What is Art? E-Book

Joseph Beuys

• Herausgeber: Clairview Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Joseph Beuys's work continues to influence and inspire practitioners and thinkers all over the world, in areas from organizational learning, direct democracy and new money forms to new art pedagogies and ecological art practices. Here, in dialogue with Volker Harlan - a close colleague, whose own work also revolves around understandings of substance and sacrament that are central to Beuys - the deeper motivations and insights underlying 'social sculpture', Beuys's expanded conception of art, are illuminated. His profound reflections, complemented with insightful essays by Volker Harlan, give a sense of the interconnectedness between all life forms, and the foundations of a path towards an ecologically sustainable future. This volume features over 40 b/w illustrations.

Leseprobe

JOSEPH BEUYS was born in 1921 in Krefeld, Germany. Conscripted into the army, he suffered injuries from a plane crash. After a period in an English prison camp at the end of the war, he began to study natural science, but disillusioned with its basic tenets he switched to art. From 1947 to 1951 he studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy with the sculptor Edward Mataré. At that time he encountered Rudolf Steiner’s work. After years of struggling as an artist and times of deep depression, in 1961 Beuys became Professor of Monumental Sculpture at the Düsseldorf Academy (from which he was expelled in 1972 for challenging the quota system by taking on all students who wanted to learn). During the early 1960s he worked with groups like Fluxus whose experimental, interventionist ‘events’ had much in common with his own strategies and concerns. This led, from 1965, to life-long collaborations with artists like Nam June Paik.

Following his first gallery ‘action’ (a term he coined) in 1965, ‘Teaching Paintings to a Dead Hare’, Beuys’s international reputation grew. He became known for his largely silent actions with substances, creatures and instruments of all kinds, and provocative formulations like ‘Every Human being is an Artist’ and ‘Art=Capital’. He participated in many major international events, including the Venice Biennale, Edinburgh Festival and five Documenta exhibitions from 1964. In 1979 he was honoured with a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, New York. In the ‘80s – alongside his engagement with ‘the Greens’ and focus on the ‘defence of nature’ with colleagues like Petra Kelly – there were more exhibitions of Beuys’s work than of any other artist, and his influence on younger generations of artists has been extensive.

Beuys – alchemist, social visionary and artist – died in 1986, just after receiving the prestigious Lehmbruck Prize. He left behind him not only numerous large-scale installations and site-works, hundreds of provocative multiples and small objects, thousands of drawings (many on blackboards developed as part of ‘permanent conference’/dialogue actions), documented social sculpture forums about energy, new money forms and direct democracy, but above all a methodology, a ‘theory of sculpture’, and ideas like ‘parallel process’ and ‘social sculpture’. These ideas – underlying his major social process works such as ‘Organisation for Direct Democracy’, ‘7000 Oaks’, the ‘Free International University’ and the ‘Honey Pump at the Workplace’ – contain unexplored seeds and are a profound basis for new generations of ecological, social process and interdisciplinary practitioners.

VOLKER HARLAN was born in 1938 in Dresden, Germany. He studied arts, biology and theology, and was a priest of the Christian Community until 2001. He is a co-founder of the private University of Witten-Herdecke, and a lecturer on the philosophy of nature and aesthetics. His doctorate has been published under the title Das Bild der Pflanze in Wissenschaft und Kunst, bei Aristoteles und Goethe, der botanischen Morphologie des 19 und 20 Jahrhunderts und bei den Künstlern Paul Klee und Joseph Beuys. Volker Harlan was a friend of Joseph Beuys from 1972 until Beuys’s death in 1986.

WHAT IS ART?

Beuys passes on the flame

WHAT IS ART?

CONVERSATION WITH JOSEPH BEUYS

EDITED WITH ESSAYS BY VOLKER HARLAN

Translated by Matthew Barton and Shelley Sacks

The publishers gratefully acknowledge the support of this publication by the Joseph-Beuys Stiftung, Basel, Switzerland.

