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Joseph Beuys
, 223 pages, with black and white photographs
- GenresArt
223 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1987
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July 13, 2025
Beuys ist mir namentlich die letzten zwei Jahre immer mal wieder durch einen sehr guten Freund zu Ohren gekommen. Nun werkelt eben dieser an seinem Bachelor und erzählte mir beim gemeinsamen Lesen und Arbeiten, dass er seinen »Erweiterten Kunstunterricht« an Beuys angelehnt hat. Bei Beuys finden wir den »Erweiterten Kunstbegriff«. Schon wieder Beuys. Dann lese ich ein Zitat in der Arbeit, in welchem Beuys sich mit einem Hasen vergleicht, und konstatiert: So wie der Hase ohne Ohren kein Hase ist, ist der Beuys ohne Hut kein Beuys. Er redet auch noch von sich in der Dritten Person. Jetzt reicht es! Ich will wissen wer Joseph Beuys ist. Ein Typ mit Filzhut, Anglerweste, extravaganten fulminanten Mänteln und einem Totenschädel-Gesicht.
Kleine Recherche und diese Biografie sollte sowohl Leben als auch Werk am "besten" einführen. Deswegen der Kauf.
Joseph Beuys (1921-1986). Mist, das 100Jährige knapp verpasst. Egal. Heiner Stachelhaus hat einen quasi in beuyssche Trance versetzt und in sein Leben blicken lassen – dokumentativ, belletristisch; vor allem aber: magisch.
Beuys der Schamane, der Künstler, der Magier, der Merkwürdige, der Rebell – Der Beuys. (So nannten ihn im übrigen seine Frau und seine Kinder. Einfach: Der Beuys.)
Beuys ist ein großer Wandler und ich bin ehrlich dankbar, diesen nicht über sein Werk kennengelernt zu haben, sondern Zugang gefunden zu haben qua dieser Biografie. Sein Werk ist – eigen. Aber darum ging es wohl. Er wollte »Gegenbilder« schaffen, Energieschübe – das durch Gewohnheit verschüttete in den Gesichtskreis rücken. Durch Intuition erschaffen.
Ein von Rudolf Steiner kommender, den Krieg in der Luft durchlebter – und hat scheinbar ein Schlüsselerlebnis nach Absturz auf der Krim mit den Tataren (Filz, Fett) gehabt, mystisch! –, rebellisch, rigoros für alle einstehender akademischer Kunstprofessor. Ein, durch seine Rigorosität eigen moralischer "Erretter". Aber auch ein sich inszenierender.
Aussagen wie "Wo ich bin, ist Akademie." und nach dem Verlust der Professur 1972 – es ist komplexer, aber weil er sich für »alle« akademisch eingesetzt hat – "Demokratie ist lustig." beschreiben Beuys' Leidenschaft im Kampf gegen akademische Gesellschaft und "demokratisches System."
Beuys' große Leistung sind die Konzepte des "Erweiterten Kunstbegriff" und der "sozialen Plastik". Sein inniger Bezug zu den Tieren, fast schon seine immanent animalische Verbundenheit, haben ihn diese Konzepte wachsen lassen. Vor allem verdankt er es der Biene. Den Wärmecharakter, die Plastik – bei Plastik ist natürlich auch Wilhelm Lehmbruch zu nennen – und den Heilcharakter, den er über die Kunst in allem sieht, kommt von den Bienen.
Bei Stachelhaus heißt es: »Beuys, der im Begriff war, aus der Erkenntnis der Ausweglosigkeit eines naturwissenschaftlich orientierten Weltbildes die Kunst als das Lebensprinzip schlechthin zu entdecken […].« Das Lebensprinzip anders heißt bei Beuys auch: "Jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler." Aber nicht im traditionellen Sinne, sondern in einem neuen. Das ganze Sein und Tun sei durch Kunst. Der Mensch ist bei Beuys das naturalistische Weltbild überwindende, schöpferische Wesen. Bei Beuys finden wir einen besonderen Menschen, der nicht überheblich aneignend, gar zerstörerisch ist – vgl. Schimmelüberzug der Erde bei Schopenhauer. Ein von Polarität getriebener Mensch – vgl. Beuys »Palazzo Regale« –, der es durch sich selbst schafft, den Materialismus zu überwinden.
