Avant-garde artist, born in Krefeld, W Germany. He studied art at Düsseldorf Academy, where he later became professor of sculpture (196171). His sculpture consisted mainly of assemblages of bits and pieces of rubbish; for one typical exhibit he smeared frankfurters with brown shoe polish. He also staged multimedia happenings. He was much admired and imitated by the younger avant-garde from the 1960s onwards. A prominent political activist, he was one of the founders of the Green Party in Germany. In 2005 a major retrospective of his work was held at London's Tate Modern gallery.
Joseph Beuys (May 12, 1921 – January 23, 1986) was an influential German artist who came to prominence in the 1960s. As well as performances, Beuys produced sculptures, environments, vitrines and thousands of drawings. A charismatic and controversial figure, the nature and value of Beuys’s contribution to Western art has elicited a hotly contested and often polarised debate.
Early life
Although he took great pride in being native to Kleve, Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld in 1921; Beuys was the son of the trader Josef Jakob Beuys and Johanna Maria Margarete Beuys.
The Beuys family soon moved to Kleve, an industrial town in the Lower Rhine region of Germany close to the Dutch border, and it was in this region that Beuys spent most of his childhood. From an early age Beuys displayed a keen interest in the natural sciences and had considered a career in medical studies before volunteering for the Luftwaffe in 1940. During his leave, Beuys attended lectures in biology, botany, geography and philosophy.
In 1942 Beuys was stationed in the Crimea and was a member of various combat bomber units. The pilot was killed but Beuys was found by a German search commando and brought to a military hospital where he stayed from March 17 to April 7. Beuys later recounted how he had been rescued from the crash by Tartar tribesmen, who had wrapped his broken body in fat and felt and nursed him back to health. Beuys recounted the story in 1979:
“Had it not been for the Tartars I would not be alive today. They covered my body in fat to help it regenerate warmth, and wrapped it in felt as an insulator to keep warmth in.”Although entering Beuys’s rhetoric somewhat later than some commentators have acknowledged, this story has served as a powerful myth of origins for Beuys’s artistic identity, as well as providing an initial interpretive key to his use of unconventional materials (amongst which felt and fat were central).
After the war
After the war Beuys returned to his parents’ house in Rindern. Beuys began to read widely, evolving ideas around science, art, literature, philosophy and spirituality. Beuys finished his education in 1951, graduating as master pupil from Mataré’s class.
Throughout the 1950s, Beuys struggled with a dire financial situation and with the trauma of his wartime experiences. Through his drawing practice, Beuys explored a range of unconventional materials and developed his artistic agenda, exploring metaphorical and symbolic connections between natural phenomena and philosophical systems.
In 1956, artistic self-doubt and material impoverishment led to a physical and psychological crisis, and Beuys entered a period of serious depression. In 1958, Beuys participated in an international competition for an Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial, but his proposal did not win and his design was never realised. Also in 1958, Beuys begins a cycle of drawings related to Joyce’s Ulysses. Completed in ca.1961, the six exercise books of drawings would constitute, Beuys declared, an extension of Joyce’s seminal novel. In 1959 Beuys married Eva Wurmbach.
Artistic Development and Notoriety
In 1962 Beuys befriended his Düsseldorf colleague Nam June Paik, a member of the Fluxus movement. Although Beuys participated in a number of Fluxus events, it soon became clear that he viewed the implications of art’s economic and institutional framework differently. Indeed, whereas Fluxus was directly inspired by the radical Dada activities emerging during the First World War, Beuys in 1964 broadcast (from Second German Television Studio) a rather different message: ‘Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet’ (‘The Silence of Marcel Duchamp is Overrated’).
What served to launch Beuys into the public consciousness was that which transpired following his performance at the Technical College Aachen in 1964. As part of a festival of new art coinciding with the 20th anniversary of an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler, Beuys created a performance or Aktion. The performance was interrupted by a group of students, one of whom attacked Beuys, punching him in the face. It was for this 1964 festival that Beuys produced an idiosyncratic CV, which he titled Life Course / Work Course.