Clairview Books Hillside House, The Square Forest Row, RH18 5ES

www.clairviewbooks.com

Published by Clairview 2012

Originally published in German under the title Was ist Kunst?, Werkstattgespräch mit Beuys by Verlag Urachhaus, Stuttgart, 1986

© Verlag Freies Geistesleben & Urachhaus GmbH, Stuttgart This translation © Clairview Books 2004

The authors assert their moral rights to be identified as the authors of this work

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

Illustration credits and © 12, 13, 20, 37, Eva Beuys. All remaining illustrations by Volker Harlan, with the exception of 2, Utz Lederbogen; 3 and 6, Jochen Littkemann; 17, Stefan Winkler; 18,19 and 22, Peter Schata; 23, Renato Aprile; 36 and 37, Rudolf Wakonigg, Westf. Landesmuseum, Münster; 26-28 and 44-46, Theodor Schwenk

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 905570 56 0

Cover by Andrew Morgan Design Typeset by DP Photosetting, Aylesbury, Bucks.

Contents

Forewordby Shelley Sacks

A note on the textby Volker Harlan

How this discussion came aboutby Volker Harlan

I. Conversation with Joseph Beuys

What is art?

What forces give rise to art?

Practice and realization

A work develops

Sculptural objects from nature

The ‘good’ world as creation of the free human being

II. Art at the thresholdby Volker Harlan

Form structure and substance: four explorations

Fat formation

Processes in water

Colour – sensory and spiritual harmony

Substance – coming into being and dissolution

Notes

Foreword

Four decades after he first emerged on the international art scene Joseph Beuys’s drawings, objects, installations and actions that work with fat, felt, animals, batteries and blackboards, continue to resonate in the work of artists and students from around the world. Whilst Beuys has remained a seminal force in almost all areas of contemporary art – including action art and performance art, installation and conceptual art, environmental art and eco-art, socially engaged art and activist art – in the thinking about his work distortions and generalizations abound. One of the main reasons for this has to do with the lack of contact – especially in the English-speaking world – with the methodology and thinking, central to all Beuys’s work, that can help us understand the connections between the object-based work and the ‘expanded conception of art’.

In a series of social process works and actions occurring throughout the period from the mid-1960s until his death in 1986, Beuys worked with an expanded definition of ‘material’ that included will, speech and thought, which is also central to his ‘expanded conception of art’. This extended the work of others before him – including Schiller, Kandinsky, Rudolf Steiner and Paul Klee – to incorporate the democratic shaping of the society in which we live. Consistent with this expanded conception of art or ‘social sculpture’ (a term Beuys formulated in the seventies), he declared both the Free International University that he co-founded, as well as his teaching, to be his greatest artworks. His intensive collaboration on shaping a social model (as a framework for exploring alternatives to private and state capitalism) and his involvement in the co-founding of the German Green Party are also part of this radical and spiritualized understanding of art.

Almost two decades since his death, Beuys’s expanded conception of art informs groups and networks within and beyond the art world who are working toward a sustainable future in various ways. These include developing direct democracy processes, exploring new money forms, facilitating perceptual thought and connectedness as the basis for an ecological society, and opening up ‘space for new vision’ and attitudinal change. Contemporary social sculpture projects – like The Omnibus for Direct Democracy in Germany; the Foundation for Culture and Ecology in Romania; Exchange Values, that creates intimate spaces in and across different countries for an engagement with globalization; and the Sustaining Life Project, working internationally across disciplines and stakeholder groups – have a significant connection to Beuys’s work. Embedded in all these works, then and now, are important questions concerning the relationship of the experiential to transformative social process, or one could say, of the aesthetic to ethics.

For several years, I have been working with a formulation of ‘the aesthetic’ that goes back to its origins as the opposite of ‘anaesthetic’ or numbness. From this perspective, aesthetic comes to mean ‘enlivened being’. This not only turns the contemporary usage of ‘aesthetic’, as something rather cosmetic and superficial, on its head, but links such ‘enlivened being’ to responsibility, not as a moral imperative, but to response-ability, or the ability to respond! So this overcoming of numbness and enlivening of being can engage one, make one internally active, mobilize people’s imagination. It is something that Beuys, as well as others, like Bertolt Brecht, emphasized in different ways. Both developed a range of strategies that seek to mobilize us internally, to disrupt: to ‘scratch on the imagination’, as Beuys often put it, enabling us to become internally active and engaged.

Beuys’s ‘honey pump at the workplace’ (see Figs. 17-19), which involved thousands of people in a ‘permanent conference’ for 100 days at the documenta 6 (1977) exhibition of international contemporary art, as well as the large-scale ecological and social process projects like the ‘7000 Oaks’, are the ‘parallel process’ works that are particularly important in this regard. They hold valuable keys to these questions concerning the relationship between the experiential and transformative process, and to an understanding of Beuys’s work that actually takes on board his central practices and concerns.

