Joseph Beuys

Joseph Heinrich Beuys , born with Krefeld the May 12th 1921 and deceased the January 23rd 1986 with Düsseldorf; German artist which produced many drawings, sculptures, of performances, of vidéos, installations and theories, in a very politically committed artistic unit.

The work of Joseph Beuys is a permanent questioning on the questions of the Humanisme, the ecology, the Sociologie - and in particular of the Anthroposophie. That led it in particular to define the concept of “social sculpture” as a total Work of art, stated in the years 1970 with “Each person an artist”, by the requirement of a creative dialog between the company and the Politique.

At the same time discussed and admired, Joseph Beuys is regarded as during German of the artists Fluxus, and counts with the international level like one major artists of the Contemporary art.

Biography

Its life starts already with a fiction. He declared being born with Clèves and not with Krefeld. It is by discovering illustrations of the Sculpture S of Wilhelm Lehmbruck that Beuys largely feels the will to become sculptor during the years 1930. It will obtain its baccalaureat in 1940, right before being enlisted as a pilot in the German air force.

An event will be determining for the continuation of its life: pilot of the Luftwaffe on the Russian face during the Second world war, it is crushed in the Crimea. Collected by nomads Tatares which give him honey as a food, it returns to the life, covered with grease and rolled up in felt covers. These elements which saved the life to him will become recurring in its artistic production (example: The Pump with Honey).

Consequently, starting from the end of the war, it becomes the emblematic figure of the movement Bewegung . Its artistic production made up of actions, from Painting S, Drawing S, Sculpture S, Vitrine S extends on more than 30 years when, simultaneously, it carries out many conferences (London, Düsseldorf, Brussels, Paris, New York,…) while teaching in many institutes (Düsseldorf, 1961-1972).

a life, a work

An individual mythology

It is starting from its accident in the Crimea (or on the myth of this accident) that it will build a work in autobiographical and metaphorical matter which it describes as " mythology individuelle". The Red Crosses which appear in certain of its works as homogeneous Infiltration for grand piano (1966) point out occulted, personal or ancestral sufferings thus. The symbolic system also passes by the use of not-conventional materials. The work of Joseph Beuys has a therapeutic vocation which aims at curing the company of its evils, which is not without pointing out the studies of medicine that it follows before being stopped by the war.

In August 1979, Bernard Lamarche-Vadel questions J. Beuys in connection with a psychic total crisis which has occurred between 1955 and 1957, which will make it possible the artist to flat carry out a handing-over of all that affects its life and to establish the basic principles of its art: “I think that the most total events are always narrowly dregs so that people call an individual mythology. Because for this period, there be not only one total research leading to a theory, which one could write on a black board like a diagram, but it was also a very productive period with much of concepts and what one will define later as initiatory features chamanistic. Also much of drawings were produced with a character radically different from the diagrams known as “theoretical” of the social body. There was also as from this time of the sculptures, then objects and performances, actions with character intermedia, with acoustics or the music. The latter were in the very logical continuation of the concepts already present in the drawings. ”

Materials

From 1964, Beuys includes in its installations of the organic materials which are due to him in heart since its air crash: the felt which isolates from the cold, the grease symbol of heat and energy, the Miel, but also the Cire of bee, the Ground, the Beurre, the died animals, the Sang, the Os, the Soufre, the Bois, the Poussière, the clippings of Ongle S, the Poil S. These last materials shows the re-use by Beuys of waste, not for the magnifier, but to put them at the service art and to explore their materiality.

Joseph Beuys is explained on the use of three of his materials of predilection in his objects and at the time of his actions, namely grease, copper and the felt: “Yes. I used more materials at the beginning and they were more conventional. But after the crisis, I began a new theory and I tried to find materials adequate to express my concerns with novelles energies, the problems of energy in general and my comprehension of the theory of the sculpture. I realized that no one did not know the real character of that about which he spoke each day, the sculpture, and which no one did not know the constellation of energies concerned by the sculpture. Also I tested pourfendre this idea conventional: sculpture; it was not for me only the fact of working in a special material but the need for creating other concepts of capacities of thought, capacities of will, capacities of sensitivity. Grease was for example for me a great discovery because it was the material which could seem very chaotic and unspecified. I could influence it with heat or the cold and I could transform it by average the nontraditional ones. Sculpture such as the temperature. I could thus transform the character of this grease of a condition chaotic and floating into a very hard formal requirement. Thus grease moved it of a very chaotic condition in a movement to finish in a geometrical context. I had three fields of power thus and, there, was an idea of the sculpture. It was the power under a chaotic condition, a condition of movement and a formal requirement. And these three elements, forms, movement and chaos were nongiven energy from where I drew my complete theory from the sculpture, of the psychology of humanity like being able of will, capacity of thought and capacity of sensitivity; and I found that it was there the adequate diagram to include/understand all the problems of the company. It, had also implied there organically the problem of the social body, individual humanity, the sculpture and art in itself. I needed means of expression. I had already grease. I in addition needed a very fast element, carrying electricity, it was copper. And then I needed another thing to isolate such sector from such other and I used the felt then. Thus, one could say that it was the first concept in the field of energy… but it is also a kind of anthropology! ” (Lamarche-Vadel, Joseph Beuys, is it butt have bicycle? , Marval, Beaubourg gallery, Sarenco-Strazzer, 1985)

A total work

A life plan

The originality of Beuys holds so that, nonglad to build its work on the account of its life (new step at the time), it turns over the terms of the problem and endeavors to carry out its work like an existential project.

