German-born artist Joseph Beuys, active in Europe and the United States from the 1950s to the early 1980s, was one of the most important representatives of conceptual art and the Fluxus movement.
As an artist who came from the war, Beuys cared about the healing effect of art on both the artist and the audience, as well as addressing psychological, social, or political themes through his performances while struggling with the post-war world.
Joseph Beuys was born in 1921 in Krefeld, a small city in northwestern Germany. He was the only child of merchant Jakob Beuys and Johanna Hulsermann. The couple moved to Kleve, a town rich in geology and cultural history, a few months after Beuys' birth. During his early education in Kleve, Beuys took piano and cello lessons while improving his drawing skills. His main interest was in natural science. Although he considered a career in medicine due to this lifelong interest, he even worked in a circus to get closer to animals before graduating from high school. After successfully graduating from high school in 1941, he volunteered for military service as an aircraft radio operator in the German Air Force (Luftwaffe). He started his education. Simultaneously, he attended biology, botany, geography, and philosophy courses at the University of Posen.
Tatar legend
Stationed in Crimea during World War II, Beuys was a member of a combat bomber unit. When the plane he was on was shot down on the Crimean Front in Ukraine in 1944, the pilot died at the scene, but Beuys, who was conscious, was rescued by a German search commando and brought to the field hospital. He had deep cuts on his face and was diagnosed with a concussion. His treatment lasted three weeks; He then continued his duty until the war ended. This event was important enough to shape his personality and future artistic life; Because, according to what Beuys told in later years, it was a nomadic Tatar tribe that saved him from the plane wreckage. He thought that he owed his life to the Tatars, who healed his injured body by wrapping it entirely in animal fat and felt.
Joseph Heinrich Beuys (12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and art theorist whose work reflected concepts of humanism, sociology, and, with Heinrich Böll, Johannes Stüttgen, Caroline Tisdall, Robert McDowell, and Enrico Wolleb, created the Free International University for Creativity & Interdisciplinary Research (FIU). He previously in his talks and performances also formed The Party for Animals and The Organisation for Direct Democracy. He was a member of a Dadaist art movement Fluxus and singularly inspirational in developing of Performance Art, called Kunst Aktionen, alongside Wiener Aktionismus that Allan Kaprow and Carolee Schneemann termed Art Happenings. Today, internationally, the largest performance art group is BBeyond in Belfast, led by Alastair MacLennan who knew Beuys and like many adapts Beuys's ethos.
Although the veracity of Beuys's heroic rescue by the Tatars is still debated today, this story served as a kind of touchstone in his decision to devote himself to art immediately after the Second World War. When he returned to his family in Kleve after the war, he had already given up his ambition to study biology. In 1946, he entered the monumental sculpture program of the Düsseldorf Art Academy, one of the two academies still operating in Germany after the war, and attended the classes of painter and sculptor Ewald Matare, whose art was declared "degenerate" by the Nazis.
The inclusive approach that Fluxus Beuys implemented in the academy attracted the attention of Nam June Paik, who was also a professor at the same school. Joining Fluxus through him, Beuys adopted the group's emphasis on action and synthesized object, action, and space to present art in a provocative way. Just as he removed the limits of being an artist, he also focused on social and political themes by bringing creativity to daily life in order to transcend artistic boundaries. The international nature of the group expanded Beuys' sphere of influence. He had the opportunity to introduce the basic elements of his artistic personality to a wide audience with the "Eurasian Siberian Symphony" he performed at the Fluxus festival in 1963.
Steiner's book The Philosophy of Freedom, in which he underlined the importance of the concept of free will and explained the power of inner experiences, was very important for Beuys. Emphasizing inner experiences to unlock creative potential, Steiner particularly emphasized imagination, inspiration, and intuition. Starting from these three concepts, Beuys transformed his past experiences in the 1960s and began to use two everyday materials that had not been used as artistic materials before felt and animal fat, which the Tatar tribe used to treat him.
