Readings: Joseph Beuy’s Coyote and other animals

extract from performance: ‘How to explain pictures to a dead hare, a wolf and 7 wild birds’

It is early morning, I am in Los Angeles, in Griffin Park walking before the searing heat pushes you back inside, to the coolness of a dark interior.   It is another ‘unprecedented heat wave’ and the sky is blue, with a light that bleaches the surroundings.  An idea looms in my mind and in a childish manner of wishing, I ask my company if you can see wild coyotes in Griffin Park.  Apparently, I am told they are present, but it is rare to actually encounter one.  Separated from the group and still lost in an early morning state with my newly acquired 35 mm film SLR camera around my neck (it is the first camera I own), I daydream about Beuy's coyote... did he stumble upon it, in the wild, or was it taken from captivity.  In the middle of New York - Joseph Beuys and the coyote. But a coyote is a desert animal, an animal, tied to the mythologies of the Native American peoples.  I belong to that heritage, my father told me so, and I am coming to America to see him for the first time. Can I, through the paternal line encounter a coyote?  What picture would I take?  And more importantly what happened to Joseph Beuy’s coyote - no one ever says.

'Coyote', I hear in loud whispered tones as if to wake me from a dream. 'Coyote'.  I turn and in front of me - not merely a meter away from me - I see a large, male coyote.  We gaze into each other's eyes, neither of us moving, and I don't remember much apart from its eyes and its breathing body.  A perfect image - the thought intrudes - but we are both so still.  To take the image, something would happen - a captivity.  I rest with the idea of an after image.  Thoughts leave the body and we stare at each other, as if struck in a trance. I blink, the coyote moves away slowly, followed by other coyotes, a mate and some young.   In unison we move and depart, but I turn and again we stand still, and look at each other - then silently and slowly we part.  

 The others who called out, ‘coyote’ witnessed the scene, describing it as extraordinary and perhaps for 15 minutes or so they say the male coyote slowly receded into the background.  When the coyote appears again for a last time as a mirage, a faint mark, far in the distance, I ask someone else to take a photograph, as evidence.

This moment has a profound effect on me.  I think upon the mythic tale of Orpheus and Eurydice.  I return to Griffin Park, but never see a coyote. And then finally,  seven years later, driving down a desert road, I see a coyote, in its habitat, a figure in the landscape.  

I have to wait - it is a passing figure, there is no gaze in this image, a shadow obscures its face.