At the Rene Block Gallery in New York in 1974, an unlikely pair of performers — West German artist Joseph Beuys and a wild coyote named “America” — enacted a public performance that Beuys called “I Like America and America Likes Me.” Surviving video shows Beuys, covered head-to-toe by a shapeless felt blanket, proffering the hooked end of a cane and tossing his gloves to “America.” The coyote, for its part, seems pretty much all in, unafraid, confident, a happy player.
Beuys’s intent was a symbolic healing of the U.S. of its Vietnam War blues. But whether intentionally or not, “I like America and America Likes Me” reset on the late 20th century East Coast a very old and mostly western American artistic tradition featuring the coyote as a kind of avatar...