Joseph Beuys

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Born: 1921

Died: 1986

Summary of Joseph Beuys

Fluxus and Conceptual art movements of the 1950s and early 1980s were influenced by Joseph Beuys’ work in Europe and the United States during this time period. Although Beuys worked in many different media, he was most known for his process-oriented “action” art, which he performed for the audience to demonstrate how artistic expression can have a healing effect on the artist and those who view it. When it comes to his work, Beuys is best known for his use of animal fat and felt, both of which had personal significance to the artist. Additionally, they appeared repeatedly in works implying a connection between “everyday life,” common materials, and art.

Fluxus, the avant-garde art movement of the 1960s, saw Beuys as a key figure. A long tradition of “heroic,” or object-oriented, painting and sculpture in Asia, Europe, and the United States came to an end at that time (much recently typified by Abstract Expressionism). These artists, influenced by experimental music, began using “found” and “everyday” objects to create “happenings,” “impermanent installation art,” and/or other largely action-oriented events that are more ephemeral and time-based.

Beuys demonstrated how art could begin with a personal experience but also address universal artistic, political, and/or social ideas during the 1950s and early 1980s (i.e. topical issues of the day). In his 1965 solo performance, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, he poetically suggests the healing potential of art for a humanity seeking self-renewal and a renewed sense of hope for the future through the use of materials of personal significance (one foot wrapped in felt, the cradling of a recently deceased animal) (one should recall that Beuys came of age in the immediate postwar period, when many Germans were just coming to terms with many traumatic aspects of their recent past).

A “higher humanitarian attitude,” or way of conducting oneself in all aspects of daily life is what Beuys advocated in both his teaching and his mature “action” and “sculptural” artworks he made. Art has increasingly become a vehicle for social commentary and political activism in recent years, and Beuys’s work heralds this shift.

As a result of his work, Beuys frequently blurred the lines between art and life, and fact and fiction, by suggesting that what one believed to constitute “reality” mattered more in matters of human action (social/political) and personal creativity than any definition of everyday reality based on traditional standards or social codes of so-called “proper” conduct.

Childhood

Joseph Beuys was born in the German city of Krefeld, which is located in the country’s northwest. To the merchant Josef Jakob Beuys and his wife, Johanna Maria Margarete Hulsermann, he was an only child. It was an upper-middle-class family from the northern Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany. As soon as Beuys was born, the family moved to Kleve, a small industrial town in the south of the country for work. A book-burning rally held by the newly formed National Socialist German Workers’ Party (or Nazi Party) in Kleve in 1933, when Beuys was just 12 years old, rescued Carolus Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae (1735), one of history’s most groundbreaking works of scientific literature. When he was just a teenager, Beuys was compelled by law to join the Hitler Youth, an ironic twist in the story.

Beuys’ teachers at Kleve recognised his early interest in drawing and music while he was in elementary and secondary school. The young Beuys also showed a talent for history, mythology, and the social and natural sciences in addition to the arts. Despite his decision to become a doctor, Beuys’s ambition was short-lived when he joined the Luftwaffe, the German air force, in 1941. (allegedly to avoid the draft).

Early Life

Even though Beuys signed up for the military on his own accord, he had no desire to participate in any kind of combat. He continued his studies in biology and zoology during the early 1940s in order to keep up with his interest in the medical field. It is widely accepted that Beuys’s life was forever altered in 1944 when his plane was shot down over the Crimean Front, but this is once again unverifiable according to Beuys’s own account of 1979. He claims that a nomadic Tartar tribe saved his life by rubbing animal fat on his bruised and battle-worn body, then wrapping him in felt to raise his body temperature. An important and prominent role in much of Joseph Beuys’ subsequent work as an artist would be played by the importance of ancient healing aids – in this case, fat and felt – for enriching and sustaining human mind, body, and spirit.

Several eyewitness accounts contradict Beuys’s romantic and exotic parables, and there were reportedly no Tartar tribesmen occupying the region where Beuys’s alleged military plane crash occurred, according to reports. Even if Beuys’ later works were based solely on fiction, they would still incorporate elements of fact. When it comes to his decision to devote himself to art and avant-garde culture in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Beuys’s tale of heroic rescue by Tartars (whether or not true) was a key factor.

