In 2021, Wilkie recreated Joseph Beuys’s Action piece I Love America and America Loves Me. The original took place in May 1974 in a New York gallery, where Beuys spent three days locked in a room with a live coyote (which mostly ignored Beuys’ attempts at interaction). The Action was intended to reflect Beuys’ troubled relationship with the US and its politics. The footage of the event, looks, we believe, rather funny.

 

The recreation took place during a seminar with Contemporary Practice Performance MA students in the New Adelphi Studio Theatre in the UoS Peel Park campus. The recreation featured no live coyote but instead used a stuffed dog, a student loosely dressed as a coyote and a small cockapoo puppy called Brenda and was built using the comedy ‘Rule of Three’ principle (McKeague, 2021 (12:2)