and dimension, because the 7 represents a very old rule for planting trees, and you can see that often from placenames in many countries. But 7 also matches the 7th Documenta. Now, 7 trees is a very small ornament. 70 is not bringing us at all to what I call in German welt wald a phrase that suggests making the world a big forest – it’s what I’m looking forward to. 70 would not signify this idea. 700 is still not enough, but I felt that 7000 is something more or less right. I could do this [plant 7000 oaks] in the present time, in my lifetime, for which I can take full responsibility. 7000 oaks will be a very strong visible result in 300 years time, when they will be absolutely at their most beautiful.

RDM: ‘So the work will continue beyond your lifetime, and beyond even the duration of the 20th Century.’

JB: ‘Surely.’

RDM: ‘And it will even outlive the contemporary artworld? But you will see this only as the first step? Why?’

JB: ‘I see it as the first step because this enterprise will stay forever and I think I see coming the need for such enterprises – tree planting enterprises and organisations. And do achieve this, I think the Free International University is a very good body⁴.’

RDM: ‘So you see young people all over the world becoming an army of helpers: children in high school; primary school children; university students; even art students…’

JB: ‘Right!’

RDM: ‘All over the world?’

JB: ‘Surely!’

RDM: ‘You can see planting on the hills of Scotland and Wales?’

JB: ‘And Sicily, and Corsica, and Sardinia, all these countries that are on the periphery. You can see the hills around Belfast being completely covered. Everywhere, everywhere in the world there are too few trees. Let us not speak of the United States, which is a completely destroyed country, because their political ideas are turning the world into a nonsense in the name of capitalism.’

RDM: ‘It is a sadness that in our time the United States are growing rockets and nuclear weaponry rather than trees. But now you will make a statement to counter balance this in the middle of Kassel: can you describe the project in more detail?’

JB: ‘I will start in very difficult places, in the centre of town. These are places that are very difficult because there is already asphalt and stone slabs with infrastructures of electrical things, and the German post office, which is a terrifying enemy. In the centre of town the planting will be most necessary to the people who live there in an urban context. There the planting of trees will also be most expensive. The whole thing will cost I guess about 3 million marks.’

RDM: ‘Who will provide this money? You will have to work with the city fathers…’

JB: ’Yes, but they will not give money. We will have to find other ways of getting some of the money. The city will co-operate so far as they will support our activities with tools – ’

RDM: ‘- and gardeners?’

JB: ‘Yes, they will give us the support of gardeners, of people who know about trees, and they will give us vehicles sometimes, but I will take responsibility for all the money problems. For I will fulfil this thing and ask many different people for support. I can see it already, so that this year I already have enough money to buy the stones, which will be important. I will use basalt stone, which has a natural form that need not be worked on by stonemasons or by artists in order to make it a sculpture. Basalt is the stone that forms the Giant’s Causeway, or Fingal’s Cave, but I will use stones that are more triangular in shape with 5, 6, or 7 irregular angles. These angled stones come from volcanic activity, and the beginning of the world. Man is 70 years upon the planet, and the oak tree is probably 700, but the basaltic stone is from the very beginning of time, and equally from now.’

RDM: ‘But tell me Joseph, how will this tree project allow you to continue your work in a new and wider dimension? This is a new dimension, a new step for you.’

JB: ’This project is a new step for me, but working with trees is not a new dimension when it is seen within the context of the metamorphosis of everything on the earth, and the metamorphosis of the understanding of art. The planting of trees is about the metamorphosis of the social order, the social body in itself, to bring it to a new social order for the future.

’The project has a lot to do with the quality of time, and also it has a lot to do with the new understanding of the human being in itself; that everyone is basically a creative soul, whether they are a doctor, a policeman, a bus driver, a street cleaner, a prisoner, or a prison officer. This has to be more than a clear and reasonable practical anthropology: it is also a spiritual necessity, which we have to view in relation to this permanent performance [of the planting of the oaks]. This action will enable us to reach the heart of the existing system – especially the heart of economics, where the flow of money is going to make society sick.

’The wider understanding of art is related to everybody’s creative ability. The [economic] capital of the world is not money; it is after all the human ability for creativity. In each and every human being, creativity is their capital. Art exists so that human beings can feel that they are free, and that they are ennobled. If you have the spirit in focus, then you have also learnt the concept of time. If there’s one dimension in my work, I show it a little in the exhibition in the Anthony d’Offey gallery, and it’s about the quality of warmth.”

RDM: ‘The quality of warmth?’