Ein Mensch, bei dem die Intuition der höher zu wertende Erkenntnisapparat ist als die Ratio.
So entfaltet sich Beuys Mensch auch als einer, der den Tod lächelnd erwarten kann. Stachlehaus schreibt: »Den Tod verstand er als Beginn der Wiedergeburt. Im Tod vollziehe sich das eigentliche Leben. Er war überzeugt davon, daß gerade das Leiden des Menschen helfe.« Leid als Chance – Beuys äußert aus eigener Erfahrung: eine von Zerstörung geprägte Physis. Eine durchlauchte psyche durch eine schwere Depression, die "er als Therapie für sich selbst gewertet" hat!
»Da aber die alten Glaubenskräfte nicht mehr funktionieren, muß der Mensch aus eigener Kraft das Spirituelle erreichen.« und »Durch das Leiden entstehe etwas geistig Höheres.« – beides Gedanken, die in verschiedenen Schulen des Buddhismus großen Stellenwert darstellen; vgl. bspw. Bodhicaryavatara des Shantideva – als Aussprüche, die Hoffnung und Verantwortung an die Hand geben.
Das Leben ist Kunst. Jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler. Und am Ende heißt es: »Der Tod hält mich wach.« Ich freue mich auf die zweite Lektüre, auf das Schauen von Beuys-Interviews und auf weitere Beuys-Lektüre. Ein wahrlich inspirierendes Leben! :3
Kleine Recherche und diese Biografie sollte sowohl Leben als auch Werk am "besten" einführen. Deswegen der Kauf.
Joseph Beuys (1921-1986). Mist, das 100Jährige knapp verpasst. Egal. Heiner Stachelhaus hat einen quasi in beuyssche Trance versetzt und in sein Leben blicken lassen – dokumentativ, belletristisch; vor allem aber: magisch.
Beuys der Schamane, der Künstler, der Magier, der Merkwürdige, der Rebell – Der Beuys. (So nannten ihn im übrigen seine Frau und seine Kinder. Einfach: Der Beuys.)
Beuys ist ein großer Wandler und ich bin ehrlich dankbar, diesen nicht über sein Werk kennengelernt zu haben, sondern Zugang gefunden zu haben qua dieser Biografie. Sein Werk ist – eigen. Aber darum ging es wohl. Er wollte »Gegenbilder« schaffen, Energieschübe – das durch Gewohnheit verschüttete in den Gesichtskreis rücken. Durch Intuition erschaffen.
Ein von Rudolf Steiner kommender, den Krieg in der Luft durchlebter – und hat scheinbar ein Schlüsselerlebnis nach Absturz auf der Krim mit den Tataren (Filz, Fett) gehabt, mystisch! –, rebellisch, rigoros für alle einstehender akademischer Kunstprofessor. Ein, durch seine Rigorosität eigen moralischer "Erretter". Aber auch ein sich inszenierender.
Aussagen wie "Wo ich bin, ist Akademie." und nach dem Verlust der Professur 1972 – es ist komplexer, aber weil er sich für »alle« akademisch eingesetzt hat – "Demokratie ist lustig." beschreiben Beuys' Leidenschaft im Kampf gegen akademische Gesellschaft und "demokratisches System."
Beuys' große Leistung sind die Konzepte des "Erweiterten Kunstbegriff" und der "sozialen Plastik". Sein inniger Bezug zu den Tieren, fast schon seine immanent animalische Verbundenheit, haben ihn diese Konzepte wachsen lassen. Vor allem verdankt er es der Biene. Den Wärmecharakter, die Plastik – bei Plastik ist natürlich auch Wilhelm Lehmbruch zu nennen – und den Heilcharakter, den er über die Kunst in allem sieht, kommt von den Bienen.
