The Moon through the Hard Water: America Doesn't Like Me

In May 1974, in New York's René Block Gallery at 409 West Broadway, Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) carried out his performance “I Like America and America Likes Me.” Arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport, he was taken by an ambulance, on a stretcher, so that his feet would not touch the land of Americans who had treated the continent's Native populace so abominably, and had himself driven to the gallery, where he locked himself up, for eight hours a day, with a coyote. Wrapped in a felt blanket and brandishing a staff, he defended himself from the small animal; he also had a triangle on him, which he sounded every now and again, and on each of the three days he took into the cage a pile of the day's Wall Street Journals. At the end of the three days, he took a flight back; nobody knows what happened to the coyote.