JOSEPH BEUYS: COYOTE — CAROLINE TISDALL

Artist: Joseph Beuys
Photographs & text: Caroline Tisdall
Additional photographs: Lorraine Senna and Gwen Phillips, New York
German translation: Keito von Waberer & Joseph Beuys
Printed in: Germany
Publisher: Schirmer/Mosel, Munich

Year: 1976. First edition.
Format: Softcover, landscape 4to
Dimensions: 18 × 26 cm
Pages: 158, with full-page black-and-white photographs
Language: German
ISBN: 3-921375-06-1
Condition: Fine. No significant defects or visible damage; only very minor signs of age consistent with the publication's 1976 date, extremely subtle and barely noticeable. Interior clean and exceptionally well-preserved.

Joseph Beuys: Coyote I Like America and America Likes Me documents one of the most iconic and influential performances in postwar European art. Written and photographed by Caroline Tisdall, the book records Beuys's 1974 action at the René Block Gallery in New York, in which the artist spent several days enclosed in a gallery space with a wild coyote.

The performance emerged from Beuys's broader interest in healing, ritual, mythology, communication, and the relationship between human beings and the natural world. Wrapped in felt and carrying objects associated with his symbolic vocabulary, Beuys entered into a sustained encounter with the coyote, an animal he regarded as carrying a complex significance within American history and mythology.

Rather than functioning as a conventional photographic record, Tisdall's documentation preserves the evolving relationship between artist, animal, and environment. The sequence of black-and-white photographs captures gestures, distances, moments of confrontation, and periods of apparent calm, allowing the performance to unfold gradually through the book's 158 pages.

The work also reflects Beuys's highly symbolic approach to political and cultural history. His encounter with the coyote has frequently been understood in relation to questions of American identity, Indigenous symbolism, ecological consciousness, and the possibility of communication beyond conventional language. Tisdall's photographs remain essential to the historical understanding of the action, transforming an ephemeral performance into a lasting visual document.

Published by Schirmer/Mosel, Munich, in 1976, this first edition includes German translations by Keito von Waberer and Joseph Beuys, with additional photographs by Lorraine Senna and Gwen Phillips of New York. Its landscape 4to format and full-page photographic sequence give the publication a distinctly documentary character while preserving the physical rhythm of the original performance.

A seminal document of Joseph Beuys's practice and of postwar performance art, this first edition remains an important photographic record of one of the artist's most discussed actions.