Bei Stachelhaus heißt es: »Beuys, der im Begriff war, aus der Erkenntnis der Ausweglosigkeit eines naturwissenschaftlich orientierten Weltbildes die Kunst als das Lebensprinzip schlechthin zu entdecken […].« Das Lebensprinzip anders heißt bei Beuys auch: "Jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler." Aber nicht im traditionellen Sinne, sondern in einem neuen. Das ganze Sein und Tun sei durch Kunst. Der Mensch ist bei Beuys das naturalistische Weltbild überwindende, schöpferische Wesen. Bei Beuys finden wir einen besonderen Menschen, der nicht überheblich aneignend, gar zerstörerisch ist – vgl. Schimmelüberzug der Erde bei Schopenhauer. Ein von Polarität getriebener Mensch – vgl. Beuys »Palazzo Regale« –, der es durch sich selbst schafft, den Materialismus zu überwinden.
Ein Mensch, bei dem die Intuition der höher zu wertende Erkenntnisapparat ist als die Ratio.
So entfaltet sich Beuys Mensch auch als einer, der den Tod lächelnd erwarten kann. Stachlehaus schreibt: »Den Tod verstand er als Beginn der Wiedergeburt. Im Tod vollziehe sich das eigentliche Leben. Er war überzeugt davon, daß gerade das Leiden des Menschen helfe.« Leid als Chance – Beuys äußert aus eigener Erfahrung: eine von Zerstörung geprägte Physis. Eine durchlauchte psyche durch eine schwere Depression, die "er als Therapie für sich selbst gewertet" hat!
»Da aber die alten Glaubenskräfte nicht mehr funktionieren, muß der Mensch aus eigener Kraft das Spirituelle erreichen.« und »Durch das Leiden entstehe etwas geistig Höheres.« – beides Gedanken, die in verschiedenen Schulen des Buddhismus großen Stellenwert darstellen; vgl. bspw. Bodhicaryavatara des Shantideva – als Aussprüche, die Hoffnung und Verantwortung an die Hand geben.
Das Leben ist Kunst. Jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler. Und am Ende heißt es: »Der Tod hält mich wach.« Ich freue mich auf die zweite Lektüre, auf das Schauen von Beuys-Interviews und auf weitere Beuys-Lektüre. Ein wahrlich inspirierendes Leben! :3
December 14, 2016
Quotes:
Connection with Wilhelm Lehmbruck
inspired by him and received the WL Prize eleven days before his death
Beuys's own "law of the universe"--the principle that sculpture is all (social sculpture)--was not unfamiliar to Lehmbruck, to whom sculpture stood for inner experience
That the burdens of life led both to deep depression--around the age of 35 in both cases--is another of their strange existential parallels
Belgian symbolist writer Maurice Maeterlinck, author of The Life of the Bee, developed a mystical pantheism
The interplay of myth, inner life, and natural science is the foundation of his concept of Social Sculpture, which Beuys was later to posit as the goal of his "expanded concept of art"
Recognizing the hopelessness of a scientifically orientated world view, Beuys was starting out to discover art as a principle of life
Steiner's Threefold Commonwealth movement in germany: 3 separate systems within state: cultural, political, economic. Decentralized state, worker cooperatives/councils, art, science, religion, and education rooted in the principle of liberty.
Politicians, entrepreneurs, and labor unionists were united in their opposition to Steiner's concepts.
Beuys and Klein shared serious interest in the music and philosophy of Wagner--in particular his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art--and in the idea that art equals life.
The international Fluxus movement, which, as a successor to Dada, had abolished the traditional boundaries between art forms. The name Fluxus meant that everything flowed into a single stream: visual art, music, theater, words, sound, gesture--it was all one big show, and spectators were welcome. The performers, with Beuys at the fore, promised exciting entertainment, with wrecked pianos, fat, flickering televisions, headstands, dead animals, primal sounds, pandemonium, and all varieties of tomfoolery.