Beuys enrolled in the monumental sculpture programme at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf when he returned to civilian life in 1946. Ewald Matare, a well-known German painter and sculptor whose work was once deemed “degenerate” by the Nazis, was a good teacher for Beuys. Beuys was admitted to Matare’s more exclusive master sculpture class in 1951 after several years of success in this small group (Beuys finally graduated two years later).

Beuys shared a studio with Erwin Heerich, one of Germany’s most important 20th-century sculptors, during his studies with Matare. The artist also draws inspiration from Wilhelm Lehmbruck. Although Beuys’s early influences were primarily distant, they included the work of Italian Renaissance painters, Galileo’s scientific theories, the writings of James Joyce, and the works of German romantics like Goethe, Novalis and Schiller.

Beuys had a difficult time in the 1950s, both in terms of his personal life and his artistic endeavours. To cope with the constant financial hardships that plagued him, he spent most of his waking hours in front of the easel, creating thousands of drawings. His goal was to find a new artistic language that could emerge from an intense period of self-reflection. This goal was furthered by his decision to focus on only three themes: animals, a female figure, and the landscape. Beuys’ devotion to pencil, ink, and oil pigments was matched by a rejection of all other media. Work such as Woman/Animal Skull (1956-57), an experimental and possibly mystical abstraction, is an example of the type that emerged from such a strict regimen.

The epic novel Ulysses, by James Joyce, was the inspiration for a series of drawings by Joseph Beuys in the early 1960s (1918-22). For this project, Beuys claims that Joyce himself asked him to create the drawings, which he did (i.e. as though by way of telepathy, as Joyce had died in 1941). Beuys’s fascination with a creative process that emerges from somewhere between fact and fiction, and physical and metaphysical self-creation, is evident in the claim that a literary ghost could act as his personal muse. This suggests that the simplest gesture could ultimately bear the status of a profound artistic statement.

Mid Life

Beuys’s first official recognition came in 1961, when he was named Professor of Monumental Sculpture at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, following a tumultuous childhood (where he himself had earlier studied). By abolishing all entry requirements (virtually anyone could join his classes), and working with a group of experimental creatives at Düsseldorf, among them Nam June Paik and others closely affiliated with the recently established Fluxus Group, Beuys made significant waves while occupying this position.

All of these new connections would have an immediate impact on Beuy’s early attempts at performing arts. The resulting works have come to symbolise Beuys’ aesthetic sensibility in the public imagination. To be considered Fluxus, an artist had to be willing to experiment with a wide range of media. This included everything from painting and drawing to performance and sound art, sculpture, video, and even poetry. Art performance, art theory, and academic teaching all played significant roles in Beuys’s artistic output, which encompassed all four of these disciplines.

When a student at the Technical College Aachen punched Beuys in the face while the artist was in the middle of a performance in 1964, the event had to be called off. When a photograph of Beuys, bloodied and raised like a prizefighter’s, began to circulate, the work would continue to resonate. It was at this point that Beuys decided to take advantage of the opportunity, writing up a fictional curriculum vitae in order to make his life seem more heroic than it actually was.

One year later, in Dresden, at the Galerie Schmela, Beuys gave his first solo performance. Many Beuys fans have come to regard this performance piece as one of his most important works since its debut on November 26, 1965. Taking the form of a morbid prophet, Beuys stood in the store window, clad only in a cast iron foot piece, holding a dead rabbit in his lap and making ritualistic, mysterious gestures as though the world’s future depended on the scrappy pulpit’s mysterious beats. Beuys had been gaining traction in the art world and the general public since the late 1970s, and this work solidified that interest.

Non-art or found materials such as animal fat were also frequently used by Joseph Beuys in his sculptures and conceptual artworks. This organic material, which Beuys used in both its liquid and solid states, suggests a great spiritual substance by its implicit potential for continuous metamorphosis. Beuys’ art spoke to people on a physical and psychological level because it was made from something that was fundamentally a life-sustaining material in and of itself. Work like Fat Corners (1960) and Fat Chair (1961) demonstrate this (1964).

