This montage grew out of an unexpected encounter with Joseph Beuys at The Broad. Moving through, I was struck by a sense of humor that rarely surfaces in U.S. scholarship or exhibitions. Alongside the familiar gravity of postwar reckoning, national trauma, and Beuys’s somber materials like felt and fat, there were moments that felt playful, ironic, even lightly absurd. That Dada-inflected wit shifted my reading of the work, loosening the weight without diminishing its seriousness.
Mike Kash and I filmed the sequence in split screen, scanning the exhibition on one side while the other frame drifted outward into Elysian Park. A bird hopping along branches, then lifting off. A child planting a tree with the help of adults. These images were not meant as illustrations but as parallel movements, gestures that echo Beuys’s expanded idea of sculpture as something social, lived, and ongoing. The museum becomes one node in a larger field rather than the final container of meaning.
What stayed with me was how humor, care, and responsibility coexist in Beuys’s thinking. The montage holds that tension without resolving it. Environmentalism here is neither symbolic nor didactic but relational, unfolding across art, public space, and everyday action. In this context, the museum’s role shifts from monument to participant, a place where seriousness can coexist with lightness, and where activism begins not with instruction but with attention.
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