During his depression Bueys had a carpenter from Kleve make him a wooden crate, which he insisted on having smoothly planed and finished. Then he smeared tar all over this beautifully finished crate, inside and out, and took it to his studio in Heerdt. His idea, as he later recalled, was that the crate was a black, empty, isolated space, in which investigations could take place and new experiences could occur. He felt compelled to sit inside it, to not be anymore, to simply stop living.
Later he would regard his depression as a purification: "This sort of crisis is a sign of either a lack of direction or of too many directions being taken at once. It is an unmistakable call to rectify things and to come to new solutions in specific directions."
When Beuys said everyone was an artist, he did not mean that everyone was a painter or a sculptor. He meant that everyone possessed creative faculties that must be identified and developed.
Creativity belongs to everyone anthropologically: medicine, agriculture, education, law, economics, administration. The concept of art applies to human work in general.
With Social Sculpture he goes beyond Duchampian readymade concerns with the museological into the anthropological. creativity to him was a science of freedom. all human knowledge comes from art; the concept
of science having evolved from creativity.
Human thought is sculpture made inside the person
Not until art had been integrated into every area of education and life could there be an effective spiritual and democratic society. He was totally certain of this.
A society that overcomes the alienation of art and develops widespread reciprocity through equality, liberty, solidarity
Art historian Udo Kultermann sees the artist as the modern shaman, this shaman produces no objects as their predecessor and their duty is to work through the abandonment of self, through self-sacrifice.
he was not trying to revive the primordial, but set signs for the future.
He always did the different thing: talking for a hundred days, wrapping himself in felt, standing on one spot for hours, living with a coyote, peeling gelatin off a wall, sweeping out a forest, explaining pictures to a dead hare, organizing a political party for animals, bandaging a knife after he had cut his finger.
"To what extent has Bueys doctrine become an alibi for amateurism? for people who see an easy way out of the burdensome demand for quality? For clowns who believe that a revolutionary attitude is the same thing as creativity?"[this was a review of an exhibit he'd withdrawn from, a showcase of all previous students who wanted to show something]
[a postive review was as follows:] "Buey's students are now to be found in education and social work, in schools, shelters, hospitals. The utopian ideal of art as something that permeates the whole of life has begun to be realized."
Bueysian politics was untraditional. He said he'd long lived in another state, one where political work was human work again.
Beuys defined the objectives of the German Student Party as: total disarmament, the elimination of nationalistic interests and of civil emergency laws, the unity of Europe and of the world, the dissolution of dependence on East or West, and the formulation of new attitudes toward training, education, and research as the foundations of a world economy, world law, and world culture.
Income was defined as a basic human right: "In principle, any work done is work for others."
The end of dependence on wages will have favorable psychological consequences.
Wanted "a new society of real socialism"
Bueys: "Nonviolent, not because at this time or for particular reasons violence does not seem to promise success. No. Nonviolent for reasons of human, spiritual, moral, political, and social principles. Human dignity stands or falls by the inviolability of the person, and anyone who disregards this departs completely from the plane of humanity. And yet the very systems that require transformation are themselves based on violence in every imaginable form. For this reason, the use of violence in any way is an expression of conformity with the system, and reinforces the very thing that it seeks to destroy."[Mathilde finds on her phone and summarizes or quotes to Eli]
If he had "only" painted those ideas, in whatever way, they would have remained "only" paintings. And so Bueys worked with the fat that protects, the felt that warms, the copper that conducts, the honey that nourishes, the battery that takes a charge. He used aggregates, recievers, filters, transmitters, condensors, dynamos, tape machines, video recorders, telephones, Leyden jars, X-Rays. He worked with blood and with filth, with bandages, plaster, gauze, hypodermic needles, bones, hair, fingernails, gelatin.