After working with drawing in the 1950s, Joseph Beuys concentrated on manipulating felt as a sculpture medium, sound barrier and poetic metaphor in the 1960s and 1970s, as he had in the 1950s. There are a number of works by Beuys that demonstrate his wide range of techniques, including Homogenous Infiltration for Grand Piano, Homogenous Infiltration for Cello, The Pack, and Felt Suit, the last of which is notable for its absence of Beuys’ usual elaborate and metaphorical titles. Feel Suit was a simple men’s suit meticulously crafted by the artist after one of his own. Beuys later claimed that the suit symbolised “protection of the individual from the world,” not to mention the fundamental isolation of the human condition, after donning it for a 1970 performance.

Beuys was fired from his professorship at the Kunstakademie in 1972, in part because of his unconventional practise of welcoming anyone to his classroom. Beuys never held the view that anyone can become an artist simply by attending art school; rather, he simply believed that anyone who wishes to attend art school should be able to do so, regardless of natural talent.

Art performances by Beuys in the 1970s became increasingly complex. It was only by adding new elements to what was already a well-established palette of felted animals and organic materials that he could suggest new symbolic meanings and inject a new visual syntax into what he called his own brand of “Conceptual art.” Beuys visited New York City for three days in 1974 to perform I Like America and America Likes Me at the Rene Block Gallery. A wild coyote, a felt blanket, straw, and a triangle were some of the items that Beuys had previously placed in the space, which he would later use to wrap himself in. When the artist insisted on using an ambulance to travel to and from the gallery each day, it was a way to extend this conceptual montage into everyday life, as he was transported on a stretcher between the ambulance and the gallery (or his temporary residence).

Late Life

Following his dismissal from his professorship in 1972, Beuys founded a number of political organisations in his later years, including the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research (1974) and the German Green Party (Grüne Partei Deutschlands) (1980). All the while, his “Social Sculpture” concept remained the driving force behind Beuys’s art, with the implicit message being that society itself was the real “art work” in any of his endeavours. One of the artist’s most controversial works of art is 7000 Oaks (1982–1987), a piece of land art, urbanisation, and environmental activism all rolled into one.

Beuys died of heart failure on January 23, 1986, in Düsseldorf, not far from his birthplace, after a long illness. Other people continued to plant 7000 Oaks trees after Beuys died, implying the artist’s presence long after his own soma had faded into obscurity. He is one of few artists whose life and works continue to spark debate and a sense of mystery over what constitutes art’s legitimate province and what might constitute human expression.

It has been more than three decades since Joseph Beuys’s death in 1986, but his insistence on the fundamentally democratic nature of human creativity suggests that every fully thinking and feeling person is, by definition, an artist. When it became increasingly popular in the 1990s that art should address social, political, and related concerns by blurring the lines between its own practise as an academic discipline and everyday reality, Beuys played a larger role in lending credence to the notion. While he had always made an impact on his fellow Fluxus colleagues since the early 1960s. Fluxus happenings and ecological art, as well as a current generation’s fascination with chance, random encounters between an artist and her/his audience, the participation of the audience in the art work’s completion over time, the incorporation of everyday materials within interactive installations and happenings, and so forth – indeed much of what has come to fall unnoticed in the art world has been influenced by this meeting of studio and street (see the book of the same name by French curator and art theorist Nicolas Bourriaud). He has also had a lasting impact on environmental art, as evidenced by Robert Smithson’s work from the 1960’s to today.

Although Beuys did not officially start the Fluxus movement in the 1960s, his widely recognised practise and example have had a lasting impact on the movement. When it comes to the aesthetic of social sculpture by Beuys, which suggested that art could have a transformative effect on an individual’s life and the larger cultural context, this is especially true. He held the view that if one is an artist by default, one can be an artist anywhere or in any situation – the studio, classroom, or “street” – all of which provide equal opportunities for creative exploration.

