Joseph Beuys 'Felt Suit'.

After researching into so many architects and artists i felt that i needed to try and find some fashion designers that used Brutalism within their designs.  Upon researching i came across Joseph Beuys and his 'Felt Suit' from 1970 and was surprised to discover that it was actualy a piece of art and not fashion which i was looking for. However i still felt that i could gain inspiration from it in terms of its concrete grey colour and also how it has quite a structured look to it due to the thickness of the felt. Both things that i felt i could consider when it came to designing and creating my final piece.

'Felt Suit' 1970.

 

In 1969, German Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys performed Isolation Unit: Action the dead mouse in collaboration with American artist Terry Fox. The event, conceived as a protest of the Vietnam War, took place in the basement of the Düsseldorf Art Academy where Beuys and Fox were both students. In the part of the performance captured in the accompanying photograph, Beuys, clad in a heavy suit made of felt, holds in his outstretched hand the body of a dead mouse that had been living under his bed.

Felt was of course a significant and recurring material for Beuys, and an integral element of his self-mythology. It was featured in his 1969 installation The Pack at the Neue Galerie in Kassel, in which an army of anthropomorphic sleds armed with rolled felt blankets and flashlights seem to escape from the back of a 1961 Volkswagen van. Suspended above the vehicle, the suit from the Düsseldorf performance now hangs limp and empty.

Beuys later recreated the felt suit from the Düsseldorf performance as a multiple, one of which is now in the collection of the Allen Memorial Art Museum. Typically displayed high out of the reach of the viewer, the suit is elevated from the realm of the everyday into the transcendent.

 

there the suit is shown high up in Josephs work 'The Pack (das Rudel), 1969'

 

 

https://www.artsy.net/artwork/joseph-beuys-the-pack-das-rudel