Sled #1

Shaped as a young man by membership in the Nazi Youth—he attended the Nuremburg Rally in 1936—Beuys was twenty-two and serving in the Luftwaffe when his plane went down in the Crimea. Beuys was known for his participation in the Fluxus movement, for his radical performance, for his philosophical/critical writings, and for his unorthodox pedagogical methods. A self-styled shaman, his influence on the avant-garde crossed European and American spheres.
Beuys produced a revisionist autobiography, a self-mythologizing recasting of historical events, that suited his ambitions and served to both prompt and explain his work. He claimed, for example, to have been shot down in the Crimea rather than to have been brought down by snow; he said he was rescued by shamanic Tatars—nomads who wrapped him in fat and flannel to save his life—rather than by Russian workers. Materially interesting and unusual, flannel and fat were recurring elements in his work, and the sled became a recurring motif. In this multiple, he adds a flashlight.