Famous Art by Joseph Beuys

Woman/Animal Skull

1956-1957

During Beuys’s early experimental phase, he produced thousands of drawings as part of a self-imposed aesthetic asceticism programme. This work on paper is from that period. As if on a frantic quest for self-enlightenment, Beuys spent most of this period working alone, searching for a new artistic language that would combine the spiritual and physical, solid and fluid, ephemeral and permanent, at the same time. The Woman/Animal Skull depicts a fusion of rational and instinctive thought, or the minds of humans and animals, emerging from a state of primordial organic disorder.

Fat Chair

1964-1985

Using organic components of fat and wood, Beuys creates a composite metaphor for the human body, its impermanence, and the tendency for social life to conform to constructed conventions in his Fat Chair installation. Fat Chair was created in 1964 and housed in a temperature-controlled museum display case until 1985, when the fat had almost completely decomposed and essentially evaporated. Through the use of these basic organic compounds, viewers may have imagined themselves sitting in this chair, giving Fat Chair the status of a “proxy” for self-reflection on the transience of human life and the necessity of channelling one’s own organic and, alas, ephemeral energies deliberately and expeditiously.

How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare

1965

Beuys’ head and face were covered in honey and gold leaf, and a slab of iron was tied to one boot and a felt pad to the other, as he cradled a dead hare in his arms. It was as if Beuys was playing a piece of strange music (or a macabre bedtime story) to the animal carcass, whispering to it about his own drawings on the walls. Beuys would walk around the cramped space, one footstep muffled by the felt and the other amplified by the iron, to change the bleak rhythm of this scenario. In addition to their symbolic and literal meanings, each item in the room was chosen for its symbolic potential and its literal significance: a wilting fir tree, the honey, the felt and the fifty-dollars worth of gold leaf, for example. While Beuys continued to produce installations and performances in the years that followed, the artist had established a new visual syntax that would influence all future conceptual artists to come.

Homogenous Infiltration for Grand Piano

1966

When Beuys wrapped a grand piano in plain grey felt, he effectively muffled and muzzled a massive sonic instrument normally used for the creation of music. Unlike many of his other works, this one’s title reveals a lot of its meaning. Homogenous implies that the composite work is, or has recently become, a single item, something previously shattered and healed or made whole again. An instrument’s return to the practical realm of the bourgeois living room or recital hall may be referred to as “infiltration.” To the artist’s own experience after being shot out of the sky while serving in World War II, and to the German nation’s own desperate aspiration for a new kind of postwar, collective composure, the entire ensemble relates.

The Pack

1969

Beuys’s healing fable by nomadic Tartars during World War II is perhaps the artist’s most intimately depicted self-portrait in this work. To the Volkswagon Bus are twenty sleds, each equipped with what Beuys considered essential for personal survival in the event of an unknown (or unanticipated) human or natural calamity. This is a sure sign of an entire era of antiwar demonstration, international social upheaval, and underlying global nuclear Cold War dread. What’s more, contrary to popular belief, the sleds are not being towed by the bus but rather are disembarking from it. There is evidence that each sled is an autonomous, sentient being, born in the wild to find other stranded animals and bring them back to safety.

7000 Oaks: City Forestation Instead of City Administration

1982-1987

An environmentalist and eco-urban planner, 7,000 Oaks was fundamentally a work of time, or “process,” according to its subtitle. Over the course of several years, Beuys and a team of volunteers planted 7,000 oak trees in the small German city of Kassel, each one accompanied by a basalt stone. To put it another way, the “social sculpture” that Beuys created in the city’s social spaces – from economic to political to cultural – was the culmination of his efforts to transform the city’s physical, spiritual, and metaphorical landscape. A guest curator organises Documenta 7, an international exhibition of modern and contemporary art, in Kassel, Germany, every five years, and this was the first time 7000 Oaks was shown there (since 1955). It wasn’t until five years after Beuys’s death that the ecological “happening” he started officially came to an end at the Documenta 8 exhibition.

BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)

Best for Students and a Huge Time Saver

• Fluxus and Conceptual art movements of the 1950s and early 1980s were influenced by Joseph Beuys’ work in Europe and the United States during this time period.
• Although Beuys worked in many different media, he was most known for his process-oriented “action” art, which he performed for the audience to demonstrate how artistic expression can have a healing effect on the artist and those who view it.
• When it comes to his work, Beuys is best known for his use of animal fat and felt, both of which had personal significance to the artist.
• Additionally, they appeared repeatedly in works implying a connection between “everyday life,” common materials, and art.
• Fluxus, the avant-garde art movement of the 1960s, saw Beuys as a key figure.
• A long tradition of “heroic,” or object-oriented, painting and sculpture in Asia, Europe, and the United States came to an end at that time (much recently typified by Abstract Expressionism).
• These artists, influenced by experimental music, began using “found” and “everyday” objects to create “happenings,” “impermanent installation art,” and/or other largely action-oriented events that are more ephemeral and time-based.
• Beuys demonstrated how art could begin with a personal experience but also address universal artistic, political, and/or social ideas during the 1950s and early 1980s (i.e. topical issues of the day).
• In his 1965 solo performance, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, he poetically suggests the healing potential of art for a humanity seeking self-renewal and a renewed sense of hope for the future through the use of materials of personal significance (one foot wrapped in felt, the cradling of a recently deceased animal) (one should recall that Beuys came of age in the immediate postwar period, when many Germans were just coming to terms with many traumatic aspects of their recent past).A “higher humanitarian attitude,” or way of conducting oneself in all aspects of daily life is what Beuys advocated in both his teaching and his mature “action” and “sculptural” artworks he made.
• Art has increasingly become a vehicle for social commentary and political activism in recent years, and Beuys’s work heralds this shift.
• As a result of his work, Beuys frequently blurred the lines between art and life, and fact and fiction, by suggesting that what one believed to constitute “reality” mattered more in matters of human action (social/political) and personal creativity than any definition of everyday reality based on traditional standards or social codes of so-called “proper” conduct.
• ChildhoodJoseph Beuys was born in the German city of Krefeld, which is located in the country’s northwest.
• To the merchant Josef Jakob Beuys and his wife, Johanna Maria Margarete Hulsermann, he was an only child.
• It was an upper-middle-class family from the northern Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany.
• As soon as Beuys was born, the family moved to Kleve, a small industrial town in the south of the country for work.
• A book-burning rally held by the newly formed National Socialist German Workers’ Party (or Nazi Party) in Kleve in 1933, when Beuys was just 12 years old, rescued Carolus Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae (1735), one of history’s most groundbreaking works of scientific literature.
• When he was just a teenager, Beuys was compelled by law to join the Hitler Youth, an ironic twist in the story.
• Beuys’ teachers at Kleve recognised his early interest in drawing and music while he was in elementary and secondary school.
• The young Beuys also showed a talent for history, mythology, and the social and natural sciences in addition to the arts.
• Despite his decision to become a doctor, Beuys’s ambition was short-lived when he joined the Luftwaffe, the German air force, in 1941. (
• allegedly to avoid the draft).
• Early LifeEven though Beuys signed up for the military on his own accord, he had no desire to participate in any kind of combat.
• He continued his studies in biology and zoology during the early 1940s in order to keep up with his interest in the medical field.
• It is widely accepted that Beuys’s life was forever altered in 1944 when his plane was shot down over the Crimean Front, but this is once again unverifiable according to Beuys’s own account of 1979.
• He claims that a nomadic Tartar tribe saved his life by rubbing animal fat on his bruised and battle-worn body, then wrapping him in felt to raise his body temperature.
• An important and prominent role in much of Joseph Beuys’ subsequent work as an artist would be played by the importance of ancient healing aids – in this case, fat and felt – for enriching and sustaining human mind, body, and spirit.
• Several eyewitness accounts contradict Beuys’s romantic and exotic parables, and there were reportedly no Tartar tribesmen occupying the region where Beuys’s alleged military plane crash occurred, according to reports.