Beuys’s first solo exhibition in a private gallery was opened on November 26th 1965 with one of the artist’s most famous and compelling performances: How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. Such materials and actions had specific symbolic value for Beuys. For example, honey was the product of bees who, for Beuys (following Rudolph Steiner), represented as ideal society of warmth and brotherhood. Beuys produced many such spectacular, ritualistic performances, and he developed a compelling persona whereby he took on a liminal, shamanistic role, as if to enable passage between different physical and spiritual states.
It was during the 1960s that Beuys formulated his central theoretical concepts concerning the social, cultural and political function and potential of art. Indebted to Romantic writers such as Novalis and Schiller, Beuys was motivated by a utopian belief in the power of universal human creativity and was confident in the potential for art to bring about revolutionary change. This translated into Beuys’s formulation of the concept of Social Sculpture, in which society as a whole was to be regarded as one great work of art (the Wagnerian Gesamtkunswerk) to which each person can contribute creatively (perhaps Beuys’s most famous phrase, borrowed from Novalis, is ‘Everyone is an artist’). In 1973, Beuys wrote:
“Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build ‘A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART’… EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who – from his state of freedom – the position of freedom that he experiences at first-hand – learns to determine the other positions of the TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER.”
Beuys manifested these ideas most notoriously in abolishing entry requirements to his Düsseldorf class. Throughout the late 1960s this renegade policy caused great institutional friction, which came to a head in October 1972, when Beuys was eventually dismissed from his post. The dismissal, which Beuys would not accept, produced a wave of protests from students, artists and critics. Although now bereft of an institutional position, Beuys continued a voracious schedule of public lectures and discussions, as well as becoming increasingly active in German politics. Amongst other things, Beuys founded (or co-founded) the following political organisations: German Student Party (1967), Organization for Direct Democracy Through Referendum (1971), and Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research (1974). Beuys became a pacifist, was a vocal opponent of nuclear weapons and campaigned strenuously for environmental causes (indeed, he was elected a Green Party candidate for the European Parliament). Beuys also continued to make sculptures, installations, drawings and performances until his death in 1986. The first and only major retrospective of Beuys work to be organised in Beuys’s lifetime opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1979.
Critiques of Beuys
One thing that the Guggenheim retrospective and its catalogue did was to afford an American critical audience a comprehensive view of Beuys’s practice and rhetoric. Whereas Beuys had been a central figure in the post-war European artistic consciousness for some time, American audiences had previously only had partial and fleeting access to his work. In 1980, and building on the scepticism voiced by Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers, who in 1972 Open Letter had compared Beuys to Wagner, art historian Benjamin Buchloh launched a polemically forceful attack on Beuys. Often either mis-represented or ignored, the essay was (and remains) the most vitriolic and thoroughgoing critique of both Beuys’s rhetoric (referred to as “simple-minded utopian drivel”) and persona (Buchloh regards Beuys as both infantile and messianic).
Firstly, Buchloh draws attention to Beuys’s falsification of his own biography, which he sees as symptomatic of a dangerous cultural tendency of dis-avowing a traumatic past and a retreat into the realms of myth and esoteric symbolism. Buchloh attacks Beuys for his failure to acknowledge and engage with Nazism, the Holocaust, and their implications. Secondly, Buchloh criticizes Beuys for displaying an inability or reluctance to engage with the consequences of the work of Marcel Duchamp. That is, a failure to acknowledge the framing function of the art institution and the inevitable dependence upon such institutions to create meaning for art objects. If Beuys championed art’s power to foster political transformation, he nevertheless failed to acknowledge the limits imposed upon such aspirations by the art museum and dealership networks that served somewhat less utopian ambitions. For Buchloh, rather than acknowledging the collective and contextual formation of meaning, Beuys instead attempted to prescribe and control the meanings of his art, and often in the form of dubious esoteric or symbolic codings. The existence of such a project invalidates Buchloh’s claim that Beuys retreated from engaging with the Nazi legacy, a point that Buchloh himself has recently acknowledged. Beuys has attracted a huge number of admirers and devotees, the tendency of whom has been to uncritically accept Beuys’s own explanations as interpretive solutions to his work. The drive here has been to wrest the potential of Beuys’s work away from the artist’s own rhetoric, and to further explore both the wider discursive formations within which Beuys operated (this time, productively), and the specific material properties of the works themselves. Museum Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
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