In a recent discussion that posed the question of the relationship of Beuys’s objects and actions to his participatory, pedagogic and social process work, it was therefore particularly disappointing to discover that a representative of an international museum of contemporary art, in charge of organizing events linked to a major Beuys exhibition, did not know of Beuys’s ‘honey pump’ or his other dialogue process works. But more disturbing was that this individual could not see the relevance of finding ways to present such works and their social sculpture processes, either by reporting on them as they occurred then or by reference to their contemporary developments. As often happens when discussing Beuys with museums, there is a tendency to split his work into ‘artworks’ and that ‘other’ work, usually described as political actions. The rationale for excluding the ‘political actions’ this time was the need for critique as opposed to simply reasserting and glorifying what Beuys claimed and declared! But how can there be meaningful critique when the works central to an artist’s vision and practice – like the ‘honey pump’ is to Beuys – are excluded? Although there are no grounds for museum people not doing their homework, there are nevertheless insights to be gleaned from this discovery that the ‘honey pump at the workplace’ was completely unknown to someone involved in the contemporary dissemination of Beuys’s work.

One of them has to do with the nature and reception of ephemeral work per se. For even when an attempt is made to understand Beuys’s expanded conception of art and how his more traditional works relate to the participatory, social process works, there are difficulties due to their contextual and time-based character, and not because these social process works, as has sometimes been asserted, were purely conceptual. On the contrary, they were embodied and could be experienced, but only then, not now. The problems of engaging with them in the present, however, are compounded by the emphasis in such works on the shaping of new forms and ideas through dialogue or other non-traditional art forms. This makes it even more difficult for those who were not there to get a coherent sense of these works, even if there is good documentation of what took place and the visible elements can be seen in museums. The visible elements are no doubt interesting in themselves, but trying to engage with these social process works through their physical, material relics is a bit like trying to respond to a painting that has been cut in half! Beuys himself says in this conversation with Volker Harlan that the people and their participation in the ‘honey pump’ were a vital element of the work, without which it would not have existed.

So how do we adequately relate to these expanded artworks? How are we to understand what they share, if anything, with those objects, actions, drawings and installations that have a more enduring form? From Beuys’s own perspective it is the methodology that connects these apparently disparate things that will enable us to understand and work further with his expanded conception of art. Such an understanding will, needless to say, contribute to going beyond superficial echoes of what Beuys did then, as well as remedying the sense of having simply to accept claims that the participatory, direct democracy processes towards the shaping of a sustainable future, are art!

This conversation with Joseph Beuys, inspired by the question ‘what is art?’, has been translated into French, Dutch, Romanian and Hungarian and reprinted in the original German six times. There are many reasons for its wide dissemination. Although Beuys participated in hundreds of interviews and dialogues, few involved a person who knows the territory that Beuys explored here as deeply as Volker Harlan. Working for many years with substances like oil and ash in his role as a Christian Community priest, and writing and lecturing internationally on the connection between Beuys’s ‘theory of sculpture’ and the threefold process in Schiller and Rudolf Steiner, Harlan brings to this discussion an intimate knowledge and understanding of things that Beuys clearly shares, such as art as sacrament (see figure 49, top, centre) and a Goethean approach to science whose methodology perceives the dynamic being in things. Although the rich and complex territory explored in this book was clearly illuminating in the period when this conversation took place, because of the ephemeral and expanded nature of much of Beuys’s major work it is even more important now. If we are to take Beuys’s ‘expanded conception of art’ or ‘social sculpture’ seriously, and not simply use these formulations as generalized, generic terms for all beyond-the-gallery social art exchanges and all cross artform and interdisciplinary work, we need to understand much more of what underpins them. The insights and approach to perceptual thought (bildhaftes Denken) contained in this book provide us with the means.

In this detailed conversation with Beuys and the accompanying essays by Harlan on processes and substances central to Beuys’s work, e.g. fat, we experience a view of holism that does not simply mean putting everything into one pot, but opens up a genuine understanding of the relationship between humans, nature and the cosmos and the interconnections between expanded art practice and our work toward a free, democratic and sustainable future.