• Even if Beuys’ later works were based solely on fiction, they would still incorporate elements of fact.
• When it comes to his decision to devote himself to art and avant-garde culture in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Beuys’s tale of heroic rescue by Tartars (whether or not true) was a key factor.
• Beuys enrolled in the monumental sculpture programme at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf when he returned to civilian life in 1946.
• Ewald Matare, a well-known German painter and sculptor whose work was once deemed “degenerate” by the Nazis, was a good teacher for Beuys.
• Beuys was admitted to Matare’s more exclusive master sculpture class in 1951 after several years of success in this small group (Beuys finally graduated two years later).Beuys shared a studio with Erwin Heerich, one of Germany’s most important 20th-century sculptors, during his studies with Matare.
• The artist also draws inspiration from Wilhelm Lehmbruck.
• Although Beuys’s early influences were primarily distant, they included the work of Italian Renaissance painters, Galileo’s scientific theories, the writings of James Joyce, and the works of German romantics like Goethe, Novalis and Schiller.
• Beuys had a difficult time in the 1950s, both in terms of his personal life and his artistic endeavours.
• To cope with the constant financial hardships that plagued him, he spent most of his waking hours in front of the easel, creating thousands of drawings.
• His goal was to find a new artistic language that could emerge from an intense period of self-reflection.
• This goal was furthered by his decision to focus on only three themes: animals, a female figure, and the landscape.
• Beuys’ devotion to pencil, ink, and oil pigments was matched by a rejection of all other media.
• Work such as Woman/Animal Skull (1956-57), an experimental and possibly mystical abstraction, is an example of the type that emerged from such a strict regimen.
• The epic novel Ulysses, by James Joyce, was the inspiration for a series of drawings by Joseph Beuys in the early 1960s (1918-22).
• For this project, Beuys claims that Joyce himself asked him to create the drawings, which he did (i.e. as though by way of telepathy, as Joyce had died in 1941).
• Beuys’s fascination with a creative process that emerges from somewhere between fact and fiction, and physical and metaphysical self-creation, is evident in the claim that a literary ghost could act as his personal muse.
• This suggests that the simplest gesture could ultimately bear the status of a profound artistic statement.
• Mid LifeBeuys’s first official recognition came in 1961, when he was named Professor of Monumental Sculpture at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, following a tumultuous childhood (where he himself had earlier studied).
• By abolishing all entry requirements (virtually anyone could join his classes), and working with a group of experimental creatives at Düsseldorf, among them Nam June Paik and others closely affiliated with the recently established Fluxus Group, Beuys made significant waves while occupying this position.
• All of these new connections would have an immediate impact on Beuy’s early attempts at performing arts.
• The resulting works have come to symbolise Beuys’ aesthetic sensibility in the public imagination.
• To be considered Fluxus, an artist had to be willing to experiment with a wide range of media.
• When a student at the Technical College Aachen punched Beuys in the face while the artist was in the middle of a performance in 1964, the event had to be called off.
• When a photograph of Beuys, bloodied and raised like a prizefighter’s, began to circulate, the work would continue to resonate.
• It was at this point that Beuys decided to take advantage of the opportunity, writing up a fictional curriculum vitae in order to make his life seem more heroic than it actually was.
• One year later, in Dresden, at the Galerie Schmela, Beuys gave his first solo performance.
• Many Beuys fans have come to regard this performance piece as one of his most important works since its debut on November 26, 1965.
• Taking the form of a morbid prophet, Beuys stood in the store window, clad only in a cast iron foot piece, holding a dead rabbit in his lap and making ritualistic, mysterious gestures as though the world’s future depended on the scrappy pulpit’s mysterious beats.
• Beuys had been gaining traction in the art world and the general public since the late 1970s, and this work solidified that interest.
• Non-art or found materials such as animal fat were also frequently used by Joseph Beuys in his sculptures and conceptual artworks.
• This organic material, which Beuys used in both its liquid and solid states, suggests a great spiritual substance by its implicit potential for continuous metamorphosis.
• Beuys’ art spoke to people on a physical and psychological level because it was made from something that was fundamentally a life-sustaining material in and of itself.
• Work like Fat Corners (1960) and Fat Chair (1961) demonstrate this (1964).
