https://youtu.be/APyEeixk2e0
This 27 minute video provides the original 16mm footage taken for Joseph Beuys’ film shows the artist in René Block’s New York gallery with a trained coyote named Little John for his performance “I like America and America likes me” in May 1974. His encounter with a “mythic” animal from the United States reflects the spiritual aspects of his concept of “social sculpture.” However, the title was also ironic: though the artist revered U.S. culture, his concepts were largely rejected when he presented them in lectures across the United States earlier that year.
Beuys was a key participant in the 1960s Fluxus movement. At that time, many artists in Asia, Europe, and the United States became dissatisfied with a long tradition of “heroic,” or object-oriented painting and sculpture (typified by Abstract Expressionism). Influenced in part by contemporary experiments in music, such artists turned away from the art world’s prevailing commercialism in favor of “found” and “everyday” items and created ephemeral, time-based “happenings,” impermanent installation art, and/or other largely action-oriented events.