[Describing an installation] Decayed rats in withered grass. A frankfurter painted with brown floor paint. Bottles, large and small, stoppered and unstoppered. Dead bees on a cake. Nearby a loaf of black bread, one end wrapped with black insulating tape. A tin box, filled with tallow, with a thermometer in it. Crucifixes made of felt, wood, plaster, chocolate. Blocks of fat as big as bricks, on top of an old electric stove, A baby's bottle. Brown chocolate bars, painted brown. Gray felt scraps. Bundles of old newspapers, tied with cords and painted with brown crosses. Moldy sausages. Two kettles wired to a piece of slate. Toenail clippings. A preserving jar filled with pears. Copper rods wrapped in felt. Sausage ends. Colored Easter egg shells. Dental impressions in tallow.
Allan Kaprow's Happenings in the 1950s. Who once defined Fluxus as "social, not aesthetic"
Syberian Symphony, 1st Movement: introduces a dead hare into it. Improvised free form music, some by Satie played, hung his hare on a blackboard, put little dabs of clay on the piano keys, stuck a twig in each, strung a wire from the hare to the piano--and pulled the hare's heart out. with this action the violence of such set him apart from his Fluxus colleagues.
He viewed Actions as a kind of therapy. Interpretations, in his view, were unartistic; and that went for self-interpretations in particular. He regarded them as a total negation of the effect of a work of art.
When Beuys set out to generate counterimages, he was clearly making a deliberate attempt to cross boundaries. And the expansion of art, and thus of human vision, is an utterly persuasive objective.
From time to time he bit into lumps of fat, laid the resulting dental impressions on the floor, pressed margarine into the hollows behind his knees and into his armpits, and deposited the resulting casts on the floor as well. Intermittently he sprang around the room like a hare.
A critic on horse performance: It is so painfully beautiful that it becomes utopian--and that means political.
He took the view that trees today are far more intelligent than people.
He saw art as the only therapy that could lastingly heal the wounds of the individual and of society.
Was it the opposite pole of life and thought, the cheerful, playful, Mediterranean element that captivated this intense Gothic, Rhineland mystic? Did it present him with his own counterimage?
Altho the Americans were much more bourgeois and less radicalized and agressive than their west german contemporaries , they were also more relaxed and open to new ideas. He praised the atmosphere of these lectures in america where there was never more laughter than before.
The americans had no very pronounced feeling for the uncanny, the obscure, the irrational, for the austerity of the Romanesque or the mysticism of the Gothic. He was profoundly alien, he struck them as a counterimage of themselves that disturbed their sense of security.
He was convinced that human beings are helped by suffering. He regarded his own period of depression as a form of therapy. according to Beuys, the world is enriched not by those that act but by those that suffer.
Connection with Wilhelm Lehmbruck
inspired by him and received the WL Prize eleven days before his death
Beuys's own "law of the universe"--the principle that sculpture is all (social sculpture)--was not unfamiliar to Lehmbruck, to whom sculpture stood for inner experience
That the burdens of life led both to deep depression--around the age of 35 in both cases--is another of their strange existential parallels
Belgian symbolist writer Maurice Maeterlinck, author of The Life of the Bee, developed a mystical pantheism
The interplay of myth, inner life, and natural science is the foundation of his concept of Social Sculpture, which Beuys was later to posit as the goal of his "expanded concept of art"
Recognizing the hopelessness of a scientifically orientated world view, Beuys was starting out to discover art as a principle of life
Steiner's Threefold Commonwealth movement in germany: 3 separate systems within state: cultural, political, economic. Decentralized state, worker cooperatives/councils, art, science, religion, and education rooted in the principle of liberty.
Politicians, entrepreneurs, and labor unionists were united in their opposition to Steiner's concepts.
Beuys and Klein shared serious interest in the music and philosophy of Wagner--in particular his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art--and in the idea that art equals life.
The international Fluxus movement, which, as a successor to Dada, had abolished the traditional boundaries between art forms. The name Fluxus meant that everything flowed into a single stream: visual art, music, theater, words, sound, gesture--it was all one big show, and spectators were welcome. The performers, with Beuys at the fore, promised exciting entertainment, with wrecked pianos, fat, flickering televisions, headstands, dead animals, primal sounds, pandemonium, and all varieties of tomfoolery.
