Joseph Beuys: The Reader

by Claudia Mesch (Editor/Translator), Viola Michely (Editor/Translator), Nickolas Decarlo (Translator)

Essential texts on a legendary twentieth-century artist, including key essays by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss, Peter Bürger, Thierry de Duve, and others.

Twentieth-century artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986)--legendary and self-mythologizing, enigmatic and controversial--remains an important influence on artists today. Beuys embraced radically democratic artistic and political ideas, proclaiming "Everyone is an artist," and advocating direct democracy through referenda. He famously worked with such nontraditional materials as felt, fat, and plants and animals both alive and dead. Beuys and his work--performance art, drawing, painting, sculpture, installation--received perhaps the most contentious reception of any postwar artist. This reader brings together the crucial writings on Beuys and his work, presenting key essays by prominent artists and critics from North America and Europe. With a foreword by Arthur C. Danto, "Style and Salvation in the Art of Beuys," Benjamin H. D. Buchloh's now classic 1980 essay, "Beuys, Twilight of the Idol," and influential texts by Vera Frenkel, Thierry de Duve, Rosalind Krauss, Peter Bürger, Irit Rogoff, and others, Joseph Beuys: The Reader is the most significant gathering of critical texts on this challenging artist that has ever been assembled. It will be essential reading for any student of Beuys and for all those interested in postwar art, the cult of the artist, and art's engagement with politics and society.

Contributors
Joseph Beuys, Eugen Blume, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Peter Bürger, Jean-François Chevrier, Catherine David, Thierry de Duve, Vera Frenkel, Stefan Germer, Rosalind Krauss, Barbara Lange, Dirk Luckow, Claudia Mesch, Viola Michely, Irit Rogoff, Gregory Ulmer, Theodora Vischer, Antje von Graevenitz, Dorothea Zwirner

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

352 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 2007

Reviews

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very well curated collection of essays that manages to make an extremely complex artist even more complex, in my understanding of him.

[Lewis Manalo · Rating 3 out of 5]

No, I didn't read the entire book, but my idea was to read enough to try to understand German scultor Joseph Beuys' work. After reading a little less than half the essays here, it seems like Bueys got a lot of his ideas from misundertanding the ideas of his predecessors. Key misunderstandings (as best outlined in Buchloh's essay) seem to be with Marcel Duchamp and Karl Marx.

I was mostly interested in Beuys' idea of "social sculpture," ("Every man is an artist" so, glibly, society is a sculpture) which I now know comes from his misunderstanding that bohemians fit in the category of the proletariat. In reality, Marx grouped bohemians with pickpockets and gamblers. Just goes to show you what Marx would've thought of Beuys (or any other Marxian artist of the Western world).

Is an idea founded on a false assumption of any use? Not to me.

[Albert]

I got to read a couple great quotes yesterday about the predatory parasitic modern spider and the classical bee of process, which seems to sum up the Broodthaers-Beuys controversy pretty well. I like Beuys.