Using film footage transferred to video, this piece documents Beuys's action, Vitex Agnus Castus, staged in the middle of his large-scale installation, Arena, at the Modern Art Agency in Naples in June 1972. The installation included approximately 400 photographs documenting Beuys's career to that point, mounted in 100 large aluminum frames. In the center of the installation was a sculpture made of two stacks of blocks: one made of blocks of fat mixed with wax, the other of iron and copper slabs, the elements of Mars and Venus. For the performance Beuys lay prone on the gallery floor for four hours rubbing his oil-lubricated fingers on a copper slab in the stack beside him. By making active manual contact with the female element until his body vibrated with exertion like a body charged with electric current, Beuys dramatized his conceptual link between social sculpture and the generation of energy, also suggesting a battery--a recurring motif in Beuys's work. Running down his back was a cobalt sash on which he had written in sulphur the name of the plant Vitex agnus-castus, popularly known as the chaste tree, a sprig of which was attached to his hat. Beuys said of the performance, "Energy emanates from the two poles, male and female. My action drew them together. I mean a different concept of chastity produced by this reaction and the conflict of elements" (Tisdall, p. 225).
