Joseph Beuys
Rot/Loch/Lampe

Beuys used the cast-iron stove top of an old oven with three openings for cooking as a template for the handmade edition Rot Loch Lampe, of which only 14 of the planned 34 exemplars were made. He used it to pencil three circles onto the portrait-format sheet, the radius of which decreases from top to bottom and which are moved to the left of the sheet’s central axis. The words “Lampe” (lamp), “Loch” (hole) and “rot” (red) are handwritten in pencil next to these three circular areas painted in black oil paint. The connection between the terms written in curved handwriting and the black areas that look like holes initially appears puzzling and raises questions but opens up to a space of association or thought that is connected to various drawings, work processes and actions by the artist. In the installation Das Kapital Raum 1970–1977 (1980), for example, there is a slate on which Beuys also uses these three terms and whose meaning he explains when asked: “There are some statements about energy, about light and orientation, so you could say: red, hole and lamp are signs for orientation in general. That something comes towards you in the red, where the power of light is most intense and that is why people perceive red as a kind of primal color. When we think of color, we usually think of red first. This is a color that strongly appeals to people. The opposite is the hole, a dimension directed towards depth and breadth, a hollow.[…] And then the sign of the lamp, which I use very often, also in connection with the felt actions, e.g. on the sleds – a sign for orientation par excellence.”¹
The great importance that Beuys attaches to this constellation of concepts and black circular areas as a “form of thought” can be seen in the inclusion of a sheet entitled Rot Loch Lampe in the drawing collection The Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland, of which Beuys says in conversation with Caroline Tisdall, “as a whole it represents my selection of thinking forms in evolution over period of time”.²
The drawing from The Secret Block was created using the same process as the sheet published in Edition Block in the same year and under the same title, but on a thicker paper. Beuys added it to the cycle The Secret Block with drawings from the period 1945 to 1976, which he first conceived in 1974, in the expansion of the collection in 1976.
A total of 14 sheets were produced up to 1979; the edition is signed and numbered on the reverse and bears an editor’s stamp with the title in reverse order Lampe Loch rot.
Text: Birgit Eusterschulte

¹ Joseph Beuys, »Erklärungen zum Werk DAS KAPITAL RAUM 1970-77. Bandaufzeichnung von Alois Martin Müller anlässlich der Eröffnung der Ausstellung Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk im Kunsthaus Zürich am 10. Februar 1983«, in: Christel Raussmüller-Sauer (ed.), Joseph Beuys und Das Kapital, Hallen für neue Kunst, Schaffhausen 1988, p. 128–139, here p. 131.

² Joseph Beuys in conversation with Caroline Tisdall, in: Joseph Beuys – The Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland, Exhib. cat., Oxford, 1974.