Art & Exhibitions
Joseph Beuys Turned Groceries Into Artworks. Conserving Them Is Complicated
The efforts are the focus of a new show in Ghent, Belgium. Butter was involved.
Joseph Beuys made art with fat, felt, and coyotes, but one of his most incisive installations contains something far more prosaic: groceries. For Wirtschaftswerte (1980), the German artist lined metal racks with goods procured from East Germany—sugar, honey, tea, barley, chocolate, cookies, beer, bandages, and the like. The enigmatic array delivers a pointed meditation on value in a postwar landscape.
Unsurprisingly, not long after the work entered the collection of S.M.A.K. Museum in Ghent, Belgium, these perishable parts of Wirtschaftswerte began to decay. Insects infested the food; paper packages tore, and their contents leaked; metal tins rusted; and environmental conditions took their toll. Stabilizing the installation has taken decades, and the work continues.
The painstaking project to conserve Beuys’s installation is now the subject of “Wirtschaftswerte: A Conservation History” at S.M.A.K. Organized by conservators Claudia Kramer and Carla Viana, the exhibition restages the work and explores what goes into its continued care. Along the way, it sparks deeper questions not just about how to beat back deterioration, but also about how decay can become part of art.
“There is a lot of work behind the installation,” Viana told me. “It’s not just about putting it on view. There is so much more that the public normally doesn’t see.”
The exhibition, Kramer added, “also shows the difference between restoration and conservation of modern art and contemporary art. There’s a shared base of knowledge, but there are different ways of approaching an artwork.”
Repairing With Butter
Made at the peak of the Cold War, amid a divided Germany, Wirtschaftswerte (“Economic Values”) juxtaposes packets of East German groceries against 19th-century oil paintings on loan from Western museums, setting up a stark confrontation between rival systems of value—scarcity and excess, material and spiritual wealth. A massive plaster block, hauled in from the artist’s studio, sits at the center of the installation, offering a cool, rational counterweight.
Beuys debuted the work at “Art in Europe after ‘68,” a 1980 exhibition mounted at the Museum of Contemporary Art and St. Peter’s Abbey in Ghent. S.M.A.K. acquired Wirtschaftswerte after the show, to the dismay of at least one city councillor.
By the time Beuys restaged Wirtschaftswerte in Düsseldorf in 1984, it had radically changed. The edges of the plaster block had chipped and broken away. No matter: The artist repaired it with butter. The packages, which Beuys signed, kept going missing, prompting him to wrap the shelves with chicken wire. (Only 462 of the roughly 510 original packets survive.)
Conservators had also already swapped the rotting contents of some packages with materials like wood, sawdust, and polystyrene beads. While Beuys did not object to the replacements, he insisted that they should match the look and feel of the original contents. “He wanted you to see that a kilo of sugar is a kilo of sugar, not something that was light and fluffy,” Viana said.
The artist left no written guidelines on how his work should endure. He did, however, specify that the paintings included in the installation should date between 1818 and 1883, the span of Karl Marx’s life.
In 1998, S.M.A.K. established a conservation studio, allowing it to more closely monitor Wirtschaftswerte. The team documented the installation’s condition in photographs and reports, while undertaking preventive measures, including creating specialized storage to hold the food packages.
The decay of these organic items deepened the meaning of the installation, which went on view more than 35 times after Düsseldorf, subverting the notion of art as enduring and permanent.
“My sculpture is not fixed and finished,” Beuys once said. “Processes continue in most of them: chemical reactions, fermentations, color changes, decay, drying up. Everything is in a state of change.”
‘It Really Smells’
Wirtschaftswerte underwent its first major restorations in 2011 and 2019. Packages received new, sustainable fillings such as sand, glass beads, or conservation foam; active insect infestations were eradicated. The plaster block was reinforced with bolts to ease its transportation. Most significantly, conservators Rebecca Heremans and Katrien Blanchaert developed a decision tree to guide future restorations.