JB: ‘Yes, the quality of warmth. The quality of warmth is in fact another dimension that has nothing to do with space and time. It comes to exist in a place and it goes away again. It is a very interesting aspect of physics that until now most physicists have not been prepared to deal with the physics of warmth. Thermodynamics was always very complicated stuff but love is the most creative and matter transforming power. You see how in this context this power is very simply expressed, but it is not shown in diagrams, which one could also bring to the discussion. To promote this interest in all these necessities is to begin the apparently simple but very powerful activity. It is to begin the planting of trees.’

And at that moment Anthony d’Offey burst in – because we were going to continue – but he said ‘Joseph!’ and you could see how angry he was ‘Joseph! You’ve got to come down, everybody’s waiting for you.’ So we had to stop the conversation there."

Beuys was perhaps an ultimate contradiction in terms of collaborative practice. His actions and happenings implied and implicated others at an implicit and essential level; he spoke defiantly of his conviction that ‘every human being is an artist’ (Demarco rephrases this slightly in his title for the Breakfast event as ‘Every Man Is An Artist’. Where that leaves me, a woman, I’m not quite sure); and yet Beuys’ persona, the figure of Beuys the artist, was singular and indivisible and un-multiplied into any collaborative sense other than the most broad: that the work of art is indivisible from the world surrounding it, which has shaped both its conception and its implementation.
The tension here is significant, I feel. Beuys described perfectly the possibility of collaboration – the possibility of a work made by many hands – without reducing his own authorship of that work. Indeed the cult of the personality artist (of the artist tied ultimately always to their own autobiography) perhaps finds its truest form in the work and life of Joseph Beuys.
Demarco clearly also sees his relationship with Beuys as collaborative in some indefinable sense. To listen to Demarco speak is to receive the impression that he believes that there are works that exist in the space between himself and Beuys, works that cannot be extricated from the influence of both men. Clearly, Beuys isn’t here to give his own view of that, but perhaps Demarco’s conviction – and inexhaustable pride – that this is the case tells us something of the power of personality that the German artist was able to project and to hold: his eternally voiced assertion that conversation and proximity can be seen as a social organism, and that he views that "social organism [itself] as a work of art”⁴. RB June 2009

¹ Richard Demarco was born in 1930 in Portobello near Edinburgh. He was one of a small group who founded the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, before moving on to found the Richard Demarco Gallery (which ran from 1966 to 1992). Demarco has been involved in projects by a number of internationally recognised artists, including Joseph Beuys, Tadeusz Kantor, Paul Neagu and Marina Abramovic. In 2008 the University of Dundee have made extracts of Demarco’s personal archive publicly available for the first time, through an online resource. You can access the Demarco Digital Archive here

³ Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) was a German artist whose practice was influential in expanding the then current notions of what art might be. He pioneered the idea of ‘social sculpture’, a moment wherein art might play a part in shaping social and cultural systems and politics. Perhaps his seminal work is 7000 Oaks, produced in 1982 for Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany. Beuys had 7000 Basalt stones placed on the lawn in front of the Fredericianum, and aligned so that they pointed to the single oak tree he had planted there, placed beside a single upright slab of basalt. Each stone corresponded to the potential of a planted tree. When an oak was planted, a basalt stone would be placed beside it. Once 7000 oaks had been planted, the Fredericianum would be empty of stones.
You can read more about the implementation and legacy of this work here
For more about Joseph Beuys try here

³ The Arts Breakfasts are hosted by Deveron Arts and co-ordinated and devised by Merlyn Riggs. The event at which this excerpt was recorded took place on 16th May 2009. Arts Breakfasts are a series of social events to trigger networking and discussion among the arts community in the North East of Scotland. This breakfast was part of Deveron Arts’ Slow Down programme with lead artist Jacqueline Donachie.
For more information about Deveron Arts try here

⁴ The Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research was founded in 1972 by Joseph Beuys as part of his enlarged conception of artistic action. One of the most pressing issues for the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research was how to help realize the capacity of each person to be a creative being; how to formulate the concept of individual freedom as the ability to shape social forms, through the transformation of resources. Particularly significant is Beuys’ statement that “Economics is not only a money making principle. It can be a way of production to fulfill the demands of people all over the world. Capital is human kind’s ability in work, not just money. Thus economics includes the creativity of people. Creativity equals Capital.”
For more information try here

⁵ From a written statement by Beuys dated 1973, first published in English in Caroline Tisdall: Art into Society, Society into Art (ICA, London, 1974), p.48.