During his depression Bueys had a carpenter from Kleve make him a wooden crate, which he insisted on having smoothly planed and finished. Then he smeared tar all over this beautifully finished crate, inside and out, and took it to his studio in Heerdt. His idea, as he later recalled, was that the crate was a black, empty, isolated space, in which investigations could take place and new experiences could occur. He felt compelled to sit inside it, to not be anymore, to simply stop living.
Later he would regard his depression as a purification: "This sort of crisis is a sign of either a lack of direction or of too many directions being taken at once. It is an unmistakable call to rectify things and to come to new solutions in specific directions."
When Beuys said everyone was an artist, he did not mean that everyone was a painter or a sculptor. He meant that everyone possessed creative faculties that must be identified and developed.
Creativity belongs to everyone anthropologically: medicine, agriculture, education, law, economics, administration. The concept of art applies to human work in general.
With Social Sculpture he goes beyond Duchampian readymade concerns with the museological into the anthropological. creativity to him was a science of freedom. all human knowledge comes from art; the concept
of science having evolved from creativity.
Human thought is sculpture made inside the person
Not until art had been integrated into every area of education and life could there be an effective spiritual and democratic society. He was totally certain of this.
A society that overcomes the alienation of art and develops widespread reciprocity through equality, liberty, solidarity
Art historian Udo Kultermann sees the artist as the modern shaman, this shaman produces no objects as their predecessor and their duty is to work through the abandonment of self, through self-sacrifice.
he was not trying to revive the primordial, but set signs for the future.
He always did the different thing: talking for a hundred days, wrapping himself in felt, standing on one spot for hours, living with a coyote, peeling gelatin off a wall, sweeping out a forest, explaining pictures to a dead hare, organizing a political party for animals, bandaging a knife after he had cut his finger.
"To what extent has Bueys doctrine become an alibi for amateurism? for people who see an easy way out of the burdensome demand for quality? For clowns who believe that a revolutionary attitude is the same thing as creativity?"[this was a review of an exhibit he'd withdrawn from, a showcase of all previous students who wanted to show something]
[a postive review was as follows:] "Buey's students are now to be found in education and social work, in schools, shelters, hospitals. The utopian ideal of art as something that permeates the whole of life has begun to be realized."
Bueysian politics was untraditional. He said he'd long lived in another state, one where political work was human work again.
Beuys defined the objectives of the German Student Party as: total disarmament, the elimination of nationalistic interests and of civil emergency laws, the unity of Europe and of the world, the dissolution of dependence on East or West, and the formulation of new attitudes toward training, education, and research as the foundations of a world economy, world law, and world culture.
Income was defined as a basic human right: "In principle, any work done is work for others."
The end of dependence on wages will have favorable psychological consequences.
Wanted "a new society of real socialism"
Bueys: "Nonviolent, not because at this time or for particular reasons violence does not seem to promise success. No. Nonviolent for reasons of human, spiritual, moral, political, and social principles. Human dignity stands or falls by the inviolability of the person, and anyone who disregards this departs completely from the plane of humanity. And yet the very systems that require transformation are themselves based on violence in every imaginable form. For this reason, the use of violence in any way is an expression of conformity with the system, and reinforces the very thing that it seeks to destroy."[Mathilde finds on her phone and summarizes or quotes to Eli]
If he had "only" painted those ideas, in whatever way, they would have remained "only" paintings. And so Bueys worked with the fat that protects, the felt that warms, the copper that conducts, the honey that nourishes, the battery that takes a charge. He used aggregates, recievers, filters, transmitters, condensors, dynamos, tape machines, video recorders, telephones, Leyden jars, X-Rays. He worked with blood and with filth, with bandages, plaster, gauze, hypodermic needles, bones, hair, fingernails, gelatin.