This is a book about seeing and hearing: seeing beyond the retinal and hearing as integral to social sculpture. It is a book that opens up territory often considered to be esoteric or mystical, revealing it to be concrete, actual and intimately involved in all the actions and processes of our everyday lives. Beuys, who was deeply influenced by Rudolf Steiner, spoke of the need to develop new ‘organs of perception’ if we are to hear the great suffering of nature and begin to work like real artists in the world. The essays on water processes, metamorphosis and the formation of fat in the plant, reveal a phenomenological kind of thinking that takes us into the real substance of Joseph Beuys’s work. They offer new insight into terms that he used, like warmth work, counter-image and parallel process as well as deepening our awareness of the interconnections between his work and core processes in the natural world. Understanding these connections is especially significant for those trying to understand the deeper roots of Beuys’s social sculpture practices and ideas or to develop a more ‘connective’ practice themselves. It not only makes possible genuine insight into his whole body of work, but confirms the legitimacy and necessity of such an expanded conception of art as well.

Getting this book out in English has been a huge and extended task. I am privileged to have worked on it and want to thank all involved, especially Volker Harlan, who made himself available for weeks on end to discuss questions relating to both the conversation with Beuys and his own texts, and to the publisher, Sevak Gulbekian, for his encouragement, thoughtful comments and patience.

This book will certainly be of use to students of Beuys in the English-speaking world. To anyone else who gives it close attention, the insights and vision contained in its pages will extend way beyond this to illuminate questions about our future and our work in the world.

Shelley Sacks Oxford, October 2004

A note on the text

This discussion with Joseph Beuys took place 25 years ago. It is 18 years now since he died, in January 1986, so it is useful to consider in what way this discussion is still of relevance in and beyond the art world today.

The conversation written up here is the outcome of a one-day event. Beuys begins by giving a short introduction to the agreed topic ‘What is Art?’. Then, through the questions and contributions of the participants, the conversation moves into ever-new directions, that include most of the central themes and concerns in Beuys’s work. Reading the conversation now, or even parts of it, it is astonishing to see just what was articulated and what emerged. It is the kind of material one can read again and again, surprising us through its richness and challenges, as if one was hearing some of the thoughts and ideas for the first time.

On and off throughout the day Beuys made strong statements, whose challenges provoke us now as much as they did then. Only now we cannot see the mischievous glint in his eyes, or hear the tone of voice that lets us know he is conscious of saying something that sounds way out of the ordinary... or his laughter, laughing until everyone else is laughing too, only to interrupt the laughter himself by repeating his previous statement. With this mercurial ability he is able to demonstrate that he is deadly serious about what he has just said – that it is something of real consequence, both to him and to other living and non-living beings. In apparent contradiction of this he writes in a letter to the actor, Schradi: ’Carefulness, indirectness, imperceptibility... [are] my abilities’. Nevertheless, he also claims to have ’a formula that revolutionizes everything’, on the basis of which’.. .let’s say, in global terms, we can solve the world’s problems’. Yet in stating this he immediately returns to careful action – imploring us to ‘engage deeply with these questions, get closer to them; get seriously interested in finding solutions oneself’.

The multifaceted kind of discussion that this book offers can take us a step along this path, as well as helping us access the work, the actions and the socially revolutionary intentions of Beuys. When Beuys speaks, explains, describes things, he often makes comparisons and develops sequences of elements which inform and illuminate each other. He presents us with polarities, intensifying them and mediating between them. He makes unconventional-sounding statements, but then uses them to reveal just how many people have similar experiences. In this sense, the way Beuys works with language and the things he says can be experienced as sculptural thought processes in themselves, as events, almost as ‘Happenings’: moments in a thinking, speaking and listening process with others, that is, in fact, a living ‘social sculpture’ or ‘warmth sculpture’ in progress. It is certainly fair to say that the real aim of all his work was to inspire new insights, to make things happen, to inform and transform – in conversation, in work and daily life, in government, locally and globally. For Beuys, everything else was a form of practice toward this goal.

Although his own journey began in art, being committed to the creativity inherent in every individual, and convinced that true innovation could happen (and was needed) in every field of work, he made every effort to help people do what was most appropriate... provided it was not simply for selfish ends. In the kind of social future that Beuys is exploring, ’fulfilling a task and earning a living are completely independent things’. But as Beuys said: ’Every human being is an artist!’ called upon to engage in the shaping of their lives and the world around them, with the same kind of love and passion that artists have for bringing something that is new and has a coherence into being. Then one’s own lifework becomes an artwork. This is what Beuys wanted to contribute to... and this conversation illuminates what he meant and how he tried to help his students and collaborators in their work toward a holistic social order. ’But let’s not project too far into the future. I would suggest looking no more than 500 years into the future... [continuous laughter!]’ is how the discussion ends.