That model was motivated by early missteps. For instance, the wood chips used in an early intervention to replace the contents of some packages ended up cutting through the paper wrappings, Kramer and Viana said.
The decision tree completed in 2019 begins with one key question: Does the package leak or not? Following that, conservators are directed via more branching steps to interventions like “replace filling,” “restore packaging,” or “maintain content,” which are color-coded to indicate their urgency. If the situation is dire, there’s an unhappy verdict: “total loss.” (Those are removed from the work, but still stored; some are on view in the S.M.A.K. show.)
The plaster block continues to receive the butter treatment, as Beuys intended—but not just any butter. In a short film by S.M.A.K. about the exhibition, Kramer and Viana are seen testing various butters for their consistency, before Viana fills in the block’s gaps and corners with the stuff.
“Over the years, the block has become more and more infiltrated by the fat of the butter,” Kramer said. “It really smells. We had it in our restoration studio for a month to do a condition check and everybody who entered the studio said what a bad smell was hanging in here.”
Working so intimately with Wirtschaftswerte has given the conservators a different understanding of it. “You really have your nose up in the work,” Kramer said. And yet, “it’s a discovery every time we grab a package,” Viana added, before mentioning their aged graphics and Beuys’s faded handwriting.
“These daily products that everybody was using from another time period, they’re witnesses,” Kramer said. “When installing the work, you have a feeling like you’re playing shopkeeper, but on the other hand, it carries a real political meaning.”
The everyday groceries that Beuys used to question value have become invaluable.
“Wirtschaftswerte: A Conservation History” is on view at S.M.A.K. Museum, Jan Hoetplein 1, Ghent, Belgium, through September 13.
Facts Only
* Joseph Beuys used groceries in Wirtschaftswerte (1980) to line metal racks.
* The materials included sugar, honey, tea, barley, chocolate, cookies, beer, and bandages from East Germany.
* The installation entered the S.M.A.K. Museum in Ghent, Belgium.
* The perishable parts began to decay after the exhibition.
* Beuys repaired a chipped plaster block with butter during restaging in Düsseldorf in 1984.
* Beuys wrapped shelves with chicken wire due to missing, signed packages.
* Conservators replaced rotting package contents with materials like wood, sawdust, and polystyrene beads.
* Restorations in 2011 and 2019 involved using fillings such as sand or glass beads for packages.
* Conservators developed a decision tree to guide future restorations based on leakage concerns.
* The plaster block continued to receive butter treatment during restoration.
Executive Summary
Full Take
The narrative pivots on the tension between material permanence and biological process, fundamentally challenging traditional notions of art as fixed and enduring. The decay of the organic materials forces a reevaluation of conservation methods, shifting the focus from merely arresting deterioration to incorporating change itself into the artwork's history. This dynamic mirrors Beuys’s broader philosophical stance that processes—like fermentation and decay—are integral to existence, not deviations from it. The development of a decision tree for restoration suggests an attempt to formalize intuition into practice, acknowledging that interventions must account for instability rather than imposing static perfection. The sensory experience of the work, as noted by conservators smelling the butter-infiltrated plaster block, points toward a form of embodied knowledge where the physical presence and history of the materials are inseparable from the aesthetic and political content. This pattern suggests that true understanding of an artwork requires embracing its contingency, recognizing that historical context and material evolution are not impediments to artistic value but constitutive elements of it.
Bridge Questions: If decay is integrated into the artwork's meaning, how does a society’s collective management of organic decay inform our understanding of long-term cultural preservation? What ethical obligations arise when conservation decisions—such as choosing between different filling materials—are guided by empirical decision trees rather than purely aesthetic preference? How can the sensory experience of material entropy be used to foster a more resilient, dynamic view of artistic longevity?
Sentinel — Human
This text reads as deeply researched journalistic reporting that synthesizes historical context with specific, experiential details about the conservation process, strongly suggesting human authorship.