Why Art - A Plan for 2025

In advance of their free film screenings next week in Walton and Franklin, Institute for Cultural Activism founders, Emily Harris and John Halpern, speak:

Emily Harris:

You disliked the artist Joseph Beuys’ work, yet ultimately became an advocate. Explain.

John Halpern

These things happen in life, what we may detest maybe something we haven’t worked out in ourselves. And then a new vision comes, maybe an epiphany, and we feel and act entirely differently. 

Although I truly did hate his art, thinking it was egoistic, Beuys was actually a real altruist, using his art and prestige, responsibly, to fight for human freedom and ecology. Like many German kids, he was in the Nazi army at age 17, dropping bombs in Russia from a “Luftwaffer.” 

In TRANSFORMER, he tells us about his plane crash in the Crimea, how the nomadic Tartars saved his life. His was badly burnt and they coated him with fat and butter. In his art, although it’s also autobiographical, he used fat for its healing power. He uses it as a social healing balm, as Social Sculpture. 

Q: Is TRANSFORMER, the film you made with Beuys, Social Sculpture? 

A: Definitely. It’s an ongoing social sculpture. Even next week when it’s shared with the community in Franklin, NY, at Mark Handelmann’s Good Taste Epicurean Speak Easy. 

Q: So, this is Cultural Activism?

A: Joseph Beuys and I are cultural activists. All artists whose works are meant to raise dialogues and questions about society, its structure, roots and evolution, are cultural activists. There’s always been a worldwide trend or movement of this form of cultural activism in art.

Q: REFUGE, with the Dalai Lama and Martin Scorsese, another of your films will be shown at the Walton Library and the library in Franklin, next week and weekend. What’s the strategy, here? 

A: Thanks for asking this. 

Responding to tumultuous world events and feeling of this current time our plan for 2025 is to continue the mission of inspiring conversations and responsive art projects among regional and international communities. 

When REFUGE was produced it was filmed partly at the Tibetan Buddhist center just outside town. Library director Heather Johnson honored my request and invited us to show the film at the library. 

I’m particularly curious to learn how, after over 30 years, the communities of Walton and Franklin relate to this kind of closeness to Buddhism. Some of the teachers from the center will join us at the screenings. As an artist and maker of films, I want to know better how the consciousness of art and meditation truly affect the people physically near it. 

Here in rural Delaware and neighboring counties the concentration of artists and spiritual practitioners has intensified, post pandemic. Is there a dialogue? Are there conversations and social mingling of any value between possibly disparate communities? How can we enhance communication and will we make a more beautiful and enduring future, together upstate? These are our questions.

Basically, these films were meant to stimulate dialogues. I’m so grateful to the library venues, Xina library director in Franklin and Heather, in Walton for the opportunity.

Q: Why the choice to screen BEUYS/TRANSFORMER at Mark Handelmann’s cheese shop, in Franklin?

A: Mark’s life and career was dedicated to social welfare, having for more than 50 years, helped to resettle millions of political and religious refugees across America. As a Jew, he knows intimately of the WWll holocaust and traveled to meet the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the oppressed and exiled Tibetans, in India. His shop in Franklin is an opportunity for people to meet him, to congregate and hangout. 

Besides this, Yoko Ono, the artist, John Lennon’s widow, was a friend and colleague of Joseph Beuys and progenitor or pioneer of the Fluxus Art community. Ono lives in Franklin.  Beuys was a co-founder of the European Green Movement, a political party for the environment.

Q: Thank you, that’s great.

A: Of course, thanks!