Coyote III is the very last collaboration between Paik and Beuys and it is a performance video of their concert held at the Sogetsu Hall in Japan on June 2nd, 1984. There are two grand pianos installed across from one another on stage and on the other side stands Beuys’ blackboard full of descriptions. Beuys holds the microphone and expresses an alternating ego from coyote to an artist, craving life and freedom, and Paik quietly performs Japanese pop music on piano with occasional improvised variations. The collaboration between these two artists create a powerful sphere of energy based upon sincere understanding of each other.

The relationship between Paik and Beuys began as Beuys proposed a performance to him in 1958 and in 1963 Beuys visited Paik’s first solo exhibition and destroyed the piano out of the blue. Afterwards, the two artists produced various collaborative works among the Fluxus and at the Coyote III concert, they also did an improvised performance. In commemoration of Joseph Beuys after his death, Nam June Paik performed A Pas De Loup (1990) as a ritual for the repose of Beuys’ soul and also documented this in video.

Joseph Beuys was born in Germany in 1921 and he was a key member of the Fluxus, an interdisciplinary art movement active in Europe and the U.S. throughout the 1950s and early 1980s. Together with the Fluxus members, Beuys opposed the commercial distribution of the arts and demonstrated how art could be merged with life through the Happening based on coincidence. Beuys also declared, “Every human being is an artist” and “Thinking is art,” in the belief that everyone could discover and develop their own creative ability in every vocation. Based on this idea, Beuys insisted that everyone’s life is part of the art, and that human beings should build ‘social sculpture’ through this art.

excerpt from 10th anniversary commemorative exhibition of Nam June Paik Art Center #ART #COMMONS #NAMJUNEPAIK exhibition catalog