Embodied Coexistence: Human and Animal Life, Ritual, and Meaning in Action in Joseph Beuys’s Work “I Like America and America Likes Me”

Abstract

Joseph Beuys’s performance “I Like America and America Likes Me” is one of the most prominent examples of twentieth-century performance art, in which a direct, lived encounter between human and animal becomes a ground for rethinking fundamental concepts of life, meaning, and ritual. By placing the artist’s body in an embodied coexistence with a coyote, the work not only challenges established boundaries between human and animal but also opens up the possibility of reinterpreting the relationship between the body, ritual, and meaning-making experience within the framework of contemporary art. Adopting a qualitative and analytical approach, the present study examines the ways in which human animal coexistence is represented in this artistic action and seeks to elucidate the connections between embodied life, ritual elements, and the production of meaning. The theoretical framework of the research is grounded in concepts such as embodied life, interspecies relationality, rituality, and otherness, drawing on continental philosophy, interspecies studies, and performance art theory. The analysis demonstrates that through the restriction of movement, the use of symbolic materials, silence, repetition of actions, and the co-presence of human and animal bodies, Beuys creates a ritualized space in which meaning emerges not through representation, but through lived experience and bodily encounter. Within this space, the coyote, as the “Other,” is not merely a symbolic object but an active agent in shaping the semantic structure of the artistic action. The findings suggest that Beuys’s coyote performance can be understood as an attempt to rethink human existence in relation to nature, history, and the spiritual realm an attempt that, through embodied and ritualized coexistence, proposes the possibility of healing existential and cultural ruptures. By offering an interdisciplinary reading, this study seeks to contribute to a deeper theoretical understanding of performance art and to the expansion of studies on human animal relations in contemporary art.