Photographic Documentation of Joseph Beuys' "Iphigenia / Titus Andronicus" (1969) Performance at Experimenta 2, German Academy of the Performing Arts, Frankfurt Abisag Tüllmann Museum of Contemporary Art, Frankfurt, Germany Recorded October 1, 1994

In this series of photographs one is caught between the still-present click of the Tüllmann's shutter birthing these images and the long-vanished sounds of Beuys speaking, moving about the stage, and occasionally playing the cymbals. Somewhere in between the two are the taped sounds that accompanied this action: simultaneous excerpts from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Goethe's Iphigenia in Tauris. Thirty years after these pictures were taken those recorded texts still seem to inhabit these pictures as much as Beuys himself does, their concurrent narratives of power and ruthlessness prodding him into motion and shaping his actions from just outside the frame of the viewfinder. These are more than just pictures of thousands of words, they are images of thousands of simple breaths drawn and shaped under the weight of those words.