‘Luck in the Double Focus’ (2017) twists a seminal artwork by Joseph Beuys into the form of a Mobius-strip-cartoon.In I Like America and America Likes Me (1974) Beuys the artist lived alone in a gallery with a wild coyote for three days and nights. Coyotes themselves hold mythic status in the USA, featuring in indigenous folklore, lending their name to illegal cross-border traffickers, and appearing in news reports for their opportunistic encroachment into human cities. This trickster identity is also appropriated by anthropologist Roy Wagner in his book ‘Coyote Anthropology’ (2010). Here Wagner converses with his animal-side through the figure of a philosophically adept coyote.Luck in the Double Focus overlays these works from art and anthropology. In doing so a third actor emerges: the crooked walking stick, brandished by Beuys and bitten by Coyote. In Spriggs' strip cartoon, Beuys and Coyote examine their own species’ identities and their relationship to culture and language, whist Beuys falls increasingly in love with his stick – his separating device, his bipedal tool, his human identity prop. It is thanks to the stick that lies in between (in this sense the stick is an analog to language itself) that Coyote can be held at bay, just long enough for the couple to converse around the universal dilemma surrounding our relationship to ourselves as human-animals.Produced as part of the AoOA exhibition Third House at Titanik Gallery, Turku, Finland. Copies of the edition are available, please get in touch for details