[Describing an installation] Decayed rats in withered grass. A frankfurter painted with brown floor paint. Bottles, large and small, stoppered and unstoppered. Dead bees on a cake. Nearby a loaf of black bread, one end wrapped with black insulating tape. A tin box, filled with tallow, with a thermometer in it. Crucifixes made of felt, wood, plaster, chocolate. Blocks of fat as big as bricks, on top of an old electric stove, A baby's bottle. Brown chocolate bars, painted brown. Gray felt scraps. Bundles of old newspapers, tied with cords and painted with brown crosses. Moldy sausages. Two kettles wired to a piece of slate. Toenail clippings. A preserving jar filled with pears. Copper rods wrapped in felt. Sausage ends. Colored Easter egg shells. Dental impressions in tallow.
Allan Kaprow's Happenings in the 1950s. Who once defined Fluxus as "social, not aesthetic"
Syberian Symphony, 1st Movement: introduces a dead hare into it. Improvised free form music, some by Satie played, hung his hare on a blackboard, put little dabs of clay on the piano keys, stuck a twig in each, strung a wire from the hare to the piano--and pulled the hare's heart out. with this action the violence of such set him apart from his Fluxus colleagues.
He viewed Actions as a kind of therapy. Interpretations, in his view, were unartistic; and that went for self-interpretations in particular. He regarded them as a total negation of the effect of a work of art.
When Beuys set out to generate counterimages, he was clearly making a deliberate attempt to cross boundaries. And the expansion of art, and thus of human vision, is an utterly persuasive objective.
From time to time he bit into lumps of fat, laid the resulting dental impressions on the floor, pressed margarine into the hollows behind his knees and into his armpits, and deposited the resulting casts on the floor as well. Intermittently he sprang around the room like a hare.
A critic on horse performance: It is so painfully beautiful that it becomes utopian--and that means political.
He took the view that trees today are far more intelligent than people.
He saw art as the only therapy that could lastingly heal the wounds of the individual and of society.
Was it the opposite pole of life and thought, the cheerful, playful, Mediterranean element that captivated this intense Gothic, Rhineland mystic? Did it present him with his own counterimage?
Altho the Americans were much more bourgeois and less radicalized and agressive than their west german contemporaries , they were also more relaxed and open to new ideas. He praised the atmosphere of these lectures in america where there was never more laughter than before.
The americans had no very pronounced feeling for the uncanny, the obscure, the irrational, for the austerity of the Romanesque or the mysticism of the Gothic. He was profoundly alien, he struck them as a counterimage of themselves that disturbed their sense of security.
He was convinced that human beings are helped by suffering. He regarded his own period of depression as a form of therapy. according to Beuys, the world is enriched not by those that act but by those that suffer.
June 29, 2024
Wer Beuys' Werke "verstehen" möchte kommt nicht drum herum sich mit seiner Biographie auseinanderzusetzen. Heiner Stachelhaus bietet einen guten Überblick, der sich flüssig lesen lässt. Die tiefere Auseinandersetzung mit der sozialen Plastik und dem erweiterten Kunstbegriff fand ich sehr hilfreich und anschaulich. Allerdings war mir das Werk teilweise nicht kritisch genug.
February 25, 2025
a pesar de que un 25% del libro habla de datos que no me interesaban demasiado, el 75% restante lo disfruté un montón. más que nada por la teoría de la plástica de beuys (L).
October 15, 2014
Gutes Buch zum Einstieg. Stachelhaus erzählt noch unkritisch die Geschichte vom Absturz Beuys auf der Krim und der Pflege durch Tataren mit Filz und Fett. Diese Geschichte gilt mittlerweile als erfunden. Der Autor neigt ein wenig zum Anekdotischen. So schreibt er beispielsweise, dass die Mutter der Gebrüder van der Grinten Beuys von seiner schweren Depression geheilt habe. Dieser anekdotische Stil macht das Buch jedoch auch zu einer leichten Lektüre.
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