Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) led the postwar German avant-garde movement by promoting his idea of erasing the boundary between art and life. His artwork Das Schweigen consists of five reels of Ingmar Bergman’s 1963 film titled The Silence that have been bathed in copper and zinc. The result is a shining yet sealed leftover, or relic—an object rather than a film ready to be loaded onto a projector. Beuys “silences” the communicative possibility of Bergman’s film by calling attention to the objecthood of the film apparatus and the value of silence in film itself. The silencing of Bergman’s work and its shifting identity as it becomes the vehicle of Beuys’s sculpture resembles the canister containing Paik’s blank film. What is the implication of reducing a filmic work to an object? Produced as fifty signed and numbered multiples, Beuys’s work might be seen as the initiation of an expansive afterlife for Bergman’s film. —LH

Image: Alfred and Marie Greisinger Collection, Walker Art Center, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1992, 1992.221.1-.7. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.