Everyone is an artist
The 1950s were the years when Beuys built the foundations of his philosophy of art. Being creative, original and individual became increasingly important for Beuys, who was introduced to Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophical philosophy alongside Matare. In addition, due to their mystical and universal qualities, he was influenced by the works of Italian Renaissance painters, Galileo's scientific theories, James Joyce's books, and the writings of German romantics such as Goethe, Novalis, and Schiller. He read a lot and made a lot of effort to educate himself and specialize in different fields of science. The output of these contributions consisted of thousands of drawings. Through his drawing practice, Beuys also began exploring a range of unconventional materials to use for his art, exploring symbolic connections between natural phenomena and philosophical systems.
When he graduated from Matare's class as a graduate student in 1953, he was experiencing economic difficulties and was still struggling with the traumas of his war experience. During his ten years of depression, he questioned everything in life and later described this period as a "rebirth". After a turbulent early life, he received his first official recognition from the academic world when he was appointed Professor of Monumental Sculpture at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where he had previously studied. When he took office, Beuys abolished the curriculum and entrance requirements, arguing that anyone who wanted to go to art school should have the right to do so. This was a natural step for Beuys, whose most famous sentence was "Everyone is an artist"; Because if everyone was an artist, everyone could also be an art student.
Beuys, who believed in the healing power of art and that it could create a real social transformation by activating the universal creativity impulse, developed an understanding of art with social and political content in the 1960s. With this in mind, his first performance in a private gallery was "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Rabbit?" It is also one of the iconic performative acts that went down in art history. Beuys, walking around the art gallery with a dead rabbit in his arms and moving his lips as if he were giving information about the paintings, covered his face with honey and gold and tied a metal plate to one of his feet.
Felt, which he began to use in parallel with his discovery of animal fat, a non-art or found material, played an important role in many of his later works. In addition to being the material that brought him to life, felt was also a versatile medium that could be transformed into an infinite number of forms, serving as a sculptural material, sound insulator, and poetic metaphor. When Beuys wore this outfit for a performance in 1970, he explained its symbolism as "protection of the individual from the world."
Last years
Just like his artistic works, Beuys's teaching had an approach that was far from hierarchical relationships and open to dynamic communication and change. Rather than imposing his artistic style or techniques in his lessons, he always wanted his students to explore their own interests, ideas, and talents. It did not take long for these teaching techniques, which did not comply with traditional academic norms, to cause major problems in the academy. When his tenure as professor was terminated in 1972, his teaching duties never ended. Describing his teaching as his greatest work of art, Beuys pioneered many political organizations such as The Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research in 1974 and the German Green Party in 1980 in order to emphasize the importance of teacher-student dialogue. While Beuys' art became increasingly political, he also developed the concept of Social Sculpture. He organized many conferences and performances in which he brought up issues such as disarmament, economic inequality and the elimination of nationalism, the unity of Europe and the whole world, the West's exploitation of the East, and world law.
When he succumbed to heart failure in 1986 after a long illness, he left behind a rich legacy in which the limits of artistic expression will continue to be debated. Today, its influence extends beyond traditional art fields, inviting us to challenge perceptions while continuing to make us think about the intersection of art, politics, and society.
Beuys' performances contained powerful symbols of life, death, and transformation. Beuys, who wrapped his body in felt and went to New York for the performance "I Love America and America Loves Me", lived in the gallery with a jackal after being taken from the airport by ambulance. Beuys, who resisted the wild animal for three days, finally hugged the jackal, which was very tolerant towards him, and was taken back to the airport without ever setting foot in America.
Beuys, who said that thought and speech were artistic 'forms', thought that we could shape the world even by living. For this reason, he defined it as a "social sculpture", seeing the society itself as the real "work of art". His actions, such as sweeping the streets to help garbage collectors after the May 1 demonstrations of 1972 in Berlin, are an important indicator that he used art as a tool for social transformation.