These five stacked reels of celluloid contain a full print of Ingmar Bergman’s film The Silence from 1963. Beuys had the reels galvanised in baths of zinc and copper, sealing in and ‘silencing’ their contents beneath a gleaming metal shell. Each bears a small metal tag, embossed with a pair of words. The first word refers to an event within the film, while the second conveys Beuys’s response to this occurrence.¹

In stacking the five reels on top of one another, Beuys assembled one of his many sculptural batteries, which appear in a range of formats throughout his oeuvre. He conceived these structures as devices for storing and transmitting spiritual energy. The Silence is likely modelled on an early electrical battery, known as a voltaic pile, to which he had referred a year earlier, in a performance called Vitex agnus castus.² Invented at the end of the 18th century by Alexander Volta, this device conducted current through a stacked pile of zinc and copper discs—the same materials with which this multiple is coated.³ Though the two metals preclude access to the images of Bergman’s film, their capacity to transmit energy suggests that they may pass on its contents in another, more abstract form.

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1. As noted in Dierk Stemmler, ‘On the Multiples of Joseph Beuys,’ in Schellmann (ed.), Joseph Beuys: The Multiples (Munich, New York: Edition Schellmann, 1997), 507. ↩

2. On this point, in connection with Vitex agnus castus, see Uwe M. Schneede, Joseph Beuys: Die Aktionen, (Ostfildern-Ruit: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1994), 319. ↩

3. On the origins of the voltaic pile, see E.A. Davis (ed.), Science in the making: scientific development as chronicled by historic papers in the Philosophical magazine (London, Bristol, PA: Taylor & Francis, 1995-), Vol. 1, 37. ↩