Noiseless Blackboard Eraser

A key figure in the development of postwar European art, Joseph Beuys viewed society as a living sculpture shaped by its members, with his own role as that of a transmitter of ideas and energy. In the 1960s, along with his contemporaries in the movement known as Fluxus, Beuys embraced the format of the multiple, an art object that can be produced in multiple identical editions and thus enables broad and democratic distribution. Beuys is famous for proclaiming that "If you have all my multiples then you have me entirely." By these standards, The Met has but a tiny fraction of the artist, who produced over 600 multiples from 1965 until his death in 1986.


Noiseless Blackboard Eraser comes from an important year in the artist’s American reception. In May 1974 created his famous gallery show I Like America and America Likes Me for Rene Block’s space. He arrived from the airport in an ambulance, being carried into the gallery on a stretcher. He then shared the space with a coyote for several hours a day over the course of a week, eventually returning to Germany in the same way he arrived. During one of the lectures he gave while in this country, he was given an eraser to prepare a chalkboard for his notes, sparking the idea for this particular multiple.