About Beuys

Joseph Beuys was a German sculptor, art teacher, and performance artist, active from the 1950s to the 1980s. Beuys was heavily influenced by folklore, myth, humanism, social philosophy, particularly anthroposophicism, and German Romanticism with their ideas about the individual, the focus on nature, and the environment. He was especially interested in

animals and the mystical powers myth and folklores had imbued in them. His work spoke to naturalistic view of society, encouraging everyone to participate in society through meaningful creative acts (He remarked famously, “every human being is an artist.”) Beuys saw himself in a sort of shamanistic role that channeled the spirituality of human existence in the natural world, initiating a healing and rehabilitative process of society, which would arguably manifest in his later overt political activism. Through this lens of spiritual renewal from an understanding of natural society against the “repressive effects of a senile social system,” we can look at Beuys’s artistic work.

His performance work was first influenced by his encounters with Nam June Paik and the Fluxus group. The Fluxus artists put on public “concerts” that mixed literature, music, visual art, performance art, and everyday life. His engagement with the Fluxus group pushed him further to develop his ideas about the “evolutionary and revolutionary power” of art in society.

Perhaps, his most famous performance (or “actions” as he called them) was I Like America and America Likes Me. For this performance, Beuys was transported in an ambulance from the airplane from to a building room. He did not want to touch American soil, partly in protest of the Vietnam War. Wrapped in a felt blanket, Beuys spent three days in a room with a coyote, a powerful god in Native American folklore that could move between the spiritual and physical world. Everyday, fifty copies of the Wall Street Journal would be brought into the room, which the coyote urinate on. Beuys kept his attention on the coyote throughout the entire three days, and the coyote varyingly regarded Beuys with caution, aggression, and companionship. The coyote, like Native Americans, had been pushed to extinction by modern society, and the performance was an attempt to heal part of this damage.

Years earlier, his action How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, involved Beuys sitting in a room covered in honey and gold in mumbling explanations of drawings on the walls into a dead hare’s ears, which he held in his arms. An iron slab was attached to his feet. The metals iron and gold symbolized connection to the earth and alchemical inquiry, respectively. Anthroposophicism, an influence upon him, taught that bees were the ideal society of brotherhood, and their product was seen in the honey poured on him. The performance spoke to the nature of ideas and their communication, and what this meant for education and politics.

Beuys later formulated an idea of society as one great work of art in which all of its participants, all of us, were artists transforming society through our words and deeds. From this understanding of art, ourselves, and society, we can see how “performance art” is one way to consciously shape the great work of art that is our society.