This year sees the start of a new Masters programme in Social Sculpture that Shelley Sacks has developed at Oxford Brookes University. This is a bold and timely endeavour. The Masters programme picks up and continues, in contemporary form, the work, which began in 1977 at documenta 6 with Beuys’s Honey Pump in the Workplace. This was the time when the Free International University, initiated by Beuys in the early seventies, worked tirelessly for 100 days, with thousands of individuals and groups from all over the world, to explore and develop appropriate concepts and approaches to understanding the ’cultural/ spiritual life’, the ’rights life’ and the ’economic life of a contemporary social organism’. In Beuys’s words: ‘Free, democratic, socialism’. We were part of this.

In the second half of the book, following on from and stimulated by Beuys’s work, I explore several processes and substances such as fat and bone, in an attempt to deepen our understanding of the way Beuys works with substances. This is important because, as an artist, Beuys was really an alchemist. Therefore one needs to understand why he used fat or felt, why he used particular substances and colours, what is inherent in them: what they mean. Otherwise the real substance of his work is sealed off and inaccessible. Beuys strove to extend the essential artistic process into all areas of life and disciplines, including natural science. For him ‘substances’ played a very important part in all walks of life: for the artist, chemist and pharmacist, as well as the doctor and psychologist. For Beuys the ‘sacramental’ – as he wrote at the top, in the centre of illustration 49 – was in everything. This is his ‘expanded conception of art’. Following on from my intensive contact with Beuys and his work, my work has continued through writing, lecturing, and working with people in different parts of the world. In 2002 my new book was published entitled: Das Bild der Pflanze in Wissenschaft und Kunst – bei Aristotles und Goethe, in der Wissenschaftlichen Botanik des 19 und 20 Jahrhunderts und bei den Künstlern Paul Klee und Joseph Beuys (The Image of the Plant in Science and Art – in Aristotle and Goethe, in the Scientific Botany of the 19th and 20th Centuries and in the artists Paul Klee and Joseph Beuys). In this book I attempted to make Beuys’s ‘theory of sculpture’ meaningful for natural science, particularly for botany. Beuys had, in fact, developed the ‘theory of sculpture’ diagram based on the plant gestalt, the inherent form of the plant. He understood clearly that the threefold idea at the heart of all formative process could be related to all living organisms – including the social organism. In the drawing entitled ‘Evolution’ (Illustration 49, lower left) Beuys laid a simple scale over the diagram against which we can assess the health of an organism: whether it has become too hardened and sclerotic or is in a state of dissolution; or if it is somewhere in the middle, harmonious and healthy, between the two extremes.

Many of us are working actively in different ways with these ideas. Shelley Sacks has carried forward the flame that Beuys talked about during his last public address, ten days before his death in 1986 (see frontispiece). Her various forms of practice reflect the independent way that she has worked with Beuys’s ideas for a free, democratic and sustainable future. This is the ‘Expanded Concept of Art’ in practice. She has also managed to find a publisher who is committed to extending the vitality and ideas inherent in this discussion to the English-speaking world. My warm thanks to Shelley Sacks and Matthew Barton for the translation, and to the publisher, Sevak Gulbekian, and his colleagues for all their thoughtful work. However, without the support of the Joseph Beuys-Stiftung Basel this project would not have been viable financially. They too deserve the warmest thanks.

Volker Harlan Witten, Summer 2004

1. Where the discussions took place: St. John’s Church in Bochum, designed by Hans Scharoun

How this discussion came about

’The most important discussion is epistemological in character.’ (J. Beuys)

This discussion with Joseph Beuys took place as one among frequent gatherings of a group of young people who met together over many years. At these meetings, lasting hours, a whole weekend, or even several days, we tried to discover fundamental insights into the world, society and ourselves. We studied ancient and modern philosophical texts, explored psychology and concerned ourselves with social problems. Essentially our questions related to how we should lead and shape our lives. It seemed natural therefore to concentrate not only on discussion and theoretical considerations but also to engage with specific, practical exercises. Such exercises were essentially artistic in character, and did not serve any immediate, external purpose. They did not serve to prepare an exhibition or a publication, but solely to ‘come into movement’ ourselves, to discover new forms and ways of living. And even if these forms were not new, they were at least self-discovered; for in discovering them ourselves they remain available to consciousness and can then – more or less – be implemented in all areas of practical life.