Joseph Beuys
From CT4CT: Creative Tools for Critical Times
Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) was a German performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and teacher, and is regarded as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, but also one of the most controversial.
His work is grounded on theories of humanism, social philosophy, and anthroposophy, a spiritual philosophy postulates the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world accessible to direct experience through inner development.
Inspired by Romanticism, Beuys held a utopian belief in the power of universal human creativity as well as art's potential to bring about revolutionary change. These ideals are embodied in his notion of the universal artwork, or a gesamtkunstwerk and social sculpture, wherein society as a whole was to be regarded as one great work of art to which each person can contribute creatively.In 1973, Beuys expounded on these concepts writing [1]:
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.
These theories were put into action in 1982 with his project 7,000 Oak Trees.
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Projects
7,000 Oak Trees
Joseph Beuys's 7,000 Oak Trees 7,000 Oak Trees (1982) was a work of land art that was created for the Documenta 7, an exhibition of modern and contempoary art that happens every five years in Kassel, Germany.
First, Beuys delivered a large pile of basalt stones, which, when seen from above formed large arrow pointing to a single oak tree that he had planted. Next, he announced that the stones should not be moved unless an oak tree was planted in the new location of the stone. With the help of volunteers, the artist was able to plant seven thousand trees over several years, each with an accompanying basalt stone. The last tree was planted on the opening of Documenta 8.
Beuys intended this project to be the first stage in an ongoing program of tree planting throughout the world as part of a global mission to effect environmental and social change. On this note, he stated [2]:
The planting of seven thousand oak trees is thus only a symbolic beginning. And such a symbolic beginning requires a marker, in this instance a basalt column. The intention of such a tree-planting event is to point up the transformation of all of life, of society, and of the whole ecological system . . .
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How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare
Joseph Beuys's performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965) is one of his most famous pieces. It is also his first solo exhibition in a private gallery. In this performance, Beuys sits behind glass in a bare room. He holds and urgently murmurs to a dead rabbit held in his lap. With his face covered in honey and gold leaf, and with an iron slab attached to his foot, he is surrounded by felt, animal fat, wire, and wood.
Such materials reference Beuys's experience in WWII. As the story goes, his plane was shot down over the frozen Crimean and when he was found, his rescuers, nomadic tribesman, covered him in fat and wrapped him in felt to warm his body and bring him back to health. This story has been at the center of the artist's controversy, as apparent eye witnesses claim that no tribesmen were on the scene where Beuys and his plane were found. Nevertheless, the mythical origins story played an important role in his work and in his own self-narration of becoming an artist.
Referencing his own past, Beuys's performance was positioned as a reaction to what he saw as an over-valorization of Dada art and what he called the "silence of Marcel Duchamp." In this sense Beuys's piece can be understood as an attempt to recover his own artistic voice and find truth and honesty in personal experience, however damaged.
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