The artist invents a character (recognizable with its hat and its waistcoat) who invests all the fields: professorship with the academy of the Art schools of Düsseldorf, creation of the Deutsche Studenten Partei in 1966, then of a international free University (proclamation of 1972); political activities and social various comprising an ironic and ambiguous dimension.

It is partly because of this subjacent irony that Beuys was décrié by certain of its contemporaries: it was reproached to him, inter alia, the mystical dimension of its work, the recovery of the History (the tragedy of the Second world war is a recurrent theme of its work), but especially a certain propensity with the Culte of the personality.

Social sculpture

Beuys creates the concept of social Sculpture having to make it possible to arrive at a company righter; he thinks that any man is artist, and that if each one uses its creativity all will be free.

Work of Beuys thus has many keys of entry; they what is called take part at the same time of a total work of art ( Gesamkunstwerk ) and artistic forms based on the feeling and the sensational one.

Analyzes few works

Wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt

The action entitled: How To explain the Tables With a Dead Hare is presented to the Schmela Gallery, with Düsseldorf, the November 26th 1965. This performance, one three hours duration, inaugurates the first exposure of Beuys in the gallery of the merchant Alfred Schmela. The artist holds on his center a died hare, as it would do it of a child. He moves in the gallery towards the tables to show them with died hare, approaching some until the touch. Its head is covered with honey and powder of gold; exceptionally it does not wear the felt hat which characterizes it so much. At several moments it assied on a Stool perched on a metal cupboard, while murmuring with hare of the incomprehensible things for the public. To the right foot of Beuys a long steel sole is attached against which is deposited a sole of of the same felt dimension. One of the feet of the stool is crimped in a roller of felt and one distinguishes under this same stool two bones. In these bones, just as in the steel sole, microphones are hidden to which the remarks murmured of the artist explaining are retransmis the direction of art to dead hare. The steps of Beuys moving with the animal in the gallery are also audible with the outside; indeed, the public does not have access directly to the scene. It can however observe it through a door glazed, a window and images vidéos retransmises on line outside the gallery on a television set.

This action affirms once again, a Concept “widened” of the concept of Art; the man is the principal link, and his bond in the tables as with a source of the Inconscient appears as important then as the tables in themselves.

I like America and America likes Me

Joseph Beuys begins this action whereas an exposure is announced to New York, in May 1974, in the gallery Rene Block. An ambulance is presented to the residence of the artist in Düsseldorf, in Germany. It is then taken charges some on a stretcher, emmitouflé in a felt cover. It then will achieve a voyage by plane bound for the United States, always insulated in its fabric. On its arrival with the Kennedy airport of New York, another ambulance awaits it. Surmounted by a gyrophare and escorted by the American authorities, it transports it until the place of exposure. In this way, Beuys will never press the American ground besides that of the gallery. It coexists then during three days with a wild Coyote, recently captured in the desert of the Texas, which waits behind a netting. With him, Beuys plays of its cane, its triangle and its flashlight. It wears its usual felt hat and recovers fabrics, they as felts some, as the coyote has fun to tear. Each day, of the specimens of the Wall Street Journal, on which the coyote urinates, are delivered in the cage. Filmed and observed by the visitors behind a netting, the man and the animal will divide together the felt, the straw and the territory of the gallery before the artist does not set out again as it had come.

For some, Beuys, through this action, underlines the existing gap between the modern nature and cities; by the means of the animal, it evokes also the decimated Amerindians of which it commemorates the massacre at the time of the conquest of the country. The coyote crystallizes hatreds thus, and is regarded as a messenger. For others, Beuys takes chamanic action here. It represents the spirit of the white man and the coyote that of the Indian spirit. The coyote is an intelligent animal, venerated formerly by the Indians of America and which was persecuted, exterminated by the white. Thus Beuys tries to reconcile the spirit of the white and the spirit of the Indians of America. He speaks even about karmic reconciliation of the continent of North America.

The cane is for him the symbol of Eurasia linked in an interdependent continent.

Beuys opens the way by this demonstration with a new form of artistic reflection: it is “conducting” as well as its Matériaux of predilection.

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