• After working with drawing in the 1950s, Joseph Beuys concentrated on manipulating felt as a sculpture medium, sound barrier and poetic metaphor in the 1960s and 1970s, as he had in the 1950s.
• There are a number of works by Beuys that demonstrate his wide range of techniques, including Homogenous Infiltration for Grand Piano, Homogenous Infiltration for Cello, The Pack, and Felt Suit, the last of which is notable for its absence of Beuys’ usual elaborate and metaphorical titles.
• Feel Suit was a simple men’s suit meticulously crafted by the artist after one of his own.
• Beuys later claimed that the suit symbolised “protection of the individual from the world,” not to mention the fundamental isolation of the human condition, after donning it for a 1970 performance.
• Beuys was fired from his professorship at the Kunstakademie in 1972, in part because of his unconventional practise of welcoming anyone to his classroom.
• Beuys never held the view that anyone can become an artist simply by attending art school; rather, he simply believed that anyone who wishes to attend art school should be able to do so, regardless of natural talent.
• Art performances by Beuys in the 1970s became increasingly complex.
• It was only by adding new elements to what was already a well-established palette of felted animals and organic materials that he could suggest new symbolic meanings and inject a new visual syntax into what he called his own brand of “Conceptual art.”
• Beuys visited New York City for three days in 1974 to perform I Like America and America Likes Me at the Rene Block Gallery.
• A wild coyote, a felt blanket, straw, and a triangle were some of the items that Beuys had previously placed in the space, which he would later use to wrap himself in.
• When the artist insisted on using an ambulance to travel to and from the gallery each day, it was a way to extend this conceptual montage into everyday life, as he was transported on a stretcher between the ambulance and the gallery (or his temporary residence).
• Late LifeFollowing his dismissal from his professorship in 1972, Beuys founded a number of political organisations in his later years, including the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research (1974) and the German Green Party (Grüne Partei Deutschlands) (1980).
• All the while, his “Social Sculpture” concept remained the driving force behind Beuys’s art, with the implicit message being that society itself was the real “art work” in any of his endeavours.
• One of the artist’s most controversial works of art is 7000 Oaks (1982–1987), a piece of land art, urbanisation, and environmental activism all rolled into one.
• Beuys died of heart failure on January 23, 1986, in Düsseldorf, not far from his birthplace, after a long illness.
• Other people continued to plant 7000 Oaks trees after Beuys died, implying the artist’s presence long after his own soma had faded into obscurity.
• He is one of few artists whose life and works continue to spark debate and a sense of mystery over what constitutes art’s legitimate province and what might constitute human expression.
• It has been more than three decades since Joseph Beuys’s death in 1986, but his insistence on the fundamentally democratic nature of human creativity suggests that every fully thinking and feeling person is, by definition, an artist.
• When it became increasingly popular in the 1990s that art should address social, political, and related concerns by blurring the lines between its own practise as an academic discipline and everyday reality, Beuys played a larger role in lending credence to the notion.
• While he had always made an impact on his fellow Fluxus colleagues since the early 1960s.
• Fluxus happenings and ecological art, as well as a current generation’s fascination with chance, random encounters between an artist and her/his audience, the participation of the audience in the art work’s completion over time, the incorporation of everyday materials within interactive installations and happenings, and so forth – indeed much of what has come to fall unnoticed in the art world has been influenced by this meeting of studio and street (see the book of the same name by French curator and art theorist Nicolas Bourriaud).
• He has also had a lasting impact on environmental art, as evidenced by Robert Smithson’s work from the 1960’s to today.
• Although Beuys did not officially start the Fluxus movement in the 1960s, his widely recognised practise and example have had a lasting impact on the movement.
• When it comes to the aesthetic of social sculpture by Beuys, which suggested that art could have a transformative effect on an individual’s life and the larger cultural context, this is especially true.
• He held the view that if one is an artist by default, one can be an artist anywhere or in any situation – the studio, classroom, or “street” – all of which provide equal opportunities for creative exploration.

Information Citations

En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.

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