#cathode rays

The cathode-ray tube in action.

“The mention of ‘cathode rays’ in the work’s title suggests a link to television sets, which use cathode ray tubes to create the onscreen image. (Beuys would perform an action in Copenhagen in 1966 entitled Felt TV, later re-staged and broadcast on German television in 1970.) The type of dark grey oil paint in this work has been used elsewhere in Beuys’s drawing practice to suggest felt, one of the artist’s signature materials (see for example Felt Sculptures 1964, Tate AR00661). The paint essentially encases the artist’s words, diagrams and notations and, like felt’s noise-cancelling properties, ‘muffles’ the page’s contents to achieve a state of mute cancellation. The artist’s materially inventive approach to drawing links the works on paper to every other aspect of Beuys’s art, including sculpture, installation, performance, or his political actions, teaching and lecturing, which all feature an interrelated set of materials and gestures developed by the artist over many decades. Beuys explained in a 1984 interview that: ‘My thinking on drawing as a special form of materialized thought is this: they are the beginning of changing the material condition of the world, through sculpture, architecture, mechanics, or engineering, for instance, where drawing ends not only with the traditional artist’s concept.’ (Quoted in Rose 1993, p.17.)”

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The #future of #television. #echopark